Trauma Zone UK

The new Adam Curtis documentary ‘Trauma Zone’ is about the build-up to the Putin era. Its premise is the idea that for a very long time everyone in that society knew that nothing really worked anymore but there was nothing they could do about it.

“In 1992 Russia began an experiment in extreme capitalism…”

As you read these words over your Sunday morning breakfast the Conservative Party will be doing backroom deals, carving up Cabinet positions and wheeling and dealing positions to present to Liz Truss and dwindling band of incompetents. It will not be so much a coup d’état as a fait accompli. A coup suggests there is something to overthrow.

Even the Tories have (at some very deep level some element of shame) and the idea that this debacle would be followed by another leadership race of fake democracy with the demented media treating it like an actual process of democracy is too much even for them. So they will go for a cleaner darker method of removing and replacing their latest incarnation.

If Boris Johnson seemed like an appropriately grotesque leader at a time of global pandemic and post-Brexit farce, Liz Truss seemed like the absolutely perfect leader for these macabre and apocalyptic times. After all staring into the middle-distance with long gaps in between speech as we shudder in complete incomprehension is what most of us feel these days.

If Thick Lizzie thinks that by her ‘decisive action’ of throwing her Chancellor under one of Boris’s Buses, she will appear authoritative she is wrong. It will simply give her senior colleagues the permission to do what they have all been saying privately. Matricide comes easily to the Conservatives who lust after power and power alone.

There are three questions hanging in the air like sulphur.

One is how could they appoint someone so stupid? To which the answer is a) they didn’t and b) their membership is racist and as stupid as her.

Two is how could she manhandle things so badly? That’s a question answered by John Crace: “We have been left with only two explanations for Truss’s increasingly erratic behaviour, neither of which are mutually exclusive. The first is that she is even more dim than she first appears, that she genuinely doesn’t understand the damage she is doing. The second is that she is a delusional narcissist – the Tory party does seem to have a penchant for choosing them as their leader – who is in a state of total denial, who looks at the chaos in the financial markets and sees only strong government.”

Three is what happens now? My best bet is that the Overton Window has moved so far so fast that Jeremy Hunt has emerged as a mainstream centrist elder statesman, but that Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, or more likely Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak will emerge to create a sort of Triumvirate from Hell. The announcement will be proclaimed like “fumata bianca” announcing a new pontiff on the pages of the Telegraph and the Daily Mail and through the state orators and confidants that sprinkle the broadcast media.

It gets worse.

If the disastrous Truss-IEA-Kwartang regime was more ‘pop-up’ than populist – the incoming replacement has the potential to act like the ‘grown ups’ in the room and also affect the pretence that this is a ‘change government’. Despite the euphoria that has surrounded the recent polling for Labour it’s possible in this dystopian country that under the photogenic Mordaunt a comeback of sorts could be mounted. It’s conceivable that they frame the Truss-IEA-Kwartang regime as an aberration, and that they are now the ones to ‘take decisive action’ – ‘unpopular decisions’ – and ‘Get Brexit re-done’. Nothing is impossible in a country run by the Conservatives and their tentacle-like connections through the political classes and the media elite. The competition is now between a Labour Party detoxified and cleansed to appropriate inanity and a Tory party rid of its most childish and repellent characters who accidently ruined the best carpet with too many pals at an Empty.

Dawn of the Replicants

Now the powerful must decide which is sanctified and promoted to best manage Britain PLC, keep things in place, protect the status quo and vested interests? It’s like two versions of replicants. Will it be the Blue ones or the Red ones?

As we stare across at post-Trump America, scoff at the crazy Italians or shake our heads in dismay at the demise of Sweden to the far-right, it’s time to look at Britain. It’s a monarchy high on regalia, presided over by for over a decade now a conveyor belt of Tories who are motivated by personal self-advancement. We have witnessed a cacophony of authoritarian polices being implemented year on year as our civil liberties are eroded to the point of removal. At the same time we have looked-on as standards in public office have fallen through the floor. We’ve watched all this through austerity and pandemic and now through the ‘cost of living crisis’, which is catapulting millions into their first experience of poverty and millions of others into destitution.

What do we do? Not much. Mostly get by, cling on. Shop.

The Dawn of these Replicants – whether Blue or Red will make little difference. Differences of degree, but you don’t get a go unless you are well-programmed and submissive to the interests of the powerful.

The Red and the Blue both believe in Brexit and the Union and outbid each other to wrap themselves up in the flag and genuflect to the monarchy. They are both entrenched in tradition and obedient to the Media Lords and Press Barons.

There’s room for nostalgia in such a predicament. In fact, Brexit has made Nostalgia the hegemony of the era. Nostalgia itself is Britain’s official ideology. It’s neither left nor right it’s just backwards. People will start remembering warmly the Old Woman Who Lived in the Palace and had dogs and the Funny Man with the gold wallpaper who had the parties.

You’re not supposed to mention Brexit anymore.

But as John Harris has noted: “Whoever people blame for our current predicament, one vivid fact is inescapable. The future that 17 million voters bought into six years ago has now collapsed into its precise opposite. In the summer of 2016, let us not forget, Johnson, Michael Gove and the former Labour MP Gisela Stuart jointly put their names to an article in the Sun which insisted that once Brexit happened, “the NHS will be stronger, class sizes smaller and taxes lower. We’ll have more money to spend on our priorities, wages will be higher and fuel bills will be lower.”

The new Adam Curtis documentary ‘Trauma Zone’ is about the build-up to the Putin era. Its premise is the idea that for a very long time everyone in that society knew that nothing really worked anymore but there was nothing they could do about it.

What you are living through is an experiment in extreme capitalism.

Welcome to your very own Trauma Zone.

Image credit: Cold War Steve