Good morning, Newdists. How are you? What a crazy Thursday! Nancy Pelosi and Schumer, wow! Against them, Tweedle Dee (McCarthy) and Tweedle Dum (McConnell) look like idiots and traitors.
Today, I have a bit of a serious diary.
But first — critters and food.
Here’s your Caturday Cafe cat
Onwards to birbs —
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Newdists, please grab a cuppa and something to eat, and join us in the thread.
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Britain Unchained or Unhinged? We’ll Know Soon.
Have you been watching the rolling debacle happening across the pond? In between bouts of phys. therapy, walking and trying to prevent my knee from freezing up, I’ve been watching, somewhat agog. Honestly, I don’t quite know as to what I can equate the mesmerism I feel, when getting an eyeful about the rightwing/libertarian section of the Tory party.
Evidently, in 2012 there appeared a published book titled Britannia Unchained. It was co-written by Dominic Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng, Liz Truss, Chris Skidmore, and Priti Patel.
What is that book about, you’re wondering?
Truss declared in her Conservative Party Conference speech last week that disruption is the price of success – an idea that reverberates throughout Britannia Unchained. The status quo is unacceptable, the authors suggest, with the stagnation of the British economy characterised by “the draining of effort from our psyche, replaced by a sense of entitlement”. The book (more a pamphlet, at only 116 pages), makes the case for a new era of national vitality based on deregulation, the lowering of taxes, and the dismantling of workers’ rights. LINK
They complained about the employment laws in Britain and how it was too protective of workers.
They argued against paying minimum wage to employers under the age of 21.
They advocated for ‘unfettered’ capitalism, and think they see it in Asia.
They want to abolish minimum wage and social protection for workers.
They want an austerity government of their dreams.
They envy the left wing it’s street presence, and want a muscular street presence for the right wing as well. Since 2012, they’ve been doing ground work to enable the radical right’s time in the British governmental spotlight:
It may come as a surprise to those who already consider the coalition a tough government, with its hairshirt rhetoric and seemingly endless spending cuts, but a growing number of Tory backbenchers, business figures, commentators and thinkers feel that the coalition – and by implication, other austerity governments across the west – is not nearly tough enough. Since 2011, as the British economy has slumped, this energetic but largely unnoticed political alliance, somewhere between a lobby group and a proper movement, has begun to show its strength. LINK
They wanted a wild, radical version of neoliberalism:
"The European economic and welfare model – I think it's over," says Mark Littlewood, director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), like the CPS a veteran British free-market thinktank reinvigorated by current possibilities. He favours cutting state spending in Britain by over a third, and leaving citizens with a "basic safety net". Yet he finds the coalition far too cautious. "There has been an incredibly modest reduction in public spending. It's as if the coalition have arrived at the scene of a road accident: they've urgently applied a tourniquet to the bleeding patient, but that's it. There's no rehabilitation programme to make the patient leaner, meaner, fitter." In part, he blames Tory fears about their party becoming "retoxified": "I've argued at the top levels of government, 'Scrap the minimum wage.' But then there's a sharp intake of breath. Anything that looks like a return to the Dickensian workhouse raises hackles. But I don't want people working in sweatshops at 5p an hour. You should sell abolishing the minimum wage in positive terms, as providing young people with a first step on the jobs ladder, as a 'jobs for all' scheme."
Because selling the erasure of minimum wage in “positive terms” will definitively improve the experience of being out there at the mercy of employers and bureaucrats.
Additionally, have you noticed how their views about minimum wage is not that far from the Trump’s Republican party’s stance about keeping the minimum wage low?
Why on earth would workers not get in line and cheer untempered capitalism? When, last, did Britain have such an unfettered labor/ employer market?
Is it a nostalgia for vanished imperial dreams?:
The industrial-imperial era was the nation’s high point, their reading of history contends, when Britain led the international rat-race. “Britain has lost confidence in itself, and what it stands for. Britain once ruled the Empire on which the sun never set… To avoid decline, Britain needs to look out to [sic] rest of the world and learn once again what it seems to have forgotten”, they say.
In this perverse cosmology, our ‘beating’ of other countries in the era of empire is more significant than the material gains experienced by the majority of people during the post-imperial evolution of the welfare state and the institution of workers’ rights.
