The present government constantly provides ministers and 'spokespersons' who will defend any policy and any situation. Thus, in the past 24 hours, a survey has shown that the majority of NHS nurses go home from their shift, not only physically exhausted but emotionally drained as well. They report not being able to be present when people die, completely alone. They are anxious and embarrassed that medication is not given on time; and is sometimes missed altogether due to the pressure of work. Some clown in the Health Department did not deny that the report was true, but made the irrelevant comment that there were 7,000 more doctors in the hospitals that there had been seven years ago.
Soldiers reported that the vehicles that were designed to protect them from roadside bombs and similar hazards often break down in the hot weather conditions for which they were supposedly designed, at a huge cost. The Defence Department flatly denied this report, asserting that the vehicles were effective in keeping the troops safe: maybe so, if the failure of the vehicles keeps the soldiers in their bases. Old naval hands despair at the lack of resources to keep the massively reduced fleet operational and seaworthy and fit for action. The two new aircraft carriers have no aircraft. There are plans to reduce the number of Royal Marines beneath the present level where they cannot cover all the actions to which politicians commit them. Mrs May flies off to Estonia to declare that Britain will defend all its NATO allies: with words and sharp cuts?
More than seventy Tory MPs have signed a demand to the Prime Minister to implement her election promise to impose a cap on energy bills for millions of households: it would only affect a minority of families, but would cover many of the most vulnerable. A smaller number of Tory MPs are also agitating for delay in the implementation of the government's penny-pinching scheme to accelerate the roll-out of the single state benefit. This would save money; particularly in that as people are migrated from the complex of former benefits onto the new system there is a six-week delay before they get any money from it. This the government's outward cash-flow is deferred; while individuals and households are plunged into desperate want, forced to apply to food banks and doorstep lenders.
The sheer insensitivity of all of this calls into mind the cynicism of the worst Victorian workhouse masters and the cynical Stalinist Commissar. Both of those classes of individual - like the civil service in austerity Britain - have had drummed into them that no more resources will be made available; so they simply deny truths that are on open display.
It is the record of socialist governments, whether Marxist or not, to assert their own propaganda more often and more fervently when the truth does not accord with the official line. This is happening more intensively [and more absurdly] by the day in Venezuela at the present time. Jeremy Corbyn's enthusiasm for the Maduro regime consequently becomes more indefensible by the day: but the Labour leader evades every opportunity to admit the lack of substance in the regime's claims and assertions; or to recognise the increasing level of oppression. Those who wore 'HANDS OFF VENEZUELA' T-shirts and baseball caps in and around the Labour Party Conference earlier this week seemed to me to be anticipating their future role as deniers on the domestic scene when the Labour Government that they expect to take office soon fails actually and humanely to implement their proposed policies. While Corbyn can still claim to be a 'seventies idealist, the people who have built his machine are ruthless advocates of extreme measures to rob the rich and to coerce the rest of the population. Nasser, Ghadfi, Ken Livingstone and a score of other 'strong men' shoved aside the much gentler figures who originally fronted their coups or electoral victories. It is well authenticated that while Mrs Attlee was driving her husband to Buckingham Palace to take the King's commission to form a government, Professor Laski, Herbert Morrison and others were plotting to hold a leadership election in the Labour Party that would choose a far different candidate than the election-winner Attlee.
There is a real and proximate danger that a Labour election victory, especially if the party won by a small majority, would quickly be followed by the overt capture of the government by a radical faction who would move quickly to consolidate their power undemocratically for a long period of authoritarian rule. As the saying in revolutionary circles goes: rely on one man one vote, once! Hence, although the Labour offering in the past week has been largely composed of highly desirable policies, and the austere Tories show that they cannot mind the shop while they flounder towards a Brexit disaster, the risks in having either party in power are immense.
Showing posts with label Attlee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Attlee. Show all posts
Friday, 29 September 2017
Monday, 12 June 2017
Being Mr May
A huge burden has fallen on the shoulders of Philip May over the past few days. His wife opened her innings as Prime Minister extremely well; then within a very short time she embraced a clutch of harebrained policies that undercut her position - notably her advocacy of foxhunting and grammar schools. Then she opted for a general election, at a time when the opinion polls indicated that the Labour party was seriously unpopular; apparently without checking that her own situation was strong. Thereafter she relied an her two close confidants, who had been unpopular at the Home Office where they had [or so it is now alleged] led her into several delusory paths. Thus came about the catastrophic manifesto and the idiocy of constantly asserting that she was 'strong and stable' as she demonstrated herself, and her position, to be anything but secure.
