The Liz Truss Premiership is about the Tories thinking they own the story of Britain – past, present and future
So begins the Liz Truss Premiership and era. She won with a grim, perilous mandate for all her upbeat ‘boosterist’ optimism which worked for a section of the Tory membership. It convinced enough of them, 81,326 to be precise, which gave her 57.4% of those who voted but rather embarrassingly a mere 47.2% of all Tory members who were entitled to vote.
Public opinion at the outset does not think much of Truss or her prospects as PM. After she was elected Tory leader a mere 14% of the public think Truss will be a better leader than Boris Johnson; a staggering 2% have a lot of confidence in her solving the cost of living crisis while 67% have little to no confidence; and by 50% to 22% public opinion is disappointed that she has become PM, with only 41% of Tory voters pleased according to YouGov.
We are strangers in our own land
The entire contest made most of us feel like strangers in our own land. This is shaped by the narrow, unrepresentative nature of the Tory selectorate. Then there is the embarrassing fact that in choosing Truss, the Tories were selecting their third leader in a row without recourse to a popular mandate and instead imposing their own private prejudices and obsessions as the sterling tests of who should be or should not be the next leader.
Hence Rishi Sunak who had been the darling of Tory constituency opinion until the turn of the year had an impossible hurdle to jump. Having presided over gathering economic stormclouds, his increasing disloyalty to Boris Johnson climaxed in his resignation as Chancellor which precipitated Boris Johnson’s reluctant resignation.
This was enough for Sunak’s support to collapse in sections of the Tory grassroots. In the Tory contest he was frequently asked about his role in bringing Johnson down; despite this he still won 42.6% of Tory members who voted. This clearly points to wider misgivings about Truss even in the heart of Toryland.
Scotland increasingly feels even more distant from what comes over as someone else’s drama and disaster. This spectacle is defined by Westminster concerns, theatre, personalities and the lies and deceptions told in the House of Commons by Johnson and his apologists.
Johnson tarnished and trashed everything that he came into contact with – all of which was deeply predictable. But such is the Tory grassroots love of all things ‘Boris’ that Truss felt compelled throughout the context to praise the outgoing leader including in her painfully bad acceptance speech as Tory leader, meaning that the Tories have not yet come clean about the nature of the man and his leadership. And that still in places they pine for the old emperor to return: a sentiment which will be encouraged in one Boris Johnson.
Scotland’s distance and alienation from all of this is reinforced by the fact that the last time the Tories won an election in this country was the 1959 Westminster general election in terms of votes. This is the election after 1955 which is much cited wrongly as when the Tories last won in Scotland – when they won 50.1% of the vote – and last won both the popular vote and number of seats – winning 36 seats to Labour’s 34 and one solitary Liberal.
October 1959 was when Harold Macmillan went to the country saying ‘you have never had it so good’ and won a 100-seat majority. In Scotland in this contest the Tories won 47.2% of the vote to Labour’s 46.7% – while Labour won 38 out of 71 seats, to 31 for the Tories and two for the Liberals. The SNP in the 1959 election stood a mere five candidates and won only 21,738 votes across Scotland representing 0.8% of the vote – a small improvement on the two candidates and 12,112 (0.5%) of four years previous in 1955.
1959 is a long-time ago. Several generations have past. Then Fidel Castro had just overthrown the Batista dictatorship in Cuba and was widely seen as a young idealist; Nikita Khrushchev was leader of the Soviet Union; Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House and JFK was but a young ambitious Senator; Charles de Gaulle was in the Élysée Palace at the start of the French Fifth Republic; and the European Economic Community was but a mere two years old.
Since then sixteen UK general elections have passed, without the Tories once winning the popular vote in Scotland. This first happened in post-war times with Ted Heath in 1970, but is now such a regular occurrence that some Westminster watchers have started discounting it and think it is just one of those things. Like Yorkshire or Greater London voting Labour and getting a Tory Government.
