Beginning to See the Light: The Theatre of the Absurd (1) 

 

‘Ain’t it fun when you’re always on the run 

Ain’t it fun when your friends despise what you’ve become’ 

Liz Truss’ speech bought the curtain down on this week Tory Conference, which, uniquely, showed how divided the party is under its new leadership. 

The general comment about her speech was that it was short, mercifully so. Unfortunately she took the stage to borrow M People’s ‘Movin’ on UP’ without their permission. Despite this it was full of absurdities: 
 
‘Cutting tax is right morally and economically‘. Since when has taxation had anything to do with morals? You can always tell when someone is trying to justify themselves, they use the term ‘morally.’ 

She told people on benefits, ‘ we have your back‘. Strange though process as her as her tax cuts gift the richest people 40x more than the low paid. 

There was repetition of her deluded thoughts with terms such as ‘aspiration‘, ‘hard work’, ‘enterprise’, plus the I wish, I wish, I wish belief that she can magic up the growth her party has destroyed in the last 12-years. 

I am still convinced that her only belief is self-belief rather like ‘Crazy’ Kwarteng. I was amused to read that when he and other high-profile guests were invited to a roundtable discussion held by Bill Gates, he acted as if he was the one in charge of the meeting ‘offering his opinion on everything‘ and ‘lecturing‘ Gates about the businessman’s own expert subject.  

One former cabinet minister who worked with Kwarteng described him as having ‘the concentration span of a gnat‘, and, ‘He was never remotely interested in other people’s point of view.’  

‘I found him very odd to deal with … but there is an intellectual arrogance about Kwasi and Liz [Truss] and Jacob [Rees-Mogg] and those four to five people at the top. They genuinely do think they are cleverer than anyone else and that other people’s views are slightly tiresome.’ 
 

‘They genuinely do think they are cleverer than anyone else and that other people’s views are slightly tiresome’

 
Unfortunately his arrogance seems to cloud his judgement. It has been revealed that shortly after he presented his farcical give away to the rich, he went onto attend a drinks reception with hedge fund managers, property developers had also been present. 

He is reputed to have told them of austerity-style budget cuts to come. 

A source told the Sunday Times : ‘He wanted to give an unadulterated message of ‘growth, growth, growth’, and that’s why he didn’t talk about savings, because otherwise the [news] agenda would have been all about savings – ‘Where will you cut? What will you cut? Blah blah blah.’ They’re fully aware they have to make savings.’ 

Two sources told the Sunday Times Kwarteng described the day as a ‘great day for freedom‘. Another said guests told Kwarteng to ‘double down‘ – an approach from which some stood to make profits. 

Now there are several failings here;  quaffing fizz after having shafted the majority of the country isn’t smart. Secondly, some of these guys were already shorting the ass out of Sterling and Gilts, why celebrate that with them? 

Of course, now he’s made a mealymouthed apology, and also withdrawn the 45% tax cut, both done with the grace of a sulky 5-yrs old. This saves £2bn a year, a drop in the ocean compared to his £43bn of tax cuts. 
 

‘quaffing fizz after having shafted the majority of the country isn’t smart’

 
Unless there are more significant changes ‘Crazy’ will have little option but to consider cuts to public spending. He has already indicated that departments’ cash spending plans that run to 2024-25 will be left unchanged, which amounts to a real-terms cut allowing for inflation. Even then this may not be sufficient to plug the fiscal hole he has created for himself. 

Doing all of this on an unfunded basis is so unnecessary when there are the obscene profits being made by energy companies that could have been taxed instead. Last week, EU treasuries called for energy companies to be bought to order over their massive profits, and an emergency cap was put on production prices, with surplus revenues, estimated at €140bn (£123bn) to be siphoned off. The cooperation steadied European markets, while Ireland’s energy consumers can already look to benefit from up to €2bn (£1.75bn). 

In contrast, we flounder on, with energy companies free to sting consumers and pocket the profits. One power station, Drax, has so far received £6bn of government money to produce ‘green energy’ by burning wood. Yet Truss will do nothing to curb energy profits soaring by tens of billions. 

As the name suggests, Drax isn’t British. While we sold off our energy industry to private companies, the governments of France, Denmark, Norway, and several German provinces and cities developed publicly owned energy companies, alongside private sector competition. 
 

‘Truss will do nothing to curb energy profits soaring by tens of billions’

 
Without shareholders extracting value, these companies generated billions to reinvest in services, infrastructure and lowering bills. Norway has one of the world’s largest investment funds, which provides C.20% of their annual budget. They are able to do this because they invested their revenues from North Sea oil and gas  into a sovereign wealth fund, whereas we squandered ours.  

There is a similar story with the infinite winds that blow across the North Sea. Over the past 20-yrs, we have had the second largest expansion of offshore wind power in the world. Unfortunately, most  of the profits flowed into the public purses of countries such as  Sweden, via the company Vattenfall; to the UAE, via Masdar; to Canada, via a Quebec public pensions investment fund. 

