The ineptitude of our government never ceases to amaze me. The last day or so has provided two further examples.
First, there is the fiasco on housing asylum seekers. The solution to this problem is glaringly obvious. The government needs to recruit, train and retain enough people to handle claims for asylum in a decent time interval. The aim should be for 90% to be dealt with within six months. Instead, less than 10% are. If this goal was achieved we would:
- Create employment.
- Deal with a social problem.
- Do justice by asylum seekers.
- Get many of those asylum seekers to work in our economy where they could contribute to society.
- Save cost.
- Reduce social tension.
It's really not hard to work this out. But instead, we get proposals to put 10% (at most) of asylum seekers on ships, where the fire risk is horrendous and the cost very high, or in army camps, where sewage systems will not be up to the job as they were never designed for this density of population.
Why can't the obvious, and cost-effective, thing be done? Because it does not suit the Tory agenda to do it. Concentration camps detention centres suit that agenda instead.
Then there is climate change. We are ten years behind on targets according to the government's own Climate Change Committee, which says all discussion of further carbon-based energy is wrong (which is glaringly obviously true). So, what do we get? A softening of targets and reliance on the wholly unproven technology in carbon capture and storage which most think will never work, but which lets the big emitters carry on polluting now as if we have no reason for concern, when our whole future is on the line.
Why can't we get this right? Because big money lobbying and funding from big oil for the likes of the Institute of Economic Affairs (whose funding is not disclosed, so I am allowed to speculate on where it comes from) prevents that happening, and the IEA get peerage nominations for suggesting we should not worry. That's why we cannot get this right.
There is no doubt that we need to act on asylum seekers: the issue is not going away.
There is also no doubt that we must act on climate change: that issue is here, for good.
But for the Tories, prevarication and fantasy technology are the preferred options.
When will we get serious politicians?
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I agree with the central thrust of this post, but all I heard on R4 this morning was the fascist use of fear – firstly with immigration and then latterly something seems to be kicking off about gender nomination in schools where I heard the accusations that (for example) boys are going to school to be treated as girls by the school on the boys say-so and without the knowledge of parents.
So, Isaac Levido is already hard at work throwing dead cats on tables and creating wedge issues just like his mentor Lynton Crosby.
Fantasy? Prevarication? Or just the deliberate diversion away from the real issues?
Here’s a real issue:
I heard an interview about NHS dentistry this morning too, with BUPA now in the process of pulling out and closing practices because of continual cuts to NHS dentistry funding since 2010 by the Tories and and 8%+ rise in dental treatments. The rep of the British Dental Association said quite simply that in a cost of living crisis the Tories were wanting to pay less for services and levy cost increases on citizens already under pressure concerning income.
So, austerity rules – as per usual but whole load of other ‘fake’ issues will be created between now and the next election to hide this.
Agreed
I heard one of the tories’ own MP’s who happens to be the MP for the constituency where one of these detention camps is supposed to be say, quite plainly, that she thought the proposal was nothing but a publicity stunt to gain electoral support, and had no practical basis behind it, and would not work.
In other words, an MP from the same party as the government is saying exactly what Richard and others have been saying about the government’s asylum ‘policy’!
These are serious politicians Richard, if by serious you mean spouting propaganda to stay/gain power, in exactly the same way that Goebbels recommended the NSDAP do. That didn’t work out very swell in the end, did it?
Prevarication and fantasy are the means – but the policy and strategy is deliberate – distort and falsify the science , co-opt the CCS researchers in a bonanza for their fossil fuel paymasters. George Montibiot says it all:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/29/uk-green-day-fossil-fuel-dirty-money-sunak-renewables
So depressing and scary they now are confident in distorting and bludgeoning any knowlege , any science and silencing enough scientists like Spieigelhalter’s silcence about stopping measuring the covid pandemic – when 1.5 million aare still infected and hundreds a week dying.
I think we need to see this for what it is, neoliberalism conjoining with an brand of authoritarianism that has powerful echoes of the past aka nascent fascism. At the present it is in its infancy, but the ease with which voices are shut down is staggering. Not so long ago one could argue the pluralist case for our media, that different voices and independent investigations were carried out as checks in society; now we have prepublication attacks and threats to the Yorkshire Post over the continuing sealife disasters on the Teeside adjacent coasts (Britain’s new freeport), a BBC that is now a propaganda mouthpiece, and press conduct that is far from pluralistic.
As a sad case study, so many did obits on Paul O’Grady without mentioning his ferocious Liverpudlian leftism, and some even left out his LBGT activism. Each selective edit or omission diminishes us, but also is a triumph for the Crosbys and Levidos of the political sphere.
Catterick Army camp would.be almost like a concentration camp. However Sunak wouldn’t like it in his backyard.
I believe the UK invented concentration camps.
