This government has faced crisis after crisis, but I argue that most of the crises which the opponents of the government have used to effectively cripple it have been fake or exaggerated problems and far more important long term chronic problems such as the increasing strain of over-population are ignored. Furthermore, the challenges to democratic legitimacy represented by powerful interests groups, such as the left leaning media, Stepford Wives style social media ‘rentamobs’ and a Bank of England which is not so independent as it might be, are far more serious than the short term cost of living pressures.
We destroyed an Election-winning Prime Minister, due to Partygate, but the Labour Party, which enacted far worse when in power with the disastrous Iraq War in 2003, were re-elected two years later! The pandemic and its aftermath were a very strange time but nevertheless it looks as though the Conservatives were victims of the problems magnified by pathological exaggeration and a complex of concocted problems where vested interests are slowly driving people bananas!
So my conclusion is that there are forces trying to create what might be called panic-demic or perhaps Banana-Gate and we need to take on the Banana-Gate Splits and I ain to present a new way forward for our society involving different solution-focused approach to policy involving popular capitalism and social enterprise”
Boris Johnson was forced from office, more than anything because of the Partygate scandal, but a Barrister has produced convincing evidence that, even if parties did take place they were most likely perfectly legal.
In December 2021, Steven Barrett argued in The Spectator that No 10 Downing Street party
probably did not break the law.
We have all seen footage of a leaked video where a senior Downing Street advisor is apparently joking about a party, but Barrett argued that even these festivities almost certainly did not break the law.
Barrett notes that during the Pandemic the guidance in terms of gatherings changed regularly but the one area of consistency was the fact that the guidance did cover exceptions to the rules for people in different places and situations, he notes that there was nothing unusual in this.
Barrett concluded that the cheese and wine gathering (which Boris Johnson denied ever took
place) had been exempted by current statute law. This is quite a technical matter, so I quote now from Steven Barrett’s article:
“The starting point in the Covid rules should be section 73 of the Public Health (Control of
Disease) Act 1984. This part of the Act states that the Covid regulations, at all times, never
applied to Crown Land (which includes No. 10). This only changed if No.10 made a written
agreement to be voluntarily bound – and no one thinks they did. So, the regulations almost
certainly never applied to No. 10 anyway”.
Why would this be? The reason is simple: in the 1980s, lawmakers decided that it would be
better to allow the government to function during any future national pandemic without
having to worry about being caught up in quarantine regulations. The thinking was that by
making the Government effectively exempt in law, the Government could continue to function.
(Barrett continues)
“In addition to the 1984 Act, there were also specific regulations that applied at the time of the alleged party: the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England)
Regulations 2020. According to these rules, gatherings were allowed in all public buildings,
or parts of them, ‘operated by a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution or a public body.’ There had to be a risk assessment, but a gathering was legal for whole swathes of people.”
Stephen Barrett has done a magnificent piece of work here because I remember that period of
time well and hardly anybody defended the Government. But there will always be exceptions for certain gatherings, and it is ungenerous in the way that people were so determined to use Partygate to destroy Government which worked so hard to get us through the Pandemic, not least with the fastest vaccine programme pretty much in the World.
No one doubts Boris Johnson made mistakes, but in my view his Premiership was destroyed
because we are now at the mercy of an increasingly crazy, hysterical, and hateful lynch mob.
Origins of Partygate
The political atmosphere became very febrile in late 2021 and early 2022.
Previously, the Left only had two serious lines of attack on Government on the Pandemic…
2.1) The argument that we had the highest rate of excess deaths – but this was always arguable – in all sorts of directions and no “smoking gun”.
2.2) The claim that people were discharged from hospital into residential homes too quickly.
But the Government was able to bat this off by stating it will be looked at in an inquiry in years to come.
Somehow by late 2021, the Left sensed blood. Dominic Cummings had been fired by Boris Johnson and was briefing against his former boss daily and my impression was that most of the Partygate leaks came directly from Cummings! I might have this wrong, but he was certainly amplifying the anti-Johnson claims.
