Author Archives: Dominic Minghella

Article: 2022 – The Year Reality Checked In

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There will be many sage reviews of 2022. This is not one of them. You don’t need me to remind you of the tragi-comic twists and turns of Tory contortion and corruption, the end of the second Elizabethan era (and the reinvention of HMQ as someone who relentlessly smiled), the surprising mid-term performance of Biden’s Democrats, the miserable machinations of Putin and Xi, the failure to keep 1.5 alive, the unconscionable aborting of Roe v Wade, the elevation to hero status of that peerless people’s champion, Martin Lewis… All of these will be amply covered elsewhere.

Instead, allow me to make just one observation about 2022: reality checked in.

When the Queen died, my mischievous son Dan hoped Charles would opt for an interesting regnal name. Dan was rooting for him to dub himself Arthur. After all, the country needed a lift, and it’s not as if there was any national gravitas left to protect.

But it turned out 2022 was not to be a year of diving deeper down the rabbit hole of  myth. Charles chose Charles. And the time for reliance on stories about our country and ourselves – our sun-never-sets history and our world-beating future, our sceptered isle, our Albion – came to an abrupt halt. Because the most significant event in 2022’s sorry calendar was the busting, courtesy of Truss and Kwarteng, of the myth of Conservative fiscal responsibility – and with it, our collective propensity to prefer romance over evidence, a malaise which had dogged the last several years of British politics.

This reality check came, as we know, at a time of confluent economic calamity. First, the energy price hikes resulting from the Russia/Ukraine war. Second, additional inflationary pressure courtesy of Brexit and supply chain issues, home and abroad. Third, interest rate rises from a Bank of England charged with controlling inflation with the bluntest of instruments, but also seemingly intent on following the Federal Reserve’s unhelpful direction of travel. Fourth, the coming home to roost of twelve years of Tory economic choices, now unadorned and unprotected by the flamboyant prolixity of the pantomime premier, Britain (or was it Briton?) Trump. So much reality, landing with so much synchronicity, on one poor unsuspecting kingdom, and no hero to pull the sword from our troubled stone..

It matters that the seismic shift in the polls away from the Tories has coincided with these economic setbacks. Because there is a school of thought which suggests that, in times of economic woe, the Tories gain votes, because the British public believes that Tories – the natural party of business and finance – do sound economics. And if the public is persuaded that belt tightening is necessary, then the Tories are the people to make those unpopular choices for the good of the country.

But the polls suggest that this faith in innate Conservative fiscal expertise has vanished in a puff of smoke. Moreover, there is an awareness that we have already had twelve years of tightening – is there really scope for more? Would it be fair? And would it even work? Cameron and Osborne’s austerity did not deliver prosperity, or anything remotely resembling it. If substantial public support for striking workers is anything to go by, the old Tory offer of bitter medicine today, in return for promised jam tomorrow, simply isn’t washing. We want the economy to work for us, and not the other way round.

We can’t know for sure whether this loss of credibility will really result in wholesale abandonment of the Conservatives in the privacy of the ballot box, come the general election. That assay may be a good year away, and much could change in the interim. In the meantime, the only hope the Tories have is to sell the idea that Truss and Kwarteng were an uncharacteristic blip, and to return to the old line that, if times are hard, you need Tory rectitude, and not Labour profligacy, to get things back on track. This leaves Prime Minister Sunak little room for manouvre, even if he wanted it. With accusations of weakness from Starmer, he has no choice but to go for a tough approach to government spending, and to take a risky hard line on (so far) popular strikes. It doesn’t augur well for 2023.

At the same time, Labour has an opportunity, unique in recent memory, to lay to rest the myth of Tory economic capability once and for all. Before the demise of Johnson, before the catastrophe of Kwarteng and Truss, such was the collective compulsion to believe in a Britain unrestrained by reality, that there were things which simply could not be said. Truths which simply could not be uttered. That Brexit has failed is one of them. That steady immigration is a prerequisite of growth is another.

But there is a truth bigger even than those, and more fundamental: the Tories are, forgive my French, fucking terrible at managing the economy. On every key metric, Labour are demonstrably better. Any voice in voters’ heads suggesting that only the Tories can set the economy straight must be strangled at birth. The party of sound economics is, on all the evidence, the Labour Party.

Such has been the power of Tory myth, that this truth is rarely uttered. From ‘Labour Isn’t Working’, to Cameron and Osborne’s effective pinning of the blame for the global financial crisis onto Brown, via accusations of failing to fix the roof while the sun was shining, and Gordon selling the gold while ‘maxing out the credit cards’, the national story has been that Labour may be ‘nice’, but they can’t manage the economy, whereas the Tories may be ‘nasty’, but that’s what makes them good custodians of the public purse.