This imperial nostalgia is an impetus for many current Conservative leaders, who are drawn from Oxbridge and the private school system, argues Simon Kuper in Chums. A yearning for a renewed age of British superiority stems from their desire to be ‘world king’ – mirroring their forbearers, whose portraits lined their school corridors – as was Boris Johnson’s childhood ambition.
Britannia Unchained is therefore a reflection of the country that its authors would like to govern – a neo-imperial power. It is a manifesto for the sort of society that would be most enjoyable for the rulers, not the citizens they govern. It is a form of private equity politics – ruthlessly extracting as much economic output from national resources, no matter what the toll on workers. LINK
That last paragraph — does it remind you of the spoken dreams of Trumpy Republicans, in office, or the ones running for it in current election?
They have some of the same ethos, with even the same people backing them here, as there — like Theil and Mercer, just to name a few.
Were the co-authors basically accusing the British work-force of laziness?
Yes.
Yes they were:
First, the authors outline what they see as “the chains”. These do not include the country’s financial elite, nor the small group that controls the bulk of our media. Instead, “bureaucracy”, laziness, an excessively comfortable welfare state, lack of ambition and lack of appetite for hard work interact to produce a country that is stuck in decline. LINK
Of course, the above link leads to the Financial Times where they pretty nearly destroyed the book, point by point, and here’s a sample. You can access the whole at link in quote:
More problematic yet are the repeated references to productivity without any visible understanding of what the term means. As an example, French labour productivity is much higher than in the UK. But high French labour costs make investing in capital (ie, machinery) more sensible. Economists have coined the term “total factor productivity” to discuss such issues. But maybe a person can leave an Oxbridge university with a PhD in an economics-related subject without coming across the fundamental concept.
It’s the central chapters, on effort and entrepreneurship, which give the strongest impression that our current leaders don’t like us very much.
Strong family ties and obsession with work in China (or Asia; the two are used interchangeably) are cultural, apparently, not the result of a weak to absent welfare system. The prose sometimes lurches into a rant, such as around how British kids want to be pop stars while their Asian counterparts want to start tech “unicorns”. The fact that Korea’s notoriously mental-health-destroying education system has families spending 20 per cent of income on private tuition is noted approvingly.
The book alternates between Daily-Mail-comment-box level economics, relying on cherry-picked facts without context, and what can only be described as haranguing of the feckless and lazy. LINK
It’s the sheer scale of what’s happened — and is an ongoing rolling, ever widening, debacle — that’s what’s scary for people living there at this time:
As hard as it is to get across the sheer scale of idiotic farce now unfolding, let’s try. Just last month, on September 6, Liz Truss replaced Boris Johnson as prime minister. Johnson had been forced to resign because Conservative members of Parliament decided he was unfit for office, after, among other things, he had been fined by the police for attending his own birthday party during lockdown. Truss won the race to replace Johnson by presenting herself as both the continuity candidate—the loyal follower who did not kill Caesar—and the new guard who would do away with all the boring bits of Johnsonism, such as raising taxes to pay for things.
What Britain needed, Truss argued, was a tax-cutting bonanza to set it free. Her rival for the leadership was Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who argued for fiscal responsibility and warned that such a reckless policy would lead to a run on the pound and a calamitous series of mortgage-rate rises. Given this choice, the electorate for the Tory leadership—the roughly 170,000 members of the Conservative Party—preferred the magical money tree.
SNIP
But Britain has never had so epic a collapse as this, nor a prime minister as deeply, painfully unimpressive—the worst prime minister ever, as the historian Dominic Sandbrook put it. When the Queen died, it fell to Truss to speak for the nation. She couldn’t, and she will never get another chance. Her downfall is different from those of her predecessors, for both its speed and what it reveals about Britain. LINK
And through it all, Truss and her supporting Tory libertarians, have displayed a total conviction of their ideological purity and necessity of her mission.
Republicans and Tories really do share some dna. Neither can let go of old delusions. {Guardian}
I hope they’ll rein in this rolling nightmare while they still can, before it become a global thing. Because domestically, in Britain, the shock is already beginning to be felt.
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