HP Source: I say chaps, it’s Anarchy in the UK

 

We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Things, 3^rd December 2020; I say chaps, it’s Anarchy in the UK

 

‘Standing in the dark

Watching you glow

Lifting a receiver

Nobody I know..’

 

As this column speculated tiers were not enough and 55 Tory MPs rebelled against the PM this week, despite Johnson standing in the spot in the chamber by the voting lobbies, where MPs would have expected to see the government chief whip, alongside health secretary Matt Hancock, pleading with them as they cast their votes.

 

One MP said Tories headed ‘sheepishly’ past him towards the No lobby. ‘They were literally pleading with MPs,’ an observer said.

Johnson was forced to rely on Labour’s abstention as the measure passed by 291 votes to 78, meaning a tighter system of measures that will plunge 99% of England into the strictest tiers.

More than 40% of people are in tier 3, meaning the closure of pubs and restaurants, while households will be banned from social mixing indoors in nearly all of the country.

It comes as the UK’s total C-19 death toll passed 75,000, according to a tally of all fatalities that mention the disease on death certificates, though case numbers have fallen significantly.

The number of rebels was less than the predictions of up to 70, but far exceeded the 34 who voted in November against the second lockdown, and the 44 who opposed the government in a largely symbolic vote on the now-abandoned 10pm closing time for pubs and restaurants.

The rebels complained that the county-level demarcation for tiers is too broad. Johnson promised the approach would be ‘as granular as possible as we go forward’, though no imminent change is expected.

The former defence minister, Tobias Ellwood, warned: ‘I am worried this government might be losing that consent if it doesn’t work with the country and with parliament in a stronger way.’

This rebellion is something Johnson should have seen coming, Tory rebels have been setting the agenda in British politics for so long now that loyalty seems to have been deleted from their vocabulary, even for a leader, who less, than 12-months ago led the party to its biggest election victory in more than 30 years.

Of course, such a sizeable majority means that Tory backbenchers have little to fear from the opposition in key votes, and the days when their MPs saw supporting the PM as their duty is long gone.

Even Margaret Thatcher was not spared in 1990, despite winning a landslide victory in 1987.

David Cameron was never forgiven after he failed to win a majority and led a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. His end came swiftly, whilst he managed to restrict Farage to poaching only two MPs for UKIP, Brexit proved to be his downfall.

The right of the Tories was represented by the European Research Group and it shares much common membership with the new C-19 Recovery Group.

This, I believe, demonstrates the hold Farage has over a section of the Tory party, and has produced a hybrid which has a libertarian aversion to regulation.

They see regulation as inhibiting commerce, suffocating freedom, and subverting democracy. They feel that, with Johnson, they have seen off the threat to our liberty from Brussels assuming, of course, that he doesn’t sign-up to a deal involving any hint of compromise with the EU in the coming weeks, and now they are turning their attention to another threat on their concept of liberty; the social and economic controls required to stop the spread of C-19.

Basically, Johnson and the libertarians within his party have used each other; he became a Eurosceptic which benefitted their cause and took the spotlight away from Farage, for him this was the route to the top job.

Johnson is no more than an establishment version of Farage, his image of himself as a Churchillian style statesman is totally deluded.

To an extent he is isolated without the winning campaigning alliance he had with Dominic Cummings and the Vote Leave team. In its place he has Dan Rosenfield, a former investment banker and Treasury official, admired by a broad spread of Tories he is the non-revolutionary fixer that Cummings wanted rid of.

 

‘Every new problem brings a stranger inside

Helplessly forcing one more new disguise..’

 

Traditional Tories are not anti-establishment, they prefer continuity and old privilege to ideology and upheaval.

Today’s party is somewhat different, many now share the ‘Faragist mode of perpetual opposition’. Insurrection against authority is its cause, which means that Johnson, or whoever succeeds him, will be a constant negotiation with implacable rebels.

Traditional Tory MPs believe that the government’s overriding priority must be to protect the public, whilst Faragists believe it should be to protect economic activity and enterprise. This issue cuts across the modern Tory party pitting northern ‘blue wall’ Tories against southern shire ones.

More fundamentally, it pits small-government Thatcherites against active-government modernisers.

Policies such as the proposed reform of the planning laws have the same divisive effect. Those in the southern shires oppose them as it impacts the ‘green belt’ and property prices, whilst those in the blue wall support any measure that might bring prosperity to those left behind.

The redrawing of the Tory party, in many ways sits conveniently with the redrawing of the political map achieved by populism. Previously, the lines between what was a Tory seat and what was a Labour seat were clear.

Now we have prosperous metropolitan and suburban areas held by Labour and working-class areas with high unemployment, the left behind, voting Tory.

Demographics help to explain the former, the young typically vote Labour, the latter is somewhat more interesting.

Since 1979, we have had only 13-yrs of Labour governments, and, especially the administration led by Tony Blair, were not what could be described as socialist.

