I decided that this needed to go out before the entire cabinet resigned, so here goes:
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I cannot decide whether Liz Truss conducts her role out of pure incompetence or she is a double agent. Truth be told, I will never know. However, it is fair to say that she is doing a great job of destroying the ERG and the Brexit illusion.
It is time for Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and their parties to acknowledge that Brexit has destroyed Britain’s resilience and offer a grown up analysis of what needs to be done to save the country from itself. David Lammy managed to dodge the bullet this am on the BBC. Brexit Remains the elephant in the room. It’s time to grow up as Jackie Brook points out elegantly.
Regards The Truss, Liz must now listen to moderate Conservatives inside and outside her party. The underlying problem is Brexit, which has destroyed Britain’s ability to absorb shocks. She must make amends to save Britain and her party. It may be too late of course. The appointment of Jeremy Hunt is a nudge strategy in this general direction. Yes, I know that some of you will have another word for Jeremy, but set against the swivel eyed ERG loons, it is an interesting strategy at this time. She faces a radical decision or oblivion and we know that she is (a) a Janusian thinker and (b) willing to be unpopular. Remainers remain (sic) stuck in the hedonic response cycle of only ever seeing one way out of this problem when binary politics delivered Brexit:
A general election is unlikely unless forced in some way. It is yet another Remainer unicorn of low probability. Hope is not a strategy.
Forget “Britannia Unchained”, see our work on a better Britain in a better Europe for a better World.
Don Adamson writes in his inimitable style from Yorkshire.
This week’s quotes: “Thick Lizzie is putting herself in a dangerous position … least experienced cabinet team the UK has had for decades (Comment after 12 years in office) … she will need every bit of Civil Service buy in she can get …Any efforts to introduce yes men will just drain the Civil Service of competent staff … … when Jacob Rees Mogg was supposedly in charge of public sector efficiency … incessantly wailing about civil servants not being at their desks while failing to notice that due to sell off of buildings there were not enough desks for civil servants to be at … Thick Lizzie’s moves are fundamentally unfair … crisis in the National Health Service is well known … calls for an independent enquiry (Comment: in Booming Brexit Britain an ‘independent enquiry is one that obeys Rupert Murdoch’s orders) … services unsafe as doctors struggle with huge workloads … no hope of building the promised 48 new hospitals … new Chancellor has admitted that any gas produced by fracking would not reduce costs for UK consumers … If he does not understand measures in his own price package what hope is there? …24 hours is maximum waiting time to file past body of the Queen … 40 hours waiting time endured by woman needing ambulance and hospital treatment … Thick Lizzie’s rusty Reaganomics … transplanting a 40 year old economic policy from USA to UK will not work … President brushed aside the contradictions … Thick Lizzie’s attempts to emulate the Gipper’s success is doomed … Thick Lizzie’s cheerleaders have read only the first part of the history of Reagonomics … early record was mixed … did not stop a recession … inflation rose … the result will be more conflict between monetary and fiscal policy … risk that inflation becomes entrenched … business leaders are warming to Labour … businesses despair of the Tory Party … after 12 years in office and four radically different PMs the Tories can hardly promise that Johnson’s tenure was especially shambolic … a suspicion that policy is being driven by ideological reflexes … Thick Lizzie’s approach worries firms … as for Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary, ‘I could think of a worse choice but you would have to give me an hour … NHS treats its workers so badly they are leaving … struggle to plan holidays … it is bonkers … the whole kit and caboodle of NHS employment is utterly Kafkaesque … working in an organisation that is indifferent to their needs … NHS can be a strikingly uncaring employer … The city is fighting to carve out a post Brexit role … 7,000 jobs, and £1.3Trillion of assets were lost from a sector that employs 1.1m … international firms opening a European hub prefer Amsterdam or Luxembourg … LSE’s importance as an equity hub has dwindled … in 2006 it raised 18% of global capital … in the first half of 2022 less than 1% … A wholesale repeat of the City’s post war reinvention remains out of reach … boosting the economy while ignoring environmental harm would be bonkers … keeping the heat on has replaced flying as an aspiration … Politicians of all stripes console themselves with the thought that Brits voted to leave the EU because they were misled by other, less upstanding politicians. ‘Nobody voted to be poorer’ runs the refrain. A scarier possibility is that people knew perfectly well what they voted for. Brexit will create a smaller economy but voters did not care … Thick Lizzie resembles a neo-liberal Kamikaze pilot, prepared to blow herself up for her cause …. The mad scientists … an experiment to test the riskiest of trickle down fantasies … It seems we have been misled … all we have needed all along was for the government to give vast amounts of money to the rich and wait for it to somehow boost the economy …Established economic theories and fact based research have disappeared a naysayer in a photograph of Stalin … all previous Tory governments have been left wing dupes … how doing nothing is supposed to increase growth is a mystery … this government will just find the money elsewhere … many things about this budget do not make sense … will cost the treasury a fortune … no additional growth, just a lower tax take … Cutting red tape is a right wing panacea, the kind prompted by snake oil sellers … the details are shocking … Justice system, social care, ambulance services and NHS are already on their knees … none of these measures