There’s a technical term for this story: bollocks. If you want evidence – and you should -take five key metrics, and weep.

ECONOMIC GROWTH

On growth, Labour do better. Austerity strangles the economy.

GOVERNMENT BORROWING

On borrowing, there is no competition. Labour held borrowing down while massively improving public services. The Tories, in contrast, have delivered extraordinary increases in borrowing, alongside devastating cuts. Truly the worst of both worlds.

UNEMPLOYMENT

How about unemployment? Remember those “Labour Isn’t Working” posters? In truth, almost every year under Labour saw below average unemployment. Most years under the Conservatives saw above average unemployment. And we know that the current recession is set to turn staff shortages into rising unemployment.

INFLATION

How about inflation? You’ll hear our Tory chancellor and Prime Minister warning that it is an evil which harms us all, as if they alone took its harm seriously (and as if they had nothing to do with steering us into the inflationay corner in which we find ourselves). But guess what? The record shows that only the Conservatives have delivered inflation over 4% — and we all know that painful recent figures will only make the comparison far, far worse.

WAGES

Wages have fallen under the Conservatives. After twelve years of Tory, pay packets are smaller than they were under Labour. No surprise that we’re seeing foodbanks running out of food, and unprecedented strikes by workers who feel abandoned and betrayed. Enough is enough of not enough.

That’s the big takeaway of 2022. The Liz and Kwasi Kwartrusstrophe blew the long-unchallenged lie that the Tories could be trusted with the economy. It was never true, but now we’re allowed to say it out loud.

Labour has the chance to rebrand, justly, as the party not just of decency and fairness, but of sound economics. It’s imperative that this vital terrain is no longer gifted to the Conservatives. The time for indulging in myths – in romantic visions of our country, made somehow strong by poetic belief in legend or empire or flag – is behind us. There is another way, based in evidence and founded on fairness, which trumps Tory entitlement to govern on every metric that matters.

Sorry, Cameron and Osborne. Sorry, Sunak and Johnson. Eventually light shines on false narratives. Eventually reality checks in on more than a decade of failure. Eventually myths get busted. Them’s the breaks.

Thanks to Mark E Thomas/99% Organisation for charts and analysis.

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Article: Light on Tufton Street

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Is it the time of year? Or has the air changed in politics? In the mayhem of Truss’s economic catastrophe, are we witnessing the green shoots of Britain’s psychological recovery?

The way the air changes in September. Summer clings on, sometimes, but then there’s that familiar nip, and things suddenly feel different.

It’s not the first time the Tory governments of recent years have taken bizarre decisions against the interests of the British people, but it is the first time they have been so swiftly and so decisively called out.

A YouGov poll on Monday showed that, across all age groups, pretty much nobody had confidence in Truss’s government’s ability to tackle the rising cost of living.

No doubt, the immediacy of the market response – the ‘flash crash’ of the pound – has helped the public to see the rashness of Kwarteng and Truss’s mini-budget for what it is.

Now even the IMF has issued its statement of dismay, summarised nicely here by the Have I Got News For You social media team:

via HIGNFY

Perhaps the cabinet can be forgiven for thinking they would get away with it. After all, they got away with austerity, they got away with Brexit, and during peak Covid they got away with the siphoning off of public funds to friends, family and donors.

But the effects of Brexit were harder to see, masked by transition periods, covid, disinformation, and the blinding nature of faith. Brexit benefited also from a democratic mandate of sorts. Flawed, corrupt, and based on a mountain of shameless lies, but nevertheless there.

The present stance of Truss and Kwarteng, on the other hand, has precisely no mandate. Pouring scorn on redistribution, they have promised public money in unprecedented, economy-crashing sums to ‘big oil’ and gas, and tax cuts for the very rich – entirely disregarding their party’s repeated commitments to ‘level up’. It’s the opposite of a mandate.

No wonder the public is unimpressed. There’s no hiding this one behind ‘will of the people’. It is will of the hedge funders. It’s will of Tufton Street. It’s will of the arch libertarians and the disaster capitalists.

Speaking of Tufton Street, that’s something else that’s changed. The BBC has finally published an article, and radio programme, on ‘the other black door shaping British politics’.

Tufton Street’s shady influence won’t be news to those familiar with the weeds of politics, but it might be news to the general public. Until now it seemed they didn’t want to know. But now, with such a bizarre departure from any semblance of fiscal caution, such a shameless favouring of the already wealthy, the public is inevitably going to ask what’s behind it. Where there is a bad smell, you look for the source.

