What you get, is just what you see. Yeah”
On Wednesday, 26th of May, in a glorified broom-closet nestled deep within the hallowed corridors of Mrs Windsor’s School of Griftcraft and Drivelry, a most unusual event took place that could (should, and in the past most certainly would) have catastrophic consequences for the Boozy Bunter of Downing Street. Before the disbelieving eyes and placid, sheeplike faces of the members of the joint Parliamentary select committees on Health and Science, Dominic Cummings, who though physically resembling an unhappily divorced Geography teacher with chronic IBS who has been sleeping in his car for the last six months was, in fact, one of the most influential figures behind the transfiguration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from a shop-soiled but still pretty recognisable western democracy into a widely ostracised shipping-hazard wracked with self-loathing, cultural resentment and tabloid-driven pebble-headedness, sat before them and, over the course of seven hours of questioning proceeded to explain that, quite contrary to the fairytale of plucky derring-do in the face of unexpected tragedy being fed to the Great British Public over the last year and a half by the Great British News Media, the all-conquering Conservative Government he himself had personally worked so very hard to propel into power when he was Clown Prince Flobalob’s Chief Political Advisor was, in fact, a law-breaking gaggle of grossly incompetent buffoons and slithery self-promoters who, when not flat out lying to the Press and the Public about the nature and scale of their colossal failures, were just as busy flat out lying to each other about their entirely fictional successes, all while being overseen with careless ineptitude and solipsistic greed by a delusional, egomaniacal and utterly out of his depth skidmark of a man to whom politics is nothing more serious than a wag’s lark and whose only interest in ‘policy’ is to ask if she’s as much of a goer as Polly A and Polly B.
My, that was a long sentence. Here’s a short one.
As to what Cummings actually said, well, it went on for quite a long time and included tons of “Oh, if only I’d had the courage to speak up more about my fully-justified concerns” and barrel-loads of “I take full responsibility for my part in other people’s horrendous mistakes”, but the main meat and gravy of it breaks down like this.
When Covid was first beep-beeping on the radar as an imminent threat, Johnson’s Government followed his lead in being utterly dismissive and supremely unconcerned, with Flobalob himself dragging his three-second attention span away from the comprehensive disaster his shitty Brexit deal was about to inflict on the British economy to sneeringly put it on a par with swine-flu. It’s already common knowledge that the lazy waster didn’t even attend the first five emergency COBRA meetings of the Civil Contingency Committee where Covid was discussed, so nicknamed because it used to meet in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms in Whitehall, and not, as you might imagine, because it stands for “Chieftains of Britain, Rally Around”, “Crumbs! Our Bacon’s Really…Aaaarrrrggghhh” or “Cowardly Old Boris Runs Away”, or because all the meetings are chaired by a gigantic snake (though it is, his name is Roger and other than his undying loyalty to Thulsa Doom he’s a really great guy with a lot to offer a girl) but Cummings also confirmed through photographic evidence that the main strategy being discussed behind the doors of Downing St through January to early March was specifically based around getting a form of ‘herd immunity’ done by shielding the very vulnerable and letting the virus rip through the general population so that, by early Autumn, the survivors would have enough antibodies for Johnson to declare Mission Accomplished.
Old Tummy Num-Num was only very reluctantly dragged into taking calls for a Lockdown strategy seriously when faced with a solid wall of expert opinion telling him that following his favoured strategy meant half a million people dead and a completely overwhelmed NHS, and even then he huffed and puffed and dragged his feet for weeks until eventually getting bounced into announcing a national Lockdown by the general public, who were way ahead of the Government in common sense and were already keeping their children home from school and working from home where possible. This deliberate delay in imposing sensible restrictions cost us tens of thousands of extra lives and allowed the virus to get down to some serious mutation in the infected population, which we (and the wider world) would be paying for with the Rise of the Variants.
Major venom was spat in the eye of Matt Hancock, a third-rate pastiche of a man so ethically challenged that deputy ticket-clipper at the annual Cleric and Choirboy Secret Ball would be a step up from his current role as Minister for Health. Already right in the middle of a growing scandal revolving around the purchasing and provision of PPE from a range of shady front-companies (established PPE producer? Sorry, we can’t take your call right now. Dog shampoo supplier owned by a Tory donor? Here’s a multi-million pound contract to produce face-masks) Hancock now has to explain why, according to Cummings, he was telling his Cabinet colleagues back in March 2020 that no one would be sent from hospital to a care-home without first being tested for Covid, when in reality he was ordering entire hospital wards emptied ASAP without any testing whatsoever in order to make room for the expected waves of infections. Somewhere in the region of 30,000 care-home inhabitants died because of Hancock’s decision. Elderly people, terrified and alone, choking to death while the staff, themselves denied any kind of adequate PPE or medical equipment, could do nothing to help them.
He denies all of it, of course. He is, after all, a Minister in a Tory Government, responsibility and accountability are for the little people, not for the likes of him, but he’s clearly very rattled. Ostentatiously sporting his Union Jack themed facemask and tearfully declaring how his first thought every single morning is how he can save lives [Ed – Resign?] but he doesn’t really have to worry, yet. Cummings also said that he’d pressed for Hancock to be fired over a dozen times, only to be told that he was being kept in his post because “he’s the kind of guy you sack after an inquiry”. Johnson can’t fire him now because it would look too much like he was validating Cummings’ claims, and if he – did – fire him he’d only have to install someone equally as inept and spineless. So, Britain stumbles on with a Health Secretary of proven incompetence that no one has any faith in and everybody expects to go at the next reshuffle, but at least Flobalob doesn’t have to break the unwritten rule of his regime and actually hold one of his underlings accountable for failure. That would cut the golden cord that ties his Cabinet to him, the promise that everyone gets to eat whatever they want, and no one has to foot the bill.
