Thursday 6 July 2023

The wrongs of the right

Allister Heath has fired off another of his totally deranged rants in The Telegraph: Thirteen years of Tory failure have shifted Britain radically to the Left. The headline and sentiment I can agree with. In fact, it’s hardly surprising, is it? Voters are heartily fed up with the Conservative Party and the right which has systematically broken virtually everything in this country over the last few years. The pendulum always swings back in a democracy, doesn’t it?

For decades I’ve believed that elections have little to do with what’s in the manifestos or political philosophies. Nobody reads that stuff before voting. Elections are more like a safety valve to avoid civil conflict and offer the means to punish those who have been in power. And the Tories are certainly going to be punished.

Heath launches a ferocious attack on the Tory Party and their five prime ministers since 2010. They weren’t really Conservatives he claims, meaning they aren’t sufficiently right-wing for his taste, of course. It’s really irrational stuff and the same stupid argument used by the left about Labour and Jeremy Corbyn.

However, Heath identifies Brexit not as the cause, partly or wholly, of many of the problems that he outlines but as the singular success of the recent past. It was a “restorationist triumph” forced on the two main parties by “popular rebellion.” He obviously doesn’t read the polls. The growing rebellion is against Brexit!

The economy is stuttering, trade and investment are down, inflation is high and rising, living standards dropping, the NHS is on its knees, and people are up in arms about being ripped off by the privatised utilities, notably the water companies. And he says this which must rank as the most tin-eared comment of the year so far:

“The Tories can’t even explain why a competitive private sector could deliver cheaper energy, better rail and roads, plentiful water, and zero raw sewage discharges.”

I'll be straight, in the 1980s under Thatcher, I thought privatisation would improve some basic services. I remember it took weeks or months to get a phone installed and everyone had a horror story about the regional gas boards’ chronic inefficiency with multiple visits to fix simple problems. The rail and coal industries were always being starved of funding whenever money was tight, which was most of the time.

Our next-door neighbour in the 1950s worked as a house painter for the city council and took exactly 13 weeks off sick every year, as he was allowed to do on full pay, something that drove my old man nuts. So, I actually thought a lot of the privatisations would improve things. Forty years on, I think most of us realise it has been a terrible mistake.

The water industry has been squeezed for every penny by rapacious foreign investors and we are now dumping sewage into rivers and coastal waters again in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated on the continent. The energy industry is a fragmented, uncoordinated mess with no controlling hand at the helm and railways have gone from being a cheap, mass transport system to an expensive luxury. It’s often less costly to fly!

The government is putting in real terms, about three times the subsidy into train services that British Rail received when it was under the Minister of Transport, while ticket prices are beyond most and services around the industrial north are all too often completely ramshackle. 

The two great ideologies of the Tory right over the last forty years - privatisation and Brexit - have brought this country to its knees and the party's day of reckoning is coming. All Starmer needs to do is, be honest with the British people and display a bit of basic competence. That should give him a minimum of 15 years, more than enough time to fix things.

Brexit has also made the UK an international irrelevance as indicated by reports that Joe Biden has blocked Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence minister, as the next NATO Secretary General. The US apparently prefers Ursula von der Leyen, something which obviously drives Brexiteers like Andrew Neil (he would deny being one) absolutely mad:

The Spectator (Chairman one A. Neil) then does a hatchet job on VdL. There is a refusal to acknowledge that for the last seven years, ever since the referendum, most serious international observers and statesmen think we have made a terrible mistake and our government is making itself ridiculous.

VdL at least looks like a serious politician who can be trusted not to kick off WW3 while Biden probably has serious reservations about anybody who served in Boris Johnson's cabinet. What does that say about Wallace?

Meanwhile, Lord Frost attacks the former Finnish PM for 'reveling' in our Brexit-related woes:

This is I'm afraid, the Brexiter's standard paranoid mindset. We have alienated the EU and are now busy alienating the USA. We are hardly going to make common cause with China or Russia and I'm not sure India can be regarded as an ally since its buying a lot of cheap oil and propping up the Putin regime and the war in Ukraine.

Britain is becoming more diminished and more isolated than it has ever been in my lifetime. And this is entirely down to Brexit, nothing else.

Zaporizhzhia

Well, the Russians haven't detonated the explosives placed around the nuclear power plant in occupied Zaporizhzhia, and if this tweet is to be believed, has called it off:

The climb down it appears has been due in part to the Chinese warning against the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, or so the FT is reporting:

It is a demonstration that almost every country in the world needs allies. Only the US and China are powerful enough to manage without. They can use force or the threat of it to get their way. Others must use diplomacy and persuasion. Russia now finds itself weakened and well on the way to defeat. 

Putin miscalculated badly last year and it's hard to see him in power next year.

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