I tweeted these two paragraphs last night:
I watched the Irish film, Arracht tonight. It is bleak, telling how English Tory landlords imposed starvation on Ireland in the 1840s. There was no famine. The hunger from the potato blight was avoidable. But the Westminster government imposed unimaginable hardship.
Now a Tory government is imposing hardship by choice, again. This time it's doing it here. There's no empire now, so they're doing it at home. I am sure far fewer will die, but the misery will be as real and scar millions of lives. What motivates them to do this, voluntarily?
Am I angry?
I am.
And I will not be alone.
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Excellent and straightforward points. Should be required reading for every economics, social and political studies student and every aspiring politician. We live in a critical time facing combined ecological, economic, social and political melt downs. To prevent mass global poverty, resource depletion, irreversible global warming and major social unrest we must harness the anger and get to grips with alternative thinking that you advocate.
I fear that it is not just the Tories who are imposing this hardship on people but Labour as well through their inability to act as an effective opposition. Sadly they merely seem intent on supporting this cruel and inhuman treatment of people.
Like you Richard I am old enough to remember The Militant Tendency.
I like to joke that in their desire to violently overthrow the established order they stopped targeting Labour and joined The Conservatives instead. (Actually not that far from what several hard lefties have done)
But I suggest that paradoxically the biggest threat we face to the stability and security of the United Kingdom is The Conservative Party.
The way things are going I can see our cities start to burn.
I watch a talk by Takis Varoufakis. He said ‘we on the left used to think socialism would destroy capitalism. We never thought we would see capitalism destroying itself. But that is what is happening.’
Something in that, perhaps.
I never know why the left did not realise it could destroy itself, when the potential was always obvious
Its always been obvious to me that sooner or later capitalism was going to destroy itself. No system can maximise the profit element at the expense of the source of the profit. I think that we are now reaching that point and we will soon see either a realisation by the right wing that capitalism is not sustainable or that they have to accept the inevitable alternative which is an uprising by the exploited elements that they rely on for their profits.
I once read Robert Kee’s ‘The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism’ (2000).
In that book – praised for it’s objectivity – Kee draws attention to Ireland’s own handmaidens of British oppression – the Irish landlords and plantation owners who went along with the purveyors of the ‘Butchers Apron’ to wreak hardship on their fellow Irishmen.
Likewise, the Tories can heap hardship on this country because there are far too many Englishmen and women acting as enablers and handmaidens to make these things possible.
The enemy within – the Tory voter – is the problem; or should we call these persons what Hannah Arendt identified in her idea of the banality evil: these ‘Eichmann types’ – ordinary, everyday people who are just incapable of thinking for themselves and carry out ‘orders’.
There seems to be plenty of ‘Eichmann types’ in the Treasury, Home Office and DWP at the moment as well as those who can think for themselves but only in a Thatcherite sense of making sure they do well materially out of it all (as many top Nazis did).
I know I keep banging on about Arendt but she was a female of the species who had something important to say about what we were supposed have learnt (and forgot) about fascism; her work lives on in Timothy Snyder.
And yes – we are living now with fascism. It is here. It is at work. Just look up.
Good book
Your conclusion is right
Behind all this is the revenant of eugenics, a particular branch of which worms around in the hearts of most current Tories. Johnson, Raab, Mogg etc, with their chums like Toby Young, see poverty as due to the lesser intelligence of the lower classes, women and non whites. Johnson facilitated a seminar on eugenics while in the FO. In this view, hardship is the thicko’s lot.
Very good point.
Poverty = your fault, whilst ignoring the fact that very very capable people can be poor through no fault of their own. You could argue that the entire tory approach (to poverty) is economically sub-optimal since intelligence/capability is distributed evenly through any population – & not a function of wealth, but in the interests of maintaining the status quo the tories favour the rich – with modest help from the poor – Knyaston in his serires of books on Post WW2 UK described how some families did not want their sons or daughters to go to grammer schools – because this would distance them (socially etc etc) from the family. The tory approach to education (since the rise of pubic schools in mid-19th cent = elitism) has led to the economic decline of the UK/growing poverty.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of the election in Hungary. Victor Orban, having been at the centralising, corrupting game longer that the Cameron / May / Johnson administration looks set to return again. So the direction works in Hungary, so why not in the UK?
Recent research has shown that stingrays and zebra fish can both add and subtract. They might be a better electorate than the estimated 35 per cent that are likely to vote Tory.
Who is going to do something about this collectively? Does it need a new organisation? Why doesn’t Christian Aid speak up? And Save the Children?