In May 2022 Dominic Cummings was quoted as saying, “Explosive photos that will show Boris Johnson lied to the Commons and, possibly the cops, will be published in the next 48 hours”.
The Daily Record from May 23rd 2022 went on to report: “The vengeful former adviser to the Prime Minister suggested pictures of the lockdown parties in Downing Street could emerge separately from the Sue Gray report into the events. The pictures could come from disgruntled junior staff in Downing Street, who are reportedly furious at being fined by the Metropolitan police while the Tory leader has had one fixed penalty notice”. (1)
If the parties were not illegal, how did we lose our most successful election-winning Prime Minister in recent times and, why did the Conservative Movement and media fail to defend Johnson?
The Lynch Mob
Part of the answer is that over the course of the Pandemic, a Spanish Inquisition-style lynch mob had grown which was composed of the various enemies of the Government including many on the Left becoming increasingly bitter. They had the prospect of a long time in opposition, following the 80-seat majority won by The Conservatives in 2019. Other constituents of this broad coalition included a perpetually resentful Remainer Rump, who were, and never will be, reconciled with Brexit.
I argue that the modern Left live by, and on, social media and we now know that they use this powerful weapon to condemn people to the modern equivalent of the dungeons by cancelling them.
“I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition” to quote the Monty Python Sketch but, in some respects, the modern equivalent is worse. Cardinal Richelieu didn’t have Twitter!
There is no doubt that there was a perception of hypocrisy in Partygate even if there is a defence of parties but, in my opinion, Partygate is trivial compared to Labour’s prosecution of The Iraq War.
The Iraq War
But the Prosecution of the Iraq War Britain
I believe the prosecution of The Iraq War was quite possibly the worst episode in British history since the days of Empire. We went to war based on false pretences regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Just-Wars are supposed to be about self-defence or the defence of others.
I didn’t think about the Iraq war very much until I saw just how badly the Conservatives were being treated by the media at the height of the Pandemic, but a little research is all one needs.
It was always to be expected that America would seek vengeance for 9/11, but the War on Terror was a poorly-defined enterprise and there was no strategic alliance between the brutal (but also vaguely comical) Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the sophisticated Al Qaeda terrorist network which had already spread its well-trained and determined tentacles into the soft underbellies of Western Europe.
It is widely accepted that the initial Hutton report was a whitewash which blamed the messenger (The BBC) for exposing Blair and Alastair Campbell’s exaggeration of the rationale for war.
We are apt to forget how surreal the run-up to the Iraq War was and this was a very dark time in British political history. Consider the treatment of David Kelly and this quote from The New Statesman:
“After (David) Kelly’s name was leaked to the public he gave evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee in July 2002 and days later he killed himself… (Tony) Blair was travelling at the time after a triumphal visit to Washington where he was given a standing ovation by U.S. Congress
When he learned about Kelly’s death, Blair told the correspondents covering his tour that Downing St had nothing to do with Kelly’s name being made public.
(The Hutton Enquiry was convened – which blamed The BBC!) (Hutton was widely seen as a whitewash…)
Years later, the observers Andrew Rawnsley established that less than three weeks before Blair spoke to the correspondents there had been a secret meeting at Downing Street where it was decided Kelly’s identity must be revealed. The meeting was chaired by Blair”.
The Lancet study of Iraq war casualties refers to 654,000 excess deaths by end of June 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties)
Beyond this, we know that the Iraq War helped to radicalise a small army of British Muslims and, as recently as 2023, it was reported that, “90% of 43,000 extremists on MI5 watchlist are Islamist terror suspects”(https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8450211/MI5s-terror-watchlist-doubles-43-000-just-one-year.html)
When Britain was attacked by terrorist suicide bombers on 7/7, the BBC and The Guardian seemed to take much pleasure in telling us that attackers were, “home-grown”, but this is mendaciously misleading: Three of the bombers were of Pakistani descent and one West Indian so it would have been equally accurate to refer to them as, “second or third generation immigrants who had not integrated well enough into British Society”. The inability or unwillingness of British conservatives to challenge these left-wing narratives, such as this “home-grown” travesty of the truth is a long-term problem to which I will return.