Priorities, you see, they got ‘em. Eton Rules.
That’s not all Hancock is on the hook for, though. Cummings’ testimony confirms that the PPE situation was far more of a crock than anyone was willing to admit. Decades of Tory cuts to its budgets and supply chains had left the NHS without anything like the necessary stocks to cope with an emergency, and when that needed to change right the fuck now, Ministers and senior Civil Service appointees were criminally slow in fast-tracking the immediate purchase of everything the country lacked. Indeed, it’s worse than that. As mentioned previously it’s an open secret that the only fast-tracking the Government did around PPE was exploiting the emergency to hand out multi-million (even multi-billion) pound contracts to anyone and everyone with a personal, familial or business connection to Tory Ministers and/or their donors while simultaneously blanking the many already established suppliers of PPE, ventilators, etc who were banging on the door offering whatever was needed but who lacked the necessary connections. Effectively the Tories were acting like Third-World warlords looting aid-money to buy themselves expensive cars and swimming pools while their people starved. NHS staff were wearing plastic bin-bags and scavenging whatever they could from friends and family and the Government’s response was to put pressure on Hospital Trusts to make talking about it on social media a sackable offense while ostentatiously being filmed doing a ‘Clap for Carers’ every Thursday at 8pm. Because that’s the kind of people we have running our country.
There’s also the matter of Johnson’s response to the need for a Second Lockdown after the premature reopening of society over the summer of 2020 had led to yet another surge in infections (viruses, how dooz dey work?) and panicked howling by all the experts that it had to be closed down by September at the latest to avoid another massive spike in Covid deaths. Britain eventually went back into a limited semi-Lockdown in October, much to Johnson’s behind the scenes fury. He’s quoted as whining that “Only 80 year-olds are dying of it”, so why hurt the economy just for those wasters? There’s also the previously floated quote about “letting the bodies pile-up” rather than impose a Third Lockdown no matter how bad it got over winter. The salient point here is that the malicious fucktard denied ever saying this, and he did it officially while speaking to Parliament. If Cummings has the evidence he says he does, lying to Parliament is a resignation offence. Not that I expect Johnson to do any such thing. He’s already done it repeatedly and gotten away with it because of the complete collapse of any institutional resistance to the Rule of “Go on then, make me”, but I look forward to the rhetorical gymnastics the News Media will go thorough explaining why the Prime Minister lying to the country is actually politics as usual and in fact a sign of strength.
You know, at some point this Government are going to float the idea of a referendum on bringing back hanging in order to blue-up the nether-veins of their reactionary Base, and though I’d normally be dead set against it, when I think about the deliberate carnage these walking advertisements for assault and battery have caused just by being shitty people in service to even shittier people a tiny wee part of me always whispers “Wouldn’t he/she look good swinging from a beam?” and I feel dirty, because the answer is “Oh, hell yes. With the families of their victims hanging from their feet.” You all should be perfectly familiar with that sensation after four years of Trump smearing his underlings all over the national furniture. Their very existence makes us worse people by virtue of the reactions they endanger. But I digress…
To be continued (same time, tomorrow, Murphy the Trickster God willing)
germy
Enhanced Voting Techniques
More proof that UK conservative politicians are better than ours; at lest the UK ones are up front and honest about their desire to swallow small animals while they are still alive.
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Oh, Roger’s deeply apolitical. He cares not what system we’re ruled by as long as all living things die wriggling in his stomach.
And he’s a Capricorn, ladies!
sdhays
@germy: That letter reads like it could have been written yesterday. I guess whining to Papa Johnson wasn’t sufficient to teach him how to be a decent human being.
piratedan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: with all due respect, if there is indeed a rodent gap “in play” here, then it stands to reason that there should be a mandate from Conservative politicians on each shore to increase the “ratfucking” as it were, it’s the only way to ensure that we maintain a proper rats/reptiles ratios for the deserving… to say nothing regarding the prosperity of the rats.
Tony Jay
@germy:
Can you imagine how easy it would be for any half-capable journalist to use a letter like that to destroy the reputation of any other politician with Johnson’s long record of immaturity and childish buffoonery?
And yet, they don’t. It’s hands off and watch the show, with no supervision and barely a tut-tut. He got held to higher standards at fucking Eton than he ever has as a Tory politician.
rikyrah
I cry when I read stuff like this.
Because, I know that’s what happened to our people over here.
We lost 600,000 people because of DELIBERATE MALICE.
I will never be able to get past that.
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That raises a sobering thought: Would America under Trump or Britain under Johnson have really been any worse under the rule of Thulsa Doom or Lex Luthor or any other comic book villain you can think of? Maybe things would have been worse if the Joker were the Emperor of America or perhaps Patrick Bateman or Pennywise, but without getting into literal demons like Mephisto, I’m hard pressed to think of a pop culture villain whose rule would have been worse to live under all these years.
jl
Thanks for your perspective and detailed info. Since I don’t think you were critical, cynical or depressing enough about the UK experience, at least before the vaccines arrived, the UK approach to the natural infection route to herd immunity set the stage for a total botch. Sweden did it better.
Cumulative confirmed deaths due to covid per million as of end of last week: Sweden 1430, US 1790, UK 1890.
Kent
I have a hard time deciding which type of conservative is worse, the UK or US variety.
