Is that a fact?

 As attention turns to the PM electoral circus, there are some who still have it in for Liz Truss. The mischief continues as she is out of office but far from finished as far as the vengeful public are concerned. If you doubt the ability of the great unwashed to be happily ill-informed the responses to this tweet by Dragon Deborah Meaden would be a useful primer.

"Can anyone who knows clarify the two-month threshold for PM to receive salary for life?"

For a start, the tweet itself is disingenuous. Surely somebody like Meaden isn’t incapable of doing a bit of research for herself, but if she is so tied-up busy why ask Twitter, of all places? For those who are not in the know this is about the Public Duty Costs Allowance against which Former Prime Ministers can retrospectively claim – backed up by vetted receipts - up to £115,000 a year for expenses associated with continuing public duties. It is neither a pension, nor a salary and it is not granted.

But this is the internet, where the truth falls into a poor also-ran place against speculation, ignorance and blind prejudice. A good number of respondents took Meaden’s query as a statement of fact that yes, any ex PM automatically receives a pension/salary of £115k for the rest of his or her days. As. A. Fact. I quote some of the responses below:

·       “I think as long as you have been appointed by His Majesty the King Prime Minister. Even if that lasted for a few minutes before resigning.”

·       “It will be right. Jobs for the boys and girls Westminster. She will probably get promoted to the Lords. Where she will be able to collect £332 per day attendance allowance.”

·       “It is true and even Keir Starmer has called for Thick Lizzie not to get that money of £115 thousand a year for life around that figure I think”

·       “I've heard she's 100% getting it but is being urged to decline it. She hasn't yet declined.”

·       “I worked it out and if she lives 30 years she will get over 3.4 million. Works out at £78,000 a day for 44 days and that’s paying her for the weekend.”

A small number of respondents sought to correct the assumptions but quickly segued into wondering how well it is policed. Another few used the opportunity to speculate over whether Boris Johnson was funding his holiday from this supposed slush fund and a few came up with such kite flying illiteracy as “How many free school meals would the ministers' pensions actually fund? Think about it. Likely the whole nation. Not likely they actually need and depend on said pensions, what with all those hedge funds and private investments they vote on to protect.”[sic]

Still more piled in to suggest that people like Deborah Meaden herself ought to be running the country, oblivious to the reality that she had begun this mendacious thread out of either malice or ignorance, neither quality being one you would seek in a leader. Or maybe it was just naivety and laziness and she tweeted without a though as to its effect. Again, not something you would look for in a figurehead.

Which brings us back to Starmer who once again demonstrated his lack of guile in handling the media when he was effectively pushed into calling for Ms Truss to reject an offer which was not even being made. Somebody really needs to get forensic over this stuff, I mean, it’s embarrassing when people get things so wrong.

Instead of looking to how we get the country back on its tracks, people are fixated by somebody they don’t know, not being given something they don’t deserve… and using the opportunity to add their two penn’orth on financial affairs about which they also nothing. And we give these people a vote? But maybe it is all just harmless bloviation. As the saying goes “I’m sorry dear, I can’t come to bed. Somebody on the internet is wrong.”

Second Guess?

If anybody needed proof that astrology only exists to give a veneer of credibility to economic forecasting, the last few weeks have provided it in abundance. No two economists (although ‘economist’ is as ill-definable as is ‘libertarian’) appear to agree, in the same way that no two humans ever seem to witness any event in the exact, same way. The truth, as is so often the case and in so many walks of life, is that nobody knows.

Sure, in retrospect we can analyse what went wrong, or right, and draw conclusions, but those conclusions are just as much coloured by what we wanted to see as what we actually saw. And those conclusions inevitably lack the unfortunate dearth of information confronting the person in the here and now, deciding what would be best for the hereafter. 

We all harbour longings to return to past events with the knowledge of hindsight, believing we would make better choices… but I bet we wouldn’t. For a start, if we could go back and re-run elections, personal choices, fashion faux-pas and the like, so too, could others. And given that we each have a slightly different agenda, the outcomes would likely be no more predictable than they are now.

