26.10.22
In the ongoing farce that is Britain’s Tory government, we now have our third Prime Minister in seven weeks — Rishi Sunak, the first Asian to hold the top job, but also the richest PM in British history, with a £730 million fortune via his marriage to Akshata Murty. The daughter of the Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, who founded the technology company Infosys, she has a 0.91% stake in the company, which constitutes most of the Sunak family’s wealth. Sunak himself was a banker from 2001 until his election in 2015, working first for Goldman Sachs, and then for a number of hedge funds.
Promoted to the role of Chancellor under Boris Johnson, Sunak is credited with successfully preventing a total meltdown of the economy during the Covid lockdowns, primarily through the furlough scheme for workers, although, to be honest, any Chancellor in place at the time would have had to do the same. Defeated by Liz Truss in the leadership campaign in the summer, he is now seen as a credible leader by the majority of Tory MPs who backed him over the last week — many, no doubt, pressurised to do so to prevent the choice of leader going back to the untrustworthy Party members who elected Truss — instead of the other contenders, Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson, who somehow thought that he could miraculously return from the political grave into which he had dug himself.
Nevertheless, the painful truth for Sunak is that no one — not even the 81,326 Tory Party members who voted for Liz Truss — voted for him, and it will be hard for him to claim any kind of popular mandate as a result. Hopefully, the calls for a General Election that increased throughout Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership will not fall away now that Truss has gone, because the only way for Sunak to genuinely claim any legitimacy is to ask the public to support him — and not merely to claim that the result of an election nearly three years ago, fought solely on Boris Johnson’s risible claim that he would ‘Get Brexit Done’, has any relevance.
After the chaos of Liz Truss’s brief tenure as PM, Sunak may appear more competent — not least because he repeatedly warned over the summer that Liz Truss’s tax cuts for the rich would be a disaster, and would specifically cause the markets to lose confidence in the government — but make no mistake: he is as doomed as his predecessors to preside over the UK’s continuing decline, because, like Johnson and Truss, and like all the second-rate politicians chosen for their dim-witted Cabinets, he is an intrinsic part of the folly that has gripped the Tory Party for the last six years and four months: the delusion that leaving the EU was a sensible thing to do, rather than the single biggest unprovoked act of national suicide in any of our lifetimes.
Brexit: the ever-present elephant in the room
A half-hour video by the FT, ‘The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK’, released a week ago and already seen by 2.8 million people, is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing insanity of pretending that Boris Johnson ‘got Brexit done’, and that leaving the EU has provided us with any benefits whatsoever, but it is also noticeable that, in just the last few days, prominent Tories have spoken out against the taboo of challenging the fairy tale account of Brexit’s alleged success.
On Monday, billionaire banker and longtime Tory supporter Greg Hands, the founder and chair of the private equity firm Terra Firma, said that the economy was “frankly doomed,” and Britain would become “the sick man of Europe”, unless a Tory leader could be found who possesses “the intellectual capability and the authority to renegotiate Brexit”, and yesterday, as Sunak rook office, Jürgen Maier, the vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, and a former CEO of Siemens UK, had an article published in the Guardian in which he urged Sunak and the government to stop lying about Brexit, and to “rejoin the single market and customs union.”
He described the lie that we “could replace the economic upside of being part of the most advanced free-trade zone in the world” as the Brexiteers’ “biggest lie of them all”, and explained, “This does not mean opening a debate about rejoining the EU. That ship sailed some time ago. But there is a new possibility. The EU has held out an olive branch: to join a grouping of European countries that don’t want to be part of the EU but do want to benefit from its single market and many collaborative bodies.”
The unforgivable appointment of the racist and authoritarian Suella Braverman as home secretary
In addition, although Sunak began his premiership on Tuesday by promising “integrity”, that promise has already been undermined by appointments that reek of favours for some of those who supported him; in particular, the dreadful re-appointment of the hysterical racist Suella Braverman — the daughter of immigrants — as home secretary, just six days after she resigned for breaking the ministerial code, after sharing confidential government information via her personal email. At the Tory Party conference earlier this month, she appalled listeners outside of the narrow racist and xenophobic crowd in the conference hall by gleefully declaring that it was her “dream” and “obsession” to successfully deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, the shameful policy introduced by her predecessor Priti Patel.
Braverman’s presence indicates that, on immigration, Sunak’s government will continue to persecute anyone daring to come to the UK, either as refugees, or as economic migrants in search of gainful employment. The ongoing Brexit debacle shows how short-sighted this is, and it scarcely seems credible that any progression can be made on alleviating our chronic shortage of workers by handing the policing of our borders to the vile Braverman.