But it is not like that. For a start, for eight of the past eleven UK elections, and for 30 out of the past 43 years, Scotland has got Tory Governments it did not vote for. That is not something that can endure into perpetuity. And Scotland is not comparable to an English region. It is a nation with its own laws, legislature and government.
The mood of the UK is not a positive one as troubles mount. An astonishing 69% of respondents agree that the UK is in decline; even more surprising 60% of Conservative supporters agree with this sentiment according an Ipsos survey for The Economist.
Then there is how the Tories plan to deal with the cost of living crisis and skyrocketing energy bills. One scheme floated by the Tories was that over £100 billion of support to freeze energy bulls would have seen voters pay back compulsory loans over a timescale of 10-20 years. It is now being briefed that this has been dropped from consideration. But in refusing to levy a windfall tax on excess profits of the energy companies the Tories are subsidising hugely profitable companies and putting the burden of paying back the enormous bill on the shoulders of taxpayers.
If the Tories try to make voters pay for a broken, rigged system shaped by private monopoly energy companies they privatised they will be committing electoral suicide. Such an indefensible offer piling the bill onto the public and taxpayers, rather than profiteering private companies, will show not only how out of touch the Tories are, but how ideologically inflexible and dogmatically attached they are to brutal, exploitative, anti-social capitalism at the expense of the public and any public good.
Expect to see over the coming weeks and months more references to the fact that Liz Truss is the first ever UK PM to have previously worked for Shell as an industrial economist – with some saying that is still where her allegiances lie. As the Scottish based academic Ewan Gibbs pointed out her Premiership will show ‘the oil age is far from over’ – with talk of new licences and fields opening up in the North Sea – none of which will help the public in the immediate.
Tories already have in recent weeks been regularly insulting the intelligence of voters with the likes of former Tory minister Edwina Currie getting out tinfoil on Good Morning Britain on live TV and suggesting worried voters put it behind their radiators. Meanwhile on This Morning later on the same day presenter Phillip Schofield was offering viewers via a roulette style wheel the chance to have their energy bill paid. Such is life in the increasingly Dickensian Tory Britain of the 21st century.
Living in an Old Country and understanding who controls the past controls the future
Present day Toryism has in an Orwellian sense seized control of how we interpret and comprehend the recent past. Hence one of the many validations of Thatcherism when it happened and retrospectively has been that in 1979 when Thatcher took office the UK was a basket case.
The version of 1970s Britain which prepared the ground for Thatcherism is narrowly scoped down to ‘the winter of discontent’ and IMF crisis. The lesson of this is that you cannot trust Labour Governments with the economy with all sorts of cliches defining the former: ‘the dead going unburied in Liverpool’; ‘the piles of rubbish in Leicester Square’ and more – a highly contentious version given validation not just by the likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Express but revisionist historians such as Dominic Sandbrook and Charles Moore.
What is missing from this selective reading is the economic turbulence of the 1970s under a Tory Government remembered as that: the three-day week, the regular blackouts, the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, alongside the fragile nature of the British economy in a world shaken by the twin oil spikes of 1973 and 1979. These have all been conveniently forgotten in the ideological capture of a decade by the right then and subsequently. It is probably too late for Labour and non-Tories to present a more rounded version of the 1970s, but as George Orwell said in 1984 whoever controls the past controls the future.
Toryism is dealing with the elixir and magic illusions of Thatcherism with the buffer still of that capture of the recent past. For decades we have been told that Thatcher ‘put the great back into Britain’. Not only that but the likes of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and Spectator have continually told the lie that Thatcherism presided over a positive economic transformation of Britain and this heralded ‘a great British economic miracle’, the upside of which we are still living with and supposedly benefiting from – for all our present problems.
It is the culmination of decades of this deliberate deception and capture of our collective past – all of which has been aided by the collusion of the Labour Party under Blair and Brown – which ultimately led to Brexit, Boris Johnson and now Liz Truss.
We are in for a bumpy, difficult, hazardous ride and the internal Tory shenanigans we have seen in recent months and years are only just beginning and will obsess them just as we need serious, grown-up government and a politics of solidarity and co-operation.
