The downfall of Lettuce Liz

So it looks like poundshop Thatcher, dizzy Lizzie, or lettuce liz as she’s now being called (as she’s likely got the same shelf life as a lettuce) is on her way out. She’s had to do more U-turns than a DVLA test centre and bring in Jeremy Cunt Hunt as chancellor (fun fact, Kwasikaze now has the dubious honour of the shortest term as chancellor who didn’t die in office).

Given that Hunt is from the opposite end of the Tory party (he’s actually a remainer! That’s like appointing a gay atheist as treasurer to the Westboro Baptist church) this quite a big deal. And straight out of the gate he has rubbished all of her plans, promising spending cuts (then again, the whole point of the mini budget was to give them an excuse for more spending cuts) and tax rises. Basically lettuce liz, like Theresa May, is in power but not in government. PM in name only. And she’s not likely to retain that role for very long.

So where did it all go wrong? Well the problem was that she, like Johnson, wasn’t brought in to be prime minster, but merely to pretend to do the job. Her real job is to distract the public, put on a bit of a show, while the actual government policy is developed by others behind the scenes (hedge fund managers, right wing think tanks, foreign oligarchs, etc.). With MP’s expected to rubber stamp it (and if they don’t they face retaliation, e.g. a nasty article about them in the Daily Mail, or cuts to spending in their local area). Its like the mob run casino’s in Vegas back in the day. Obviously they can’t just open a casino themselves (they’d be lucky to get anywhere near Vegas without getting themselves arrested). So they get someone else to act as the squeaky clean front who pretends to be in charge. Meanwhile a couple of well placed henchmen are slipped in to run the actual operation….and bleed the joint dry.

The trouble for lettuce liz is that she’s not very good at lying. And let’s be honest, she’s not very bright, a bit arrogant and lazy (her 4 in a row car crash interviews on local radio could have been avoided by doing a bit of prior preparation on the questions she’d likely have been asked). I mean she was finished the minute she gave Starmer a straight answer at PMQ’s (first rule of crime, don’t admit to you’re crimes). Johnson, a professional conman, could talk for hours without ever communicating any actual facts. He had a gift for lying and delusion that Truss just doesn’t have. He could murder a granny in full view of the public and still convince half the people that she’d intentionally ran into the knife 22 times.

The other problem for her is that the Tory party have gotten more extreme and arrogant over time. They are now the most right wing party in the developed world, to the right of actual fascists. Thus the policies she were sent out to announce were just bonkers. And they didn’t even bother trying to hide how bonkers it was (after all, that’s the job of the Tory tabloids). Which prompted a market reaction beyond what they’d been expecting (largely because the UK post-brexit is more akin to a developing world economy and isn’t as resilient as it previously was). This put her in the awkward position of trying to defend the indefensible.

I’ve heard one commentator describe Truss as a one trick pony. Well if that’s true her one trick, to bring up the energy price cap, was actually a labour policy. And labour’s version would have cost less and provided a complete freeze on energy prices. Plus they hoped to claw back some of the costs with a windfall tax. And she also spent most of the leadership election arguing against it. She’s less the Manchurian candidate but more the lame duck candidate.

So what now? Well the Tories seem to think they can just replace her with somebody else, likely Sunak and that will be that. But they seem to forgetting about this little thing called “democracy”. Firstly, while in theory yes, they can have a leadership election, vote for Rishi again (who won the last contest among MP’s, but was rejected by the party in favour of Liz) and then pressure the 2nd place finisher to withdraw. But think for a minute how that’s going to look to your average Tory voter. You are telling them they are mad as a box of frogs, thick as mince and to please f**k off, we know best. Oh and btw Rishi’s flagship programme is privatising the NHS (so basically kill off half the party members…which probably explains why they aren’t too keen on him).

And what if the 2nd place finisher (likely Penny Mordaunt) doesn’t back down? The Tories are a party of ambitious backstabbers, who make the Targayen’s look like amateur hour. You don’t get to be that senior in the Tory party without have stepped over several bodies first. If she sees polls indicating she’d win a leadership contest, then its pretty likely she won’t withdraw and this whole mess will drag on for months.