likely to increase growth at all … a right wing wet dream … without even a semblance of an effort to make the numbers add up, no wonder the Office for Budget Responsibilities has been gagged … terrible news for those with mortgages (Comment: Daily Mail readers will love that) … right wing commentators in the press are praising it to the skies, but ignore these and read their financial pages instead … a right wing fantasy, an ideologically driven experiment to stuff the mouths of the rich with gold … it is betting with borrowed money that nobody knows how to repay … schoolboy errors … put the UK economy at risk … Kwarteng has always been a high risk appointment … too casual … too enamoured of his own intellect … a cabinet determined by loyalty to Truss rather than competence … in the space of four days three decades of sound economic management have gone up in smoke … pound suffered a rout … cartoon Thatcherism … Millwall strategy (no one likes us, we don’t care) is hardly a serious approach … Kwarteng, like the Bourbons has learned nothing and forgotten nothing … betrayed weakness not strength …,It is a fantasy to pretend that Britain can ignore the trend … a grab bag of ideas, poorly presented …it makes you wonder if Thick Lizzie is an undercover agent for the Bring Back Boris campaign … smug, cruel, arrogant, know it all ideologies …f*** the lot of you … failings of a wasted decade … sounds like insider trading … if it had happened under a Labour government the papers would have played merry hell … the money markets have made it clear they have no faith in Trussonomics … detestable characters in the Johnson resignation honours list … there are claims that Nadine Dorries knowingly misled Parliament …
Pip Pip Medway Delta (Retired) Saboteur and Brexorcist First Class
Editor’s footnote: since Don wrote this, another Tory MP has been fired …
Don Adamson writes from Yorkshire on the latest mayhem which contributes to our Britastrophe.
This week’s quotes: “Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ agenda is ailing and listless, a casualty of Johnson’s lack of seriousness … Few doubt the new chancellor’s intellect but he swings between genius and idiocy … an attention span of four seconds … The Chancellor rattles the Treasury … the Treasury needs good advice more than ever … may not be enough to avoid a downturn … None of this bodes well for the public finances. Yet the government is expected to announce tax cuts … Having got their woman into Downing St dodgy financiers can look forward to … deregulate their businesses yet further … Kwarteng should be able to get his ideas through with less sense checking from experienced officials…. However resounding the next crash the sound for friends of Kwasi wil be ‘kerching’ … Department of Health and Social Care is proving shy about efforts to claw back billions of pounds from underperforming suppliers … progress on suspect suppliers is close to bugger all …Priti Patel put former Australian Foreign Secretary (who helped create Australia’s harsh anti-refugee system) in charge of ‘independent review’ of her Rwanda scheme … leaked files showed guards hitting children or demanding sex from female inmates in grim camps in Papua New Guinea … If Downer could not detect abuse in Australia’s infamous offshore camps it seems unlikely he will spot it in Rwanda … Chris Philp, new appointment as Chief Secretary to the Treasury … why pay any tax at all when they can simply fold their companies when owing hundreds of thousands of pounds to Revenue and Customs … It was refreshing to hear a Labour Politician unapologetic about opposing Brexit, clear about the palpable damage was doing … Sept ans plus tard qui peut pretendre que le Royaume-Uni a beneficie du Brexit (Translation – after seven years who can pretend that the UK benefits from Brexit) … the answer is next to nobody. The tragedy is that the few who do pretend are sitting round the cabinet table, living in la la land imagining that Brexiters who ‘knew what they were voting for’ knew that it was bankers getting bigger bonuses … many of Thick Lizzie and Kwarteng’s plans are detailed in an economically illiterate pamphlet they published ten years ago … Britannia Unchained … unremarkable, badly researched, cherry picked data using taxi drivers’ anecdotes as ‘evidence.’ … evidence is thin … lifting the ban on bankers’ bonuses … even Johnson retreated on this idea … the authors without a science or maths degree between them or any sense of irony … one of the most illiterate parts of the prospectus is the notion that we will all have to work harder … in fact British workers put in longer hours but productivity remains low … the obvious change is more training, investment and better management … if you don’t believe ‘Britannia Unchanged’ the pamphlet has the evidence to convince you … the opinions of taxi drivers … the authors are terrible at maths, economically illiterate, ignorant of science and engineering and completely unaware of how to research a book or write well … smug, selfish, self satisfied, lacking in empathy, ignorant of facts and believing in their own fantasy economics …unfortunately they are now running the country …
Pip Pip
Don Adamson, Medway Delta (Retired), Saboteur and Brexorcist First Class
This from Don Adamson.
The Queen is dead. God Save the King. My first thought on hearing the news was about Prime Ministers. Churchill, love him or hate him punched a hole in history. Eden is remembered for a grave error after years of respectable public service. He should have listened to the diplomats. MacMillan dragged the Tory Party kicking and screaming in the 20th century. Pity the effect was temporary. Douglas-Home was unlucky with his timing. He presided over an exhausted and accident prone government. You could say the same about Brown. Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Major could have achieved more but for the lunatics around them who p****d in the soup. Blair tried to drag the Labour party kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Pity the effect was temporary. Cameron May, Johnson and Truss were/are worse than useless. These Tories do not learn from their experiences.