The Tories think they own the story of Britain and that their economic, social and cultural account of modern UK, combined with their entitlement culture, privilege and self-belief in their divine right to rule, insulate them from opposition criticism and public discontent.
They are admittedly testing this theory to breaking point, but given the built-in advantages the Tories have in UK politics and proven inadequacies of the Labour Party, it would be foolish to completely write off Tory electoral prospects even under Liz Truss.
The terrain for a radical critique of Britain’s broken economic and social order and the undemocratic political system which underpin minority Tory dominance is there to be made, but after years of Labour self-doubt and ingrained conservatism, can they tap into the mood of gathering discontent, anger and indignation? This does feel like the end of an era but can Labour and the centre-left capture that sentiment and shape the future? On that the jury is still out.
Image credit Stewart Bremner, More here: Art created in Scotland – Indy Prints (indy-prints.com)
And to complete the Orwell quote: ‘…who controls the present controls the past’.
The question is: Can the centre-left gain control of the present, reframe the past, and thereby shape the future in accordance with its narratives? Surely, part of the problem for the centre-left is that the its old-time narrative of state capitalism is now met with as much incredulity by the British electorate as is the centre-right’s now discredited narrative of ‘trickle down’ free-market capitalism, and it’s struggling to put together a coherent alternative that has the ‘mass’ appeal that would enable it to win control of the present at the ballot box?
Perhaps the old normal/dominant paradigm or ‘metanarrative’ of politics as a competition between rival ‘left’ and ‘right’ narratives – a culture war if you will – is in crisis, out of which a new paradigm is emerging to control the present and the old paradigm is becoming meaningless or ’empty rhetoric’, ‘words o sangs/ wi gey smaa meanin/ buit wi muckle soons’. Maybe the future is neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’ of centre as normal politics has been in the past; maybe politics in the 21st century is moving beyond that.
That sounds suspiciously like the third way as proposed by Anthony Giddens. Is that you Mr Blair?
I greatly admire Anthony Gidden’s critique of sociology, in which he continually redefined the field through the critical reinterpretation of its canonical texts. I also admire the theory of structuration he developed out of that critique, by which he explains society as an ongoing dialectical tension between agency and structure in which he ascribes primacy to neither. He also has some interesting things to say about modernity, globalisation and politics, especially the impact of modernity on social and personal life; in the last 25 years, he’s turned his attention to social and political issues relating to the evolution of world society, environmental issues, and the digital revolution (what the ‘great resetters’ of the World Economic Forum call ‘the fourth industrial revolution’). His Politics of Climate Change (2009) and his Turbulent and Mighty Continent (2014) (a critical interpretation of the role and nature of the European Union) are well worth a read.
I’m not so keen on his his critique of postmodernity and the new utopian-realist ‘third way’ in politics that he worked out in the 1990s, in The Consequences of Modernity, Modernity and Self-Identity, The Transformation of Intimacy, Beyond Left and Right, and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. It’s represents for me a last throw of the dice for capitalism.
Giddens social hope was that, in the fin de siècle age of late and reflexive modernity, pluralism, and post-scarcity economics (the economics of affluence and conspicuous consumption), ‘life politics’ (the politics of self-actualisation) and ‘emancipatory politics’ (the politics of inequality), which he dubbed ‘reflexive projects of the self’, might lead voluntarily to more positive social change than political parties can achieve operating coercively through the state. In particular, he hoped that such ‘reflexive projects of the self’ in the fields gender and sexual relations and decolonisation, for example, might lead the way via the ‘democratisation of democracy’ to a new era of Habermasian ‘dialogic democracy’, in which differences are settled and society ordered voluntarily, through discourse, rather than coercively through violence or the threat thereof. He called this regime of dialogic democracy ‘communitarianism’ in contrast to the ‘authoritarianism’ of our traditional adversarial democracy of competing parties.
