Beginning to See the Light: Used, Abused, and Torn Apart 

 

‘A wooden head and a broken heart 

Used, abused and torn apart 

I gave you my best and you gave me the rest‘ 

 

As I wrote two-week’s ago in ‘Hoist with [their] own petard‘, ‘it is easier to sack a Chancellor than attempting to remove yet another leader.’ 

In sacking him, Truss is doing her usual ‘it wasn’t me guv‘, when, in truth her fingerprints are all over the crime scene. I wonder how long her colleagues will tolerate her blame games, previously, she has trashed government policies made when she herself was in the cabinet.    

I find it hard to believe that her own position isn’t under threat despite her concluding that sacking ‘Crazy’ was essential for her political survival. One Tory MP told Sky News: ‘The idea that the prime minister can just scapegoat her chancellor and move on is deluded. This is her vision. She signed off on every detail and she defended it‘. 

Another who hasn’t covered himself in glory during this folly is Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England Governor, who did what was needed but little more. As a result the ship is still rocking as markets sense there is more to come. His actions pale into insignificance when compared to Mario Draghi’s promise that his European Central Bank would do ‘whatever it takes‘ to put out the conflagration of the continent’s sovereign debt crisis. Those three words did much more for world GDP than any number of tax cuts for corporations. 

I am also surprised more commentators haven’t been critical of Truss’s commitment to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030. An increase in excess of inflation, which will double our current spending £100bn. 
 

‘her fingerprints are all over the crime scene’

 
This is simply a vanity project, allowing Truss to swan around like a latter day Boudica. We face no material military threat other than terrorism, and in any sort of global confrontation would be largely irrelevant.   

This is just another example of preening, caring more for her role on the world stage than for the majority of the population who are funding this vanity.  

Too many of this governments plans are misjudged and ill-intentioned. 

The energy crisis is driving much of the current economic hardship, and ideological inflexibility stops the government from dealing with it effectively. 

Initiatives requiring collective effort and sacrifice are viewed as ‘nannying’. Windfall taxes on energy providers extreme windfall profits are vetoed as coercive and confiscatory. Working with the foreign ‘other’ is regarded as a constraint on sovereignty. 

Instead, we are proposing ridiculous tax cuts at the same time alongside unknown spending on an energy cap, seemingly without realising that there is a global crisis, and then act surprised when this causes contagion in the financial markets that risks damage to our allies. 

Small wonder that the US and EU governments think we have taken leave of our senses. They look on bewilderment at an unfunded £150bn energy price guarantee package, and her veto of a £15m public information campaign to help people save energy. 
 

‘US and EU governments think we have taken leave of our senses’

 
Even the outgoing CEO of Shell, Ben van Beurden, has spoken out against our policy, saying: ‘One way or another, there needs to be government intervention… that somehow results in protecting the poorest. And that probably means governments need to tax people in this room [of energy companies] to pay for it – I think we just have to accept [that] as a societal reality.’ 

On top of the governments planned £45bn of tax cuts Truss’s proposal of investment zones in cited to cost up to another £12bn of lost corporation tax revenues. 

It is hard to know whether Truss actually believes this Neo-libertarian madness, of if she has been brain-washed by groups such as the Institute of Economic Affair (‘IEA’) (see: The Hand That Rocks The Cradle), or just sees this as the winning side?     

Irrespective, she seems to view opinions such as those voiced by Van Beurden as suffering from a ‘false consciousness‘, as Marxists used to say of workers content to live with capitalism. Energy providers may have got lucky with the oil price, but their sole responsibility is to distribute them to shareholders who will spend their windfall as they think fit or invest in what it considers likely to yield profit in future.  

Truss’s views are so extreme that she has fallen-out with Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business department over plans to ban solar power from most of England’s farmland. 

Truss and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, want to ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or C. 58% of agricultural land. Rees-Mogg’s opinion isn’t designed to benefit the planet by increasing our reliance on renewable energy , but is believed to be based on the equally ideological view that  it is ‘unconservative‘ to tell farmers what they can and cannot do with their land.  

Truss’s spokesperson confirmed on Monday that the plans to ban solar from agricultural land were going ahead. This is despite analysis in the Financial Times showing that in doing so, England would lose £20bn in investment, which critics said would harm her growth agenda. 