The UK variety seem to blend conservative dumbshittery with upper-class twittery which at least is a bit more honest when you think about it.
The US variety affect a fake working class thing. Like Donald Trump and all the other Ivy League twits like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz who pretend to be working class. I honestly find that more revolting. Just fucking be honest about who you are. They are both upper class twits.
When I watch either variety perform, I don’t understand the appeal. I guess it’s mostly just tribal anymore. And racist of course.
jl
@rikyrah: If we’d followed best European practice of Norway and Finland, the death toll would be one tenth of what we’ve had so far. With less (yes, I said it, LESS) disruption and costs to society, less destruction of emotional and financial lives of millions of individuals.
Let alone the examples of over a dozen countries scattered over every continent.
But, the US was judged to be the best, the very best, prepared (on paper) before pandemic. As was the UK.
Tony Jay
@jl:
World-Beating! Toot Toot!!
And now we’re entering a Third (though technically Fourth) Wave of spiking infections with a partially vaccinated population and a long, hot summer of no real restrictions ahead. The absolute perfect conditions to breed a genuinely vaccine resistant virus mutation that will put us back to square one and probably lead the the navies of the world blockading Plague Island for their own protection.
But, of course, no one could possibly have predicted…
Citizen Alan
@jl: Or as I’ve said all along, had Hillary Clinton been President, the death toll would have been held to well under 100,000 and the nation would have safely reopened last September. And every god-damned Republican in America would have held up that 100,000 number–a fraction of those killed under Shitgibbon–as worse than the Holocaust and proof that HRC was both supremely evil and utterly incompetent. And the fucking media would have gone along with it.
jl
@Tony Jay: My understanding is that the surges in places like Bolton are mostly among the unvaccinated, and the have a lower vax rate than most of the UK. Is that accurate?
Hope they up their game on vaccination, or they get close enough that the current surge gets them them there soon.
Do the places in UK with low vaccination rates have anything in common that would explain it? UK missing some pockets of poor underserved, or immigrant communities. Or more prosperous IGMFY Trumpster types?
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
Me neither. They sentenced people to die rather than admit that a decade of their ideologically-driven cuts and rank laziness had left the NHS unable to cope with an event they had been warned was GOING TO HAPPEN.
And right now they’re deflecting any questions about their actions by hiding behind the vaccination program ran and staffed by the same NHS they recently offered an effective pay-cut to.
Remember when people used to say that Villagio Delenda Est was over the top with his remedy for conservative sins? Not me. He was dead on and when I’m King of the Bastards, that man is being given a department and a fucking budget.
Ken
@Tony Jay: If it’s any consolation, because of the new WHO guidelines the new deadly strain won’t be called “the British variant”. It will be called “variant Lambda, which first appeared in Britain”.
jl
@Citizen Alan: For GOP, maybe even as bad as the US Ebola catastrophe!
Kent
@jl: The US is 50 different states with 50 different governors and public health services.
If we had simply followed the lead of WA or OR or the New England states in terms of masking and distancing we likely would have saved 250,000 plus lives and the US death rate would have been comparable to say Germany or Canada. The top 10 states all had Covid responses and death rates equivalent to the reasonably decent Euro countries.
Hunter Gathers
You’d think the opposition might be able to do something with all of the malicious Tory buffoonery, but as far as I can tell, the opposition offed itself a few years ago while listening to an old record by The Smiths.
Ken
@jl: I have seen speculation (possibly on this blog) that part of the GQP dismissal of the dangers of COVID was because they’d already hyped Ebola as a political weapon, and assumed the opposition was doing the same.
jl
@Kent: Yes, that is true. New England, VT, HI, many parts of WA and CA and some Native American governments (given their outsize disadvantages) did very well.
SF was world class in keeping hospitalization and death toll down. But most of the high performing states and metros weren’t world class at all in getting prevalence of active cases down low enough to have any sustained reopening, unlike much of Europe. SF wasn’t. So, we had endless shutdowns, attempts at reopenings that blew up as soon as they started. And at least in SF Bay, they blew up before nasty holidays mixing was added to the mix.
I think VT first, and HI second, were the places in US that got close to any kind of world standard .
Old School
@Ken: Yes, that’s certainly seems like the driving force behind the idea that we’d never hear about COVID-19 again after the November 2020 election.
Brachiator
From my reaction to Tony Jay’s great comments when they were first posted:
I saw a clip where Dominic Cummings noted that Boris Johnson was an idiot for hiring someone like him to be an advisor. I would think that this would pretty much undercut anything else he had to say.
There is a combination of false modesty and pretend penitence at play here. Despite the false modesty, Cummings goes on to push his standard line that he is uniquely qualified to critique the British government and civil service, and if only people would listen to him, the ship of state would steer correctly. And his claims that he was telling all in hopes of pardon might have some teeth if either he or Boris Johnson were actually at risk of being removed from office, fined, convicted and imprisoned.
Otherwise, who found any of these “revelations” to be surprising? No one, except maybe those fools whose noses are deeply up the ass of UK right wing media.
Strange how Cummings holds himself apart from all this, when in fact he and his own henchmen closely monitored (and maybe censored) the information coming from the science advisory boards.
From what I gather, Cummings slapped Boris around, and Matt Hancock, but had little to say about Michael Gove and other Conservative Party Princes of Darkness. In a reply, Tony Jay noted that Cummings has prior connections to Michael Gove.
Overall, the best putdown of this farce came from a recent broadcast of the satirical program, Have I Got News For You, which pithily noted that it was only after he was fired and kicked to the curb that Cummings discovered any of Boris Johnson’s inadequacies.