They are neutered by charity law
Do you agree that there is a similarity between Johnson and Putin. Putin promised riches to his chosen few, to the detriment of most others. Their requirement was basically to do as they were told. Johnson has also chosen his ‘yes’ men and women who, on a daily basis, repeat his lies. Many, if not all, have benefitted financially, particularly during the pandemic.
They are both on the far right
As yet there are differences
I fear the gap being closed
You are closer to Putin than Johnson… you are an authoritarian who is intolerant to anyone holding an opinion which is different to yours.. you claim anyone who voted brexit to be racist and anyone voting Tory to be fascist. You would no platform nearly half of the population if you had your way…
Usually I ignore drivel like this
But when I ban people it’s not to silence them – I respect their right to an opinion. But equally I have a life, and do notneed to deal with nonsense (like this) here when it’s sole aim is to be destructive.
Doing so is not oppression. I know, and respect your right to your own bloG. You do not need to be on mine then. And freedom is the right to say know, which I exercise
Freedom is also the right to be represented , which I uphold
But do I despair of the fascist, racist mindset that drive Brexit and the Tories? Yes, because I respect people and am baffled by those who can only hate
Tell me, why do you hate people?
“Tell me, why do you hate people
Why do you think I hate people? How could you possibly draw that conclusion? I don’t think I hate anyone (aside from Putin)..
You on the other hand hate any Tory or Brexitier.. perming the two that’s probably not far off half the adult population!!
As I have explained, I am nothinf like the person you suggest
And I am as far politically from Putin as I can be – being very firmly a democrat respecting the right of all to be represented
So why your fantasy?
And why your hatred?
Answer the question, as your comment is dripping with loathing based on your fantasy, but nothing to do with reality
And tell me too, why are you defending the racists who hate ordinary people who gave us Brexit and this crisis?
So why your fantasy?And why your hatred?
As I say I do t think I hate anyone aside from Putin. Fantasy? Well I said you seem to hate Tories and brexiters.. it is true isn’t it? So hardly a fantasy!!
No answers
Just distortion
And now you see why I delete people like you
Just time wasting truth distortion is all you have to offer
It seems to me that the link that joins the dots of powerful far-right governments – USA, UK, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, India and no doubt others – is Steve Bannon. Wherever he has been active the seeds of fascism are sown.
This is engineered poverty, deliberately created. Pair it with Rees Mogg’s stated wish to reduce our living standards to those of India or China so the UK can compete with them for manufacturing ie, his companies can compete and profit while we work for a pittance in Dickensian conditions, and consider too the emerging so-called freeports as centres for manufacturing where little or no regulations regarding wage levels, health and safety, hours (bye bye the weekend) , home ownership or renting (hello the workhouse) will apply (they’ll be separate jurisdictions from the UK) and it would appear from Mogg’s demented POV it’s all going to plan. I understand Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law does rather well from these or similar places back home in India so perhaps he, Sunak, seeks to emulate the old man. No wonder he said when questioned about his budget that he was “comfortable with the choices” he’d made.
It’s a known fact that poverty has long term effects on childrens health, and of course their prospects in adulthood. The UK/EngGov are starving children, which is criminal. They should be in court facing charges for deliberately keeping people including children, poor and in poverty. It’s what the Tories do but it’s just become much worse now. I saw a short film about how people are not managing in England, even before the utility price hike, old folks, and parents with young children and they all seemed utterly disenfranchised. A perfect outcome for the Tories, because people who are so despondent and who feel powerless, do not turn out to vote in general. One old lady said ‘we can’t do anything about it’. Until people start doing something ‘about it’ it will just carry on and get worse.
Still, a ready army, when so many young people are without work or further education, and plenty of people to pick fruit and courgettes before they rot in the fields again, and what a huge bonus to the Tories, the young people are stuck in the UK now, (except the rich ones) having lost their right to FOM, brilliant.
Covid, England’s BREXIT, and the war against Ukraine, are all gifts to the Tories, it’s going better than even they’d have thought I’m sure. The NHS in England will not last much longer, and Scotland’s NHS will be sold off as part of the UK/EngGovs’ ‘internal market act’.
The UK, consistent of four nations, is in a mess, and it’s deliberate. Labour with Starmer as their leader is utterly useless, is England now a one party state?
Here is a recent article about the effects of deprivation on families and particularly children.
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-economic-pressure-stress-poverty-impacts.html
“What motivates them to do this, voluntarily?”.
No empathy. They are incapable of seeing themselves in others shoes. & this situation – has not changed in centuries.