Which is why elections are so fraught with uncertainty. For sure, a Conservative government going into a general election right now would likely be annihilated. People are pissed off enough to vote for the charisma-void of Starmer’s Labour, but would it really be ‘better’? I think we could probably come to a reasonable consensus on what better means: happier, more stable, debt-free, anxiety-free. That stuff is easy, but how to get there is not.

Free markets rely on the agglomeration of many independent choices, so if enough people opt for one particular course of action – buying decisions, for instance – the overall outcome will look like the ‘invisible hand’ has been hard at work. But the devil makes work for idle invisible hands to do, so without regulation free markets become enslavers of the many to the whim of the few. But who regulates the regulators? In theory we, the electorate do. But, in practice?

In the aftermath of the last week's political car crash everybody seems to want to proffer an opinion as to what went wrong. From lofty positions of superior education and supposed insider knowledge right down to the bile-spitting, snarling Tory haters, driven by nothing but their revulsion for something they know nothing about, nevertheless they all feel the need to be heard.

Literally nobody knows whether the defenestration of Truss would instantly buoy-up the markets, or whether it would take a full-scale Tory Apocalypse to achieve that. There is too much going on, too much turmoil, too much distrust, and too little in the way of hard facts. The future will only be known once it is in the past, and the most honest seers should admit to luck playing a large part should their prognosis come about.

But every now and then, all those different observers, from their partisan viewpoints do happen to see at least something on which they can all agree. Whether the eventual outcome is equally transparent is another matter entirely, but I’m pretty sure we can all get behind the notion that Truss’s time in power is done.

The Party's Over

And now, the end is near and Liz Truss faces her final curtain. The wolves are at the door, salivating like crazy, and nobody gives the Truss/Kwarteng axis a cat in hell’s chance of making to the end of next week, let alone Christmas. Simply staying in office for two whole months now seems unlikely - even Andrew Bona Law managed from October to May – and with the collapse of the Truss interlude goes also the credibility of the Tories staying in power.

Party unity, never a strong feature of the Conservatives in recent decades, is in tatters; whoever assumed the throne would face their own baying pack of detractors, rendering their leadership impotent. A general election now would almost certainly put Labour in power with an overwhelming majority, the power to do whatever they want.

And what Labour have always wanted is the total destruction of the only party to have ever really been committed to genuinely improving everybody's lot. Forget any future for an independent, proud, British Britain. Forget fair wages and efficient public services – not that the recent Tory governments have won any medals in this regard – and say hello to open-door Britain. Say hi to sweated labour and fat-cat unionised, nationalised monoliths.

I really see no future for the country I grew up in. With Labour the national flag will become a hate symbol, the monarchy will be dismantled and we will become the Afro-Indian satellite of the European Union at best. Our history, displayed on every plinth and in every museum, will be rewritten as a triumph of multiculturalism. I read today that people are calling for more foreign accents at the Royal Shakespeare Company, to better reflect modern Britain. Sod representing the bard, appeasement comes first.

Line up here for your reparation payments will say the ad campaigns throughout the third world. Whoever you are, whatever your people have done, all the bad things in your life are the fault of those hideous dead white men of the slave trade – only whites ever kept slaves, you know – so now their ancestors will be wrung out to dry to pay for those sins.

You think Kwarteng and Truss’s magic money tree is fanciful? Stand by for plantations of the things. You think the care system and the NHS is creaking at the seams now? Watch what it’s like when the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel moves to Peckham and enterprising imported new GPs find ever ingenious ways to screw the system. Transport, education, the law, public works… I dread to think how they will function when the last of the Smiths, the Browns, the Wrights and the Tuckers leave the building.

They did it... their way

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men could be rewritten as No Country for White Men, but of course there would be no backing for such a project. I don’t believe Truss can live out the year and I don’t believe the Conservative party can last the parliamentary term. With them dies Brexit, independence, opportunity, hope and pride. With them, probably goes Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. RIP United Kingdom, may you find the tranquility you deserve.

