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Tag Archives: Rishi Sunak

Zombie Policy Apocalypse Part 2: Cruel Britannia

Continued from Part 1

From Cruel Britannia, Land of Grope and Tory – a scandal-ridden post Brexit economic basket-case, The Sick Man of Europe, or gaga but stable as described in Colin Hay’s “catastrophic equilibrium”, a simultaneous failure and stability, comes news of a new probe into old allegations against former party Whip, Chris Pincher, MP for Tamworth, who now sits as an independent while The Australian Solution to asylum-seekers offers no quick fix at a time when City puppet Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is preparing another set of cuts to spending and tax increases which will do nothing to ease stagflation or the long-term damage caused by George Osborne’s austerity measures in his first budget in 2010.

Chris Pincher is to be investigated. Revisiting “Pestminster” is the last thing Rishi Sunak needs. The oxymoronic office of the UK Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Stone OBE, opens the investigation on 20 October, into “actions causing significant damage to the reputation of the House as a whole, or of its members generally”.

There’d be a horde of Tories ducking for cover under this rubric – notorious serial sex pest, Chris Pincher is the fifth in three months – but Johnson whose regime is a string of scandals since 2019, promotes a known abuser, normalising abuse by describing Pincher as “handsy” and referring to him as “Pincher by name and Pincher by nature”.

All of which speaks volumes about Tory sleaze-baggery and locker room culture; while for Johnson, his trivialising of Pincher’s sexual offending means his lies must find him out.

Pincher allegedly, sexually assaulted two men at the elite, members-only, Carlton Club, a Tory political incubator. Battling to keep the lid on the Tory dumpster-fire, is poor little rich kid, billionaire PM Rishi Sunak, another City of London catspaw, who rues the day he re-instated failed Home Secretary, Cruella Braverman, rewarding her support in his bid to be PM.

Crazy Braverman breaks Home Office security rules six times, whilst ignoring legal advice on catastrophic overcrowding in Manton, a former RAF base in Kent, where four thousand men, women and children are crammed into a facility designed for a thousand.

Children’s hands reach out through chain mesh and tarpaulin covers. Hungry youngsters huddle together under a thin blanket on the plywood floor of a marquee. Such highly visible reminders of policy failure and the public spectacle of an ineffectual and rogue Home Secretary, are already casting doubt on Sunak’s political judgement.

There’s a fabulous plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda but that’s run into a legal hitch.

Johnson’s government cancels its first deportation flight in June when the European Court of Human Rights rules that the stunt carries “a real risk of irreversible harm.”

The scheme is now being tried in the UK’s High Court. But there’s no shortage of support from the arse-end of the earth from a former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister who tells The Weekend Australian,[paywalled] he’s set his sights on becoming the next Lord Mayor of Adelaide.

“Put them onto stable craft and drive them back to France – that’s the simple solution and would destroy the smugglers’ business model in a week,” Alexander Downer chortles.

“Short of that, [make] sure they can’t settle in the UK under any circumstances – the [agreement the] government negotiated with Rwanda – is a good solution as well.”

Sound familiar? The eternally vigilant Liberal Party’s elder statesmen never sleep.

“Suppository of all wisdom”, Tony Abbott hawked his boat-stopping to former Tory governments, even though asylum seekers boats had stopped under his predecessor, Labor’s Kevin Rudd, 19 July 2013, two months before the election.. It’s become Liberal Party dogma; a xenophobic, cynically opportunistic, contempt for international law and human decency, not merely inhumane but gratuitously cruel. When you sell someone else your barbarism, it makes your own monstrous indifference to others; your squalid moral bankruptcy; your poverty of mind and spirit seem less abhorrent.

Somehow.

Downer always seems to be able to go lower. In February, former Johnson regime unparalleled failure, Home Secretary Priti Patel invited him on to her Rwanda committee – bugger-human-rights-and-international-convention-send-them-on a one way journey to a Central African nation with a bad human rights record. He’s into it like a rat up a drainpipe.

Now Big Al or Bunty as he’s fondly known at home, a patrician fop with a lordly sense of entitlement honks out the heartless xenophobia that has worked so well for MPs here.

Drive asylum seekers back to France from whence they come like moths to a flame? Or shivering from hypothermia, drenched to the bone, exhausted, in leaky, overloaded rowboats, navigating only by eye toward the white chalk cliffs of Dover.