Research by the TUC shows that if the UK had a publicly owned energy champion like other countries, the Treasury could receive between £63bn and £122bn over the next two years due to the increases in wholesale energy prices. That’s at least £2,250 for every UK household, sufficient to fund the majority of the government’s energy price guarantee. 

Going forward we will need to build a large amount of new clean energy infrastructure, to reduce our reliance on volatile fossil fuels and to mitigate global warming. As Labour proposed last week this should be a public energy champion giving us, and the public purse the benefits of a new energy infrastructure.  

Public energy champions can think ahead and have the ability to innovate, such as Orsted did with offshore wind and EDF with nuclear.  

Instead, Truss and her hordes are moving backwards and looking towards fracking, and pushing through sites without local approval by designating them as nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs). Jacob Rees-Moog, the energy minister, has dismissed opponents within Tory ranks as ‘socialists’. He is so enamoured  by fracking that he would be ‘delighted‘ for his back garden to be fracked.  

This is just one part of the ecological Armageddon Truss plans to unleash, based on neoliberalism belief that everything on Earth can and should be turned into something else. 
 

‘just one part of the ecological Armageddon Truss plans to unleash’

 
Friedrich Heyak, the founding father of this deranged nonsense proposed that, rather than seeking to protect the soil, which forms part of the delicate ecosystem from which 99% of our calories are produced, ‘we should seek to exhaust it , then abandon the land‘. The role of soil is to create a ‘temporary contribution to our income‘, which we can then invest in other moneymaking schemes. For ‘there is nothing in the preservation of natural resources as such which makes it a more desirable object of investment than man-made equipment‘. 

Effectively, this suggests that we monetise nature. Suggestions that the inevitable ecological collapse will destroy every aspect of our lives are refuted with the claim that resources are effectively infinite: minerals will continue to be found, ecosystems will renew themselves. During this summer drought John Redwood, the Tory MP stated: ‘The water regulators and companies want us to use less water in the years ahead. Why? Water is the ultimate renewable resource, available in abundance on our planet. They should get on with putting in the capacity so we can use what we want.’ 

Truss is trying to rush through parliament a bill that will delete 570 environmental laws inherited from the EU.  Experience suggests that she will not replace them with laws of equal strength, but with weaker laws or none at all. 

Previously, as environment secretary, the cuts she made enabled water companies to pollute our coastline. In addition, she let farmers dredge the watercourses passing through their land, without oversight or regulation. An Environment Agency report showing how such dredging wrecks the ecology of streams and rivers while increasing the risk of flooding downstream, was deleted from government websites.  

Next we turn to the NHS, our new health secretary, Thérèse Coffey the fifth in 5-years, who, so she tells us, has a ‘laser-like focus on patients’. So, that’s where we were going wrong!  

She has yet more band-aid to apply, this time it’s extra auxiliaries and greater use of pharmacists as prescribers. In 2019 Johnson promised 6,000 extra GPs and, there are now 1,850 fewer fully qualified full-time GPs than in 2015, with 16% more patients per GP, according to Prof Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs  

Social care was given a placebo. There is C.13,000 NHS beds blocked by people waiting for care, £500m extra doesn’t begin to approach the £13bn Liz Truss promised during her selection campaign. 

Much of the problem stems for a failure to train and recruit staff to offset the NHS and social care vacancies. Coffey knows the NHS will get no significant new money, so she reverts to type and blames the staff. What she conveniently forgets is that  we have fewer doctors, nurses and beds per capita than similar countries. 

Funding will get worse not better. To fund their growth plan Truss needs to £40bn of spending cuts in November to pay for her unwanted tax cuts. As a result those dependent on functioning public services and benefits confront privation and even destitution. 

Capital investment, the science budget, new schools and hospitals, increasing benefits and public sector wages in line with inflation are all history. In place of growth, we will see economic and social dislocation and ongoing stagflation.  
 

‘In place of growth, we will see economic and social dislocation and ongoing stagflation’

 
This is the cost of supporting hard-line Brexiters. The referendum led to a bloodless right-wing coup, based on destructive libertarianism shrinking what they believe to be a bloated state,  cutting taxes, and eliminating regulation. They claim they are  ‘liberating enterprise‘ and forcing ‘self-reliance‘ on what they claim is a lazy, cushioned workforce.  

The EU was never the mainstream issue for the electorate that is was for the hard-right who viewed it as emblematic of ‘big state’ regulation, and worse still, it was from abroad. They failed, or didn’t want to understand that for the EU to create commonality across products, services and professional standards regulate was necessary.  

To support the creation of this commonality the EU imposes laws outside of the control of our parliament. This had the effect of nullifying the influence of the English upper class via the Tory party. Despite the EU giving us access to continental market, high-quality standards and continent-wide competition, our membership threatened the hard-rights concept of liberty, and their self-interested idea of sovereignty. 

This discontent has been festering for years, however it was  only after immigration showed its ugly face that it became more than a minority issue, when Nigel Farage created the unlikely alliance between English libertarian toffs and an elderly, white working class.  
 