Truss has always had a personal ambivalence towards ground-mounted solar, falsely claiming when she was environment secretary that solar panels harmed food security. During her leadership campaign this summer, she dismissed panels as ‘paraphernalia‘, adding: ‘On my watch, we will not lose swathes of our best farmland to solar farms.’ 
 

‘Nero, ‘fiddled while Rome burned,’ and that seems true of the Tory party looking-on as Truss wreaks havoc’

 
They say that ‘Nero, ‘fiddled while Rome burned,’ and that seems true of the Tory party looking-on as Truss wreaks havoc. What’s often missed at party conferences are the fringe events where they are often wild ideas bandied around. 

For example, at the last Tory conference, there was a fringe event entitled. Are We Losing the War on Woke? Tory MP Miriam Cates suggested drastic cuts to higher education, partly to save money, but also to stop young people being ‘indoctrinated‘ with liberal ideas. 

This was part of an overlooked, and so far a largely below the surface effort to get the party fully engaged in a US-style culture war. This includes issues such as free speech, transgender rights, structural racism and a pervading sense that the UK is dominated by a left-wing establishment, observers say it is in part linked to Truss’s embrace of free market libertarianism. 

While there were 45 conference fringe events about levelling up in various forms, against little more than half a dozen connected to free speech or the woke threat, it appears that there was much enthusiasm from many Tory members, and the rapturous response at other events for the two key culture warriors in Truss’s cabinet, Suella Braverman (home secretary), and Kemi Badenoch (international trade secretary). 

Insiders say a lot of this enthusiasm, particularly for free speech issues, comes from younger members who have been fired up by GB News, and by online content. Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, described woke ideas as ‘a battle for the foundations of our civilisation.‘ 

One MP said their impression from the conference was that the proportion of Tory members invested in culture wars, which they put at ‘about a third, but a very active, loud third‘, seemed newly energised. He continued saying: ‘I don’t think they’ve changed their views that much. They just seem more bothered by things.’ 

All of this madness is nothing new, it’s roots lay with the success of ‘vote leave’ in 2016. 
 

‘All of this madness is nothing new, it’s roots lay with the success of ‘vote leave’ in 2016′ 

 
Back then, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and the former Labour MP Gisela Stuart jointly put their names to an article in the Sun which insisted that once Brexit happened, ‘the NHS will be stronger, class sizes smaller and taxes lower. We’ll have more money to spend on our priorities, wages will be higher and fuel bills will be lower.’ 

A year later, Jacob Rees-Mogg, told us that leaving the EU would open the way to much cheaper food, and therefore increase people’s disposable income. 

For the Truss  government, post-Brexit politics are proving to be impossible. They want life outside the EU to mean Neoliberalism, tax cuts, public spending cuts and a smaller welfare state, the opposite of what the millions of leave supporters thought they were voting for, nor what the Tories offered in the two elections that followed. 

Whilst the current Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, wants to cut net migration to ‘tens of thousands‘, Downing St suggests that it wants to liberalise the UK’s immigration system in it drive for growth. The reaction of the many racist Brexiters will be something to behold. 

As I have warned before, anyone who assumes that this sea of disappointment will see moderate, or even left-wing politicians triumph needs to think again. Recent elections in Italy, Sweden and France show a yearning for reckless, authoritarian style of leadership that Johnson combined with his more showbiz aspects. I will cover Italy in detail next week. 
 

‘anyone who assumes that this sea of disappointment will see moderate, or even left-wing politicians triumph needs to think again’

 
We finish by considering the funeral pyre that is neoliberalism which did for ‘Crazy’, and, if there is any justice, Truss to. 

As I have written before Truss is a Thatcher tribute act, wanting to be similarly transformative, or ‘disruptive‘: ‘The status quo is not an option,’ she told last week’s conference. ‘We are the only party with a clear plan to … build a new Britain.’ 

Neoliberalism is based on the belief that free markets, low taxes and a state with little or no interest in equality will produce the best economic and social outcomes is so last year. In this week’s FT this, the columnist Rana Foroohar argued that the west was entering a ‘post-neoliberal era’: there would be more state intervention in economies, more regulation of markets and more power for workers.  