Over 35,500 asylum-seekers cross the channel this year; up from 28,000 in 2021.

Dozens have drowned in the attempt.

All hands to the bilge pump to dispel the “southern invasion” of Albanian economic migrants as asylum-seekers in small boats are misrepresented in The Daily Fail and by Home Secretary, raving Cruella Braverman.

The Home Office worries that the make-up of people on small boats is changing. From January 2018 to June 2022, it claims that Iranian (28%) and Iraqi (20%) nationals represented nearly half of all small boat arrivals. In the first six months of 2022, over half (51%) of small boat arrivals were from three nationalities – Albanian (18%), Afghan (18%) and Iranian (15%). These figures are unverified.

From May to September 2022 Albanian nationals alone comprised 42% of small boat crossings, with 11,102 Albanians arriving by small boat in those five months.

The Home Office claims that Albanians don’t need asylum because they come from a “safe” country. The data suggests otherwise. In the year ending this June, 53% of Albanian claimants were granted asylum, or other forms of leave to stay in the UK, on first decision, and a higher proportion on appeal.

Dressed to kill, in Top Gun pilot’s helmet and flak jacket, Braverman commandeers a Chinook military helicopter which “can lift anything and go anywhere” to travel thirty kilometres from Dover to an overcrowded migrant gulag at Manston. Is Suella morphing into android or super hero mode? What’s clear is she will fight them on the beaches in her own chauvinistic Churchillian movie, acting her socks off as a loyal defender of the realm.

But don’t sell her short. Ruthless Rishi’s record sprint to the top job means he’s done deals all over the shop. Crazy Ms Braverman who is unlikely to outlast a Tesco tomato, owes her unholy resurrection to a Sunak deal. Who knows whom else he owes? Virtual political Mayfly, Truss, a fifty-one day dud, is a well-grubbed Tufton Street mole.

Is the fast-tracked Sunak human? A bot, programmed, like the Tory Party itself, to self-extinguish? The political knackers’ yard beckons the new PM, even without his Infosys slave-trading gig or his “brave” deal to reinstate Leaky Sue, (Send them) Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Tory arch bigot and anti-immigration dog-whistling xenophobe.

“Either he appointed a home secretary with a vicious demagogic streak knowing she is useless, in which case he has wilfully sabotaged one of the most important departments in Whitehall for no obvious gain, or he did it because he is blind to Braverman’s deficiencies, in which case he shares them,” writes The Guardian UK’s Rafael Behr.

On the third hand, it’s certain that the tabloid-orchestrated chorus of xenophobia – an “invasion on our southern coast” according to Sue, is the Sun and others running distraction for a Tory regime that’s a vortex of ineptitude, bad policy and worse PR.

What possessed Sunak to boast to Tunbridge Wells’ Tories he was Robin Hood in reverse; that he had diverted public funds from “deprived urban areas” to “areas like this”?

Sunak has blood on his hands. As BoJo’s Chancellor, Sunak’s £850 million “eat out to help out” meal and drink subsidy stunt drove new COVID-19 infections up by between 8 and 17% in the second wave of the pandemic in 2020.

Sunak, like BoJo or our ScoMo, doesn’t consult any experts.

It’s all part of our postmodern, post truth, faux-populist, global right-wing politics’ anti-intellectualism. Why would Chancellor Rishi Sunak consult public health experts before inflicting his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ stunt in the UK Summer of 2020?

What would they know about a healthy economy? The £10 discount scheme, which provides cheaper meals to diners going out to their local curry house, restaurant or Pizza Express, (plus a bonus free COVID exposure), is “epidemiologically illiterate” sniff experts interviewed by The Institute for Government (IfG) for its report – a formal indictment of the cloud of unknowing at the heart of Torydom from BoJo to ScoMo.

“At times it was very unclear, outside the inner circles, just who would be involved, how decisions were taken and on what basis.”

Similarly self-harming are Sunak’s vows to stop crops of solar panels popping up in fields; or halt onshore wind farms, pledges aimed to attract party carbonari during his summer campaign failure to outbid Tufton Street muppet, Libertarian crash test dummy Liz Truss.

His emotional bypass may suggest Rishi’s a robot – as with Liz, but it’s not true. They’re zombie economics fanatics who will do whatever it takes to make the rich even richer.