As well as seeking to keep the UK isolated, friendless and alone, Braverman’s appointment is also alarming because it suggests that she will also press ahead with the monstrously anti-democratic provisions of the latest Public Order Bill, introduced by Priti Patel, which seeks to criminalise even the very thought of dissent. As George Monbiot explains in the Guardian today, under the bill, “anyone who has protested in the previous five years, or has encouraged other people to protest, can be forced to ‘submit to … being fitted with, or the installation of, any necessary apparatus’ to monitor their movements. In other words, if you attend or support any protest in which ‘serious disruption to two or more individuals or to an organisation’ occurs, you can be forced to wear an electronic tag.” As Monbiot adds, “Serious disruption” was redefined in Patel’s Police Crime and Sentencing Act “to include noise.”
Ongoing doubts regarding the Tories’ environmental awareness
Elsewhere, although it is a relief that the climate change denier Jacob Rees-Mogg has resigned, Sunak apparently has no room for Alok Sharma, the only truly environmentally conscious Tory minister, who was the President of COP26, the climate summit that took place in Glasgow last year, and who has taken his job — and its message — seriously.
Sharma, who, like Rees-Mogg, supported to return of the disgraced Boris Johnson as Prime Minister (perhaps because Johnson, for all his myriad faults, reportedly recognised the seriousness of the climate crisis when briefed by Sharma) will apparently only stay on until the COP27 summit, which begins in Egypt next month.
Another environmental blow is the move from health to the environment of the lamentable Thérèse Coffey, who, under Truss, aroused the ire of health professionals by suggesting that people should hand out antibiotics to their friends and family members, and who, as a junior minister in DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) managed to antagonise both the National Trust and the RSPB.
Both of those organisations have already been mobilising the support of their members (many of whom are, lest we forget, Tories) against Liz Truss’s enthusiasm for completely unregulated “investment zones” across the country, where workers’ rights, planning law and environmental protections would be torn up (a dream of her backers in the unaccountable far-right ‘libertarian’ lobbying groups based in Tufton Street), and it remains to be seen if Sunak ditches these plans.
Also of enormous concern is Truss’s similar, Tufton Street-backed enthusiasm for the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, introduced by Rees-Mogg, another Tufton Street puppet, and currently making its way through Parliament, which proposes, by December 2023, getting rid of 2,400 laws that are a legacy of our EU membership, and which, again, involves getting rid of workers’ rights and environmental protections, as well as fundamental health and safety protections. As with the establishment of “investment zones”, it remains to be seen if these shameful proposals — intended, in the absence of the UK having a written constitution, to allow the government to scrap all kinds of fundamental laws and protections without scrutiny — will be dropped.
On the plus side — if there is one — the presence in Sunak’s Cabinet of Remainer Jeremy Hunt, and Michael Gove, returning as the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, who, despite his key role in the Vote Leave campaign, seems to have the intelligence to recognise that all is not rosy in Brexit’s “sunlit uplands”, suggests that, if Braverman can somehow be removed, grown-up discussions about the impact of Brexit might finally be allowed to permeate the isolationist stupidity that has consumed Tory ministers since 2016, and that has, fatally, divorced politics from common sense.
It’s a thin straw to cling to — and it won’t be offset by Hunt’s enthusiasm for austerity — but it may be the only glimmer of hope.
Please, no return to austerity
Austerity, however, will be the main battlefield on which Sunak’s government survives or fails with the public. While the Tories have spent the last four months engaged in their various leadership psychodramas — and the mainstream media have, in general, slavishly devoted themselves to every twist and turn of this ridiculous soap opera, the ‘cost of living’ crisis, involving rampant inflation, and out of control energy bills, is still pushing half of the country into destitution, and threatening a wipeout of businesses.
Truss’s only concession was a two-year cap on energy prices, which would have ensured that the average household’s energy bills would be £2,500 a year, but that plan was spiked by Jeremy Hunt when he took over as Chancellor from Kwasi Kwarteng, the architect, with Truss, of the doomed tax cuts ‘mini-budget’, and the cap is now only scheduled to last until next spring.
In addition, Hunt has also been suggesting that the only way to deal with the economic damage caused by the recklessness of Truss and Kwarteng is to inflict massive cuts on the country’s public finances, even though there is nothing left to cut after the devastation wreaked by David Cameron and George Osborne — with Hunt’s support — in the early years of what is now 12 years of misery inflicted by the Tories on the British people.
Sunak and his team are, of course, aware that the Tories’ popularity sank to its lowest level in living memory under Truss, with the Labour Party currently commanding a 36-point lead over the Tories, with Labour on 56% and the Tories on just 20%.
With Truss gone, Sunak can expect something of a bounce in Tory support, but there is no reason to suppose that it will be significant, without policies that genuinely tackle the ‘cost of living’ crisis, rather than just appeasing the markets by making the poor even poorer.
An urgent need for windfall taxes and tax rises for the rich
What is needed, very clearly, is, first of all, a windfall tax on the energy giants who have made huge unearned profits because of rising prices following the war in Ukraine. The EU announced a windfall tax at the end of September, which, along with a cap on the revenues of renewable energy and nuclear power companies … in response to the ‘unexpectedly large financial gains’ made in recent months, as a result of their profits being linked to the price of expensive gas and coal”, is expected to raise £123 billion.