Giddens argued that, in our fin de siècle age of late modernity, the established political concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are now breaking down. To rescue society from its increasingly necrotic politics, he argues that we need to: a) repair our damaged ‘solidarities’ or ‘real communities’, which have been undermined by the ‘imagined communities’ of nationalism; b) displace the ideological politics of ‘left’ and ‘right’ with life politics recognise the centrality of life politics; c) embrace dialogic democracy and reform our democratic institutions accordingly; d) reform the authoritarian and bureaucratic welfare state along more mutualist communitarian lines; e) ‘out’ the violence that’s endemic in our current adversarial democracy and render it intolerable.
According to Giddens: ‘[T]he overall aim of third way politics should be to help citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalisation, transformations in personal life and our relationship to nature.’
He remained optimistic in the face of the mounting catastrophe of capitalism: ‘There is no single agent, group or movement that, as Marx’s proletariat was supposed to do, can carry the hopes of humanity, but there are many points of political engagement which offer good cause for optimism.’
He discarded the possibility of a single, comprehensive, all-connecting ideology or political programme (Lyotard’s ‘grand récits’). He advocates basing our politics instead on the plurality of ‘petit récits’ that ordinary people can directly affect at their home, workplace, or local community. This is the difference between the pointless utopianism of socialism, liberalism, fascism, et al, and utopian realism of envisaging ‘alternative futures whose very propagation might help them be realised’, ‘things new and extraordinary… [that are] rooted not transcendently, in the world of ideas and wishful thinking, but immanently in existing social processes of which they are a practical extrapolation’. Such a future, he imagines, has at its centre the more socialised, demilitarised, and planetary-caring global world order that’s variously articulated within the plurality of equalities and self-actualisation movements and within the wider dialogical movement they socially comprise.
Tellingly, Giddens dissociated himself from New Labour. For him, the Third Way was not about succumbing (as New Labour did) to neoliberalism and the marketisation of our public decision-making; it was about getting beyond both market fundamentalism and traditional top-down socialism in a global world in which both have become obsolete and neither any longer works for us.
And yet he was the cheerleader for Blairism. A sociological cover for a rightwards moving clique.
I’m aware that many on the traditional left have typically ‘denounced’ Giddens for what they see as his capitulation to the traditional right and his proposed renewal or ‘revaluation’ of social democracy for what they see as simply neoliberalism dressed up in the language of a radical ‘post-ideological politics’. But I’m sceptical of this denunciation.
I’m sceptical not because I believe that his revaluation is beyond reproach but because I’m doubtful of the supposedly ‘more authentic’ fundamentalist left and its wisdom in clinging to the ‘old-time religion’ of its 20th century narratives. The political terrain has irremediably shifted since 1979 in ways that have weakened the ‘historical project’ of the traditional left. I wonder whether we should demand more from contemporary politics then the eternal repetition of the same old ritualistic formulae and shibboleths.
But I’m also wary of Giddens himself, for his revaluation of social democracy is still enchanted by the Enlightenment project and its utopianism, its dream of human advancement and perfectibility. He’s still making a last and, in my view, futile throw of the dice for capitalism before it crashes and burns.
If socialism as state capitalism is a casualty of the “culture wars”, I’m intrigued as to why polls of right wing newspaper readers routinely show that Tory voters are very amenable to things like nationalizing the railways and the energy companies, and are resistant to NHS sell-offs and so on.
What’s probably happening instead is that an effective resistance to neoliberalism is being hamstrung by the culture wars, because a social-democratic majoritarian politics gets a thousand simultaneous wedge issues driven into it, issues which get lumped together under some neologism that changes every 18 months (the last two have been “woke” and “identity politics”.) I knew Jeremy Corbyn was going to lose when he responded to the ISIS attack on London bridge by going down to a mosque and crying. And the Tories have a nice little fund of political capital available to them any time they like by outflanking Labour to the right on issues like gender recognition reform. This is political capital which the left ceded, absolutely gratis, to the neoliberal parties crushing the working class, and furthermore they will cancel you just for saying so.
The New York Times has provided a platform for a number of Brits to weigh in on the current state of the UK recently, and, as a result, has attracted the ire of frothing Tory apologists. The most interesting recent piece in the NYT is Kojo Koram’s pointing out that Truss’s most apt antecedent is not Margaret Thatcher but Enoch Powell: Britain’s New Prime Minister Is Still in Thrall to the Empire.