So, too will LNP serial dud, Peter Dutton, another political Loaded Dog who claims “tax cuts boost economic activity” but who shows he doesn’t know his Yeppen from his Yeppoon, a gaffe which Coalition women try to bury by accusing Albo of bullying Michelle Landry.

Truss believes that if you just make the rich richer, (an imperative in an era of record profit, off-shoring and price-gouging), through tax cuts, subsidies and deregulation, it creates a virtual Niagara Falls of wealth for everyone else.

Oddly, no-one has ever seen it. In reality, wealth tends to trickle-up. Yet this is to miss its true function. Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist explains,

“The power of trickle-down economics has never been its economic logic but rather its political logic. Thatcher created a suite of rhetorical and policy tools that consistently united middle-class and high-income voters in the belief that the lower their taxes, the better their country would be.

The genius wasn’t selling the direct benefits of tax cuts to those who would get the cash, it was arguing that helping the rich was actually the best way to help the poor. And so “compassionate conservatism” was born.”

Truss is a rusted-on devotee of the IEA, a “”cell of Libertarian extremists which styles itself as “an educational research group which furthers the dissemination of free-market thinking” but like our IPA, won’t disclose its donors.

What you don’t know can’t hurt you? Spoiler alert, ExxonMobil gave Policy Exchange $30,000 in 2017.

The “think tank” went on to recommend the creation of a new anti-protest law targeting the likes of Extinction Rebellion, which led to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Protesters can be banned from future protest, be fitted with tracking devices and worse.

Labour peer Lord Hain sees the law as “the biggest threat to the right to dissent and the right to protest in my lifetime.” It would have “throttled” protests by the suffragettes, he adds. Suella Braverman says it is not a human right to vandalise property.

Or not pay their power bills. E.ON, a German-owned energy giant which forecasts a profit of £3.6bn in global pre-tax earnings for 2022 spent its last summer lobbying Kwasi Karteng against capping of energy bills and also warning about what it sees as an “existential” risk posed by campaigners who threaten to stop paying their gas and power.

Also clear is the link between fossil fuel industries and the IEA; Truss’ mother-ship. The American Friends of the IEA pocketed a $50,000 gift from ExxonMobil in 2004, while the UK branch HQ of the IEA has received donations from BP every year since 1967.

OpenDemocracy reports, ‘Truss is particularly close to the IEA, having founded its parliamentary wing FREER in 2011 and hired its former communications director Ruth Porter to run her campaign, later rewarding her by making her deputy chief of staff’.

Tim Montgomerie, a former Johnson advisor, tells Twitter the Truss budget is a “massive moment for the IEA”. “They’ve been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.” Director General Mark Littlewood is said to be distraught over how the market repudiated his group’s free-market experiment.

Some Trickle-downers trace their faith to a Will Rogers joke or a sketch on the back of a table napkin in the 1980s, the Laffer Curve, drawn by Reagan era economist Arthur Laffer, who also argues that government spending depresses the economy.

In reality, cutting taxes to increase prosperity is David Hume’s idea in his 1756 essay Of Taxes, as University of Newcastle economist Professor Bill Mitchell patiently points out.

It defies all evidence. Especially historical. In the 1940s and the 1970s in the US top rates were anywhere between seventy and ninety-four percent, yet the nation posted record growth in GDP. After the 1980s, top rates began to come down yet GDP never recovered Iits post war boom. In reality, the rich tend to hang on to a tax windfall or spend extra funds buying back shares in their own company boosting its market value.

Zombie economics get another run in the UK. Coined by economist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman it’s the free market gospel that somehow comes back from the dead to despatch the hapless Truss. It helped turn the US into the world’s biggest creditor nation into the world’s biggest debtor nation in Reagan’s two terms in office.

Frydenberg’s stage three tax cuts are a brazen, unfunded, unnecessary bribe to its donor class to vote for the Liberal Party, wrecking a progressive tax system and promoting inequality.

Labor promises to keep the cuts – who wants to get wedged in an election campaign? -but now Lucky Jim Chalmers calculates that the cuts will cost $254 billion over ten years, meaning so much less to spend on schools, hospitals, or the NDIS just to benefit a wealthy elite who already have the means to access tax minimisation schemes and don’t need it baked into the system.

Bank CEOs, surgeons, and federal politicians will get a windfall tax cut of $9075, while aged care workers, disability carers and those on minimum wages will get nothing.

