UK politics

Two more years of cuts and the Olympics — what fun!

Tories, UK politics
Published on

As predicted by BBC Newsnight bod Paul Mason:

The Coalition will fall. Not because of protest, not because of unpopularity but because everytime it tries to do something serious a bit falls off the machine. If they don’t get AV and Vince Cable does not get radical banking reform, then by the time the public sector job losses are eating into their popularity, around party conference time, the Libdems will call it a day. Even more audaciously I will predict the outcome: no election but a Second Coalition to be formed between the Conservatives, an inner core of Orange Book Libdem leaders and various Unionists, with a slim majority. One or two Labour rightwingers, disgruntled by Ed Miliband, may also be tempted to join. Cameron will face down the Conservative right and embrace Coalition government as a modus operandi until 2015. Labour, locked in a policy review process and possibly still reeling from (8) above, will avoid an election.

Jamie had some fun with the second part of that prediction, but I want to look at the first part. Protests, especially in the UK, do not have a particularly good track record in bringing governments down, or even get them to change their minds, but the ConDems are more vulnerable than most, largely due to the Dem part of it and its internal contradictions. Even then, it’s hard to imagine protests, even ones as big as the 2003 anti-war protests, will do much to disrupt the coalition, other than to accelerate the weakening of the machine as Mason puts it.

However, there is the potential for a huge, embarassing clusterfuck to happen smack dab in the middle of the ConDem’s reign. I’m talking of course about the 2012 London Olympics, enthusiasm for which never was that high in the first place, which will make the perfect opportunity for anybody fed up with the coalition’s policies to show their displeasure in front of the whole world. BBC London News today reported that a large part of the success of the Vancouver Winter Olympics was due to the large number of well trained, friendly volunteers at the games — image what could happen if thousands of disgruntled students, jobseekers and other victims of ConDem policies decide to take to the streets during the London games…

What struck me was the contrast between what will be everyday life in England after two years of budget cuts, slashed social services and a crumbling social infrastructure and the attempt to turn London in the world’s largest potemkin village as the Olympics come to visit. Normally the general public is not keen on anybody who politicises the Olympics, but when many members of it will be victims of ConDemmed policies themselves, how will that change?

The Tory party at its worst

Tories
Published on

Ann Widdecombe is the picture of elegance dancing on Strictly

No, not lord Young telling the unemployed they “never had it as good”, Ann Widdecombe making a fool of herself on Strictly Come Dancing. It may be a small thing in the scheme of things, but it show the essential pettiness and nastiness disguised as humour of much of the Tory party.

As you know, Strictly Come Dancing is a lighthearted entertainment show and dance competition featuring a dozen or so celebrities who’ve never had dancing lessons and their professional partners. Some of the celebs find out that they’re actually good at show dancing, some find out they’re crap and weeks of training doesn’t change that much, while most muddle through for shorter or longer periods. Widdecombe is of the second category, hopeless and with no chance of improving. There’s no shame in being a bad dancer, but what Widdecombe does goes against the spirit of the show: she doesn’t even attempt to try and dance to the best of her abilities, but flat out refuses to do anything she deems indecent. Though how shaking your hips is indecent while being dragged over the dance floor legs akimbo with your bum sticking out isn’t, I’ll never know.

Widdecombe than is even worse than John Sargent, who did try his best to dance when was in the programme, but treated it as an extended joke once it became clear he had the audience on his side and would never be voted off, no matter how dismal the judges scored him. He at least withdrew once the joke had stopped being funny. I can’t see Widdecombe doing that: she has a much too huge ego. As a result, each week better and more deserving dancers are voted off. It’s typical Tory to abuse priviledge this way, to disguise ego as principle.

What Twitter was made for

UK politics
Published on

Epic is not the word for it, Chris Brooke’s Tour de Force retweeting of Tony Blair’s autobiography. Thanks to his sacrifice there’s no need to read it yourself anymore — you can get the gist of it from the quotes:

42. Blair, p. 65: “On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength.” Wed Sep 1 12:03:56 2010 via web

[…]

163.Blair doesn’t say that something is funny, he says (p. 290) that there had been “a proper quotient of amusement”. Wed Sep 1 19:15:17 2010 via web

[…]

215.Blair broods, p.373, every day, on the victims of his wars, & “uses that reflection to recommit to a sense of purpose in the bigger affair.” Thu Sep 2 09:27:54 2010 via web

216.Blair, p. 373, “can only hope to redeem something from the tragedy of death, in the actions of a life, my life, that continues still.” (Wow) Thu Sep 2 09:28:56 2010 via web

[..]

426.Blair, p. 509: “The British people, whom I genuinely adored… like a love affair, had ceased loving and were not going to start again.” Thu Sep 2 20:15:41 2010 via web

[…]

529.Blair, p.567: the killing of JC de Menezes was a “terrible error”, but he also feels sorry for the officers, “who were acting in good faith” about 21 hours ago via web

[…]

554.Blair, p. 578: the heart of New Labour was its “championing of aspiration”. “Equity cd not & shd never be at the expense of excellence.” about 21 hours ago via web

[…]

771.Blair, p. 670: “Keynes was a great man”, but “I bet he would be surprised at how his theory is being applied today.” about 14 hours ago via web

Zeitgeist

Law in action, Natural World, Science, UK politics, US politics, wingnuts
Published on

Drive your rightwing friends even more batty: Nixon was worried about climate change:

Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention.