In any event I have my doubts that Mordaunt or Sunak would be any better. After all, they were part of the cabinet that got the country into this mess in the first place. And with inflation set to rise (along with taxes and more austerity) I can’t really see how they can avoid a defeat in the next election. The problem for the Tories is that, post brexit, all of the grown up’s either left or were forced out. And then when Johnson took over, he purged anyone who showed any hint of competence or decency, as they could represent a threat to his leadership. The “grown ups” can’t take over from Liz, cos there aren’t any grown ups left in the Tory party.

And why is it the Tory party are allowed to change their mind about who is the PM, yet the rest of the country isn’t allowed too? Strictly speaking a government is elected to carry out the mandate in its manifesto. Now yes PM’s do change, but that’s okay, so long as they stick to the same manifesto. Major events can cause a change to that plan, e.g. when May took over from Cameron, inevitably she had to do something about brexit (one could argue this wasn’t breaking manifesto promises, as it had included an in out referendum). In fact it was foolish of her to call that election when she did (which was more about trying to take advantage of labour’s low poll ratings and get more control over her own party than getting a democratic mandate for brexit).

And yes, Boris stuck to his manifesto for about ten seconds. But even so, its very hard to avoid the question of legitimacy. This also feeds into the problems facing Truss, as she also lacks a democratic mandate for her policies. Meaning her own MP’s are more likely to rebel, the civil service may drag their feet, the lords may vote against it and the king would be within his rights to withhold consent on any legislation.

In fact, another thing the coup plotters might want to be wary of is to remember they repealed of the fix term parliament act. This give the PM a nuclear option to put down any rebellion – go to the king and advise him to devolve parliament. If he agrees (and while monarch’s tend to favour the Tories over labour, the Tories have managed to piss him off recently) this would trigger a general election, wiping out the Tory party. So she can potentially use that as a bargaining chip to cling on a little longer.

Bottom line, the interests of the country are, yet again, being sacrificed for the narrow selfish interests of the conservative party. I had to laugh when Starmer claimed the Tories were playing politics with people lives. Buddy “playing politics with people’s lives since 1834” is practically the Tory party motto!

Poundshop Thatcher’s supermarket sweep

So the poundshop wannabe Churchill has been replaced by a poundstretcher wannabe Thatcher….who immediately tanked the pound, forcing an expensive Bank of England rescue.

In fact the value of the pound is less of the problem, its more the lack of confidence that this has triggered. As this nearly led to a meltdown in pensions and is likely to lead to mortgage rates rising (well I suppose if you can’t afford to pay the rent/mortgage on the home you can’t afford to heat, that solves two problems! ). Within her first two weeks in office she’d cost the country £500 billion, that’s over a billion pounds an hour! And I’m sure its just a coincidence that the chancellor Kwasi Kamikaze happened to be having champagne with a bunch of hedge fund managers after the mini budget (who spent the last week shorting the pound and had meetings with the chancellor before the budget was announced).

The line the Tories keep repeating is how this is an unprecedented energy crisis. Its all the fault of Putin, etc, etc. While he has a lot to answer for, but he’s not been in charge of the UK’s energy policy for the last 12 years. As I’ve pointed out before, had the Tories not banned onshore wind, continued to support solar and kept the labour policy of both insulating older homes and raising energy efficiency standards on new ones, the UK won’t be in nearly as bad a mess right now. So this is a very expensive fix for a Tory problem. And a windfall tax (as proposed by labour) would have helped (to some extent) to offset the spending needed.

Furthermore, the markets weren’t spooked by these temporary price cap measures. They were spooked by a series of unfunded tax cuts, that were made without any proper scrutiny. And this on the back of the firing of senior treasury officials whose job it was to stop the government doing anything crazy. Market analysts have been very clear about that. What’s that you say, but the government U-turned? Actually no, they temporarily U-turned on £2 billion out of £45 billion. So its still the same bad idea.