Despite all her policy nonsense, it is chilling just how quickly Truss is trounced, bounced and hounded into resignation by the 1922 committee of hacks or backbenchers the Conservative Party keeps under the counter for just such emergencies.

It was only yesterday that Tory “grandees” were praising the new PM for her refreshing iconoclasm. Her show of blithe unconcern as to where the money was coming from? Too much. A volatile market was spooked and it cost the Bank of England at least $65 billion in a bond buy- back as it frantically- and far from convincingly – tried to calm the farm.

Her resignation speech mirrors her premiership or footage of Truss being received by the Queen at Windsor “haphazard, uncomfortable to watch, and almost comically short.”

Will the myth of trickle-down also be laid to rest? Not with Jeremy Hunt at the helm. Brought on by Truss to replace Chancellor Kwasi Karteng, with just a little prompting from Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, who hints of a glass of whisky and a revolver, is Jeremy Hunt who caused a stir when he set up arms sales to the Saudis, worth at least $20 billion since 2015.

The issue is not how quickly Truss is undone but how she became PM at all. And how quickly and cruelly she is disabused of her delusions. Johnson’s, prank candidate, Libertarian free-marketeer and Maths whiz, Liz- as she prefers to be known-goes into a dizzy downward spiral of U-turn after U-turn, desperately trying to dodge a barrage of opposition to her mini-budget’s rejection by the market – only to be bullied into resignation. Humiliated as Jeremy Hunt publicly, sadistically, undoes every strand of her £460 billion bold new plan.

A plan not to raise corporation tax, and a plan to cap energy bills without resorting to a windfall tax on energy company profits. It ends with us having none of these things, writes Loughborough University, London’s Dr Gerhard Schnyder who notes that the battle was not between good and bad economics but which bad prevailed over worse.

Luckily, austerity is well in hand. In two weeks, rhyming slang Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and his PM will collude in ruining the lower orders with “fiscal tightening”, a fertile formula for the ruling elite, which involves cutting government services for the masses, raising interest rates, just as gas and electricity corporations price three quarters of households out of the market while a quarter must buy groceries on their credit cards.

Austerity is calculated to line the pockets of pawnbrokers, loan sharks, usurers, banks and other money lenders while energy corporations jack up the price of gas and electricity (elevenfold since 2019), leaving the poor to starve in the cold and dark as winter approaches. UK natural gas prices rose nearly 96% in the year to July.

The Conservative Party itself is riddled with corruption far more toxic beyond Johnson’s faux populism, his vainglorious loutishness or his malignant narcissism, making it more of a push of spivs than an outfit seeking to revive life as it was in 1922, only with a personal hedge fund manager, a peerage for beer money and a personally curated concierge service.

Revelations of dark money contributions and paid lobbying abound in conservative parties worldwide, although UK Tories have an edge. Even its honours system is up for sale.

Fifteen out of 16 Tory party treasurers in the past seven years donated £3 million to the Tory party. Every one of them is offered a peerage. The sublimely named Peter Cruddas, a former Conservative Party treasurer, donated £30 million over ten years only to give the Tories £500,000 three days after taking his seat in the House of Lords in February 2021. Cruddas was busted soliciting cash for access to David Cameron, ten years earlier, a process now streamlined into a club named The Advisory Board run by Tory entrepreneur Ben Elliott.

Elliot, who sees himself as a “willing slave to the stars”, a luxury lifestyle consultant made his name running Quintessentially, a “concierge” company and aristocrat life support ecosystem that caters to the caprices of the rich, from shipping a dozen albino peacocks to a party for Jennifer Lopez to airlifting elm tea bags to Madonna.

All in a day’s work, the 45-year-old Etonian and son-in-law of rock star Steve Winwood tells the Financial Times in 2011. Securing services for his wealthy clients is all about knowing the right people to contact for the right favour.”

Elliot has the right connections. The nephew of Camilla, he was once accused of offering access to then Prince Charles in exchange for a lucrative Quintessentially membership.

But there’s more. With wealth comes power and with both comes The Advisory Board. Businessman and Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi tells The Guardian that Elliott’s Advisory Board Conservative club is “like the very elite Quintessentially clients’ membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben.”

Elliot has made the Advisory Board the number one club in the Conservative Party. Members got monthly access to Johnson or then chancellor Rishi Sunak, say insiders.