Ultimately, a lot of this reminds me of the Trump appointees who have their “come to Jesus moment” about the Orange Beast’s failings only after they have quit or been fired. And sadly, nothing that Cummings has said seems to have had any impact on Johnson’s popularity.
Also, I get the impression that the British system of governance is so slow and bound by tradition that nothing could be done about Johnson until a public inquiry had been started, which might happen sometime after the year 2075.
ETA:
I thought that the cheekiest conclusion was the commission’s assertion that non-white people had not risen to the top because of the class system, and nothing could be done about that because, well, breeding tells
ETA ETA: Apparently, British scientific experts are warning that there may be another Covid surge, but Johnson seems to be committed to opening things up later this month despite their warnings. Here we go again.
jl
@Ken: And Trump and Jared are idiots, besides being conmen and crooks, who thought it would just blow through and the financial markets would not be hurt too bad if a lot of oldsters did their patriotic duty, and agreed to die quickly, in a few months.
John S.
@Hunter Gathers: This is the part I cannot fathom. No matter how utterly inept or disastrous the Tories are, Labor somehow continue to lose ground to them.
I gather from Tony Jay’s other dispatches that the British Media are totally in the bag for conservatives (even more so than our media), but it’s still remarkable how the Tories consistently fail upwards.
Steve in the ATL
@Citizen Alan:
Ugh comfort shoe companies are literally the devil!
cain
Too busy tut-tutting the Duchess of Sussex – which seems to be a more comfortable target for these low rent yellow thespians.
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: Alan will need comfortable shoes when he moves to NY.
rikyrah
@jl:
BUT,
they assumed that:
Dolt45 and his team wouldn’t have thrown away the PANDEMICS FOR DUMMIES Manual that 44 left.
That Dolt45 wouldn’t have fired the almost 3 dozen people that 44 had hired and put in high places in the government to coordinate a pandemic like this.
That Dolt45 wouldn’t haven taken away out infectious disease person in China, who would have been on the ground when this broke out.
That Dolt45 would listen to the scientists and the competents, like other Presidents would have done.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tony Jay: Signal Corps officers are notably unreliable. Cave.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I think there’s more to it than just the governors and health departments. Even within states, there were very different results depending on the facts on the ground. Southern California did much worse than the Bay Area, and a big chunk of that is about poverty and crowded housing rather than public health policy. Admittedly, things like crowding are a result of public policy, but it’s a longer-term problem and not a result of bad choices made during the pandemic.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gin & Tonic: Alan is a lesbian?
Citizen Alan
@Gin & Tonic: My biggest fear about the move is that I will no longer be able to wear shorts and flip-flops for nearly the entire year. I’m already looking forward to my first “Northern Winter” with utter dread.
Steve in the ATL
@Gin & Tonic: he’ll never get a table at a decent restaurant in Manhattan wearing comfortable shoes. Hope he likes the cuisine in Yonkers!
Tony Jay
@jl:
Mostly, according to Public Health England 73% of Delta (which is what they’re calling the India variant now) cases are in unvaccinated people and only 3.7% Delta cases are in people who’ve had both doses. They also say that 5% of people hospitalised with this variant have had both jabs, which I don’t quite get (no statistician me) but there you go. So there are people in hospital who have had one shot and even full vaccination, but the variant they’ve picked up is something like twice as infectious and hits harder.
Bolton and Bedford, where the variant first came to light, both have something like 15% British-Asian populations, the majority of them Muslim, but so do a lot of other places in the country. Whatever reason lay behind the outbreaks there that’s water under the bridge now. The Government dragged its feet on taking the threat of the Indian variant seriously for about three weeks when all the experts where screaming blue-murder, basically because Johnson still wanted to enjoy a nice jolly in India with Modi and didn’t want to offend him, so now its popping up everywhere. Nice one, Flobalob.
If we remained in Lockdown for a bit longer until the spread of the variant can be choked out, that would be bearable, but according to the Government, summer is here and the time is right, for dancing in the street, so…. we’re probably buggered.
Citizen Alan
@Omnes Omnibus: My being a lesbian trapped in the body of an asexual bear might well explain my dating history.
Steve in the ATL
r@Omnes Omnibus: he was bragging about his flannel shirts and tool belts the other day, but you may have gotten sucked in to stereotypes
Omnes Omnibus
@Citizen Alan: You certainly can do it. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it can be done.
HypersphericalCow
I’m not sure which kinds of British politicians are worse, the naked grifters like Nigel Farage, or the ones who pretend to actually care about the country, like BoJo.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: Me? Never.
Ken
@Citizen Alan: Sounds like a great premise for a body-swap comedy.
Old School
@Citizen Alan:
Rest assured that there are people in the northern climates that do wear shorts in the winter. Not sure about flip-flops, but I assume there are some.
The question is whether you will want to.
trollhattan
@germy:
Jesus, he really is Trump’s Doppelganger. Lazy and entitled.
trollhattan
@jl:
And, the forests would all be raked.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: I am convinced conservatives both here and there saw the mass die-off of frail elderly to be a monetary savings and good for the budget.
Something like 75% of the new surge of the India variant is among the unvaccinated, I read. What is up with vaccine production there? They’re sticking with a steady output schedule and no try for a volume ramp up? Hm.
Dominic Cummings’ FIVEHEAD is so so “Megamind” I cannot bear to look.
Still waiting for travel to open; Then you’re invited up to the water meadows for a relaxing weekend decompress.
J R in WV
Tony J, great job, looking forward to any additional information you can provide.