‘Nigel Farage created the unlikely alliance between English libertarian toffs and an elderly, white working class’

 
They failed to see, or didn’t want to see that EU membership had given us 40 years of economic growth, whilst allowing Britain to become a much more liberal society. The better part of the City boomed, offered a continental hinterland, while multinational investors turned round swathes of the British economy, as they were able to export freely from low-cost Britain into the EU single market. Regions were supported by EU funding. Longstanding weaknesses, from endemic financial short-termism to a chronically weak training system, were disguised. Even our weak regulations were overturned ensuring that we had clean beaches and security at work. 

Brexit has taken all this away from us. 

Johnson’s talk about levelling up, and boasts of becoming a science superpower and restoring the City’s greatness, were doomed without EU membership. We are no longer leaders in these fields. Our finances no longer allow us to fund levelling up, and we are isolated, and struggling to attract inward investment. 

Truss’s experiment will fail, but there is an alternative; the UK must join the customs union allowing us to open up EU markets to our business, high tech, universities and finance. Within this we must realign with EU rules and regulations.  
 

‘they can either cut their consumption, or they can get a higher salary, higher wages, go out there and get that new job’

 
Finally, we return to this week’s Tory party conference. The consensus seems to be that a weakened Truss can be pushed around by the parliamentary party. Jake Berry, the Conservative chairman, might talk tough, promising to remove the whip from rebels; try doing that to 30, or more and see what happens to your majority. 

The Guardian made an interesting analogy between drug addicts and Truss’s cabinet being high on their own ideology. It does help to explain their ridiculous comments and statements. 

The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman condemned what she termed the UK’s ‘Benefits Street culture’, saying there needed to be ‘more stick‘ to get ‘a stubborn core who see welfare as the go-to option’ back into work. 

Chris Philp, a Treasury minister, said that, ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg [the business secretary] has a whole load of ideas to do that – one of which is making sure no business under 500 employees gets subject to business regulation, another critically important move. Jacob is going to lay out a whole load more ideas in that area.’ (2) 

James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, said: ‘A number of people aren’t used to hearing about the stimulating effects of tax cuts and the growth effects of deregulating. Quite understandably they are reacting. People don’t necessarily like bitter-tasting medicine but it will make us all collectively, economically feel better.’ 

But, my favourite came from Jake Berry, who explained the government’s brilliant plan for struggling people to make the choice to stop struggling. 

 ‘People know that when their bills arrive, they can either cut their consumption, or they can get a higher salary, higher wages, go out there and get that new job. That’s the approach this government is taking.’ 
 

‘He’s never early, he’s always late 

First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait’ 

 
Notes: 

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_the_Absurd 

1. 61% of UK businesses employ 250 or less. Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06152/SN06152.pdf 

 
 
For the first time, I’m going to let Philip’s pre-amble do all the talking. His article is scary enough; the rationale behind it, simply terrifying – as he says, ‘how did we ever sink so low?’:

‘This whole charade with Truss and her horde has temporarily stamped all over it. It’s  like the first-leg of punk which was dominated by the Sex Pistols, a short, sharp shock that was destined to be short-lived.

She talks of a reset, and I agree with her. As with punk, what comes after will be more interesting as what influenced it. In this instance, Truss’s neoliberalism and supply-side reforms (cutting regulation) will prove to be the reset the electorate need to see that this is the end of the current Tory experiment with the country. Each experiment is more blatant than the last, an exercise in controlling the majority, while they and their mates make me hay. If we were a third-world country they would be dismissed as corrupt, yet we have become so accustomed to it that we know no better.

Truss will signal the end of this cycle, the reset moment. The party is increasingly out-of-touch with the electorate, and has been culled of any significant ability among moderates.

She and her horde are choked full of their own self-importance, dazzled by their supposed brilliance, and have an unrealistic air of superiority. In reality, they are insignificant narcissists having their 15-minutes of fame. They strut around as if they own the place, whereas they are simply jumped-up working class people with delusions of grandeur.

The comments about “Crazy’s” behaviour with Bill Gates are cringeworthy, but simply shows someone who’s ego knows no bounds. I suspect if “Crazy” was analysed you would find a deeply insecure person.  

Much is made of the economic mess they have created, but we should not lose track of the other areas such as health, energy, environment. Each will be subjected to the same strictures and will be equally impacted.  

What we are seeing is the inevitable conclusion of Brexit. A minority has taken over the country by stealth. I have constantly warned that a proto-fascist government would be the outcome, and that is what we have. Fascist’s don’t always wear black uniforms. No one voted for it, well about 80,000 white middle-class males did. It is as always with these people, they grab the levers of power by stealthy, but legitimate means.

The analogy with their addiction to ideology and parallels with drugs was borrowed from the Guardian, and it is very apt. The comments I have highlighted could only come from someone high on their own supply.

Lyrically, we continue with this theme. We start with the Dead Boys wonderful “Aint if fun”, a band that was destined to die young and the lyrics catch that mood totally. To close we return to the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man”, a perfect picture of waiting for your dealer. You can just see Truss and Co. reading-up Hayek and getting revved-up for their speech.

How did we ever sink so low?’

 
@coldwarsteve
 

 
Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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