We now know that the fall of the Hussein regime in 2003 was only the beginning of the problems for Anglo-American peace-keeping forces because not enough planning had been undertaken in rebuilding Iraq post-regime change, and there was a huge problem with British soldiers driving around in inadequately protected vehicles.
As if to prove this point, 53 British soldiers died in the actual Iraq War in 2003 as opposed to 153 who died in the period 2004-09 as the British and Americans tried to control a state which had descended in anarchy. https://www.statista.com/statistics/580916/british-soldiers-killed-in-iraq/
During 2009 to 2019 we saw the rise and fall of the infamous Islamic State in the region and for 3-4 years large parts of Iraq and Syria were controlled by a terrifying and ruthless Islamist Army.
Just recently, Andrew Neil argued that, “America has made many grievous errors in the prosecution of the War on Terror and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a catastrophic mistake and a major setback which unleashed a whole new wave of terrorist attacks”.
Neil wears rose-coloured spectacles here, perhaps because he was, at the time, a supporter of the conflict and will no doubt say that he simply believed Tony Blair, but The Iraq war started this near two-decade-long chain of disastrous events. I don’t think political catastrophes come any worse than this.
Boris Johnson was accused of lying to Parliament about Partygate but there is a world of difference between the carefully contrived lies of Blair and Campbell which were part of the most efficient media management machine that we have ever seen, and the muddled reporting of a Prime Minister (Boris) who excels at broad brush impressionism and has no regard whatsoever for the fastidious approach to actuality more typical of the Pre-Raphaelites.
In retrospect, the different reports which Boris told about the alleged Partygate events can be compared to the succession of different stories which David Cameron told when the story broke about the benefits he was accruing from offshore savings accounts.
How does The Iraq War compare to other infamous events in British History?
The horrors of Iraq have led me to think about other episodes in British history of which we can be truly ashamed. And, if we want to look for a view as to how awful the British have been throughout our history one could do worse than look in the pages of The Guardian.
This is a quote from a review of Jeremy Paxman’s book, “Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British”:
“The worst atrocities of British imperial rule (include): The horrors of the slave trade, …..one of the most disgraceful episodes in British history… the opium wars, the British reprisals after the Indian mutiny, “genocide” (Paxman thinks) in Tasmania, the Amritsar massacre, Balfour’s perfidy in Palestine, ‘offering land belonging to one people as a gift to another’, the great Bengal famine, the now notorious Kenyan prison camps, …..”
Paxman condemns some of the leading Empire builders who were, for many years, seen as heroes of our civilisation and who featured in classical English schooling:
The early ones were mostly, “pirates and freebooters”. Clive of India was mainly a, “fortune-seeker, scheming, and devious in business”, General Gordon was, “half-cracked”, Cecil Rhodes “a sabre-toothed empire-builder”, Kitchener was, “a monster” and Lawrence of Arabia again, “half-cracked”, Lord Meath, the creator of ‘Empire Day’, is described as looking, “a bit like Father Christmas”, with “a bald head, a red face and an enormous white beard”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/05/empire-ruling-world-paxman-review
I refer to this rather jaundiced view of Empire merely to arrive at what might be called, “An Idiots Guide to British Villainy”.
Paxman is precisely the sort of BBC intellectual who likes to show contempt for Boris Johnson’s ability and character but, if the above quotes are anything to go by, then the proclaimed Newsnight nemesis writes in tabloid-style soundbites and, has a similar grasp of the conceptual analysis to that of a “history-hating skinhead”.
No need for any nuance around mental health difficulties or psychiatric illness when you can just describe people as, “cracked”!