Some of that bad smell emanates from the prodigious profits of hedgefunders who have bet against the pound and UK gilts, making big money out of our national misfortune.

(They did this before, of course, making substantial donations to the Brexit cause, only to reap gigantic rewards in the sterling slide which inevitably followed. But Brexit was different. That mandate again.)

The bad smell is particularly strong around the links between these hedge funders and our chief policymakers. They seem to have worked for each other, funded each others’ startups, and met up at what would appear to have been opportune moments.

Even if there has been (as is claimed) ‘no trading benefit from these relationships,’ the seemingly-close alignment of people, policy, prediction and profit is going to be hard to stomach for a public fretting about heating and eating, inflation and borrowing costs.

But locating the source of the smell is not just about who profits. It’s about why. What possible line of thought brings us here? Tufton Street provides much of the answer. We learn that its opaquely-funded outfits have been nurturing the likes of Truss since forever, inculcating in them their vision of the UK as a billionaire sociopath’s nirvana: small state, deregulated, safety-net free. We learn that now, with the successful installation of Truss in No 10, the UK has finally become their ‘laboratory’.

Yes, we are lab rats in a mad experiment. And they are saying it out loud.

Maybe that’s why the air seems to have changed at the BBC, too. Maybe that’s why it has chosen now to begin to shine a light on Tufton Street. It might not be the very first time it has done so, but it certainly feels like it. It feels like the BBC is daring to break free of its internally- and externally-imposed constraints.

BBC news’ reporting seems more direct in the last day or two, describing the economic fallout of Truss’s plans with cold, incisive clarity, for example, and reminding viewers, right up in the headlines, that a falling pound, by making imports more expensive, only worsens inflation, while requiring interest rate hikes – which further exacerbate the cost of living.

Watching and listening to their coverage, it really feels as if they’ve decided they’re not frightened any more. It really feels as if the BBC knows the Tories’ number is up, and there is no longer any benefit in kowtowing.

Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Labour seem to have had a remarkably upbeat conference. Delegates’ excitement was palpable. The intention to renationalise the railways, the bold green policy, the insistence on sound money. And above all, the confidence to paint a picture of a rosier future. I was struck by the lady who, interviewed after the leader’s speech, said that Starmer had restored her hope, after her husband died following a traumatic six-hour plus wait for an ambulance. She wanted someone to turn the NHS around, and Starmer convinced her that he would. Change was coming.

Perhaps most comforting of all are the little anecdotes you pick up here and there.  A couple of ladies in the hairdresser in affluent Esher, card-carrying Tories, overheard declaring that the tax cuts for the rich were ‘just not fair’. Or the die-hard Brexiteer in a family WhatsApp group finally saying he’s made up his mind to vote Labour – ‘Starmer’s got his act together, and the Tories have lost the bloody plot’. It might be September, but are these the green shoots of Britain’s psychological recovery?

None of this is to forget the power of the Tory campaigning machine. They won’t go down without a fight, and they fight below the belt. Anyone who is sure we’re on the brink of a ‘97 moment, and not a 1992 stumble, is naive.

But the British public, like its supine public broadcaster, seems to be waking up. For twelve years, the Tory emperors have worn no clothes. Suddenly, their dishonesty, their folly, their callous, naked greed, is there for all to see.

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Updated 28 Sept 2022, 15:40 with minor tweaks and additional images.
Updated 29 Sept 2022, 14:47 to reflect Labour conference has finished.

Review: The Decade In Tory, by Russell Jones

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Do you have a politics junkie in your life? Then their next gift is in the bag. Russell Jones’ hugely impressive first book, The Decade In Tory is the politics junkie’s masochistic wet dream. Inspired inevitably by the mega-thread commentaries “The Week In Tory” which have shot him to deserved twitter fame, Jones brings his combination of forensic precision, clear-sighted overview, and cruel mockery to the dark decade of “Tory” beginning with the Cameron government of 2010.

Jones’ journey through the decade charts its twists and turns exactly as the reader remembers them. There is a sickening “oh my God, that’s right, they really did do that, and they really did say that” sensation of recollection, like flipping through a grotesque highlights album of the country’s downfall. Despite this familiarity, the startling claims and even more startling ‘solutions’ emanating from the dramatis personae of the decade in Tory sometimes seem so far-fetched that you want to pinch yourself, or at least check you’re not sharing in a hysterical dream. When that uncertain feeling comes over you, Jones provides ample footnotes in evidence. This stuff really is true.