It did, during the Boer War
It seems appropriate that Dickens’s “Great Expectations” is being serialised on TV currently. Magwitch, a convict has been imprisoned in one of the hulks. He escapes, but is recaptured, and is transported to Botany Bay, never supposedly to return to Britain. We like to assumme those brutal policies belong to a distant past time. But Raab yesterday was anticipating with relish the intention to condemn asylum seekers to imprisonment in “barges”, while Braverman exulted in transporting them to Rwanda I suppose they have great expectations of success in stopping the illegals, much as our ancestors believed they were punishing crime. Remind me – were the Tolpuddle Martyrs not sentenced to transportation?Neiher hulks nor transportation reduced the crime rate in Regency, Peterloo nnd Tolpuddle Britain, and neiher will barges and concentration camps nor transportation across the globe to faraway lands prevent Braverman’s “invasion” of this island by desperate frightned men and women fleeing terror and chaos in their homelands.
We can confidently expect that the run up to the next election will be dirtier than ever. Even more divisive and dishonest than Brexit. Behind the smooth facades of Sunak and Hunt, are two of the most right wing Tories albeit with some of the rougher edges smoothed off. It is naked politics where the impact on the economy, society or environment are irrelevant – stirring up the base is all that matters. And rewarding their mates.
My only hope is that they are ever more preaching to the choir and that there are enough Tory voters who are alienated enough to be pushed into the arms of LibDems, Labour or Greens. More important than ever that they work together, however covertly. Meanwhile the SNP are doing a good job of helping Labour North of the border at the moment.
It seems to have been generally missed that at the Liaison Select Committee, The PM was asked by Angus McNeill MP, in the 78 years since 1945 how many years, Has Britain not been in deficit (the answer was eleven)? Sunak said this, “It is very rare for countries to run overall deficits”. This is an astonishingly silly remark.
In fact Sunak clearly knows nothing about the real history of Britain, as a country that created its wealth through the expansion of its debt. Over the last three hundred years of Britain in its modern form, with a ‘national debt’ as we now understand it, not only has Britain conventionally run a deficit, but much of its consequent, increasing debt was in ‘perpetuals’ (with no guaranteed maturity), and the debt/GDP ratio generally ran above 100%. Indeed for most of Britain’s long period of greatest economic and financial power, it was powered by running big debts and deficits to achieve its imperial and industrial success. From the 18th-20th centuries, the debt/GDP ratio often ran for extended periods much nearer 200% than 100%. The peak was reached only in 1945, at the close of WWII at 250%. Had the war extended another year, no doubt it would have been higher. Sunak’s smooth superficiality disguises a profound ignorance of the nature of British financial methodology, and the the reality of State financial realpolitik, or even the State he now runs. It is child-like.
The desire to eliminate the national debt (the closet wish of neoliberal Conservatives like Sunak) is also not new; and has often in our history presaged the worst financial judgements ever made in British state finance, at disastrous cost to the nation.
I wonder where Angus got that data from?
He doesn’t say. It is not clear precisely how McNeill is measuring ‘deficit’ (), or for that matter precisely that to which Sunak refers, when he uses the term ‘overall deficit’ (given the number of deficits to which the word is generally attached; fiscal, budget, current account, cyclical, structural and so on, and on); perhaps it was just a shorthand, cryptic prevarication for someone who doesn’t know the answer, but wishes to sound confident he does, yet still not leave a hostage to fortune.
I have not analysed the data in detail, but by simple inspection of UK Budget deficits since 1945, I would have estimated that Britain has been in deficit roughly around 45-50 years out of the last 78 years. Ironically the Budget surplus years; and certainly the sustained periods of surplus appear to be under Attlee, the Conservatives to MacMillan, and the Wilson/Labour Governments, up to 1975. From 1975-2023 it has generally been deficits; often large ones. The longer term history of Britain is generally of large debt/GDP ratios, suggesting sustained periods of deficits.
Sunak clearly doesn’t know; but appears to possess a primitive faith the ideology that drives his politics and economics just can’t be wrong. Oh, yes it can.
He used this https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/
I should have ‘twigged’; after all, I commented twice in that thread! My defence is that I did quibble a little ‘at the margins’ with the analysis, but I agreed then, and now, with the general thrust of your basic proposition; broadly Conservatives borrow as much, or more and typically for longer; but not only is their (entirely self-promoted, not proven) reputation for borrowing less demonstrable false; their use of the resources they borrow is almost invariably incompetent; as a matter of history.
It seems that the problem is glaringly obvious. Politicians! Any professional specialist in a given field – economics, environmental protection, green energy, healthcare, immigration etc. would never propose the policies of the current government or, for that matter, the current opposition. They are a bunch of, at best, rank amateurs, or, at worst, criminals. I fear to imagine what the solution is.