Regarding Ratfuckers, like Alexander Boris de Poeffel Johnson and his minions, I enjoy imagining how tiny a penis one must have to enjoy fucking a rat of any species.
Yay!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kent: I think the difference is Boris knew better and with Trump everyone knew he was a failure since the 90s. Boris is a smart man pretending to be an idiot, Trump is a dumb man pretending to be a genius.
jl
@rikyrah: True.
But, I think capabilities of US public health, and public sector generally, have been gutted. Due both to lack of funding and bad political leaders making sure that neither were allowed to do much of anything to serve any part of the US population except the rich.
There were signs of the paper only US capabilities even before covid: decline in life expectancy. Latest available data for 2018 show that it hasn’t recovered declines since 2014, not even close. And now it’s at 2010 level overall.
And what boggles my mind is that among the groups hit hardest were non-rich white guys in the Trumpster base. It didn’t even phase them. It’s a weird dysfunctional country.
It would be interesting to see which has produced more premature death in the US, declining mortality since 2014, or covid.
We didn’t care for life in general before covid, why would we care during covid. Obama tried at least. Hope Biden renews the effort.
cynn
Wonderful rant! Do you have a newsletter, website, instagram, substack, youtube channel, et cetera, to which I might subscribe? Seriously! It’s Hitchens-worthy!
jl
@Tony Jay: Thanks for info. I think most of the vaccinations in UK have been AZ, and there is evidence that one is somewhat less effective against the variants than Moderna and Pfizer, and one of the Chinese vaccines. But, still good enough to get the herd immunity job done, if enough people get it, and for safety’s sake, soon enough.
Hope the UK resumes its good work on vaccines. With variants, from what I’ve read, need to get going on the second dose. Still better immunity if you delay somewhat beyond three weeks, but shouldn’t wait too long. Certainly need to get a second shot at some point.
Kay
This issue gets collapsed into “voting rights,” but there are two tracks here. One is how you vote, the other is whether partisan officials can straight-up overturn the results after the fact as Trump demanded.
Exactly.
They do SUCH a better job reporting on voting than they used to do. It’s just improved 100%. Accurate, specific, they understand the laws and categories. Bravo. Good work.
Brachiator
@jl:
The US through out its pandemic playbook before anything had happened, so we were screwed, even if you were grading on a curve.
The UK has some of the best scientists on hand to serve as advisors, and yet the Dominic Cummings theatrics still obscures the degree to which Boris Johnson and his minions blundered and deliberately hampered response to the pandemic. Budget cuts and other malfeasance with respect to the NHS also contributed to the woefully inadequate response to Covid-19 outbreaks.
And yet, strangely, many of the British public are asking Boris, “Please sir, can I have some more” misery, confusion and mishandling of everything.
Baud
@jl:
Racism is a jealous mistress.
TS (the original)
Who’s idea was the video balloon juice ad on my screen. Video ads are incredibly distracting & I can’t read the comments with that flashing in the background & no way to stop it.
Lobo
For those of you who are D&D fans, the best way to look at it is that TFG and Johnson are more in line with Chaotic Evil. Lex Luthor would fall under Lawful evil. Lex would still have evil designs but not wasteful ones. He would still want a functional country to rule over and profit from. But what do you say when you admit Lex Luthor would be tons better than TFG?
Tony Jay
@John S.:
Basically, the faction of the Labour Party currently running the show spent five years working hand in glove with the Tory Press to tell absolutely everyone they could that the Party was shit, awful, totally untrustworthy and crawling with racists (not the decent, patriotic kind of racist either, no, the other kind, the smelly, lefty/brown version). When they had achieved their aim of ousting the previous leadership and took over they barely had time to finish high-fiving each other before they realised that millions of people had actually listened to them and didn’t trust the Party. Imagine that.
Now the Opposition is stuck in a rut of its leadership’s making. It doesn’t actually have any policies, it’s done a screeching 180 on the main political/social issue dividing the nation (Brexit) and has displayed astonishing levels of political incompetence at every turn. People don’t know what it stands for, it doesn’t say anything, and the figurehead at the top has all the charm and charisma of a faded Edwardian ghost.
Nothing about that will change until there’s a change of leadership and probably a major civil-war to drive out the people who preferred Johnson in office to a Labour Government they didn’t control. Which is pretty shit, but it is what it is.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Thank you, Mr. Jay! Your post is very entertaining, but even more educational.
Tony Jay
@cain:
Did you see the story about the White’s Only employment policy Rich Lizzy has been running at the Palace for her entire reign? The declaration for open-season on Meghan came right from the top.
Martin
@jl: Vermont benefitted by having a city no larger than my HOA. HI benefitted by not treating asian sensibilities WRT masking as anti-american. See also: San Francisco.
Tony Jay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Motivation is the key.
Tony Jay
@HypersphericalCow:
The ones who get power and use it to hurt the most people. Johnson hands down.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: I did see that. That, and all the Queen’s Consent stuff is alarming, to say the least.
And good for H&M wriggling out of grasp and living their best life.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Tony Jay @ Top:
Not necessarily saying this would have been a better sentence (it wouldn’t have, for lack of concrete illustration), but just wanted to note that the same meaning could have been conveyed in fewer words with:
I suppose it could have been shortened even further as:
WaterGirl
@Citizen Alan: Can you send me an email so I have your current email address?
HeleninEire is happy to be in touch about Queens, but I need your email address in order to put the two of you together.
mdblanche
@sdhays: From what I’ve heard about Papa Johnson, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and he probably thought the letter was meant as praise for his parenting.