We now have Charles III. He experienced the longest apprenticeship in history and his best years are behind him. I wish him well but I cannot help feeling that if it is necessary for the monarch to submit meekly to Tory lies then the Monarchy has outlived its usefulness.
HMQ visited NZ in 1977 for the Silver Jubilee. NZ is a realm so Government House took the lead. I was tasked to approach the NZ Post Office to arrange for mail to be collected and delivered to the Royal Party. I went over there and found this old fossil with a pile of documents on his desk. He pointed at the pile and insisted the information was all there. He would have it all sorted in time for the Royal Visit. I reported this through the proper channels. It was getting rather close to the visit when I got a telegram from London saying that they really needed that schedule of postal delivery and collections. I returned to the NZ Post Office and found the same swivel eyed loon staring at the same pile of papers.
I suggested that we needed to match the visit itinerary with daily times when the Post Office closed their mail bags and sent the bags on their way. It was fussy, detailed work and easy to make a mistake. It was certainly not rocket science. All you needed to do was concentrate and check your findings carefully. According to the itinerary HMQ would be in a certain town on a certain date. Ask the Post Office to collect and deliver mail in accordance with existing schedules. It took about an hour. I made two copies of the draft, left one copy with NZPO and took the other back to my office to incorporate into a telegram. A few days later we got a reply along the lines of thanks chaps, this is what we need but may we suggest one, repeat one, very minor repeat minor amendment. I phoned the swivel eyed loon in the NZPO who went ballistic: how dare I criticise the splendid work he did. I called him down and he agreed to the one, repeat one, very minor adjustment. I later learned that the swivel eyed loon was decorated for his efforts. That is right. Somebody else got the medal for the work I did. I might have been angry if I had not been laughing so much. Besides: one hour of uncomplicated work hardly merits a medal. Such things happen. The captain of a destroyer was awarded a medal for his heroism at Dunkirk. Later investigation revealed that the captain had been on leave that week. The medal should have gone to the first mate. You expect incompetence from the army and air force but higher standards are expected of nautical types.
There were two security incidents. Cops had to intervene to rescue somebody saying nasty things about HMQ. Badmouthing the Brits was one thing but being nasty to the Queen was another. While HMQ was in Wellington we got a package for her from London. I never knew why that went through British channels rather than NZ channels. The office car took me over to Government House. There is a two tier police system in NZ. You have traffic cops who deal with vehicular crime and regular cops who deal with anything else. There were 12 traffic cops at the gates of Government House and 6 regular cops. Behind them there were three soldiers from the NZ SAS. The Kiwi SAS differs from other SAS units in that they wear the maroon beret of the airborne forces not the sand coloured beret favoured by other SAS regiments. The kiwis did wear the standard winged dagger cap badge worn by all SAS units. What I found interesting was that two corporals carried automatic rifles while the one officer wore a sword and belt. Perhaps this was to kill the bad guys quietly so as not to upset the Queen. I delivered the package to the Queen’s Private Secretary who suggested I leave by the back gate. There was no security at all on the back gate
2001 was an important centenary for the Australians. They wanted to celebrate it style. They asked that we should stop the traffic for half an hour one afternoon mid week so some Australian dignitary could lay a wreath at the Cenotaph. Some idiot of an MP had to kick up a stink about that. I felt there were two relevant points. 1. Laying wreaths at the Cenotaph meant as much to us as it did to Australians. 2. If this was only a once in a century event then it seemed churlish to disoblige the Australians.
The Australian army sent a contingent of troops to stand guard over the Royal Palaces. I passed them once or twice. They were alert and looking for trouble. I could almost feel sorry for anybody who meddled with the Queen while these guys were on sentry duty.
Nothing is as it seems in Buckingham Palace. I remember being summoned to a conference at the billiard room in Buckingham Palace. I naively wondered if I might squeeze in a game if I asked nicely. It was not to be. They had moved out the billiard table and replaced it with a conference table; Chiz!
I always enjoyed the Christmas parties at Buckingham Palace. How I wish my mother had lived to read that sentence. They were held in the Palace Mews. Traditionally the “Mews” is the accommodation for horses and horse drawn vehicles. I assumed the party would be a barn dance or a hay ride; no such luck. It was just an ordinary room where people drank wind and nibbled canapés. In the event HMQ died of natural causes and at a great age. This indicates that the officers responsible for her safety were top of the range.
We went to Welham Green for the weekend. We wanted to see Rohan and I would take the day off to join in the anti Brexit protest in London. The protest was cancelled; which was a scunner. The good news was that I got to see more of Rohan. I may need to go south again in a few weeks when they decide to hold the delayed protest. Have you noticed that Monarch’s only die when there is a Tory government in office? What is the reason for that?