Most significant, and dangerous for the entire country, was her inability to explain how she would lead the negotiations on Britain's exit from the European Union. Part way through the election campaign I decided that this was because she genuinely did not understand what was expected of her. I do not think that she begins to understand what a 'hard Brexit' would be, or what catastrophic effects in would have on the entire population. I do not think that she understands any economic issue at all, whether in terms of rational ratiocination or idiotic economic theory.
She has now put her party in a position when they are in office but not in power, and even Boris Johnson has been able to see that she has earned the painful position that she must now be kept in for as long as possible. Michael Fallon and other senior ministers have made it clear that she will be controlled from now on; that policy will be made in cabinet, and she must follow it. So there is a hope that the country will get a decent outcome, and the Tories may even achieve a little credibility.
Mrs May will not enjoy that situation. Recently it has been made even more clear than before that she it utterly dependent on her husband: to a degree that makes her marriage very different from Denis Thatcher's. Denis became a popular figure, who was seen as powerless but fully autonomous; and Margaret's loyalty to him was unquestioned. Mrs May's dependency is palpable and painful, and the removal of her guard-dogs leaves the couple dangerously exposed in their isolation from real life.
Prime Minister's spouses have long been important, but to go back just eighty years, no-one doubted the calming and cheering influence of Lady Churchill. Then, when Labour won by a landslide in 1945, as Harold Laski and Herbert Morrison were said to be plotting to remove Clement Attlee from the Labour leadership, Mrs Attlee drove the small family car to the palace and her husband was given the King's commission; thus the plotters were stymied. Lady Eden took her husband on holiday when he ran off his trolley after Suez, and thereafter the nation was polite about the difficulties of the MacMillan marriage. Mary Wilson became a national treasure, supporting Harold in sickness and in health and later taking care of Lady Thatcher when she was a demented widow. Cherie Booth's independent career - and her republican reputation - did her no harm, nor did she have any detrimental effect on Tony Blair's career. His relatively recent marriage, and the children it produced, gave Gordon Brown a positive future after his defeat; and the loss of office after the loss of the referendum reanimated "Sam Cam's" career.
How Mr May fits into that catalogue is yet to be proven: but few people could envy him.
Most significant, and dangerous for the entire country, was her inability to explain how she would lead the negotiations on Britain's exit from the European Union. Part way through the election campaign I decided that this was because she genuinely did not understand what was expected of her. I do not think that she begins to understand what a 'hard Brexit' would be, or what catastrophic effects in would have on the entire population. I do not think that she understands any economic issue at all, whether in terms of rational ratiocination or idiotic economic theory.
She has now put her party in a position when they are in office but not in power, and even Boris Johnson has been able to see that she has earned the painful position that she must now be kept in for as long as possible. Michael Fallon and other senior ministers have made it clear that she will be controlled from now on; that policy will be made in cabinet, and she must follow it. So there is a hope that the country will get a decent outcome, and the Tories may even achieve a little credibility.
Mrs May will not enjoy that situation. Recently it has been made even more clear than before that she it utterly dependent on her husband: to a degree that makes her marriage very different from Denis Thatcher's. Denis became a popular figure, who was seen as powerless but fully autonomous; and Margaret's loyalty to him was unquestioned. Mrs May's dependency is palpable and painful, and the removal of her guard-dogs leaves the couple dangerously exposed in their isolation from real life.
Prime Minister's spouses have long been important, but to go back just eighty years, no-one doubted the calming and cheering influence of Lady Churchill. Then, when Labour won by a landslide in 1945, as Harold Laski and Herbert Morrison were said to be plotting to remove Clement Attlee from the Labour leadership, Mrs Attlee drove the small family car to the palace and her husband was given the King's commission; thus the plotters were stymied. Lady Eden took her husband on holiday when he ran off his trolley after Suez, and thereafter the nation was polite about the difficulties of the MacMillan marriage. Mary Wilson became a national treasure, supporting Harold in sickness and in health and later taking care of Lady Thatcher when she was a demented widow. Cherie Booth's independent career - and her republican reputation - did her no harm, nor did she have any detrimental effect on Tony Blair's career. His relatively recent marriage, and the children it produced, gave Gordon Brown a positive future after his defeat; and the loss of office after the loss of the referendum reanimated "Sam Cam's" career.