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
I know I rag on the FTF Guardian a lot (because they totally deserve every serrated inch of it) but I find it really interesting that they only stumbled upon their exclusive information about the naked racism permeating Windsor Inc after the whole “Meghan was treated badly because of her skin” furore had passed on by.
There’s more to that story.
Roger Moore
@jl:
I think you’re wrong about that. I think they are acutely conscious of the fact that things are going badly for them. It’s no coincidence that the driver of declining lifespan is “deaths of despair” like drug abuse and suicide.
The problem is their reaction. Instead of trying to adapt to a changing world, they’re retreating into nostalgia for a misremembered past. They want to go back to a world where America was the undisputed Top Nation, white men were still in charge of everything, and you could get a job that paid well enough to raise a family right out of high school. It doesn’t matter that we can’t get there. That’s what they want, and they’ll go hard for anyone like Trump who promises it to them.
Tony Jay
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
You’re right, of course. Right down to the ‘War on Woke’, the Flag-shagging and the deep-dive into nationalist racism.
Imitation, flattery, etc.
Barry
@jl:
“Cumulative confirmed deaths due to covid per million as of end of last week: Sweden 1430, US 1790, UK 1890.”
Denmark: 432, Norway: 146.
In comparison to their neighbors, Sweden did badly.
Tony Jay
@cynn:
Nah, why would I need all that when I’ve got BJ?
cynn
quite right
Tony Jay
@J R in WV:
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, and I’m sorry if you’re eating, but I’ve seen videos online and… well… they don’t take the rats, uh, capabilities into account at all.
TKH
@TS (the original): while I object to “who’s idea….”, I have to concur with the sentiment. This is objectively worse than ZergNet ads with Chauvin’s face, something I had no idea I’d ever say.
My humble apology for an OT comment in a most excellent Tony Jay guest thread
Kent
Maybe so at the very top. But the US GOP is riddled with accomplished Ivy League types who have just gone all-in on the country bumpkin know nothing racist routine. Elise Stefanik is a Harvard grad, Josh Hawley is a Stanford/Yale grad, Ted Cruz is a Princeton/Harvard grad. Senator Kennedy from Louisiana is a Vanderbilt/Virginia/Oxford grad.
CarolPW
@TKH:
Agree, and it escapes my ad blocker. It is driving me mad.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
Problem is the previous Labour faction was not much better. I guess that whatever is labeled the Labour Party is doing OK in Wales, but is irrelevant in Scotland and England. As far as I can tell, as an ignorant but trying to learn American observer, Labour actually has done fairly well when they have been in charge, compared to the Conservatives, but they have lost the support of the people.
I see apologists for Labour say stuff like, “well, Labour voters just stayed home rather than vote for Tories,” or “Labour voters have been misled by the press,” but this still counts as a loss.
I recently saw some citizen in an interview say “I voted for BREXIT because I wanted change.” I had to do a facepalm. The Conservatives were in power before and after BREXIT and yet somehow this doofus thinks that he is getting something new and different. And Labour is probably just flat out invisible to someone like him.
Labour never had a coherent policy with respect to BREXIT. When the debate was raging, Labour essentially said, “vote for us and we will tell you what we will do about BREXIT after the election.” And some people offered some valid reasons why Labour was reticent about BREXIT and had to acknowledge a hard truth that Labour supporters among voters were split in their support or opposition to BREXIT.
Problem is that the reticence still failed to achieve anything.
BREXIT is a failure, and yet a good chunk of the population still believe that it might work some day. These people subsist on fantasies of recovered sovereignty and xenophobia. But the Conservatives are using BREXIT to wreck the economy for all but their own plutocrat cronies; so even if Labour somehow were able to form a government, it would be nearly impossible for it to repair the damage done.
Who might be a better leader? And don’t say Jeremy Corbyn. He may be a righteous dude in many ways, but he is as much responsible for Labour’s current irrelevance as anyone.
One odd thing about Starmer. Even though he seems stolid and dull, neither the Conservatives nor the media have really been able to effectively smear him. And some of his questions and points during the Prime Minister’s Question Theater have stung. Boris Johnson’s typical strategy is just to ignore the question and ramble bullshit. The Speaker and the compliant media let Johnson get away with this, and Labour is unable to capitalize on their attacks, no matter how good or poor.
So I guess it may be inevitable that Starmer gets dumped. But unless you really have somebody better lined up, it may be another instance of Labour shooting itself in the foot for the umpteenth time.
Another Scott
@Kent: Yup. Sorting them in Smart / Idiot bins is probably a category error. What they have in common is they’re all shameless Liars.
The last Prime Minister’s Questions I heard on the BBC Radio had someone questioning him on where some plan (for pensions or something) was that he promised N years ago. The direct question was “Where’s the plan?”. BoJo said “of course we have a plan” (when it’s obvious that he doesn’t) and then started into a rant that it was all Labour’s fault.
BoJo (reportedly) thought that only the weak got COVID-19 – until he got it.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”
It doesn’t matter if BoJo was clever at Eaton and did well on exams (if in fact he did). He governs as badly as a Putin stooge out to destroy the country. His fancy education obviously didn’t help the UK.
Grr.
Thanks as always, TonyJ!
Cheers,
Scott.
Mary G
@Tony Jay: Late to the thread, but I’ve been waiting for you to come out of the alcoholic coma to write about this, because that Cummings is just such a …
I keep wondering what’s wrong with the Labor Party. This helps, but jeez.
unknown known
Britain is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world at this point. Something like 75% of the adult population have had 1 shot, and 50% have had two (taking the entire population into account it’s something like 60% have had one shot). The vax program has been steadily chugging away here, and, yes, trying to ramp up supply, but that’s really hard to do, so mostly it’s been a matter of buying up the world’s supply, and letting poorer countries swing.