For a less jaundiced, and far more historically accurate view of Empire, I would turn to the late Professor Christie Davies, who wrote the following in The Salisbury Review in 2016:
“What made the empire different from earlier trading empires such as that of the Dutch, was the parallel economic transformation of Britain itself – with new technological inventions the
power of steam, the huge production of coal and iron machinery and textiles, railways and ships that made Britain the world’s first industrial nation.
Through innovation, industry, and empire Britain created the modern world. For a time in the mid-19th century Britain was the world’s first and, at the time, only superpower. The pioneers of empire whose aim was trade and conquest brought with them enlightened values and institutions which have rarely been found in other empires: Belief in the autonomy of the individual in free markets, a representative government, and, the rule of law. These were first transmitted to the American colonies and are today sacrosanct in those colonies’ successor – The United States. Because of them, the British Empire was the only major empire ever to dissolve itself deliberately and in a reasonably orderly way…” “On Which the Sun Never Sets”, Christie Davies, The Salisbury Review Summer 2016.
I compared Partygate to the Iraq war because I think that the British state did something very wrong, in the prosecution of that war, which not only led to half a million people losing their lives but led to a chain reaction of terrible events over a twenty-year period, and yet Tony Blair survived the Iraq war, and Boris Johnson was driven from office due to the comparatively trivial events of Partygate.
I believe that, if the Conservatives had been responsible for such a disaster, we would never have been allowed back into government, but neither do I believe that any Conservative Prime Minister would have been so reckless, as to take us to War based on such poor evidence.
Was Iraq as bad as any of the episodes of imperial skulduggery, referred to by Paxman?
Arguably, it was far worse because we are supposed to be a post-imperial power and as Christie Davies so eloquently noted, we gave up our empire freely and invited the former colonies to join a new Commonwealth of friendship, which was quite unique, amongst countries which had presided over empires.
What I find particularly contemptible about the Iraq war is that, unlike these imperial episodes, we simply tagged onto the shirt tails of a genuine superpower and didn’t bother to ask too many questions….
The Irish Famine, (which Imperial Britain presided over) is left off Paxman’s list and could well be regarded as one of the worst episodes of British history because we simply watched as perhaps as many as three million people died and, surely, the worst horrors of empire as all those were; we have acted as though human life doesn’t count.
The Iraq War was similar to this as we recklessly pursued regime change under the pretence of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Some will make the strenuous point that it was the principle of Partygate, which was so wrong because it suggested that Government did believe that there was one rule for them and one rule for the population and that the symbolism of Boris and the cake can be compared to Marie Antoinette.
But I would argue against this comparison. Our Government and nearly all governments across the world advised lockdowns in order to keep people safe. There is always a concern in these crisis situations that the government will overreach itself but all the evidence shows that the lockdowns were seen as essential. If anything, Boris Johnson is regarded as having taken the decision to lock down too late and the decision to lift lockdown too early.
Whether or not there were episodes with people in Downing Street who did not follow lockdown guidance, you could argue that those risks were entirely down to the individuals involved. Regardless of this, the Government took the decision to enforce lockdowns across the country in order to stop the spread of the Pandemic.
Andrew Griffiths, the treasury minister, noted recently that the level of financial support given to people during the pandemic and subsequently, to what people have termed as the, “cost of living crisis”, is £4,000 to £6000 for every person in this country, so there is no comparison with the out-of-touch French monarchy at the end of the 18th century.
The post-pandemic tax burden is the highest since the events of the post-second World War period and this is a testament to just how much money the Government spent in order to help Britain through the Pandemic. People are now grumbling about the scale of the tax burden but they were not grumbling about the financial support given at the time.
Lastly, the British Government was the first to produce a series of successful vaccines.
I remember the events of the early summer of 2020 and thinking how awful it would be if this pandemic and the lockdown restrictions continued on an ongoing basis. We were hoping against hope that a vaccine would be found and the news that a vaccine programme would start before the end of the year was a ray of light for everybody.