So what are the Tories playing at? Well a bit of background. Several of those in the cabinet, and their corporate masters down on Tufton Street, are on record as wanting to shrink the state (Rees Mogg’s dad even wrote several books about how to profit from the downfall of the welfare state and Truss contributed to neo-liberal book). No more social welfare, disability allowance, public sector pensions and a fully privatised NHS. If you are poor, disabled, sick or just getting on a bit, you can crawl in a hole and die as far as they are concerned. Of course in order to do all that you need to stop labour coming along and just reversing everything. Well labour can’t do that if the Tories burn down the house before they lose the next election. Can’t raise taxes if everyone’s broke. Can’t borrow if the pound isn’t worth anything (recall they will have their money in offshore tax havens which rely on the so-called “euro-dollar” instead of sterling, so they’ve got no skin in the game).

One the themes from the last few weeks was how this was “the end of an era” with the Queen dying. Really? What exactly has changed? The people who were in charge a before (i.e. the oligarchs and the donors to the Tory party) are still the ones in charge. They’ve got a new face on the coins and a new puppet PM to do their bidding, but that’s about it. Other than that the funeral was little more than a queueation.

Case in point, Charles wanted to go to the latest climate summit, but was told not to go by number 10. After all, one of their main sponsors happens to be the fossil fuel industry, with a climate denier for a business secretary. It won’t look good for Charles to be going off tree hugging. He has about as much real power as a 12 year old.

You may also recall how we were told throughout the funeral how doing absolutely anything was “disrespectful”. Even just going cycling or doing DIY. Oddly enough rifling through the royal bins, bribing their staff, snipping photos of them with telephoto lens, ruining multiple royal marriages and being partially responsible for the death of Charles first wife, isn’t disrespectful. You’d think he’d speak up about this. But he probably know’s that the press (and the Tories) would quickly go from ubra-Royalists to seeking his replacement, if he’s seen to outlive his usefulness. King’s are two a penny and can easily be replaced. Just ask the former Spanish King (ousted in 2014), or King Edward back in the 1930’s.

Is Truss worse than Johnson? That depends on the context. Brexit would never have happened without Johnson, as he’d calculated that his best shot at being Tory party leader was by being the loser of the leave campaign (he hadn’t actually expected to win). And he sabotaged May’s attempts at a brexit deal and went for a hard brexit, because that’s what he then needed to do to keep the ERG (the hard right of the Tory party) on side. He was the one who appointed the cabinet of fools (including Truss) who were specifically picked not for their ministerial skills, but their inability to threaten his position. And he was the one who mismanaged the economy on various vanity projects that went nowhere. As well as overseeing a massive rise in corruption.

The major difference between Truss and Johnson is he was more about presentation. Gesture politics and looking like he was doing the things the ERG wanted were considered good enough. However, Truss is a little too dim for that. And she’s in a much weaker position, as its widely accepted that she’s very little chance of actually winning an election, or even remaining PM without ERG support (recall the majority of MP’s backed Sunak not her, she only made it onto the ballot thanks to the ERG).

So she, and her corporate masters, know they are on the clock. In essence what we are going to see over the next few months is a sort of right wing supermarket sweep as they attempt to grab as much as they can, while doing as much damage as possible to the public sector before they are inevitably removed from office. Hence they aren’t even pretending to hide what they are doing.

In fact this also probably explains the sudden nose dive in the markets. Normally the Tories rely on a policy of doing things that will produce short term growth just before an election (and cutting taxes is one of those), but which produce long term negative consequences (e.g. higher national debt, higher borrowing costs, slowing down the economy), which can then be blamed on the next labour government (or in this case, the future labour government, no kidding!). However, the markets are wise to this game. And the economic circumstances are now very different.