Despite this, Truss is determined to shape a country with the opposite characteristics: a ‘lean state‘, less ‘red tape‘, less redistribution of wealth and stricter anti-union laws. Much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of thinktanks such as the IEA, who’s director, Mark Littlewood, presided over fringe discussions at last week’s Tory conference with an air of barely contained delight. At one point, he said he was ‘very excited‘ about the Truss premiership.  

However, there were words of moderation: on deregulating business, Rees-Mogg warned: ‘You can’t go for a year-zero approach. People will think we’re just lunatics.’ An adviser to Littlewood, Sam Collins, went further. ‘Attempting to introduce free-market reforms and doing it badly can poison the well for a generation.’  
 

‘The Tory’s are yesterday’s news, stumbling around ‘waiting for Godot”

 
The first country to try neoliberalism didn’t concern itself with popularity. Chile, in 1973 gave up democracy and was a dictatorship ruled by Augusto Pinochet after a military coup. This  turned what had been a relatively open and egalitarian society into a laboratory for polarising free-market policies such as privatisation and austerity. ‘There was much bloodshed and numerous political prisoners were taken,’ Alan Walters, a right-wing British economist who worked with the Pinochet regime, wrote in the Times in 1990. ‘But [there was also] vigorous economic recovery, the wonder of the rest of Latin America.’ 

Readers many remember that Walters went on to be Thatcher’s chief economic adviser. While obviously less authoritarian than Pinochet, her government similarly used coercion, such as aggressive policing and anti-union laws, to suppress opposition to neoliberal policies. As in Chile, some economic freedoms – to get rich, to avoid regulation – were considered more important than others, such as freedom from overwork or poverty. Whilst there has been sufficient support from vested interests and some of the public for this approach in the years following,  it has only intermittently produced strong economic growth. 

Today, neoliberalism is supported only by a minority, and is less popular than the socialism and social democracy it supposedly defeated for good back in the 70s and 80s. In Britain, the latest annual social attitudes survey shows that even among Conservative supporters, only 7% want a smaller state and lower taxes. 

The Tory’s are a party out of ideas; in the last 12-years they have tried Cameron’s ‘big society’, Theresa May’s focus on the ‘just about managing’, and Boris Johnson’s populist nationalism. All have failed. 

The Tory’s are yesterday’s news, stumbling around ‘waiting for Godot’. Their time is long past. 

 

‘But I’ve never caught a glimpse

Of how the others must see the faker 

I’m much too fast to take that test’ 

 
Today has been manna from heaven to political commentators, and fortunately Philip didn’t resist the temptation to dip his quill; and he had been telling us what was coming.

His political obituary will record that Mr Kwarteng backed Truss’s economic vision; here’s some free energy saving advice – turn the lights off when you leave love.

So what got Philip’s creative juices flowing like a rivulet at the bottom of a favella the morning after curry night?:

Well, as predicted after the not a budget fiasco, “Crazy” had to be the scapegoat for this misadventure.

Quite where Truss goes from here is a mystery. Politically she is finished, these were the policies she campaigned on, and “Crazy” has paid the price for her ambition.

To an extent I feel sorry for him. His ideas might be ill-judged, out-of-date, and serve only to fuel the fires of inequality, but he did believe in them. Truss, as I keep saying, believes only in herself and being on the winning side.

What does surprise me is the lack of comment regarding the increase in defence spending, as the songsmith wrote, “Guns before butter”.

It’s strange that even people like Rees-Mogg see the need for restraint. I suspect she is too influenced by the IEA and others, dazzled by their brilliance, perhaps.

Brexit caused a revolution, Johnson was sufficiently well advised to take advantage of this, whereas she is just doing the opposite. As a result Brexit will be even more of a self-inflicted catastrophe.

I managed to find a country that made a success of neoliberalism, Chile, under a military dictatorship. I guess if you use enough force most things can be made to work.

Let’s hope that isn’t where we are headed. At the moment it feels like anything and everything is possible. The best we can hope for is to muddle through the next 2-years. The markets will eventually tire and move on to a newer and tastier looking morsel. Until then just close your eyes and pretend it’s a bad dream!

Lyrically, we open with Visage, and “Mind of a Toy”, strangely apt. To close, we look no further than the great man, and “Changes”. They can’t come soon enough. Enjoy!

 
@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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