When traditional socialists did lead the Labour party, e.g. Foot and Corbyn, they were soundly beaten. Clearly the electorate doesn’t embrace socialism, the left behind appear to have been brainwashed into believing that populist Tories are the answer to the inequality.

The reality is rather different. Since Thatcher’s era the industry that was in these areas has not been replaced, there has been had little success in attracting outside employers, therefore no new jobs have been created.

To change this, we need to train people. Johnson promised to ‘build, build, build’ which requires builders. Numerous PM’s have talked-up the need for vocational education for skills, yet they never make available the funding required.

By the time the furlough scheme ends it is expected that unemployment will be C. 2.6 million, these people will need retraining.

Instead they will be forced onto universal credit, wasting soul-destroying time forced to prove they are applying for scores of non-existent jobs, and only allowed to train for part of the week, rather than starting a serious course to retrain.

 

‘Pick you up, and drag you in.

Stubbing things to schemes and places..’

 

Extensive research by Kathleen Henehan of the Resolution Foundation shows ‘a strong association between training and returning to work, particularly among non-graduates’, and for people to change industry, ‘only full-time education has a substantial relationship with the likelihood of a 25- to 59-year-old making a career change’.

Crucially, but ignored by the government: ‘Longer and qualification-bearing training is strongly associated with job re-entry among non-graduates.’

 

• The government’s apprenticeship programme has created only a fraction of its target of 3 million apprentices, and fewer than a quarter of apprenticeships went to under-19s, for whom it was intended.
• Further Education (‘FE’) colleges have been flooded with applicants, as 16-year-olds escape the ‘no jobs’ market, but the extra FE funding doesn’t replace the cuts of the recent years. Total spending on adult skills dropped by 45% between 2010 and 2018, says the right-wing thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies. FE does not get the same level of funding as universities or under-16 school students, despite the higher cost of specialist staff and materials for engineering, construction, hairdressing and other practical courses. Another example is nursing; despite the government promising 50,000 new nurses, FE colleges have been barred from offering nursing courses. The government’s Kickstart scheme, which pays employers to take in young workers for six months, includes no training ingredient.
• The government has axed the Union Learning Fund programme which trained 200,000 people last year. For the small sum of £12m from the DfE, 40,000 union reps help those in the workplace with low skills to take basic courses in IT, mathematics, and literacy. Since the Labour government launched it in 1998, 2.5 million people, union and non-union members alike, have been through the scheme, this helped create German-style good relations between unions and employers, as they worked together to upskill the workforce

 

Exeter University research shows the ULF not only helped people to improve their jobs and pay, but also every £1 spent gained the economy £12.87. No reason was given for its abolition.

With high unemployment on the way, and another generation at risk of being out of work, the government continues to do the bare minimum. Brexit is still to come, too, and the governor of the Bank of England warns that it will do more longer-term harm than C-19.

The government’s Shared Prosperity Fund was supposed to compensate for the loss of EU structural funds for poor areas, but the £1.5bn announced by Rishi Sunak in his spending review is far less than the EU sum, and only £220m is all that will be released next year.

The £100bn allocated for infrastructure ‘will take years not months to come on stream’, according to Tony Wilson, head of the Employment Studies Institute.

Much of what has happened post-1979, when Thatcher came to power, has benefitted the ‘haves’ in society, the pandemic has been no different.

The super-rich have had a great coronavirus crisis. UBS calculates that the already vast fortunes of the world’s billionaires had surged to a record $10.2tn by the end of this July, the recent surge in global stockmarkets that has seen the major US indices hit new highs will have added to this.

The merely affluent have done well too. Provided they avoided falling victim of the virus, most, if not all, have kept a well-paid job performed from a comfortable home.

The rise in the savings ratio suggests they have been accumulating money as they haven’t been able to spend on meals out, entertainment, or holidays.

Brexit is still to come, too, and the governor of the Bank of England warns that it will do more longer-term harm than C-19; the International Monetary Fund, argues for ‘absolutely crucial’ social spending, expanded public work projects and more progressive tax policies to ‘mobilise revenues in an equitable way’.

It could have been so different. At the beginning of the crisis several Tories gave the impression that they agreed with the case for rewriting the social contract; ‘key workers’ would be more fairly rewarded, inter-generational inequality would be addressed.

Those who had done well could expect to pay the larger share of the post-crisis bill, we were ‘all in it together’.

Alas, it didn’t take long for the Tories to regain their usual swagger and posturing. After helping their mates feather their own nests with jobs and over-priced PPE, paid for by the country, Rishi Sunak warned us that ‘the economic emergency has only just begun’, forecasting that Britain will endure the deepest recession since Queen Anne was on the throne (1702-1714), while government borrowing will reach the highest level in peacetime history.

To offset this Sunak announced a £4bn cut in international aid, in addition to the ‘automatic’ £3bn reduction that was due because the aid budget is linked to the size of the economy which has shrunk.

This cut triggered a rare, united protest from all five living former prime ministers, three of them Conservative, and the condemnation of the archbishop of Canterbury.