But Jones doesn’t get lost in, or distracted by the detail. He moves with ease between macro lens and panorama, between the granular and the lofty, and sees the overall trends for what they are. His distaste for the Tories is writ large, but don’t be fooled; there is real political writing here too – thoughtful, informed assessment sits underneath the venom. That’s why his punches hit home, both in his online commentaries and in this substantial book. Jones knows his oats.

For all his smarts, Jones is also rude. “You may have never kissed a Tory, but you’ve still probably spent most of your life being fucked by them.” Of Grant Shapps, he writes, “he had more identities than Jason Bourne, somebody else who people would travel half way around the world to punch.” Jacob Rees-Mogg is described as the result of a Dalek having hate-sex with a pendulum. You get the gist. Some may see this as puerile, but the utter contempt in which he holds the protagonists – or is that antagonists? – in his story entirely justifies, and even demands this level of vituperation. There is plenty of dispassionate political commentary out there, which too often describes hateful political ideas and deeds without taking the logical next step of attributing hatefulness to the characters involved. No such pussy-footing around here. Jones is merciless. Progressives tend to pull punches with the occasional damning quip, while the hard boys of Brexit and beyond use language with blunt effectiveness. For those of us who see the world as Jones sees it, a new critical vocabulary is needed, and if the character assassinations here feel a little uncomfortable, that only serves to underline the point. A new school of informed, forthright opprobrium is growing among the stars of progressive twitter, and Jones’ voice shines among the very brightest.

This book will comfort you. It will confirm for you that the grim decade in Tory was as you remember it; you haven’t gone mad, even if the Tories have. It will sadden you, too, for exactly the same reason. The UK really has plummeted from premier league to non-league in just a few seasons, and at great human cost. (As a barometer of this decline, Jones repeatedly cites the year-on-year increase in the number of Britons reliant upon foodbanks. Each citation is more sickening to read than the last, and the cumulative effect is nothing short of enraging.) And this book will entertain you. There is a bleak comedy to this ‘inventory of idiocy’ as Jones calls it, and you can’t help but laugh as he celebrates it.

The Decade In Tory is a bravura performance. Substantial, meticulous, incredible, depressing, hilarious, rude – and essential reading.

 

The Decade In Tory by Russell Jones is published by Unbound on 27 October, 2022.
Russell Jones on Twitter: @RussInCheshire

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Article: I Was At School With Steve Bray

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I was at junior school with Steve Bray. Steve was smart but rebellious. He looked at the rest of us like we were dunces when our teacher asked if anyone knew what the ‘DC’ in Washington, DC stood for. Someone said ‘Democratic County’ and Steve shook his head in despair. Steve’s brother was a certified genius and had been helicoptered off the Isle of Wight to a scholarship at some glamorous school for geniuses on the mainland. Steve probably had identical smarts, but less good fortune.

Steve was the bane of our authoritarian teachers’ lives. When we were very little, they taught us how the Romans brought civilisation to Britain. Steve threw up his hand and said, ‘Do you call strapping a man to a boulder and then rolling that boulder down a hill civilised? Because I don’t.’ This didn’t go down well.

Aged about nine, Steve’s IQ was assessed at over 156 on the Wechsler scale. He was extremely widely read, and knew more about most things than most teachers. When he challenged them, it was hard for them to admit error, and they needed to ‘win’, to save face and keep order. Their arguments boiled down to ‘because I’m the adult here’. He would counter with the question, ‘How does being born at an earlier date than me make you right?’

Steve was an atheist and didn’t want to attend school ceremonies at the nearby church. The school insisted it was an integral part of our community life. At Harvest Festival, with donated food bedecking the long tables, and parents in best bib, the chaplain talked about sacrifice being at the heart of Christianity, with the symbol representing Christ’s sacrifice at the centre of it. Steve put up his hand: ‘I think you’ll find the cross predated Christianity, and was in fact a pagan symbol adopted by the Church.’ Steve was barred from attending school church services after that.

For all his brashness, Steve was an astute reader of people. One of our teachers used to devise spelling tests notionally for the whole class, but which in fact were targetted at me. I was a good speller, and he wanted to catch me out. I expect I enjoyed this attention, but Steve suggested that the guy had a prurient interest in me. (His words were blunter than that, but I’ll spare you.) I think I knew deep down he was right, and possibly Steve alerted me to, and saved me from, potential trouble there.

Steve refused to follow the rules and wear his cap en route to school, and the sadist in charge of discipline made it his business to call Steve into the tuck shop, where he kept his bittersweet lair, and beat Steve hard with a shoe. Steve was tough, but the beatings were tougher. I’ll never forget his broken face, thick with tears as he left the tuck shop after a particularly severe thrashing, clutching his rear. His bravado was gone, replaced by the shock of pain, shame and raw fear.