Will Davies points out the “one reason the Right considers claims of Powellism outrageous is that they don’t read Powell”. I am not sure many on the Left did either, but he is correct that Tom Nairn did and made interesting observations.
Based on the preview while awaiting moderation I think the html links got stripped out:
Kojo Haram reprint: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/britains-next-prime-minister-is-still-in-thrall-to-the-empire/
Davies: https://twitter.com/davies_will/status/1567227891183656962
Nairn: https://libcom.org/article/enoch-powell-new-right-1970-tom-nairn
Dinnae tell mae she’s rid’n a TANK . No anither Ruth Davison. Help mah Boab.
Did Thatcher no set the femdom/cock-haudin precedent?
1599 is a long-time ago. Queen Elizabeth’s Tudor totalitarian tendencies were oppressively flexed “in the wake of one of the Council’s most repressive acts of literary censorship when satires and epigrams were burnt in the Stationer’s Hall, it was further enjoined that ‘no Englishe historyes be printed excepte they bee allowed by some of her majesties privie Councell’.” according to Janet Clare in ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Unlicensed books were burnt. Previously, the Privy Council halted circulation of the 1587 second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles and ensured that material deemed embarrassing to the state was revised or excised before reprinting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles
Interestingly, we still have Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council in full operation. Perhaps we could as Alba Party leader, Privy Councillor Alex Salmond, what it is up to these days. Of course, the royals keep much of British history locked up in a private family vault, so if you are interested in that kind of material, perhaps it helps to suck up to them.
Queen Elizabeth’s institution of political censorship of the theatre lasted until 1968, so perhaps the British hold some kind of record. Although their authorities often deny holding some kinds of records (see Hanslope Park). This level of control over the writing and silencing of history may sound like a Conservative fantasyland of unicorns and rainbows (or at least gilded turds). But who knows, perhaps the Privy Council is already demanding that e-book histories be silently and remotely edited.
These days, the Privy Council is a mechanism through which interdepartmental agreement is reached on those items of Government business that is delegated by Parliament to Ministers as Privy Counsellors rather than as Departmental Secretaries. Although members of the Privy Council, like the Rt Hon Alex Salmond, are appointed for life, only Ministers of the current Government participate in its day-to-day business, for which they remain accountable to Parliament.
Privy Council business falls into two main categories: a) prerogative business, where there is no legislation allocating the responsibility of advising the head of state to a particular Minister; and b) statutory business, where an Act of Parliament delegates order-making powers to the Privy Council. Most prerogative powers have nowadays been taken over by Parliament, and the Privy Council is delegated only powers relating to the affairs of chartered bodies (i.e. the 1000 or so institutions, charities, and companies that are incorporated by Royal Charter), including those of some professions.
The democratic check lies in the fact that the orders the Privy Council makes can only be made ‘in’ and ‘of’ the power delegated to it by Parliament through legislation and for the exercise of which power it’s responsible to Parliament. It no longer serves as a state censor.
Re the headline. Scots are not going to change, revise or even airbrush British history by running away from the Tories.
Liz Truss’ first act as UK Prime Minister appears to have been a brilliantly-conceived regicide, crafted to split her core Tory vote forever into viciously feuding camps of ultra-royalists versus anti-mask-wearers, sending the large overlap into does-not-compute meltdown, whilst immediately rendering Jeremy Corbyn electable on the basis that in several meetings with the Queen he failed to take advantage of each opportunity for stopping her heart (of course he would have been crucified by the Conservative press if the Queen had croaked hours after shaking his hand).
I blame Boris rather than Liz. The joy of getting shot of him as her prime minister was clearly too much for her. At least she died happy.
Mind you, poor LIz will now have to suffer being patronised by that slimy Charles in their weekly meetings. She should take a leaf out of Angela Rayner’s book and knee him in the scrotes.