There were lots of aspects of the pandemic management that need further investigation. One of the things which has concerned me is the fact that post-Partygate, it almost seems as though people no longer care about the analysis of what went wrong because they have the sacrificial lamb of Boris Johnson. We need to ask searching questions about why the NHS closed down in ways that the health services in France or Germany did not, but there will never be a media lynch mob asking awkward questions about the NHS.
In summary
I feel that Britain has again, to use Margaret Thatcher’s phrase, “too much socialism”, and much of it has been provided by blue Labour consecutive governments which followed her, and which followed the transformative Blair government, which took steps to introduce Big State
Government back to Britain and to change British demographics forever.
I also think any Conservative government is better than a left liberal establishment who are making active plans to use tactical voting to ensure the Conservatives never get into power again, so the events of the last few years are deadly serious.
The Left weaponised Partygate as they assembled a powerful lynch mob to deliver a near fatal blow to this Government and they used the hysteria and exaggeration around Partygate in their ongoing effort to keep the Conservatives out of power for a generation or more.
I will do whatever I can to fight the lies, exaggeration, and the hysteria associated with Partygate and with the Pandemic to protect something very dear to my heart. Not just the Conservative Party, but the future of conservatism itself in the country which built the greatest civilization ever seen, which is now being transformed into some sort of dystopia that none of us will recognise.
Proxy Politicians
As part of my new theory of British politics, I argue that we have seen the growth of Proxy Politicians many of whom use their celebrity positions, to make political points and put the Conservatives under pressure but they never want to stand for election themselves.
Perhaps the most prominent of these proxy politicians is Martin Lewis who has done well out of energy privatisation because he became a multi-millionaire as a result of his energy bill comparison companies and he has also performed a role by giving millions of people sensible money advice.
Perhaps more than anybody else, Lewis was responsible for the hysteria about energy prices in early 2022 which went so far as to suggest that there would be civil unrest because heating bills would be rising later that year. We kept hearing from pressure groups who assured us that people will apparently be having to, “choose between heating and eating” and this led to Boris Johnson promising assistance and then to the new Prime Minister Liz Truss including a multi-billion-pound programme whereby, “every household in the country receive assistance with energy bills”.
But the multi-billion-pound programme of assistance was itself the disastrous, partially unfunded, budget which quickly led to the downfall of Truss herself, so in many ways the only real victim of civil unrest was the hapless 49-day Prime Minister herself.
Feargal Sharkey has led the charge against both the Government and privatised water companies about, what his supporters and many in the media call, “a Dirty Waterways Crisis”. Basic research reveals that sewage was always dumped in rivers. Only EU regulations forced us to do a closer analysis, which made the rivers look dirtier. Left wing Fergal Sharkey will not tell you that because he just wants to get rid of the Conservative Government.
Also, a Conservative Norfolk council leader has quite literally said that Fergal Sharkey
has not talked any sense about the water since he was last a successful pop star thirty
years ago!
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/23830152.norfolk-county-council-leader-hits-feargal-sharkey/
Do we have a Dirty Waterways Crisis?
No. Sewage was always dumped in rivers and only EU regulations forced us to do a closer analysis, which made the rivers appear dirtier. Left-wing Fergal Sharkey will not tell you that because he just wants to get rid of the Conservative Government.
Steve Loftus, water commentator, has pointed out that on May 19, “UK waters are better than they have ever been. More attention is being paid to it than ever before, more money is being
spent on it than ever before. Believe it or not, the current Government have done more for water quality than any past Government”. @LoftusSteve May 19
A far bigger reason, that our rivers and waterways are dirty is that we are using too much water which can be attributed to overpopulation and mass immigration.
Population has grown from fifty million in 1950 to sixty-seven million now. (And many think this is an underestimate).
And you see what I mean by Proxy Politicians like Martin Lewis, Fergal Sharkey, Gary Lineker, or Vorderman – they all use their celebrity positions, but they never want to stand for election.
