When the choice was presented at the last General Election between sensible and transformative policies that targeted specific structural issues in the UK economic model presented by a genial elderly chap who nonetheless had been relentlessly smeared as the devil incarnate, and comforting lies belched out by a shambling after-dinner speaker with all the grace of a pantomime horse, the country took leave of their senses and elected the clown with enough seats for free reign. This free-thinking electorate did what they’ve done in every election since 1979; they voted for the party Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers instructed them to.
We are now more than 40 years into Thatcher’s neoliberal project, and what do we have to show for it? I mean other than levels of inequality last seen in pre-revolutionary France. Every institution is corrupted and crumbling: primary and secondary schools have teachers bringing in food for hungry children while their classrooms are deemed a health hazard. Universities have been corrupted like all industries remodelled to chase profit; they cram in as many students as they can carry and then offer substandard education led by lecturers living in their cars, while the Vice-Principals are picking up the kind of salaries you’d expect from hedge fund managers. The National Health Service is suffering unprecedented delays in operations and ambulance response times, due to deliberate underfunding, needless outsourcing and burnt out staff leaving in droves. The Passport Office is in meltdown, Border force is forced to follow wacky schemes like offshoring refugees and inspecting private airfields for smuggling, while leaving the border at Dover as a smuggler’s paradise because the level of checks required would bring the country to a standstill and prove the utter idiocy of Brexit to all of its citizens. The criminal justice system is leaving victims and accused waiting years for justice, all while more loony laws like criminalising peaceful protest are added to the statute books.
In fact, the last point is illustrative of the only thing this government has done effectively: force borderline fascist laws onto its citizens. Bills to allow cops to potentially rape and murder with impunity; banning peaceful protest if it upsets the Home Secretary; forcing photo ID to be shown at polling stations to disenfranchise poor and ethnic minorities, and these are just the tip of the authoritarian iceberg. We now face rolling crises: the most urgent being climate, which is effectively ignored by Rishi Sunak as he incentivises more drilling to take us closer to the point of no return for 2 degrees warming. The cost of living crisis demonstrates that the Tories resent spending a single penny of taxpayer’s money on non-Tory voters or donors. The policy was only rolled out eventually to save Boris Johnson’s skin in the wake of the Sue Gray report. Which brings us to the head of this Chimps’ Tea Party of a government: Boris Johnson, who with every grubby scandal just doubles down and brazens it out while bribing and threatening underlings and backbenchers to keep him in post, despite obviously repeatedly lying at the despatch box.
The pathetic intermittent statements imploring everyone to return to office working is so obviously just a favour for the newspapers Johnson desperately relies on to gaslight the remaining gullible public who still support him, while much of the Covid negligence and tiresome threats to rip up the Northern Ireland protocol were driven by his pandering to the hard-right ERG whose approval he must retain. There’s not a person in the country or cabinet he’s not lied to, yet still some bootlickers continue to prop him up. This must be what an empire at the tail end of its decline looks like, and it could get a lot worse before it improves. And nothing will improve while Johnson or Bluekip remain in office. Keir Starmer has shown he has not much more integrity than Johnson in abandoning all his leadership pledges and launching antisemitic purges of his own membership, so if we want leadership and hope, we’re going to have to show it ourselves and rise up, or accept a decline we don’t yet know the severity of, only its inevitability.
What hath blog wrought? 