How Mr May fits into that catalogue is yet to be proven: but few people could envy him.
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Little and Large
There is no doubt that the USSR regarded Britain as a potent enemy during and after the Second World War. After Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg on The Soviet Union, Churchill openly said that if Hitler invaded Hell the British coalition government would make a pact with the Devil: the read-across from 'Devil' to 'Stalin' was unambiguous.
While Churchill ran the war with the support of his inner War Cabinet, the Lord President of the Privy Council - Clement Attlee, the Labour Leader - effectively ran the home affairs of the nation as Chairman of the Lord President's Committee of the Cabinet. When the war ended, Attlee became the Prime Minister, pledged to a programme of specifically democratic socialism in which he was constantly harassed by Moscow-supporting Communists who campaigned overtly and covertly, most obviously by infiltrating the trade unions which both provided funding of the national Labour Party and local support for MPs and Councillors through Trades Councils. Other significant fields of infiltration were the expanding universities and 'higher journalism': a very limited number of people wrote editorials and think-pieces in the broadsheet newspapers and in the upper-end periodical magazines. In those pre-television days the fashionable commentators also got a platform on BBC radio. Among their un-idealogical pupils and followers the 'fellow travellers' disseminated a dogma that Britain had done magnificent things in the war, but that this had been the last hurrah of an exhausted political and economic system: Britain was now finished. We should give up the Empire - let tiny cohorts of Marxist guerillas take over one colony after another, just as quickly as Moscow could train and equip them, and thereby save British soldiers from risk in confronting them. The government should reduce the defence establishment while it taxed incomes and inheritances so heavily that the aristocratic and capitalist cohorts would be squeezed out of existence in a few decades. This would leave the country to be led by a 'meritocracy' of people whose qualifications for power would be based on education and experience: assessed and monitored by the cohorts who were most heavily penetrated by the inspired left.
The political right was too powerful to be submerged. There was a strong corps of right-wing intellectuals, especially in the older universities, who could keep key posts from capture by disruptives. The military and the civil service mostly stuck to the plain meaning of their oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Religious institutions remained strong and largely uninfluenced by the left; and the most powerful trade union leaders had obtained and retained their positions by confronting assaults from the left, which left people like Ernest Bevin among the strongest and most-aware resistants to left-wing 'entryism'. This resistance did not defeat the left; it forced them to adopt Fabian tactics [named after a Roman commander who waited for the right moment to strike, despite the frustration that his approach provoked in many of his contemporaries].
The right also settled down to a long and largely unheralded strategy of defence: by a mixture of influence and 'philanthropy' conservative graduates influenced appointments in universities; magazines [most notably Time and Tide] were funded heavily by UK and US institutions to counterbalance the prevalent left tendency in 'heavy' journalism.
Meanwhile the mass of the population was presented with a policy that was essentially the Roman model: bread and circuses, paid for by exploiting the empire. As the empire shrank in area as as Britain's former preponderance in global trade shrank with it, the limits to taxing the rich were quickly exposed. Spending on investment [which had largely been paid through defence procurement] was reduced dramatically, leading to the decline of shipbuilding, aviation, computing and a massive range of other industries over four decades between the 'sixties and the 'nineties. As industry declined, the options of allowing credit inflation and 'selling the family silver' - disposing of the nationalised industries - became the preferred methods for balancing the books as the state spent vastly more than the economy earned.