Tory Warlords claim the Advisory Board evolved before Boris took power, but won’t say when. Nor is it named in any party literature. A senior minister in David Cameron’s administration says: “I’ve never heard of it.”

Interviewed by The Guardian UK, Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds is blunt:

“This appears to be less of an advisory board than a means for a select group of elite donors to gain privileged access to the prime minister and the chancellor.”

Above all, the seeds of Brexit bear bitter fruit. Leaving the EU helps create division and instability while conferring none of the riches its advocates promised. Gone is instant EU access, exporters now face thirty days’ delay. The bureaucracy of the EU is now replaced by UK officialdom. Trickle-down Trussonomics builds on Brexiteers’ magical thinking; blending a defiance of expert consensus and the market with contempt for Britain’s partners.

Brexit has proved an unmitigated disaster to the UK economy, according to a wide range of commentators from academics and left-leaning journalists to growing numbers of bankers such as Citibank’s Chief Economist, Benjamin Nabarro.

But rotten as it may be, the party has its elite stormtroopers who move like a wolf on the fold when self interest is at stake. The party that pays lip service to liberty calls in its own Bank of England stooge, Jeremy Hunt, when the market panics at rising interest rates fuelled by a Trussian October Revolution of unfunded tax cuts, fuel subsidies and state spending.

Truss’ vision of an agile, lightly-regulated, innovative, entrepreneurial Britain with a Melbourne Cup field of “investment zones” where can-do capitalism can knock itself out free of red tape (or green) would not be out of place in a Malcolm Turnbull speech and is cut from the same international think-tank boiler plate. Build it and they will come. Especially with favourable tax and planning approval. It is more Singapore on Thames, critics sniff, than a practical solution to Britain’s real economic challenges of under investment, inflation, spiralling inequality and recession.

Others point out that it’s handing a blank cheque to businesses who’d have to force themselves to have a ten year tax holiday at the government’s expense. In the meantime, the government still has to pay to keep its projects afloat.

Pet projects grow into white elephants. Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 pumped Hydro pipe dream with subsidies boondoggle – a bargain at $2 billion in its initial “under-cooked” quote – is now estimated to cost at least $10 billion and could be on stream by 2028 at the earliest.

It’s a snip compared with Inland Rail, the Nationals holy grail, which experts advise the Senate will cost at least $20 billion and counting.

Lean green machines, they are not. Utopia’s Rob Sitch, says the grid as it stands means that “pumped hydro is like trying to charge a Tesla with a diesel generator.”

Liz is a fizza but shadow lenders, unregulated, unaccountable and untouchable, increasingly deal themselves into the high-stakes poker of the biggest game in town.

The Tory Party’s abrupt reversion to orthodox, austerity economics is testament to the power of the old guard at the City of London to dictate economic policy.

Or is it a last-ditch attempt to dictate government economic policy by the unelected BoE board? As our Reserve Bank is currently making. Unfortunately, full steam astern will only lead the nation deeper into recession.

But it will be cruel Britannia all the way with all the help that tabloid media can supply about the need for a nation to take its medicine – and not to fuss itself over the prescription. The Bank of England Bank Governor and his pliant board will raise interest rates on household mortgages to halt inflation caused by corporate price gouging at the supermarket, the privatised supply of gas and electricity and the economic disruption of Russia’s War on Ukraine.

If that sounds like our own charismatic dynamo, Philip Lowe that ‘s because he’s reading from the same zombie apocalypse script. It will help protect the fortunes of the ruling elite but it will be the average wage earner who is forced to pay for it all.

 

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Zombie Policy Apocalypse Part 1

Taking Britain and Putin’s oil and gas war-disrupted Covid-stricken world markets by storm is Trussed!, another spectacular episode of trickle-down and double backflip, a 45 day far-right detour in Little Britain’s post-Brexit Tory Story, an action-packed, adrenaline junkie’s in-flight entertainment featuring political jokes, fiscal hocus pocus, bitchy infighting, breathtaking ineptitude, self-parody and inglorious failure. Spoiler alert. There is no happy ending. Whilst Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, the surreal spin cycle of UK Tory politics will continue to inflict misery and suffering on the poor.

Have the Tories come full circle? “The UK is once again in the grip of austerity and anti-democratic politics – when we got into this crisis precisely because of austerity and democratic failure. The vast spending cuts made by George Osborne wrecked our hospitals, our schools and our town halls, and stoked the frustrations that ensured Brexit,” writes Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty. Now there will be more.

