Mrs May's Incomprehension

In an emotional Commons sitting yesterday, Mrs May displayed her total incomprehension of the realities of life for the very people she has said she wants to convince that 'Britain is a country that works for everybody'. She absolutely refused to pause in the roll-out of the new single benefit, even though Tory MPs had lined up to warn her of the stress that this was causing in households up and down the land. She lauded the principle of the benefit, and gloated that it was forcing people to take low-paid jobs [though, of course, she did not formulate it quite in those terms].

The government more generally have emphasised that people can get an advance of 50% of their benefit for the six-plus weeks they have to wait to draw the main sum; downplaying the speed with which repayment of the advance is required once receipt of the benefit is confirmed. It is a matter of indifference to the government whether the 'helpline' charges 50p+ per minute or is free: no doubt, if more people can access, it more of the callers will find it constantly engaged.

The same day, figures were produced that show that more than a quarter of young mothers all over the country and of the people in north-east England lead the large league table of people who are locked-in to low-paid jobs, with no hope of shifting to better situations in the short term. Thus more people are more deeply depressed than have ever been since the introduction of the welfare state; with the food banks planning for a bumper Christmas this year.

A long way beyond Mrs May's comprehension is the fact that as more people are driven into low-paid employment, that is also low-productivity employment.  So the more people 'gain' from the single benefit, the lower will be the average wage and the less will be the average output per head over the whole workforce: so the lower will be the average 'productivity' of labour: brilliant!

Today Mrs May is off to Brussels, to reveal her equally profound incomprehension of the plain English, French and German in which she and David Davis [and their team] have been told what the EU expects before they are willing to talk about giving Britain special access to the EU single market after Brexit. The Tory headbangers have sent her a formal warning not to be led into making any 'concession' to the EU: as if the UK has any real choice in the matter. Of course, none of the clots who have issued the warning lives on the breadline. None of them are dependent on the minimum wage, or on the single benefit; indeed, many of them have no need to earn their current income at all as they are rentiers or pensioners [or both]. So none of them will be in the categories who would experience extreme deprivation in an economically-isolated UK; but there are millions of people in Britain whose precarious living standards would be smashed to smithereens under WTO Rules. Thus these Privy Councillors and party hacks are showing the same arrogance of affluence as Mrs May and her Secretary of State for Work and Pensions showed yesterday. They are flexing their power to destroy the Conservative Party: perhaps they should be allowed to do just that; before the final vote in Parliament on the implementation of Brexit is held.

Back to Blogging: Barnier and Boris

I have begun to draft a prolonged 'Thinkpiece', and am already thinking that it is probably going to be too wordy for the normal blog format. I'll press on with it for a few days, but in the meantime I intend to carry on blogging most days in simple, short dollops. It seems to suit my temperament.

This morning, the radio brought me the shocking early gossip that David Davis - the Brexit Secretary who has made such heavy weather of a simple job, so far - has suggested that in the summer of 2019 he will retire and leave to Boris Johnson the task of implementing whatever Brexit deal the UK ends up with at the March deadline. The one reassuring thought to which this gives rise is that it is probably Johnson's destiny to lead the Tory party to a defeat of greater proportions than that of 1945.

The prospect of two dangerous Marxists leading a cosmetically-rational Labour majority in the Commons down a road to ruin is not enough to scare anybody sensible into voting for Boris, who seems anxious to display his complete failure to understand either the crazy orthodox Economics of the 'free market' school or the realities of economic existence. I have not heard his comment on the scandal of the botched roll-out of the Single Benefit, and suspect that he has not made one. I don't suppose that he would understand even as little as does the Prime Minister of the situation of people who are faced with the prospect of having no income for an average period of six weeks. Most Conservative MPs seem mollified by the assurance that these desperate individuals can get a loan of half the level of benefit that they can expect ultimately to get, on strict payback terms. So little do most recipients trust the system to treat them fairly that they suspect that if they took up the offer of the loan they would be under even more intense scrutiny than they already have been. The disconnect between the 'hard Brexiteer' minority in the Commons and the grassroots of the electorate - including traditional Tory voters - has become greater than one could have forecast even a year ago.

In the 2017 General Election Mrs May got a greater Conservative vote than did her predecessor in either 2010 or 2015: but that did not translate into a majority of Commons seats: just as happened when Hillary Clinton's three million vote lead in the election failed to translate into Electoral College votes in the USA. Mrs May's largely zombie-like performance since her wining defeat is comprehensible, but it is desperately bad for the country. Her most egregious error was to hire a hall in Florence in which to make a statement to some of her ministers and to the British press [and a handful of local Italian politicians] that she should have made in more precise terms to the House of Commons six months earlier. That would have obviated the 'need' for any election in the UK, and made it possible for M Barnier to say: "Ah, now I begin to understand where she is coming from: let's start the serious talking."

Mrs May could, possibly, have been a competent prime minister: had she possessed the one essential quality that she conspicuously lacks: confidence in her own instincts. This seems increasingly to be derived from the circumstances of her upbringing an early career. A nice home in the home counties, a nice school in the home counties, an easy passage into an easy degree at a top university, a comfortable partnership with a slightly younger man, a job in the Bank of England and an easy passage to a safe parliamentary seat. There has been no need in that life to struggle: no hardship; not even experience of work in a competitive business: and how all that now shows!

The same goes for Boris, of course; his troubles have come from his lies and his lusts. Jeremy Corbyn's origins in the family manor house and his career on the champagne socialist circuit have kept him carefully isolated from the harsh realities of life. Here we have three of a kind; and there are more of their kind all around.

It is good to have practical builders like Philip Hammond and successful competitive investment managers like the egregious Mr Mogg to bring balance to our political life!