This came to a head in 2007-8, but it had been inevitable since at least the mid-sixties, when the policy of handouts regardless of earning-power became evident. The major factor in making this bizarre impossibility the reality was the charade of democracy by which politicians acted out a shadowy conflict that blinded almost everyone to the economic reality. In this they were abetted by Economists, whose normative models transcended material reality. This blog has spent a lot of words on trying to present that situation in palatable doses. it has repeatedly been pointed out that a major component of the current incomprehension is the fact that the inventors of Economics progressively dropped the older and mature science of Political Economy as the fantasies supported by Economists became increasingly discordant with the truths exposed by the older science. Over the next couple of weeks I will lay out the Principles of Political Economy for the twenty-first century. People may now become willing to pay attention, as the evidence of failure of Economics and of charade-Politics becomes more blatant.
While Churchill ran the war with the support of his inner War Cabinet, the Lord President of the Privy Council - Clement Attlee, the Labour Leader - effectively ran the home affairs of the nation as Chairman of the Lord President's Committee of the Cabinet. When the war ended, Attlee became the Prime Minister, pledged to a programme of specifically democratic socialism in which he was constantly harassed by Moscow-supporting Communists who campaigned overtly and covertly, most obviously by infiltrating the trade unions which both provided funding of the national Labour Party and local support for MPs and Councillors through Trades Councils. Other significant fields of infiltration were the expanding universities and 'higher journalism': a very limited number of people wrote editorials and think-pieces in the broadsheet newspapers and in the upper-end periodical magazines. In those pre-television days the fashionable commentators also got a platform on BBC radio. Among their un-idealogical pupils and followers the 'fellow travellers' disseminated a dogma that Britain had done magnificent things in the war, but that this had been the last hurrah of an exhausted political and economic system: Britain was now finished. We should give up the Empire - let tiny cohorts of Marxist guerillas take over one colony after another, just as quickly as Moscow could train and equip them, and thereby save British soldiers from risk in confronting them. The government should reduce the defence establishment while it taxed incomes and inheritances so heavily that the aristocratic and capitalist cohorts would be squeezed out of existence in a few decades. This would leave the country to be led by a 'meritocracy' of people whose qualifications for power would be based on education and experience: assessed and monitored by the cohorts who were most heavily penetrated by the inspired left.
The political right was too powerful to be submerged. There was a strong corps of right-wing intellectuals, especially in the older universities, who could keep key posts from capture by disruptives. The military and the civil service mostly stuck to the plain meaning of their oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Religious institutions remained strong and largely uninfluenced by the left; and the most powerful trade union leaders had obtained and retained their positions by confronting assaults from the left, which left people like Ernest Bevin among the strongest and most-aware resistants to left-wing 'entryism'. This resistance did not defeat the left; it forced them to adopt Fabian tactics [named after a Roman commander who waited for the right moment to strike, despite the frustration that his approach provoked in many of his contemporaries].
The right also settled down to a long and largely unheralded strategy of defence: by a mixture of influence and 'philanthropy' conservative graduates influenced appointments in universities; magazines [most notably Time and Tide] were funded heavily by UK and US institutions to counterbalance the prevalent left tendency in 'heavy' journalism.
Meanwhile the mass of the population was presented with a policy that was essentially the Roman model: bread and circuses, paid for by exploiting the empire. As the empire shrank in area as as Britain's former preponderance in global trade shrank with it, the limits to taxing the rich were quickly exposed. Spending on investment [which had largely been paid through defence procurement] was reduced dramatically, leading to the decline of shipbuilding, aviation, computing and a massive range of other industries over four decades between the 'sixties and the 'nineties. As industry declined, the options of allowing credit inflation and 'selling the family silver' - disposing of the nationalised industries - became the preferred methods for balancing the books as the state spent vastly more than the economy earned.
This came to a head in 2007-8, but it had been inevitable since at least the mid-sixties, when the policy of handouts regardless of earning-power became evident. The major factor in making this bizarre impossibility the reality was the charade of democracy by which politicians acted out a shadowy conflict that blinded almost everyone to the economic reality. In this they were abetted by Economists, whose normative models transcended material reality. This blog has spent a lot of words on trying to present that situation in palatable doses. it has repeatedly been pointed out that a major component of the current incomprehension is the fact that the inventors of Economics progressively dropped the older and mature science of Political Economy as the fantasies supported by Economists became increasingly discordant with the truths exposed by the older science. Over the next couple of weeks I will lay out the Principles of Political Economy for the twenty-first century. People may now become willing to pay attention, as the evidence of failure of Economics and of charade-Politics becomes more blatant.
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