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UK Politics: The Tory leadership (disg)race to the bottom and beyond - not worth a Penny.


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17 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Ok, let me get this clear, from what I've seen here for the past few weeks, there is not a single good politician in the UK? Hell, I bet even the US must have a handful. I know good is a vague adjective but...shrug

They are largely a bunch of uselessly corrupt, selfish cunts, who represent the absolute worst of us.

 

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Vol. 44 No. 15 · 4 August 2022
The Seductions of Declinism
William Davies

"Britain is not experiencing an economic rerun of the 1970s. Long-run economic growth is lower, inequality far higher and the trade unions less powerful. Inflation, as yet, has nothing to do with wages rising too fast (if only). Where there are signs of chaos to rival the ‘winter of discontent’ – the twenty-mile queues of trucks waiting to get through the port of Dover, the six-hour waits at A&E, the missed holidays because of delays with passport applications – this has nothing to do with left-wing insurrection, and everything to do with the Johnson administration’s own policy choices and failings. The invocation of the 1970s is less significant for what it captures about reality than for what it tells us about the exhausted, wishful thinking of the right."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n15/william-davies/the-seductions-of-declinism

Quote

 

.... The picture painted by Stagnation Nation is familiar from the work of many political economists, such as Brett Christophers and Jodi Dean, who have tracked the drift of contemporary capitalism towards ‘rentierism’ and even ‘neo-feudalism’. What these terms suggest is that economies like Britain’s have effectively abandoned the pursuit of prosperity through the traditional capitalist practices of investment in technology, R&D, skills and entrepreneurship (all of which offer a reason and a means for businesses to increase wages), and descended instead into passive speculation on unproductive assets, above all housing, but extending to such Ponzi schemes as NFTs and other cryptocurrencies. This tendency can be dated back to the explosion of financial services in the late 1980s, but has become acute in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, when – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – an abundance of very cheap credit, which could have been used for the creation of new firms, new production methods, whole new business models, was instead used to inflate the value of existing assets even further. One reason that highly unequal, low-productivity economies tend towards stagnation is that wealth management strategies of the sort pursued by the super-rich become largely defensive, aimed at preserving and exploiting existing assets, rather than risk-taking. The Resolution Foundation is quite praising of recent government efforts to increase the rate of investment in the public sector, but despairs at the extraordinarily low investment in the private sector. To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future. It’s against this economic backdrop that the nostalgia fest of the Tory leadership election is taking place.

As Boris Johnson limped towards his final prime ministerial disgrace, his supporters in the Conservative Party and the press believed they had hit on a strategy for weathering the mounting economic gloom. With inflation now reducing the value of every pound by 9 per cent a year, it was no surprise to see unions representing transport workers, refuse collectors, teachers and telecom engineers, among others, begin to ballot their members to strike for higher pay. The political right immediately responded with oddly euphoric analogies to the 1970s. ‘Labour Isn’t Working!’ one Daily Mail front page yelled. ‘We regret to announce that this country is returning to the 1970s,’ the front page of the Sun said the same week.

The aim in conjuring up this memory (at least among the over-sixties) was quite clear: if this is a replay of the 1970s, then the unions must be responsible for a large part of the economic disorder, so what’s needed is some strong, Thatcherite figure to come along and take charge. Not only that, but Labour – which Johnson and his supporters have gone to comical lengths to identify as the ultimate instigator of any strike action – would be responsible too. Cultivating an exaggerated sense of conflict and chaos holds out the prospect of far greater political rewards than facing up to the stagnation described by the Resolution Foundation. Chaos calls for an authority figure to suppress it on behalf of the silent majority. Stagnation calls for ... what exactly?  ....

 

We see this playing out here too, though with somewhat different flavors.  There is no economic policy out of the reich other than no taxes.  Everything is about women, immigration, gender, etc.

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Well, amid accusations that the Met's investigation of "partygate" was more cover-up than investigation, they've now admitted that they didn't even ask the PM about the PM's actions...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/25/met-finally-admits-not-sending-boris-johnson-questionnaires-over-partygate-gatherings

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2 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

Well, amid accusations that the Met's investigation of "partygate" was more cover-up than investigation, they've now admitted that they didn't even ask the PM about the PM's actions...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/25/met-finally-admits-not-sending-boris-johnson-questionnaires-over-partygate-gatherings

Why would you, when you already know the decision you're supposed to reach?

Between the Met covering up for Johnson and the US Secret Service deleting all their texts related to the Trumpist coup, our elite law enforcement organizations leave no reason to trust them for anything.

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32 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Why would you, when you already know the decision you're supposed to reach?

Between the Met covering up for Johnson and the US Secret Service deleting all their texts related to the Trumpist coup, our elite law enforcement organizations leave no reason to trust them for anything.

Most of the MPS are barely literate. Honestly it's terrifying. 

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7 hours ago, TheLastWolf said:

Ok, let me get this clear, from what I've seen here for the past few weeks, there is not a single good politician in the UK? Hell, I bet even the US must have a handful. I know good is a vague adjective but...shrug

There are a few in devolved areas, in city politics and on the backbenches. But they mostly get filtered out before getting anywhere near prominant Westminster positions. The qualities that enable one to get ahead in Westminster and the qualities that make for a decent representative (or even just a decent human being) are a venn diagram with two circles with a couple of miles of empty space between them.

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