Do we have a Cost-of-Living Crisis?
No. The term, “cost of living crisis” was coined by ex-Labour leader Ed Miliband but this is another example of ludicrous exaggeration of problems for political objectives.
We have rising prices for the first time in three decades.
We have seen rises in fuel prices over the last two years and this is related to the war in Ukraine and to decisions made by previous governments to scale-down oil, gas and nuclear energy sources and focus on so-called “renewables”.
On Talk TV in the week of 24th September, Ian Collins was discussing rising prices with a Consumer Affairs adviser and commented that we have a generation of people who have got used to zero interest rates and the fact that interest and mortgage rates had to rise for first time since 2008 has come as a rude awakening, in financial reality, for such people.
But the fake, “cost of living crisis” was fuelled by the Leftist proxy politician Martin Lewis.
The vain-glorious man has been threatening civil unrest because last winter people apparently had to choose between, “heating and eating”. However, the cash assistance which the Government gave people was more unaffordable than anything else in the Truss Mini Budget, so maybe was responsible for what the hysterical people call the, “crashing of the economy”.
These exaggerated terms such as, “trashing or crashing” the economy is all part of the leftist hysteria and utterly detached from economic reality.
Twenty years in the psychotherapy industry, has taught me that the things people would rather not discuss, or perhaps the things that they acknowledge only reluctantly, are far more important than the things they talk about incessantly, and what is really terrifying about this is that we live in a Market Economy so people should be used to rising and falling prices as a matter of course. Furthermore, the more that people in a Market Economy do not understand the realities of economics, then the more they will become estranged from reality itself.
What we really need is for commentators to urge caution rather than jumping to conclusions like than an Olympic long jumper with OCD. To help people develop resilience and the sense of perspective which allows us to understand challenging experiences by reference to human history itself, which is that of a remarkable anthropological ascent. Instead, what we are seeing is a worrying detachment from reality which starts to look like a collective and significantly pathological psychosis.
Dr Who, Jodie Whittaker, has been opining about how the prison system discriminates against men. I do not think there has ever been a Dr Who who has not been a walking fashion disaster (apart from the ever sartorially elegant Jon Pertwee), but to get social policy advice from the woman who looks like a Gingerbread/Foodbank Co-ordinator in her dungarees really does take the Digestive…
Whittaker states that, “too many women are leaving prison into homelessness.” And yet the vast majority (approximately 85%) of homeless people are male. My personal favourite is, “The prison system pushes more people onto the streets”.
A colleague who is a Planning Consultant and has been local councillor for twenty years, told me, “Over the course of my career I have dealt with several properties which were part of
an entire system dedicated to providing housing for ex-offenders, admittedly usually those with low complex needs. Apart from the Government set ups, there are several charities dedicated to housing ex-offenders and, so far as I’m aware, most local authorities and housing associations have schemes as well”. His advice to Ms Whittaker is to, “check your facts” before “shooting your mouth off” or, “people will have an even lower opinion of you than they do already”.
Since Brexit we have seen a plethora of Celebrities entering the fray, and they really do think they know something about politics.
Carol Vorderman (she’s had so much cosmetic surgery they need to put a green belt on her to limit further development). And, Gary Lineker who exemplifies the culture of exaggeration better than anybody when he described the Government’s efforts to take back control of our ludicrous immigration and asylum system as, “similar to the policies of The Nazis”.
The current system is heavily balanced in favour of people trying to enter our country, because of the colossal statute of human rights legislation passed when Labour, and people who think like Lineker, were last in power.
Unfunny Steven Fry and the list goes on….
Feargal Sharkey – who lectures about sewage and judging by the state of him he might even be qualified in this respect, because he looks like he’s been drinking it!