I know the anti-monarchist sentiment in those contributing here is almost universal, so my socialism that would co-exist with a reformed monarchy and political system is not likely to find much approval. But for anyone to suggest that Liz Truss should resort to violence and kick Charles in the scrotum is particularly wrong-headed.. Compare and contrast a sober, well constructed, thoughtful and humane speech and appropriate tribute to the dead Queen from the new King, along with his lifelong and often unfairly criticised concern with humanity’s failure to care for the environment which sustains us, with anything that Liz Truss has said or done in her lifetime, then it should be the King, in all justice, who should be verbally dressing down this feeble and inept excuse for leadership. In my mind at least, whatever he may represent to the chagrin of those contributing here, Charles’s personal qualities are head and shoulders above Truss’s toxic Toryism, as this article describes so well. Cheers.
Down with the King! (and Liz Truss)
Let us take over Balmoral and turn it into. affordable housing for people. Power to the people. The revolting peasants.
@Alistair Taylor, should that bastion of evil’s name really be Malmoral, like some vice-ridden keep out of Arthurian legend? Google suggests one for the other.
I’m finding Janet Clare’s book (see above) really interesting. For example, Master of the Revels censor Tilney seems to have been keen to do down peasants’ revolts and remove the advice of Warwick to York to gain mass popular support for his campaign for kingship (“”ten thousand Ragged-staves”). The big no-no seems to have been dramatic deposition scenes.
‘Present day Toryism has in an Orwellian sense seized control of how we interpret and comprehend the past.’
Having made this claim, Gerry Hassan fails to substantiate it. Does he really believe that the Daily Mail and Daily Express have such power ?
It seems like only yesterday that Rupert Murdoch was the arch-villain who poisoned public discourse.
What the Tories are attempting is what political parties routinely do; portray themselves are representing success. Labour does it with regard to the welfare state; the SNP does it with anything and everything in Scotland.
The problem with ‘radicals’ – not least in Scotland – is that they are overwhelmingly middle class and almost totally divorced from the 21st century working class; a middle class which has done well for itself in the post-Thatcher world; one which has just about abandoned
electoral politics.
Yes, I think Gerry does overstate the case. It’s true that there are distinctive ‘Tory’ narratives by which they render the past to the present in an attempt to steer the future, but there are also distinctive ‘Nationalist’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Liberal’, ‘Green’, and umpteen other narratives that compete with them and each other in the appropriation of history. That’s part of what we mean when we talk of ‘culture wars’ and of postmodern politics as a cacophony of incommensurable voices that can speak only to themselves and not to each other. The most that can be said is that the Tories currently have the loudest voice in the shouting match.
Some of us get beyond this perpetual and unreconcilible rammie by assuming an incredulity towards all such narratives on the grounds that the matter of which provides us with the ‘correct’ understanding of the past is undecidable (for reasons that I’ve rehearsed elsewhere on this site), which renders the whole rammie pointless. We get beyond it, that is, by pulling the rug from beneath the feet (or, to change the metaphor, by slamming our doors in the faces) of all the various narrative salesmen.
Every narration of the past is just some party’s attempt to sell its preferred future to the present with a view to outselling its competitors at the ballot box. All narratives (and not just the Tory ones) are suspect, and all suffer from ‘the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt/ That damns the vast majority o’ men’. Scepticism, an incredulity towards all narratives of history, is the only way I ken to dodge that curst conceit.
You appear remarkably interested in and opinionated about British politics for a former Hungarian footballer.
All the more remarkable considering according to my research you died in 2011.
Are you giving us your opinions from beyond the grave?
…says JP58, which is a strain of e-coli.
You are Kevin McKenna and I claim my fiver.
Damn – my cover has been blown. I shall now post under my new pseudonym of Nandor Hidegkuti.
I would send you the £5 you have claimed but only have notes with old monarch’s head on them – sorry!
It is quite clear, even to the most dense, that the British State is all but bankrupt. The acolytes of Thatcherism, both left, right and center, have no answers to the immense problems facing society today.
Privatization of Public institutions is now exposed as the lie it always was. It has proven to be nothing more than a license to defraud a nation of its own heritage.