Addendum

This was written a few hours before Mr Kwarteng was unceremoniously dismissed. I see no reason to row back on any of my comments. And Phil Hammond has quite the nerve to come on air and criticise when he was among those who did their level best to split the country over Brexit, before and after the public vote. The Tory Party is over - they now need to decide which two, or three parties they wish to split into.

Give Truss a Chance?

The knives are well and truly out for Truss. If it was just the eternal opposition of Labourites this would be unremarkable. If it was just the puffed-up pontificating of that malodorous and wretched excuse for a human being, James O’Brien it would be business as usual. If it was just the former spin doctor and liar-in-chief, Alastair – raging bullshit – Campbell it would be laughed off as irrelevant, but it’s not just the usual suspects, it is everybody.

The Bank of England, the BBC, the EU, the IMF… and more besides. There is almost a queue of people awaiting their turn to do down the pound and in turn to unseat the fourth Conservative Prime Minister in less than a decade. If current moods are anything to go by, we might yet have another one before the next general election, such is the zeal for turmoil.

Chaos abounds. In every critical area you can imagine chaos and confusion is now the default mode. Name a sector – industry, energy, financials, law and order, education, health, care and society-at-large – and nowhere will you find a comforting sense of order. And so many seem to be heavily invested in perpetuating this state. Especially those who see themselves as political victims. Victims of Toryism, Trumpism, Brexit and, of course, Boris; nothing will satisfy these malcontents short of a complete collapse of everything. But their next step is unclear. You bring down the wall, perhaps, but what do you do afterwards?

It is clear that something needs to be done, that sanity needs to be restored to our national debate. Most ordinary people still think along the same lines we always did, but the conversation has been hijacked by those who will not admit anything other than their own thesis. Identity politics has split the national psyche asunder and allowed crank ideas such as critical race theory, gender issues and hate crime rhetoric to distort every utterance. If only they were given the chance.

In every speech, every policy, every initiative there will be something to offend somebody. And yet, instead of pushing ahead, somehow the storm-force winds of protest manage to keep the ship in harbour. We are sunk without a leadership with the balls to tackle all of this, and such a leadership would be mightily cheered on by the huge majority who feel powerless against the wokeratti.

And lest the anti-Brexit, anti-fracking, anti-oil, anti-white, anti-Tory, anti-justice mob pretend to themselves they are doing god’s work, let us not forget that none of them give a good goddamn for the country. They do this entirely for themselves. It is all about them. To the woke mob, solving any of our national problem comes secondary to the outright rejection of anybody with whom they disagree. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, John Major said. Well, this is for certain the tyranny of the minorities.

We were and are warned about all of this. Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Doyle, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Christopher Hitchens and many others, whatever you think of them – and make no mistake, what you think of them is most certainly influenced by the perpetrators of national destruction – have been telling you for years. And yes, I deliberately included Hopkins and Robinson in that list because if your reaction to their names was revulsion, you may be a small part of the problem.

If you reject an idea, a notion, a warning, simply because of who delivers it, or if you embrace an ideological position for the same reasons you may be behaving rationally, but you are not behaving well. The march of the so-called progressives has been a long one and its roots lie centuries ago in the doctrines of Engels and Marx and it is carried on today by the extreme left factions of the Labour and Green movements. Its agitators are the young and foolish and the middle-aged and straight out cranky, and others like them who will never have to suffer the consequences.

The old society may have had its faults and it may have disadvantaged certain groups whose voices needed to be heard and heeded, but the breakdown of the social order portends far worse outcomes than its perpetuation ever did. The media is a never-ending rendition of new varieties of Project Fear; Project Doom-and Gloom, Project Bring Down the PM, Project Hate the Tories, and Project Talk Down the Country. If we can just learn to ignore the naysayers, hold our noses and give Truss a chance, we might find she has something to offer. If instead we listen to the haters we will never find out.