I am reading Caroline Elkins : Legacy of Violence. The first two pages are “interesting” showing Churchill in his true light: a muderous racist (1897 in North West India – exterminating Pathans), which in many respects – reflects the outlook of Tories (= muderous racists) . In most respects, what Churchill & Co did in 1897 in “North West India” is what Putin is doing now in Ukraine (I have a Ukrainain family staying with me btw). Read the book, Elkins makes her points by the simple expedient of quoting from Churchill’s diary and letters to mummy. Condemned with his onw hand.
Some tweets have suggests that Putin planned a genocide in Ukraine. This begs the question what we call 125k dead people in the Uk due to “austerity” 2011 – 2015. Or the incompetance which killed so many in the UK under Covid. Circa 200k dead due to the Tories? – & lets pass over those that die cos the NHS cannot cope.
Maybe Putin should cuddle up to Mendacious Fat & his mates – he could learn a thing or two about exterminating people you don’t like – and all the time smiling whiilst washing your hands and pretending everything is peachy – & people still ovte for you!.
Just a quick note to ‘Craig’.
The cost of living crises is not an ‘opinion’.
BREXIT’s negative consequences are not ‘opinions’.
Partying when others are prevented from seeing loved ones/the dying by adhering to the rules is not an ‘opinion’.
Taking Russian money to fund your party/premiership is not an ‘opinion’.
These are all facts which make Johnson intolerable.
Pretending that Covid was not that serious was an opinion – one of Boris’ opinions in early 2020. And look where it got us? His opinion was wrong.
Now for goodness sake, wise up Craig.
I wonder what Craig hates about my defence of the private sector?
I wonder too why he hates my concern for people who face hunger and cold
And why he hates my desire that everyone should have the chance to vote for who they want, with a chance they might be elected?
Why even hate my dislike of tax cheats, unless you are one?
What is it he hates?
Craig hates acknowledging weakness and the needs of others.
It makes him feel uncomfortable because he’s either endured hardship himself and is too proud to admit it or he’s doing alright thank you and dealing with reality is just one big inconvenience and ruins his perfect Tory life.
It is a fair question: “What motivates the Tories to impose hardship, by choice ?”
To agree with previous contributors, the Tories do set out to make life worse for the common people, whether of Ireland , England or benighted colonials. And austerity kills – cf.. 1.2. below. And it’s not that they are don’t know this – cf. 3.below
I do not think it is as simple as believing the words of the idiot present Governor of the BoE would suggest, that they genuinely think that supply-side inflation can be cured by raising interest rates.
It is tempting to think that it is a belief in eugenics, for instance: but a moments thought reminds us that Bloody Johnson – or Mendacious Fatty as Mike Parr so charmingly englobed him – has never believed in anything except his own self-interest: and the same is clearly true for many of the rest of them – one knew of Grease-Smug but I was not aware of his explicit wish to reduce UK workers to the level of serfs or peons or coolies – thank you, Bill Kruse..
Certainly Mike Parr is correct about failures of empathy – Chruchill the murderous racist reminds one of some of Kipling’s characters of Empire. Most of the Tory cabinet would be horrified at the KGB-run camps in Donetsk, described by Asieiev – 4 below. However rendition to the CIA’s torture chambers seemed perfectly acceptable to Blair’s Labour government., and it is hard to see that a Tory government would have behaved differently.
Briefly, I think it is a choice: to decide to ignore what it might harm one’s wealth or happiness or society or &c. to acknowledge, to admit that one’s view of the world – as well-ordered because it leaves me comfortably placed -might be wrong. And so, to make that judgement that some are more deserving than others – Ukrainian refugees than Sudanese ones, say, though even they are apparently not very deserving.
But this choice is only more or less conscious. With respect, I think Pilgrim SR overstates the case of the evil of the enablers: that there are some, I make no doubt, particularly in the Home Office (when younger I knew a two men who wanted to join specifically to keep the blacks out, and interior ministries everywhere seem to have that attraction). But most are probably trying to be impartial civil servants, through more or less clenched teeth, with or without wringing of the hands.
For the Johnson mob, however, I do not think there is any excuse. Like Cameron and Osborne, they prefer to wallpaper over any slight difficulties. – a point well made by Felicity Lawrence in 5 below. It is as if they, like corporations, obey a law:
“The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people’s money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only as means to serve the corporations own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when its genuine.”
— Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power [6]
References:
1. “Austerity blamed for life expectancy falling for first time in century”, S. Bosely, The Guardian 25feb20
2. “Austerity in England linked to more than 50,000 extra deaths in five years”, A.Gregory, The ~Guardian 14oct21
3. “Austerity loses an article of faith”. M Wolff, F.T. 23apr13
4. Stanislav Asseyev: « Un journaliste en camp raconte », transl. I Dmytrychyn, Atlande
5. “It was Tory governments that created the low wage economy – not immigration », The Guardian 14oct21
Ardj
You credit me with too much originality.