The promise that only the private sector can provide the investment necessary to modernize national infrastructure flies in the face of over a century’s evidence that they do no such thing, and more to the point, never intended to.
Given the choice “British investors” have always chosen their own dividends over nation building.
That is why the rivers are full of excrement, the railways are unaffordable, the NHS is irideemably broken and the education system has been reduced to nothing more than an expensive version of children’s day care.
Not content with destroying the futures of those already alive, they will turn towards destroying those of future generations by saddling them with ever increasing debt to satisfy the insatiable greed of the hyena class who have been the beneficiaries of this wanton destruction.
For the Scots, the only solution to this is to walk away and cut our losses.
England is on the cusp of a wholesale peasants revolt. We should get out of the way and leave them to it.
When the dust settles, we can only hope their nation will have rid itself of the anachronistic concept that leadership of a nation should be left in the hands of a class that has shown itself to be guided by nothing more than their own greed, self advancement and personal ambition. An ancient regime that has finally reached the stage of eating its own children.
The death of Elizabeth II has taken their security blanket away from them. Deference to the monarchy will wain with her now gone. She was the last bulwark of the old regime. It is only a matter of a few short years now before the entire edifice will come crashing down.
All revolutions begin on breadlines. There are now 45 million people on those breadlines in Britain.
This is the true legacy of Thatcherism and no front pages of the Daily Mail, Express or Telegraph will distract enough of those on those bread lines from this inescapable fact.
@ John burrows
Absolutely! Very well said.
GREAT POST John.
Yes John the “BRITISH ‘ state is bankrupt meaning the lower class ( English expression) of course. However it is quite the reverse for the aristocrats from the KING down who are much more wealthier than ever. That would include the British controllers of the NU-S.N.P. The Murrells.
I’ve commented about Charles and Truss elsewhere. The problem with this discussion, and this article, is its unintentional parochialism. It isn’t just Truss or Boris or the Tories failing this country, but the planetary failure of an economic and political system that is even now bringing the whole planet and its humanity to ruin. Our very existence as a species is under threat. This makes the trials and tribulations of Toryism and Scotland and England almost irrelevant, because in most countries the opposition to this system, just as here, is mute and cowed, where it even exists. For instance, is there in the Labour opposition in the UK any understanding at all of this compounding existential threat? I don’t believe so when Starmer can claim very recently that the solution to all the UK’s problems is “Growth, growth, growth”. This is in reality “insane , insane, insane”.
When the UK started the Industrial Revolution two hundred and sixty to two hundred years ago we made a pact, as Monbiot said in his book “Heat” in 2006 , with the Devil, a Faustian bargain. The Devil is now demanding payment. In Monbiot’s writing Marlow’s “Tragical History of Dr Faustus” becomes a prescient parallel for humanity’s fate:
I’ll have them fly to India for gold
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delights.
So too have we been ransacking to the oceans and the lands with ever more frantic speed and success and so too will we meet the same fate.
One can no longer write about or debate meaningfully the seriousness of the gathering problems afflicting Scotland and the UK, whether social, economic, political or moral, and ignore this much greater reality. And you know, more and more citizens are beginning to realise this. There is an ever increasing undercurrent of serious existential angst among the populace, and people, once reticent to suggest anything of this nature ever crosses their minds, will come to admit or explain it. The faint and inchoate understanding of how the powerful are dragging us all to the precipice is becoming rather clearer and more frightening.
Nothing other than a revolutionary and desperately urgent change in everything humanity thinks and does will save us. A few contributing here have touched on this in regard to getting past the left vs right paradigm, but without realising perhaps how stunningly irrelevant that now is.
You forget, at your peril, that all politics are local.
People may, in some esoteric way, believe themselves to be citizens of the world, but until they can effect poltical change at a global level, national/local elections are the only tools available to them to effect the necessary changes you advocate.
If every nation acted to remove from power all those who were the agents of the chaos you foretell, this would be the very definition of democratic revolution.
What other revolution would you suggest?