And again: Reagan was kind of a wuss compared to the wingnut fantasy version of him:

In fact, Reagan was terrified of war. He took office eager to vanquish Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and its rebel allies in El Salvador, both of which were backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. But at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion “scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan,” according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley. “Those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua,” Reagan told chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein near the end of his presidency, “and I’m not going to do it.”

Continuing our theme, the epic tale of when Terry Savage met a free lemonade stand shows that when it comes to political correctness even the most uptight liberal leftwinger has nothing on the wingnut right:

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs — how much the lemonade costs, and the cups — and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

Imagine having to live this way, of having to determine of anything you do whether or not it’s properly capitalist or backsliding deviantism and worse, having to do this not just for yourself, but for anybody you meet?

Some quick links to end the day:

The yellow peril

economic crisis, UK politics
Published on

Lenny on the budget:

However, the government does have a strategy, which involves terrorising and cajoling people. They have talked up the need for cuts, quite relentlessly, once in office. They have tried to create a panic about the state of the public finances, simulating a Greek-style shock, though in fact the fiscal situation is better than it was thought it would be. They have used the budget to not merely cut, but threaten severe attacks on all non-ringfenced public spending, slashing an average of a quarter of the budget across departments. But their real target is, and always has been, welfare. They hope that by scaring people about what they will do to education, transport, justice, etc., they will gain support if they suddenly decide to shift more of the burden to welfare.

And on the subject of welfare, quelle surprise, they are coming back for more. To begin with, promises enshrined in the coalition agreement that supposedly protected the poorest, such as the pledge not to attack bus travel subsidies and winter fuel payments for pensioners, are about to be tossed overboard. The welfare system is experiencing a phased attack, each additional blow intended to gain acquiescence and soften people up for more. The FT approves, editorialising in favour of more welfare cuts, and cuts in public sector pay, to avoid cuts in other areas such as justice and transport. The Economist agrees, bemoaning the fact that no party could publicly call for attacks on welfare during the election, but insisting that welfare must bear more of the burden. This is the ruling class in full battle cry – bail out the banks, pay off the bond traders, keep the basic infrastructure working, and make the poorest bear the cost.

The Tory budget would not be possible without the LibDems. Had they not gone into coalition with the Tories, the latter would’ve had to form a minority government and not have the support to put through such a radical plan. There’s not much difference in the three parties’ economic views, but only the Tories see the current crisis as an opportunity. And because the LibDems have committed themselves to support the coalition for its full term, they have no room to negotiate (assuming they’d even want to); they’re stuck with the Tories and no longer believeable as a sensible alternative to either them or Labour. Phil thinks he knows what that means for the party’s longer term future:

For a variety of reasons – some positional, some tribal – the possibilities open to the Lib Dems have been massively reshaped by their alliance with the Tories. The formation of the coalition, in and of itself, will have made it almost impossible to take the Lib Dems seriously as a party of the centre-left, or even the centre, for a very long time; I don’t think the party leadership realised just how big a break they were making with the old tradition of ‘equidistance’, let alone the party’s more recent position on Labour’s left-libertarian flank. But there was also a second miscalculation, and a larger one. The coalition is designed as a long-term project, with a five-year expiry date – and every day of those five years will bring negotiations, adjustments, decisions to retreat from Lib Dem priorities or accede to Tory policy. In other words, the Lib Dems are locked in to a process of rapprochement with the Tories: they’re not merely a satellite of the Tory planet, they’re a satellite in a decaying orbit.

This is roughly what happened to D66 in Balkenende’s second to last government. A left-liberal party like the LibDems, they too sold out their principles for government participation and were punished by the voters in the next elections, dropping to only two seats in parliament. It was only thanks to a clever repositioning as the anti-Wilders party that they managed to come back, but it took years.

The root causes for both parties’ behaviour are the same. Though they are described as being leftwing, on economic issues they’re on the right, comfortably neoliberal and firm believers in capitalist realism: the idea that the current system is the best we can do and can only be tweaked, not changed. They distinguish themselves through social issues that are far less rooted in ideology. So if you agree on the fundamental economical questions, what’s left is just a series of issues you can trade with other parties. Labour may be a bit more gay friendly but that’s offset by the Tories opposition to 90 days detention, etc. So for the LibDems working with the Tories was no different from working with Labour, even though voters disagreed. The endresult: this budget, which lets the poor pay for the crimes of the rich.

UPDATE: The Liberal Democrats are already paying the price for enabling the Tories:they’re going down in the polls. Of course, if the coalition does stay the course this may not matter; a lot can happen in five years. But it would fit the pattern D66 has established: doing well in opposition as the respectable party, plummeting when in government.