But bravado was Steve’s fallback. He used to encourage me to play truant, and once the sadist came by in his car – surely not by chance – and wound down his window to ask if we were, as we had informed the school, unwell. I hung back, frozen in fear. But Steve took a drag on a cigarette and leaned into the sadist’s window, and blew the smoke into his face. ‘Very,’ he said. I couldn’t believe the daring.

We lost touch when I left that horrible school, but I gather Steve was expelled soon after.

I met him again at college, where he had morphed into a mouthy socialist worker. He riled our teachers with brilliance of mind, rigidity of argument and incapacity to conform. He talked openly in class about his reliance on cannabis, and did precisely no work. He was cleverer by miles than me, and knew more about politics and philosophy than I will ever know, so, arguably, precisely no work was the amount he needed to do. He was perhaps not the greatest of abluters, and his sweet, defiant, gifted maladorousness went with him when he was ‘sent down’ after a couple or three terms.

Another Steve Bray – and by now you may be suspecting, correctly, that these Steve Brays are not the one who was arrested yesterday in Westminster under the new ‘noisy protest’ law, and are creative amalgams of individuals I have known – was a gifted university philosopher. A maths prodigy plucked from poverty and sent to Oxford at 16, he was the sharpest mind I’ve known to date, and a brilliant, empowering and illuminating teacher. His colleagues more or less hated his guts. His unwashed and unkempt presentation, his verboten cigarettes in the hallowed halls, his popularity with enthralled students. And above all, his incessant challenge. Like new-Bray-on-the-block, Mick Lynch, he would gladly, and firmly, fix a fellow don with a hard stare and state, ‘You Are Wrong. That Is A Lie.’ He demolished arguments with a devastating flick of the intellectual wrist, and left distraught scholars lost in the ruins of their painstakingly-built theses. He was never given tenure.

I’m guessing at your school, or your college, or your place of work, or in your family – somewhere in your story, there is a Steve Bray. Someone who tells it how it is. Someone with a good brain who can’t be quiet, can’t be polite, can’t help standing up to authority.

In my experience, the Steve Brays of this world speak for those of us who are too shy, too conformist, too cautious, too careful to pipe up. In doing so, they put their heads above a dangerous parapet. We all know – and even THEY know – that it is only a matter of time before the powerful take them down. Even when they are right – especially when they are right – they threaten order. They cannot be tolerated. If existing rules cannot be brought to bear against them, new ones will be cooked up to do the job.

The rest of us hang back, keeping our distance, not wanting to go down with them. We tell ourselves there are better ways to make the points they are making. More nuanced ways. More polite ways. More constructive ways. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that some systems are better reformed from the inside, justifying our conformity. We tell ourselves that, in the end, these guys are society’s losers, and it’s a shame, but their way is not the right way.

I have also met the real Steve Bray. The “Stop Brexit” Steve Bray. But I can’t say I know much about his story. I don’t know if he’s unusually clever, like the others I’ve known, or was beaten at home, like one I’ve known, or a little bit ‘on the spectrum’, like the ones I’ve known. I don’t even know if he’s a good bloke, decent though he seemed when we chatted. Like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, I highly doubt he is a messiah, and I’d be surprised if he wasn’t a very naughty boy.

But I do know this. He speaks the truth. If “Stop Brexit” Steve had been wrong, and Brexit had turned out to be all sunlit uplands and Britannia ruling the waves, he’d be a forgotten irrelevance by now. ‘That bloke with the hat,’ we’d say. ‘The one with the megaphone. What was his name?’

But he wasn’t wrong. Brexit has demonstrably torpedoed our economy, our unity and our international standing. It has damaged us below the waterline, and he was right to warn us. Ain’t no megaphone loud enough to get that existential message across.

Is he wrong now on corruption inside government? Hardly. From a ‘system’ in which the Prime Minister polices himself, to the wholesale dispensing of public funds to friends, family, donors and client media, the corruption charge appears all too real.

To this corrupt regime – to this Vote Leave regime – Bray isn’t just a pain in the arse armed with a megaphone; he’s a pain in the arse armed with the truth.

So, like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, they will stop him. Make no mistake, he will lose. They will take him into their tuck shop and whoop his ass. The question for the rest of us is are there really politer, more constructive, more effective ways to speak truth to this particular brand of corrupt, dishonest and self-policing power? Or to put it another way, when he eventually exits the tuck shop a broken man, will we, who did not stand with him, be able to meet his gaze?

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