The picture of the unremarkable, ordinary person just not thinking in their bureaucratic role in the delivery of evil is one put forward by Hannah Arendt – a Jew who was interned herself briefly at one time by a Nazi friendly regime and whose work lives on in the historian Tim Snyder.
Arendt came to this conclusion when she went to Israel to watch the Adolf Eichmann trial. Expecting to be confronted by the epitome of human evil (high ranking SS), she instead found Eichmann to be totally ordinary – unprepossessing in every way – bleating about following orders and speaking in bureaucratic, abstract terms about the human beings (mostly but not exclusively Jews) he was sending to their deaths.
Eichmann seemed to accept that he had been born into a world created to hate Jews and which was basically a militarised society that demanded absolute obedience and brutalisation and he went to the gallows never really seeming to have questioned his own acceptance of this state of affairs. In other words – he did not think. That was as big a crime perhaps as actually organising the extermination camp transports he was in charge of. Discuss.
Arendt’s observation caused huge uproar when she reported back about what she saw. It did not help that she criticised Jewish leaders from going along with Nazi efforts to move Jews around Europe, but she was also accused of excusing Eichmann when her objective was really to get us to understand him and his mindset that helped the extremists above him to fulfil their inhuman dreams.
The thing that Eichmann taught us Ardj was not that you needed many Eichmanns (and there were enough throughout the -Todt (death) system); just that you needed the right amount in the right place at the right time to enable hell on earth.
So – beware the Eichmann in your neighbourhood. We’ve all got ’em BTW. Overstating the case? Not a bit.
And it’s the same in the DWP, Treasury and Home Office. I’ve been to too many presentations by the DWP about Universal Credit – even when Therese Coffey has turned up to tell us how generous it is to have council and housing associations landlords tell her to a face (if she was still around) that UC is one of the meanest most regressive regimes ever foisted upon the poor in modern times.
Impartial civil servants? What an earth are you talking about?
No-one I know in the service is impartial. There are two camps in today’s civil service – those dedicated to the ethos of public provision surviving from post WWII and those who think that they are just here to administer services and sit in judgement of the underserving poor.
This latter group has grown as budgets have been tightened and it has got harder to help – they’ve just given up. And the other eroding factor is the propensity to copy the private sector in its recruitment practices and remuneration for senior officers where we are now seeing private sector wage differentials in public organisations, and too many senior officers thinking more about their needs than the needs of the service.
The rest of you observations on Johnson I can agree with but don’t forget the bullying that has gone on over the years for this Government to get civil servants in post more aligned with their ideas shall we say.
Thanks PSR
Much to agree with
I have just been reading about a woman in The Wirral who is thinking of going to Dignitas in Switzerland because she has had her hip operation cancelled for a third time and she is in so much pain she doesn’t want to live any more.
I know I always bring things down to the personal, but this is what this government has brought people to.
And when I come on here and find people attacking Richard for caring about people, it upsets me even more. I can’t think of a single tory MP that I don’t hate at the moment, and I hate the government even more than the others.
I don’t hate them
I hate what they think and do
But the line is fine, I admit, on occasion
Exactly. And I hate what they make me feel.
Reply to Pilgrim SR 5apr22
As Professor Murphy says, much to agree with (as ever). And I appreciated your use of the analysis of Arendt as a tool for understanding the UK and particularly its government and civil service today, but thought to summarize it by crediting you with its use.
But both on Eichmann and on the UK today, I wonder if you are framing matters in too absolute a framework.
I do not dispute your experiences with the civil service: though the only instance you cite involved the wretch Coffey rather than civil servants. An expatriate for some years, I have only a few contact experiences, most of which were answered as best they could by well-meaning but over-worked agents. I have had worse responses from lordly Chief Executives.
So I wonder about your absolutist schema. I see parallels in France, with the government and upper managerial class generally (no, not universally, that would be silly) making a conscious decision to ignore all arguments of logic and compassion for their own comfort and pride, but a more human, as best one can, practice among more ordinary mortals.
It is true that one can receive a discourteous brush-off among the French, but then jacks-in-office are not the property of one country. I see in post offices – in labour exchanges, hospitals, tax offices, benefit offices – people trying to do their best with limited time and means. And I am not going to start on schools and universities.
Your picture of two camps is striking, and I accept that it gets harder to help as means, time and even the opportunity to help are taken away. But I wonder if even those obliged to grind the faces of the poor are doing so willingly.
P.S. Sorry for the delay.