Mary Elizabeth Truss, is a product of Tufton Street, a hotbed of fossil fuel lobby groups and right-wing think tanks that have colonised government. Political activists Led by Donkeys’ latest video depicts three members up a ladder placing a mock blue plaque on 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, central London, a Georgian townhouse serving as HQ to right-wing zombie idealogues who spout the dud policies so popular with Truss.

“The UK economy was crashed here,” reads a “Liz Trussorative” sign, dated 23 September 2022, the day Ms Truss’s ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announces his uncosted “mini-Budget”, cunningly named to avoid Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) scrutiny. Proposing big tax cuts and heavy borrowing at a time of high inflation, lifts interest rates, shaves three percent off the value of the pound, upsets the bond market and has the Bank of England in damage control.

Within days, high profile Sunak supporter, Jeremy Hunt, a former Health Minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, pops up like the White Rabbit and proceeds to shred every thread of the Trussian roulette crazy plan. He vows to set up a new economic advisory council, with four crack economists already on board, Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s former chief of staff, and a JP Morgan executive. George Osborne, the king of cuts?

All is not lost. Hunt keeps the uncapped bonuses for bankers, a vital fiscal reform.

Britain’s third PM in four years, a fanatical Libertarian Free Market Neoliberal, who acted her idol, Baroness, Margaret Thatcher in primary school, is dumbstruck; heartbroken to be booed off stage by The City, financial centre of the world, if New York.

Trussed! is a cautionary tale of a hapless, half-baked Thatcherite who strikes fear and loathing into the heart of the market she worships; a tale which may help dispel some of the voodoo economics of neoliberalism if not point to its death – as our own national living treasure, The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Richard Denniss writes.

“It took Liz Truss just 45 days to destroy Margaret Thatcher’s life’s work. For 40 years the idea that tax cuts for the rich would trickle down to help the poor has not just dominated the rhetoric of Western politicians but aligned the ambitions of those who already have the most and those who wish they did.”

But it may be premature to dance on the grave of middle-class welfare or government run by a privileged elite on behalf of that elite at the expense of the pathologically lazy wage slave, as Truss and her pals, all members of think tank The Free Enterprise Group, “encouraging classical liberalism” slander British workers in Britannia Unchained, (2012), her manifesto.

“Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.”

Truss is hounded into resignation soon after her opening solo, Trickle Down, an attempt to woo the oligarchy and schmooze the rich, leads to her being replaced by Rishi Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund manager when the firm brought on the 2008 recession.

“Dishy Rishi”, as tabloids dub him, goes on to marry fashion designer, venture capitalist and software heiress, Akshata Murty, whose father N.R. Narayana Murthy, founded tech sweatshop giant, Infosys which, incidentally, twenty years ago contracted to do a lot of IT work for Telstra. Whilst his affairs are hidden in a blind trust, the little battler, whose father was a doctor and whose mother owned a pharmacy, does very well for himself.

It’s cheering to see Sunak unchained, slaving to overcome a privileged upbringing in Hampshire, one of England’s most affluent counties. Our hearts go out to Rishi as he battles his way through an elite prep school, Stroud, before Winchester (£45,936 per annum) where he’s made head boy and then he’s up to Oxford, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Later he’s on a Fulbright Scholarship doing an MBA at Stamford. There follows a stint where he is director of his father-in-law’s company. But can he do something useful with his life?

True, only in a parallel Tory Universe could a billionaire whose family fortunes are linked with labour outsourcing and who keeps his affairs secret, ever be a successful PM, just as any government on behalf of a wealthy elite will tend to perpetuate injustice, inequality and indifference to those lower on the ladder.

IT outsourcing itself is a paradigm of inequality, a neoliberal magic wand to make IT costs disappear, only to appear in a developing nation, for example, in 2017, a typical IT Indian worker would be paid $5,000 while their US counterparts can expect north of $100,000. Another part of the magic is that as IT costs disappear, so, too do jobs.

Already in the UK the poor are poorer. There are plans to cut government spending because Trussonomics causes a £70 billion black hole, or so Hunt declares, (sound familiar?) which will mean cuts to schools and hospitals already in crisis due to under-funding. Even the fuel cap on household gas and electricity bills is cut from two years to a token six months.