To answer other questions: Places like Bolton are generally poor, with crowded living conditions, etc. It is far from the only place like that, but it’s one that got unlucky with an early outbreak. They’re surging vaccines there now (because it’s a nationally coordinated effort, not run randomly by different states, so they can do that), and it looks like it’s starting to come under control there… but the Delta variant is basically growing everywhere exponentially now, so it’s more or less a matter of time until we have a big wave and lockdown.
In terms of Labour… we had a bunch of elections here recently, UK wide, and the basic pattern was that all the incumbents won. The Tories in England, Labour in Wales, SNP in Scotland. So the people who were on tv constantly trying to sound reassuring about health crises got rewarded (no matter how incompetent their actual efforts), and everyone else who has been stuffed into a media black hole suffered.
Corbyn was a DISASTER for labour. The activist left LURVED him HARD, but a lot of the rest of the coalition was totally creeped out by him, and a whole lot of very blue collar old industrial places went Tory for the first time ever (by way of having been Farage-curious – Brexit politics really fucked a lot of shit up here, even beyond the actual fuckery of Brexit itself).
Starmer has limited charisma, but he’s a bit Biden-y in the sense that his opponents are having a really hard time getting anything to stick to him (he isn’t a long-time pol like Biden, he just radiates a sort of staid decency.
The question is, how does Labour do better from here. The lefty critique is that we need lots of EXCITING POLICIES, which is lovely, except for the fact that the reality that most of the populace live in see those two words as antonyms (more the shame them, but they do).
My personal take is that they could actually do quite well by channeling Biden more thoroughly, but only if they could combine it with better short pithy messaging, and if they could learn to do what Americans call “ground game” – phone banking and door knocking are just things that DO NOT EXIST in Britain… though I suspect that this may be partly because British culture is highly allergic to talking to strangers about anything other than weather and football. But there we are.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Here’s the thing, the previous faction was better. Labour was losing support and votes in a constant stream from the day Blair became PM, deliberately ignoring its traditional areas of support in the cynical belief they had nowhere else to go. Corbyn’s election changed all that. Not because he was an amazing leader, but because he was a genuine, life-long democratic socialist who offered Britain the option of a genuine democratic-socialist alternative to centre-right orthodoxy. The current leadership offer nothing. No policies. No excitement. No opposition. Just constant internecine wars within Labour as they seek to ensure that never again will their control be seriously challenged and focus-grouped bullshit aimed at winning back white, working-class racists who went via UKIP and Brexit Party to the Tories and are never coming back.
And you’re wrong to say the Tories haven’t been able to make anything stick to Starmer. They have. His studious blandness has allowed them to define him in the Media as a weak, passionless smarty-pants more interested in showing off his forensic skills in Parliament than he is in offering Britain any genuine alternative to whatever the Government is doing. And it’s succeeded. Labour is going backwards, failing to win back any of the Brexit voters it lost (thanks to Starmer’s Brexit strategy, he was the guy who wrote it) despite its hypocritical swing into being a pro-Brexit party, because they don’t believe it to be anything more than cynical politicking, while also alienating huge numbers of voters who stuck with Labour in 2019, because of its hypocritical swing into being a pro-Brexit party.
I can genuinely see Labour in England following the example of the French and Israeli Labour Parties in completely collapsing over the next few years if Starmer and the people running his show don’t get turfed out and told to go join up with the Lib-Dems. It’s that serious. They are toxic on so any levels.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
Got a link for that?
Tony Jay
@unknown known:
Mate, door knocking and phone banking are the meat and potatoes of any activist political membership, that’s what they do. Give people a positive message to sell at the doorstep and they’ll work their arses off. Labour let that atrophy through the early 2000s as the activist base were turned off by what they had to defend, but it came back in a big way in 2017 and was made a Party priority from 2018.
Starmer’s leadership team dissolved the Party’s entire Community Outreach Unit just before the Hartlepool Bye-Election because they are that opposed to having anything or anyone who doesn’t have their level of hate and resentment towards Corbyn representing the Party.
I can’t even with this. Corbyn’s gone, Starmer’s in the hot seat now and he’s fucking up like an centipede in a rake factory. If they wanted people to vote for them maybe they shouldn’t have spent five years nodding along to the scumbags in the Mail and the Express and working to lose elections.
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
Here you go.
It makes lovely reading.
lowtechcyclist
Nitpick: might want to change the header. Googol and Googolplex are the very large (but finite) numbers; Google and Googleplex are the search engine and its corporate headquarters.
unknown known
@Tony Jay: meh.
Starmer with a Corbynista type agenda would actually probably be somewhat successful.
The problem with Corbyn was primarily (but not entirely) the packaging . He was pushing a (largely good) agenda that was outside the immediate norms of Brit politics, and when you do that your opponents are going to brand you as a dangerous crazy radical. Corbyn was INCREDIBLY easy to paint with that brush, because he pretty much embodied a complete set of British cultural cliche’s for a beardy London intellectual of the sort that is far more tethered to impassioned and esoteric righteousness than to reality (fair or unfair, but he was from cultural casting central for that role). True lefties admired the boldness to just own it, but it scared off a LOT of traditional labour supporters.
(he also had the political liability of open and sincere hostility to flag-waving and to militarism, which played just horribly to a large chunk of the country that unabashedly identifies with that stuff).