Lenny Henry, surprise, surprise, thinks we need Black History Month throughout the year…
Of course, a genuine Bame intellectual (and he would hate that description), V.S. Naipaul had some pretty choice words about black activism. He implied there was a resentment culture emanating from the Caribbean and that this was related to the fact that societies like Trinidad were, in his words, “only half-made”. He also said that Africa had, “no future”.
Now that the Chinese are pretty much asset-stripping the entire continent, we can see that Naipaul was not far wrong. But, modern society has got this completely upside down. We listen to and elect complete nonentities and are less open than ever to the truth.
I cannot remember celebrities or footballers getting involved in politics when I was growing up.
What question do the modern-day “Banana Splits” want us to avoid?
The economy is important but, fundamentally, its population growth is stupid.
I would argue, that underlying so much anxiety and real-life problems is our burgeoning population. Former editor of the Salisbury review, Myles Harris, argued eloquently in summer 2022,
“in 1950 the population of the UK was 50 million it is now 75 million… while the average population density in Europe is 34 people per square kilometre, it is 426 per square kilometre here.
There are not enough trees, flowers, wildlife, grass, or moorland that can sustain such a vast population squeezed on such a small island and as a result Britain is one of the most biologically depleted countries on the planet with an average 40% loss in animals and plants.
There is no health service that can pay for all these people… no road or rail system that can carry them all, no national agricultural system that can feed them all. To serve such an increase, an extra 750,000 school places will be needed by 2025 and 300,000 new houses a year.”
Hardly anyone on the Left ever talks about a, “population crisis” but this would seem to
be the biggest threat of all to our formerly green and pleasant land. Many of these people talk about so-called “renewable energy” but even this will need to be paid for, and last time I checked, it is not very easy to renew money once it has been spent. Perhaps it is prescient that the word “When” doubles as an acronym for the challenge facing us in terms of a growing population posing an ever-greater threat to:
(W)ater
(H)ousing
(E)nergy
(N)ature
Who crashed the economy? (Surprise, Surprise it may have been the “Banana-Gate Splits”!)
The Left and Britain’s mainstream media maintain that Liz Truss crashed the economy with her 2022 mini budget and this is another example of “panic demic” thinking. Clearly the Bank of England had to respond to financial market problems in the British economy, at that time but it is pathological exaggeration to use terminology like, “the economy has crashed”. The British Economy did not even crash when we had the massive trauma of the Second World War. We just had huge debts following the Second World War!
Arguably the British Economy has never actually crashed, but there are recessions and depressions and times of economic trauma which are sometimes more short-term, but outside of the London media institutionally statist Blob, many people think Liz Truss was a victim rather than a perpetrator of turmoil.
Daily Telegraph journalist, Liam Halligan, argues that in effect, The Bank of England ousted Liz Truss and says this about this interview with her:
“I asked her about this, and she argued that the Bank of England and the political establishment caused so much turmoil that she was effectively ousted from Government”.
Halligan also says, “I think that the Bank of England did do that and that’s what the record shows….and the Bank of England did something called ‘quantitative tightening’ in the days before the mini budget which basically means they throw billions of pounds worth of gilts or
Government IOUs at the market which of course makes it harder if a politician is saying we are going to borrow a certain amount of money and then, when Truss was out of the door, they reversed that and did something which supported the market so, it made it look as if……
I mean the traders were euphoric when Sunak and Hunt came in and yet now, we have higher mortgage rates. Much higher than at the height of her mini budget”.
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/liz-truss-ousted-bank-of-england
The hyperbole about Truss can be seen as a crisis of democratic legitimacy threatened by over-powerful Bank of England, with a symbiotic relationship to an anti-Tory media, and a media which is particularly allergic do any ideas which are too free market orientated. But the important thing about Halligan’s claim is that we can now see the destruction of the Truss
administration as part of a crisis of democratic legitimacy, where powerful influences in the media and in the anti-government BLOB could bring a Conservative Government down.
This is a genuine crisis for our democracy, and I would argue that the precedent was set when The Left, and the assembled left-leaning British establishment, attempted to reverse Brexit.