You see, the UK economy post-brexit, is more akin to that of a developing world nation. That’s not to say the country is as poor as one. Its just that by cutting off trade with Europe, while running up large un-costed deficits (mostly run up giving above inflation benefits to pensioners or multi-billion pound no bid contracts to party donors) over the last 12 years has put the economy in a very precarious state. And at the same time, they’ve unleashing massive waves of corruption and tax delinquency. And of course there’s issues such as the baby boomer pension time-bomb and the debts run up during covid. As a result markets now have to ask, where is the funding for these tax cuts going to come from?

The government can’t simply borrow it, because that would push up interest rates and just make servicing existing debts that much harder. Quite apart from the negative effects this will have on the economy, which could cause the income from taxes to fall. The Tories are claiming that they will fund it through spending cuts. And, as noted, their whole premise is about getting rid of as much public spending as possible (so this crisis gives them the perfect excuse to do that). However, public spending is an economic stimulus. It generates economic activity. Take it away and you’ve got less economic activity, slower growth and ultimately less taxes flowing into the government coffers.

As for privatising public services, they’ve been shown to be more expensive and less economically efficient that publicly funded services. Regardless of whether the state pays for it, or individuals pay for it through insurance, it comes with an economic cost. And those costs are going to be higher, meaning people have less money to spend on other things (which again means less economic growth and lower tax revenue).

So how do we stop the Tories? Well I won’t hold my breath if you are expecting anyone in the Tory party to help. Yes Sunak was correct in his appraisal of the situation, but he was also the one who ran the economy into the ground in the first place. Really about the only thing that will stop them is if they think it will leave them (and I stress them, not the country) worse off.

If for example labour planned to include Proportional Representation on their manifesto, that would pose a problem. The Tories only get into power because of the unfair nature of the FptP system. They’ve won majorities with as little as a third of the popular vote. PR would mean the only way there can ever be a Tory majority government is if they can get +50% of the people to back them. And that’s not happened for nearly a century (I think sometime in the 1920’s is the last time it happened). Inevitably they will be stuck in coalition governments (who will likely restrain their more extreme policies) or in opposition, with labour primarily in power, affording them plenty of time to undo the damage the Tories are now inflicting.

And an obvious way of doing that would be in forming a customs union with the EU. Not only because this would eliminate the needless checks at the border (and thus stimulate economic growth), but it also means that if the UK can’t borrow in its own currency anymore, it can instead borrow in euro’s (this doesn’t require the UK to ditch the pound, the debt would simply be held by European banks and be denominated in euro’s rather than pounds).

This would be nightmare for the Tories. Firstly, the whole reason for brexit was to avoid the scrutiny of European tax authorities (who have this crazy idea that wealthy people should pay taxes like everyone else). Doubly so if labour were to now make clear they will be ending non-dom status and cracking down hard on any tax dodgers. It would also mean the end state of brexit will be less the UK in the room with the other countries, but down in the scullery waiting for the bell to ring (which basically means the UK will just end up rejoining sooner or later).

And a labour party that made it clear it was also going to ban foreign ownership of newspapers and restore the BBC’s independence would spell a huge problem for the Tories. They are only able to survive (both politically and literally, as in avoid being lynched by an angry mob!) due to the unwavering support of the Tory press. Read the Daily Fail and you’d be under the impression we have a prefect government that has never made a mistake and been right about everything (except getting rid of Boris).

But we are not seeing any of that. Starmer has rejected PR, and wants to “make brexit work” (i.e. sit in the burning building and make himself at home once the Tories have left). He’s cozying up to media barons, has given no indication of how they will reverse Tory cuts and is still inexplicably not backing striking workers or those protesting the against the Tories. He’s firmly moved towards the Blairite camp. Which, as I’ve mentioned before is problematic.

Firstly because it raises the question of party unity. A sizeable block of those on the left now reject Blair as little more that a lighter version of the Tory party. The danger is they will splinter off and back third party candidates such as the green’s or lib dems instead. The other problem is, what’s the point of voting for labour if they aren’t actually going to change anything. And that could be a significant question when things like Scottish independence comes up.

In short, Starmer is enabling the Tories to do their worse. If they were actually afraid of what a labour government would do they won’t dare try to get away with what they are now doing.