Four billion pounds per annum is relatively trivial in the context of a deficit running at around £400bn this year. Unsurprisingly, this was well received by right-wing newspapers and the ‘charity begins at home’ crowd.

 

‘When I looked at the streets

And when they looked at me..’

 

Now, before I get more criticism than usual, I understand that our priority should be to help our own first, my contention is the definition of ‘our own’.

By this I refer to the freeze on the pay of many public sector workers at home. For a chancellor who once said he would not be bound by ‘dogma’, he did just that, and offered up nothing about how the affluent will be expected to contribute, e.g. making tax relief on pension contributions less generous for the high earners who currently extract most benefit, or windfall taxes on the lucky companies that have made swollen profits from the pandemic.

Not forgetting the companies that have drawn on the government’s business support schemes, and then paid the money out to shareholders in dividends.

This seemingly never entered Sunak’s thought process. Why disadvantage your mates when you can take away support from the impoverished abroad and key workers at home?

The Sunak we saw during the early stages of the crisis who attracted praise from trade unions and Labour MPs, promising ‘whatever it takes’, is now bedecked in true Tory blue.

Slipping through under the radar a £10bn cut to other departmental budgets, and repeatedly refusing to guarantee the £20-a-week uplift to universal credit beyond April.

This, don’t forget, is a man who chose to pursue a career as an MP during the George Osborne era of austerity, one with ambitions to lead the party, and pandering to the right.

There is a reason why I call the Tory MPs in the blue wall seats the ‘temporary 55’, they won’t be sticking round.

Tories have a default setting; they prefer to cut support and services for the less well-off rather than to raise more revenue from the affluent.

Nothing has been learnt from how the financial crisis of 2008 was dealt with. The cheap-money policies adopted by the central banks helped avoid a depression while fuelling rises in financial markets, property prices and other assets.

The ‘haves’, those who already had capital, did well as a result. But, if we truly think we avoided a depression we are fooling ourselves, the majority, the ‘have nots’, saw their incomes stagnate or decline while the public services and social assistance they depended on were cut.

The results were economically damaging. Inequalities widened, society became more polarised, and politics turned toxic, e.g. Brexit, the rise of Trump and other populist leaders. In effect, the resurrection of fascism.

In those far-off days of March and April the government appeared to realise the mistakes of 2008, Sunak said, ‘No one will be left behind.’ Johnson added: ‘We all remember what happened in 2008. This time, we want to make sure that we put the people first.’

There is nothing so cheap as talk…………

 

‘Once I was so sure

Now the doubt inside my mind

Comes and goes but leads nowhere..’

 

When his accompanying note started with  ‘this week it is a very bleak assessment of where we are’, I didn’t expect roses around the door, soft-focus ’50s boundless optimism, but I did wonder if Philip had rather over-egged the pudding. It all felt a bit ‘lost-a-shilling-and-found-sixpence’.

However, little could be further from the truth, and even after nine months of this blasted pandemic, it’s hard not to get just a little bit mis, based on the evidence as presented.

He’s stayed away from the vaccine, and to some extent the Brexit ‘deal’ as they are each on a knife edge; however, as a recurring theme in this column, inequality is back with a vengeance.

As ever, this is fast moving, since Philip’s grim prognostications for those ‘left behind’, Grant Shapps has ably displayed how little this government GAF by announcing that ‘high value’ business travelers – eg clients of his alter ego Michael ‘I’ll make you stinking, filthy rich’ Green will not have to quarantine along with we plebs.

Another quail’s egg Farquahar?

 Statements such as ‘Brexit is still to come, too, and the governor of the Bank of England warns that it will do more longer-term harm than C-19’ and ‘the super-rich have had a great coronavirus crisis’ are unlikely to fuel unbridled optimism, nor any belief that ‘levelling up; is anything other than an electoral slogan.

If the narrative is bleak, Philip has thrown some beasts at us with the lyrics this week; some would say morose, few would disagree with obscure – protocols are in place, with only those in tier 1 able to deliver entries in person.

First off the rank ‘an electro pioneer and founder of a pioneering band’ 3 pts for John Foxx and 3 for ‘Underpass’; next ‘the punk goddess at her best’ 3 pts for Siouxsie and the Banshees’, 3 for ‘Christine, and five, count them, for ‘naming the group of friends she was part of in those heady days of 1976’ *

Third ‘possibly the founders of electro in this country’ – 3 pts for Cabaret Voltaire and 3 for ‘Crackdown’; then ‘this all-girl punk band is almost the last standing today’ – 3 pts for Raincoats (?!) and ‘The Void’.

Last, but by no means least, ‘SE London’s ultimate Bowie Boys’ – 3 pts for Japan, 3 for ‘Ghosts’ and then ‘5 for naming the film soundtrack written by Ryuichi Sakamoto which the singer was involved in**, and a further 5 for naming the singer who starred in the film***. They’re not a laugh a minute, but enjoy!

 

_{*Bromley Contingent}

_{**Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence}

_{***David Bowie}

 

 

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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