Sunak is not popular with his party. Just last month, given a choice between Sunak and Truss, Tories voted for the untested, wild-eyed ideologue. Sunak solves his lack of support – for now – by recycling ministers from the fabulously impressive Johnson and Truss governments. Keeping RWNJs close. We’ve seen how well this tactic works in recent Coalition governments in Canberra.

Sunak strategically re-appoints, as Home Secretary, the anti-immigration, anti-protest right winger, Suella Braverman, who lampoons dissent on energy and environment policy as the work of “tofu-eating wokerati” an MP who sees opponents as “the anti-growth coalition.”

Is Barnaby Joyce moonlighting? Or is the anti-progressive invective multinational?

But it’s a risky gambit. In forgiving Braverman for her breach of security only six days after she resigns over sharing a confidential document, the new PM inflames Tory divisions over political direction and probity that could cause him to lose authority. No big deal.

Former Tory party chair Sir Jake Berry accuses Braverman of “multiple breaches” of the ministerial code; calls her Leaky Sue”. He tells TalkTV that, far from coming forward and admitting her mistake, she has only fessed up when confronted with the evidence.

Minutes later, another Tory MP, Mark Pritchard, helpfully suggests that MI5 lacks confidence in Ms Braverman and that Sunak needs to do something about the situation.

Also helpful are Harry Cole and James Heale whose ebook on the rise and fall of Liz Truss, Out of the Blue, to be published 1 November, (desperately brought forward one month), claims Braverman also leaked market-sensitive information when home secretary. These trifling matters aside, the MP is irrepressible; always keen to stir up racism, xenophobia and gratuitous cruelty.

Braverman will be cheered, she says, when the first plane load of asylum seekers is sent off to Rwanda. “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”

But rehabilitating Braverman who breached the ministerial code by sending a cabinet document by personal email, dog whistles the Tories’ right wing. And may win Sunak some Johnson supporters. What could possibly go wrong?

Sunak’s clearly no slouch. He’s also fixed up the misunderstanding which forced his wife to not pay tax on her £400 million share in Infosys, because of her non-domicile status saving her £20 million in taxes on her annual dividends of around £6 million.

At first, Sunak argued his wife was entitled to the tax break but now declares that she will pay all taxes. That’ll fix it.

To briefly recap the plot, with a warning that this account features names of people who are politically deceased, Liz follows Boris’ Level Up, an utterly gutted slogan so hollow it’s a virtual black hole, with Zombie Apocalypse Now, a free market-libertarian burlesque where Truss pledges to shower Londongrad, HQ of the UK’s fabulously wealthy oligarchy, in buckets of borrowed money.

The City promptly swoons; the pound falls to a new low almost on parity with the US dollar, interest rates rise and pension fund managers struggle to keep away from upper-storey windows. Truss’ Bold New Plan involves unfunded tax cuts for the rich. And £100 billion in home fuel subsidies. All on tick. But it’s less the plan itself than how it snubs the very idea of budgeting, a process which has morphed into a form of performance art about credibility. Balancing the books is prudent government – if you believe the Tories and their tabloids.

The City is thunderstruck. BT’s pension fund, one of Britain’s biggest, is filthy. BT loses £12bn in the mayhem after 23 May when Truss and Kartweng spin their mini-budget thingie.

Pension funds are made up of a range of investments and encourage gambling with other peoples’ money and betting on interest rates and bond yields.

Unfortunately, along with energy oligopolies’ price gouging and mortgage rate hikes, pension funds can fuel inflation.

Increasingly, funds invest in basics which increase your shopping bill and what you pay for petrol. More than €30bn is tied up in European pension funds, which are used to bet on the price of raw materials like food and fuel.

Nick Dearden, Director of campaign group Global Justice Now, explains that pension funds are “gambling on food prices, in the process driving up those prices and fuelling the cost of living crisis for all of us.”

The UK is the second largest source of foreign investment in Australia. DFAT says its stock of investment was valued at $574.8 billion in 2018. But we’ve nothing to fear.

Otherwise, our media would be on it like a blowfly in a pickle bottle. If they’re not all worn out telling us our fundamentals are sound.

We’re all safe as houses because of the great shape that the Morrison government left the economy in, as Spud Dutton and his team of small potatoes keep telling us.

Putting a trillion dollars of poorly structured debt to one side and overlooking his government’s energy, pandemic and environment catastrophes, ScoMo’s greatest legacy is the damage he did to the Coalition with his decision to whip up transgender prejudice, euphemistically termed culture wars instead of protecting Liberal heartland.