I think there’s a very valid critique of Starmer that he’s more worried about not offending anyone than he is about standing FOR stuff, which I think is partly just who he is, and partly trying to overcompensate for the horror that a lot of labour stakeholders held for Corbyn… He’s trying to establish his “no, really, we aren’t scary” bonafides.
Ironically, I think someone like Starmer would be far more successful at selling Corbyn style policies than Corbyn was, precisely BECAUSE it’s a mix of red meat to the base, while also being hard to paint as wildly radical, because he comes across as so astoundingly conventional. That’s what I mean by trying to copy the Biden formula – Biden has swung hard left, but nobody outside the R 27% is really willing to believe he’s a radical.
In any event, right now it doesn’t matter WHAT Starmer says, or if he got a personality transplant direct from Oscar Wilde, because the entire media ecosystem is completely fixated on ignoring every single person who isn’t either a top cabinet official, or a two bit “celeb” from a reality TV show. Starmer could show up in front of the mic’s tomorrow, wise crack with enormous verve through an announcement that he’d nationalize the entire economy, and the next morning the tabloids would run the same headlines about him they always run, and nobody else would even notice.
Ruckus
@John S.:
There is a different ¿malfunctionality? to the British system than we have here. They are broken in a different way than we are. But it is conservative values just differently applied than we do more than anything else. Conservatism worked, sort of, at one point in time, but education, exposure to reality rather than a closed system of failure are keys to both countries failures. We got a guy with more narcissism than any 3 other people and their system is basically the same, one side of the aisle seems to be loaded with people with seemingly (or actually) no more sense than a pound of moldy cheese supported by the money hoarders/racists, non of whom could find their way out of a wet paper bag.
Conservatism has more than run it’s course, everywhere in the world, it’s just an unreasonable percent of the worlds population is in that same situation of level of sense as those of the moldy cheese variety.
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I’m not sure Boris is all that smart. He may have been at one time but huffing one’s own farts for too long never gives good results.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
As noted, I am just an American observer who knows nothing, but am interested in British politics.
Don’t matter. The previous Labour faction was still ineffectual. And lost. And it is clear that Labour has lost favor with a lot of voters.
I am super cynical here, but I suspect that Labour’s dreams of traditional values are just as empty as the right wing’s dreams of a return to empire. I hear a lot of prattle about the working class and socialism. But a lot of those industries are dead. A huge amount of England’s GDP comes from services, especially the financial services sector. But Labour talks about trade unions and nationalizing trains. Who gives a shit?
On the other hand, Boris Johnson’s promises about leveling up the North is clearly empty. But I have not read or heard of any realistic Labour policy that would do a damn thing for the region.
There are, sadly, a lot of traditional Labour voters who wish that non-white Britons would go away or at least shut up. I’ve seen too many interviews with people who voted for Labour in the past, but insist on seeing the world as a zero-sum game. They see London Labour as only caring about non-white people in Southern cities. Similar problem here in America with a lot of people.
I see this coming more from the left than from Tories. And again, this is weak sauce that doesn’t stick, especially compared to the smear job against Corbyn.
I see Labour factions harping that Starmer’s forensic skills mark him as somebody who ain’t no real working class bloke. But I truly believe that the Conservatives fear Starmer. They may have feared Corbyn as well, but they were able to neutralize him.
And I note that Starmer is boring an uninspiring, but shit I just watched a clip of Ed Miliband saying that Labour must embrace BREXIT. You guys are fucked if this is the best alternative you’ve got.
Labour’s BREXIT strategy was always doomed to failure. And Corbyn tried to be coy about BREXIT. Also Labour could not find a way to blunt the racism and xenophobia that inflicts Britain. They are out of touch because a lot of Britons want racism and empire. This is not simply a failure of Labour. Labour, like the Democrats here, have to convince a lot of people not to be selfish, racist assholes. It is easier to appeal to fear and anger, which is why you have Boris and we had Trump. So, Labour not only has to develop and assert good policies, they have to work hard to appeal to people who have been suckered into voting against their own interests by false promises and lies of the restoration of past glories.
Starmer is not Labour’s problem. I keep asking who the next leader might be if you don’t like Starmer. The new faction and previous faction are just as useless and out of touch. But I would really like to see Labour work its way out of its current jam.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
SHIT,
Paging Sid Vicious
texasdoc
@TKH: I too apologize for an off-topic comment, but that video BJ ad (Video Crunch?) is first, distracting, and second, infuriating because I can’t turn it off or make it go away. Aargh!!
Matt McIrvin
Perish the thought. This is America! Both the proposal and the daydream were about firing squads.
Jado
“But I digress….”
Even with all the sublime literary agility on display in this polemic, THIS is the section that elevates it all into True Art
Jado
@Citizen Alan:
This is the natural way of things. The Media have parsed the data and tweezed the accounting books for trends, and the Prime Mover of advertising dollars is “The Democrats Are Terrible; This Republican Will Tell You Why”. Honestly, how can we continue to criticize the Media as if we understand their job? They are not tasked with doing what we THINK they should be doing, but they are tasked with doing what they are actually doing: telling people with inherent biases what they desperately want to hear to justify their terrible political choices, so their economic overlords can continue to squeeze every last penny from their miserable existences. For money.
Just like every other industry, the Media is very good at doing their Job-if they weren’t very good it it, they would be replaced with others by the old white guys who write the checks. It’s just not the same Job we think they should be doing. WE are the ones with a fundamental misapprehension of their mission.
Pete Mack
He threw so much shade that it even got darker in my living room!