Liz Truss has one hell of a job and that's before we take into consideration she's basically a pound shop Thatcher with the personality of a house brick and as thick as pig shit and that's not me being horrible. It's like the Tory grandees have looked at the state of the country and gone, 'there's fuck all we can do about this, we're going to have to let the Labour party back in so they can sort the mess out.' Sunak might have had a go at tackling the problem, but it wouldn't have been conservativism as they want it and he would probably fail because most sensible people will know the truth when they see it.
I recount a story from about 1972; a memory of mine that for some strange reason has stuck with me more than a lot of other things for 50 years. My mum used to work in a fruit and veg shop in a shopping precinct in Daventry, we'd been decimalised for over a year and there was an inflation problem for a few years - it was running around 8%. The price of a pound of potatoes rose from 2p a lb to 5p a lb, a very hefty % increase. My mum, serving two older ladies in the shop, replied to one of the women who said the price would go down soon enough with, 'Once the price rises it almost never returns. Prices go up they rarely come down.' She wasn't wrong and it's this analogy that worries the shit out of me.
The first thing I struggle with is why freezing energy bills should cost the government - therefore us - £100bn? Shouldn't the energy companies, who regularly get bailed out by the government, just not make as much profit for a few years? The second thing is now that Gazprom have switched off the Russian gas supply, although the UK only takes 4.3% of its gas from them (the rest comes from Norway and our own gas), the effect on Europe will have knock-ons that will give our energy firms a license to make more money at our expense. We wouldn't be paying more if it was nationalised.
But let's not get bogged down with just the potentially catastrophic energy bills crisis. Truss also inherits a recession, a trade war, a supply chain problem, mounting strikes, an NHS still on its knees, the threat of another Covid winter, a cost of living crisis that could plunge more than a third of the population into survival mode and all the excellent bi-products that fuck up economies brought on by all of those things - more unemployment, more poverty, less tax being paid, more benefits, people actually dying of lack of food or heat in 2022. Frankly, I knew Brexit was going to be one royal shit show of a clusterfuck but it's surpassing even my worst forecasts and this is pretty much down to Brexit - not Covid, not the Ukraine, not anyone else's fault but our own, because had we still been in Europe we would have been in a much stronger position and we wouldn't be as badly off as we are, because regardless of what the Daily Mail might want you to believe, it's tough in the EU but not half as tough as it is in the UK at the moment.
The only real way of solving this problem is to throw money at it. That would solve the problem - short term - until the next round of price rises hit; until the shareholders, desperate to continue doing fuck all for their millions, want even more. Capitalism is broken; that's clear to see. It is just a version of slavery that every week discards to pretence that it isn't just a form of slavery. What makes capitalism work in the eyes of the unwealthy and right wing is the fact that you can make it in this system, you can become a proper consumer. The thing is we were always told it was through hard work and commitment, but it's usually through having a lot of money - maybe someone else's - to start with.
I am seeing something of a backlash against shareholders, CEOs and profits made by companies essentially there to supply us with things we shouldn't be forced into poverty to have. People I know as conservatives (small c deliberate) posting and reposting memes playing the whataboutists at their own game, but using targets that have a proper tangibility in the world. It's okay using whataboutery in hypothetical scenarios (but... Jeremy Corbyn, is a perfect example), the problem is it starts to look desperate when someone defends the very rich getting richer. Which, of course, is what Liz Truss has already done by suggesting, yet again, that tax cuts to the richest benefit the whole of society. It hasn't since it was first suggested and there's no reason to suggest it will now.
Despite a lifetime of leftist leanings and I love it when people try to suggest social democracy and socialism are two disparate ideologies and should never be entwined because both have one word at the core of their existence - fairness. Back in the 1990s when I had my small business, my landlord, who ran the local Chinese takeaway, Mr Chan, once said to me, 'I don't want the world to be anything other than a fairer place.' and you know, I think, deep down, that is what most normal people want. They don't want to have to worry about basic essentials, they want a few luxuries, a holiday and a safe roof over their heads, maybe a few quid in the bank for rainy days or those emergencies we all know are going to happen. Didn't a lot of us used to have that? A lot more than we have now?
How is that progress?
How is fighting to save our personal dignity a positive thing a quarter of the way through the 21st century?
How can we allow people to profit from things that should be available to every person for as little as humanly possible?
How does allowing any utility service to be run by private companies going to benefit anyone other than the people making money?
These are bleeding obvious questions some people have been shouting into the abyss about for 40 years, but we've allowed greed to supersede every other thing and we're heading for a genuine Us and Them scenario. When the voice of consumer realism Martin Lewis says he fears there might be civil unrest in the winter you want to think he's overreacting but I bet part of you thinks, 'yep, he could be right.'
You could argue, quite reasonably, that we're being gaslighted by the media in the same way our NHS doctors tend to err on the side of caution when giving a prognosis, possibly in the hope that if it doesn't get as bad as everyone says it will then at least we can still heat our gruel by candle light, even if the candle has been made from rendered rat fat.
I said in the last blog I wrote somewhere that I'm actually quite scared of what the next few years holds. I cannot believe the UK could possibly slide into some kind of dystopian reality that many of the myriad of gammons out there in internet land have dismissed out of hand as scaremongering and project fear, but imagine what is going to be in Truss's in-tray? This is a woman with a slightly maniacal grin and the natural rhythm of a badly constructed android who has announced herself as the next Iron Lady and will lead Britain forward with the richest at the front. No one in their right mind would want to have to try and clear up a mess that has only just started. This isn't even a situation yet, this is a looming darkness on the horizon almost designed to put us into a dark ages mindset, perhaps to steel us for the grimness to come, but it's going to come.
Of course, this could all be a ruse. A double negative that ends up with the Tories calling a general election because the bounce from their measures means they can continue their good work for another 5 years. Yet, this does have a mid-1990s feel about it, like we're winding down on the Tories for bit and we'd rather vote for a one-eyed Jack Russell called Rusty than any of them, ever again. I don't think this hapless bunch of morons have had much idea what they've been doing for the last 5 years, at least and I think the future is scaring the shit out of them, while Boris is eyeing up the 2030 General Election as his chance to regain his throne, maybe as a born-again Blairite? I don't think they know how to stop the country from going bankrupt, because all of the money we should be getting is being syphoned off by all the people who bought UK PLC and not into British bank accounts.
We're almost at a stage where we need a Clement Atlee styled leader with a vision to change the UK into a better place for everybody. I don't see that person sitting on any opposition bench. I don't think people like that are welcomed into parliament because they tend to be hard work for the entitled and privileged.
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