Liz Truss is similar. Like Morrison, she, too, inherits a party of disunity and disorder.

But take a bow, ex-Prime Minister Truss. Typhoid Mary of Torydom, is a huge role, in itself. Egomaniac, liar, grub and complete imposter Boris did a lot to wreck the Tories, single-handedly, although any party that would elect Boris as its PM has to be beyond all surgery. Yet now, the former Minister for Trade, who became a born again Brexiteer to get the gig, sends world financial markets into a death spiral. The Tory-fawning UK press is most unkind. Reviews are quite hostile. Bring Back Boris is the worst.

You can’t blame the actor. The superbly named Sir Tom Scholar, Treasury Secretary, is sacked. Experts ignored. Being “Trussed”, or showing contempt for reason, is part of a wider cult combining racism, tribal stupidity and borrowing heavily on the fashion for showing contempt for all forms of expertise, now taking the world by storm. All with Rupert Murdoch’s help. Let’s not forget, it was largely his company’s paper The Sun wot got Brexit done.

Truss blusters about how she’s going to take a stand against all that nanny state nonsense apart from the afterthought of a household energy cap which would rescue struggling energy corporations anyway. Pensioners can suffer penury for their work-shy lifestyles and their wilful lack of thrift. Corporate welfare is cool. And cutting tax for the rich is a must if you are going to encourage entrepreneurs, attract startups and lure Russian oligarchs.

Eyebrows arch in the City of London. Or Londongrad. Wags note that the financial capital’s prime locations are now owned by Russian Oligarchs. The purchase of a pad in Hampstead, Knightsbridge or Belgravia was an easy way for Putin’s kleptocracy to launder fortunes amassed from stripping former Soviet state assets.

Alas, it’s not so easy these days in an era of sanctions against Russia over its war on Ukraine. Blinds are down and drapes are drawn in entire Kensington streets, today. Asses are frozen. And who knows what else. Banks did fabulously well, of course, as did the City, as the financial district is known.

London was a mecca for Russian oligarchs seeking foreign capital-raising. Shonky operators flocked not only for the money but for a listing which would fake international financial respectability. Over twenty firms, with a total market value of more than 400 billion pounds ($536 billion), are listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

Financial skulduggery isn’t just something that happens in the UK; there has been a concerted and decades-long effort to encourage it to do so’ writes former Russia correspondent, Oliver Bullough, who has led “kleptocracy tours” of London notes Dean Acheson’s observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough hints that it did find a role in keeping with its decadence, as a mum’s-the-word- butler – full body massage or crypto-therapy, sir? -to Russian Mafioso and other Muscovy movers and shakers, opening doors to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and the best private schools money can buy,

Naturally, included in the deal were mining and Murdoch corporation-class tax evasion accountants, attorneys for legal spats, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K.

After permanent residency, sir?

Ten million pounds.

While the laundering of money, the growth of shadow lending and the growth in the power of dark money are international trends, Londongrad’s The Financial Times’ editorial board gets huffy, telling the new PM that she should stop playing free market libertarian and knuckle down current economic orthodoxy; play by the rules.

But did Liz fall or was she putsched? Her successor, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” Rishi Sunak, is a power-hungry oligarch, a puppet of The City of London. Big Finance took over Westminster in the 1980s. Sunak’s a former Goldman Sachs chap, the firm that lit the touchpaper on the recession of 2008, that we choose to call the GFC.

What iscertain is that Britain is once again in the grip of a zombie policy apocalypse – austerity is being touted as the only way out of a mess all of the Tories’ own making, when it can only lead to further suffering. Here’s Nobel Laureate, economist Paul Krugman writing seven years ago,

“… all of the economic research that allegedly supported the austerity push has been discredited. Widely touted statistical results were, it turned out, based on highly dubious assumptions and procedures – plus a few outright mistakes – and evaporated under closer scrutiny.

It is rare, in the history of economic thought, for debates to get resolved this decisively. The austerian ideology that dominated elite discourse five years ago has collapsed, to the point where hardly anyone still believes it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the coalition that still rules Britain – and most of the British media.”

For Britain, substitute Australia. Could we be having our own zombie policy apocalypse, too? In Part 2, the sleaze, decadence and corruption of the modern Tory Party beckons.

Link to Part 2

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