Another crisis of democratic legitimacy was the four-year Campaign to overturn the biggest single mandate in British political history and which was led by the likes of the leading coordinator of anti-Brexit and Tory feeling, Alastair Campbell, the architect of our involvement in Iraq and surely one of the most bitter men in British political history.
Another genuine crisis is the fact that our contributory welfare state is now at risk because the Government is spending so much more per person than people are ever going to pay back in tax, so we are seeing the creation of a, “something for nothing” society. Apparently current Government spending equates to £17,500 per person and any party spending that much should be 20 points ahead not 20 points behind.
£17,500 per person in Government spending per capita but only a small number of people pay anything like that in tax so it’s down to the rich and massive borrowing. The bottomless pit of the NHS, pensions, an Education Budget which has pretty much doubled in thirty years, a famine relief programme (because prices rose for the first time in about three decades) and pretty-much free nursery care. All, except for the two things we need more than ever, which is an effective Army and a Police Force.
The police are basically a uniformed body of social workers, responsible for policing hate crime – yet the MP for Hartlepool told Parliament at PMQs that her staff and people in the town face intimidation from illegal immigrants every day.
£17.500 per capita and how many people pay even a fraction of that in tax every year?
I say again that this can only funded by massive borrowing and the fact that the income tax take is so redistributive that 30% of all the income tax revenue collected is collected from
1% of earners. (I think 16% of earners pay about two thirds of the tax take). So, we no longer have it contributory welfare state. Much more a, “something for nothing society” until the rich leave, (but where would they go? Most of ‘The West’ is like this) but if the rich ever did leave people will be paying £80 a visit to see the GP.
Even the greatest civilization on earth can turn itself into La La Land. Rudyard Kipling referred to a society where people would be responsible for nothing and entitled to everything. Indeed, a society where we would rob one person, “Peter” who has money, to pay for collective, “Paul”.
I think there is a huge problem related to the population crisis, of self-identity. Rafe Heydel-Mankoo has shown that there has been more immigration in the last 25 years then there has been in the previous 2000. The fact is the British people never wanted or requested this and it is changing our identity, but the “Banana-gate Splits” will never talk about this because it is part of their plan.
Labour’s task will be to provide even more, “something for nothing” – I am going to fight back somehow and it might even be fun…
Conclusions
‘Pathological exaggeration’
“Pathological” is defined by Britannia dictionary as, “extreme in a way that is not normal, or that shows an illness or mental problem”.
For example, “he is a pathological liar or gambler she has a pathological fear of heights”.
The Left have been encouraging pathological exaggeration in order to create a sense of crisis.
You can even say they have created a new Pandemic – a mental Pandemic based on exaggeration, hyperbole.
All this deranged “crisis” thinking, such as,”cost of living crisis” and “climate crisis” is making young people depressed and it is all nonsense.
I think it is also creating a creeping collective psychosis.
“Psychosis” is defined as, “a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality”.
Another fake crisis is the so-called, “mental health crisis”, which apparently resulted from the Pandemic. I think it much more likely that a society that has undergone such dramatic changes as we have seen in recent decades, will certainly result in a great many unhappy and perhaps insecure people but the analysis of this as far more is complex and reference to a, “mental health crisis” is a very good example of the pathological exaggeration and hysteria, I refer to!
There is a sense in which those people who are trying to create a sense of crisis are themselves experiencing pathology and as the term, “going bananas” is commonly used as a euphemism for “going mad”, perhaps the proponents and ideologists of crisis have created their own “Banana-Gate” or “Banana-Demic”!
I believe that these Crises are manufactured by a complex of the social media-based Left and the anti-Tory anti-free market media.
Appendix One
References
(1) “Dominic Cummings claims Boris Johnson’s Partygate ‘lies’ to Commons will be exposed in photos – Daily Record”
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/dominic-cummings-claims-boris-johnsons-27040380