The Tories are failing at everything

By Pete North - September 23, 2021

It’s hard not to take a completely jaundiced view of politics lately. Though I’m not up to my usual blogging strength I am keeping tabs on things and I still see the usual daily stabbings, weekly machete attacks, the ongoing Dover invasion and the dumping of migrants on councils. I see an energy sector in complete disarray, unfolding largely as predicted. I see all the usual themes of dysfunction and decay where the fundamentals are breaking down while politicians obsess over trivia. But worst of all, I see no hope.

It is true that I had low expectations of this government, but even I didn’t anticipate the Tories essentially becoming New Labour. And as bad as they are, there is still no sign of coherent opposition. Starmer is trying to reanimate the corpse of New Labour while the party still hasn’t got over Corbyn. It doesn’t matter either way since both main parties are dead set on imposing eco austerity on us and raping whatever’s left of our incomes. Elections couldn’t matter less, we are stuck with a posturing oaf for a prime minister, things are just going to get worse and there’s nothing legal or peaceful to be done about it that I can see.

This is what makes writing about politics hard at the moment. At least when we were in the EU there was at least the dimmest hope that things could get better, but Brexit for the Tory party was never about reclaiming Britain. It really was just a matter of settling old scores within the party, and now that it’s notionally done they’ve washed their hands of it. Brexit is now an afterthought and they’re back to their habitual rudderless managerialism. Boris Johnson never cared about Brexit thus the momentum to do anything with it has all but evaporated. For this administration it’s now just a matter of putting out the brushfires it creates without any meaningful reforms.

I was never a fan of the Johnson/Cummings government. Nor was I ever taken with the “genius” of Cummings, but with him gone and the vacuum filled by the court prostitute, the government is doubling down on all the worst aspects of establishment politics from before the referendum. There’s no end to the moral, spiritual and intellectual decline of the politico-media class. No lessons have been learned from Brexit, and post-Brexit politics has been reduced to bland political slogans. Nobody knows what “levelling up” means or has any faith that it means anything at all.

Meanwhile, insofar as the economic fallout of Brexit goes, it’s virtually a non-event next to all the creative ways the Tories are managing to cock just about everything else up. Between that and various global stresses on energy supply and shipping, it looks like it’s all going to hell in a handcart, while our entire political class occupies a different planet entirely. For all that it looks like our disastrous obsession with renewables is driving us toward a long term energy crunch, the Tories are pushing for more of the same. At the same time lining the automotive industry for a spectacular fall by coercing it to retool for electric cars. Cars that nobody wants and the grid cannot supply.

It seems the signal for Sanity FM just doesn’t reach into Wesminster. The PM and his whore do not have the remotest grasp of reality and Johnson believes his own lies thus there is no sense just how deep in the shit we really are. Moreover, insofar as his cabinet are able or willing to admit there are problems, they lack the essential ability, drive and intellect to bring remedy to anything. Patel repeatedly fails to stop the invasion at Dover, the Northern Ireland Protocol is still a total mess, and food and farming is facing a crisis on every front. They keep failing, but nobody in high office ever faces consequences.

Any hope that Brexit may arrest the decline is now dead. Nothing can shock the establishment out of its stupor, and I’m not even sure power cuts will be enough. There seems no bottom to this hole we’re nosediving into. We’re heading for political and economic crash and those of us who can see it coming are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. What passes for democracy in the UK is in tatters and even if we could get rid of the Tories, all we can do is accelerate the decline.

The problems we face are technically resolvable, but not without fixing the politics first. That, though, without meaningful democracy is looking impossible. We are little more than spectators in to our own demise, and all we can do is watch and wait. There is a price to pay for this systemic rot and the bill keeps accumulating. It can’t be too long now before we reach the “contact point” for decades of misrule.