A similar windfall tax for the UK would work out at around £20 billion, but there is no sign, as yet, that the government wants to pursue the energy giants, despite Shell’s outgoing CEO, Ben van Beurden, declaring just four weeks ago that a tax on energy giants’ profits was “inevitable” as a way of “protecting the poorest” people in society. Instead, under Truss, proposals were put forward by Rees-Mogg for a tax on renewables and nuclear power — accidental beneficiaries of a pricing system rigged in favour of fossil fuels — but not for the much bigger windfall tax.
Perhaps reason will prevail on energy costs, but it seems unlikely that the government will take other necessary steps to protect half the country from destitution. Brexit, of course, which has led to the loss 16% of trade from the UK to the EU, and 20% of trade from the EU to the UK, urgently needs addressing, but so too does a fundamental Tory Party shibboleth: the obsession with cutting taxes rather than raising them. As the organisation Tax Justice UK explained yesterday, “Rishi Sunak’s new government could raise up to £37bn to help pay for public services and the energy bills support scheme if it introduced a string of ‘wealth taxes’”, as the Guardian described it.
As Tom Peters, Tax Justice UK’s head of advocacy, said, “Tax is about political choices. At a time when most people are being hit hard by the cost of living crisis it would be wrong to cut public services further. The wealthy have done really well financially in the last few years. The chancellor should protect public spending by taxing wealth properly.”
Another organisation, the UK Wealth Tax Commission, went even further last year, recommending that “a one-off 1% wealth tax on households with more than £1m, perhaps payable in instalments over five years, would generate £260bn” — enough to dig us out of a hole that is largely of the Tories’ own making.
But with Rishi Sunak married to a woman who, undoubtedly with his blessing, took advantage of the loopholes afforded to the super-rich by claiming “non dom” status, and not paying UK taxes on money earned abroad until that particular scandal was exposed (although she has since agreed to pay taxes, she has refused to give up her “non dom” status, despite very obviously living here), it may be unwise to expect that this particular PM will do anything to upset the one group he cares about above all — no, not the Asian community, whether rich or poor, for whom he is now supposed to be some kind of figurehead, but the rich and the super-rich who are, quite clearly, the only people he really cares about.
Can Labour wake up?
There’s an opening here for the Labour Party to not just sit back and watch as its current extraordinary lead in the polls shrink, but for that to happen Keir Starmer will need to define policies that benefit the majority of the country, who are suffering, and stop his obsession with being nothing more than a slightly less horrible version of the Tories, and miring himself in imaginary battlegrounds from which the public have already moved on.
To give just two examples, on Brexit, over half the country now believes that it was a mistake (52% against 35% supporting Brexit), but instead of embracing the opportunities for advocating for a return to the single market and freedom of movement, Starmer insists instead that he will “make Brexit work”, and on environmental protest, while 66% of respondents in recent polling declared their support for protestors’ actions, Starmer was, instead, bleating on about maximising prison sentences in an excruciating radio interview.
If Starmer doesn’t shape up, I fear that he will go down as the Labour leader who squandered the biggest electoral lead of our lifetimes — all because he couldn’t identify with the real people of the UK, and remained fixated on those with ‘aspirations’, on law and order, and on ‘populist’ anti-immigration sentiment that is both heartless and wrong, and that also no longer reflects the Brexit crisis that the whole country is currently facing, and will forever face until someone with courage can be found to challenge its toxic fantasies.
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.
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Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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21 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Here’s my latest article, looking at the colossal challenges faced by Rishi Sunak, who has become the Conservative Party’s fourth Brexit Prime Minister in six years, after the ousting of the lamentable Liz Truss.
Sunak is trying to position himself as promoting ”integrity”, but his Cabinet choices have already betrayed him; in particular, the return of the hideously racist Suella Braverman, the daughter of immigrants, as home secretary, less than a week after she was forced to resign for breaking the ministerial code.
I believe that Sunak is doomed as soon as his premiership has begun, because it seems clear that he will implement savage austerity cuts, largely to pay for the damage caused by Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, but also because, as I describe it, “he is as doomed as his predecessors to preside over the UK’s continuing decline, because, like Johnson and Truss, and like all the second-rate politicians chosen for their dim-witted Cabinets, he is an intrinsic part of the folly that has gripped the Tory Party for the last six years and four months: the delusion that leaving the EU was a sensible thing to do, rather than the single biggest unprovoked act of national suicide in any of our lifetimes.”
There’s much more in the article that I hope is worthy of attention, as I try to provide a coherent overview of the fractured Tories trying to portray themselves as unified and coherent. As ever, a General Election would be the best way for them to test whether or not they have the support of the people, but we’ll have to see whether Sunak gets any kind of bounce in the polls, or if the Tories continue be extraordinarily unpopular.
And if they fail to recover support, of course, what is also needed is for Keir Starmer to, as I describe it, “stop his obsession with being nothing more than a slightly less horrible version of the Tories, and miring himself in imaginary battlegrounds from which the public have already moved on.”
...on October 26th, 2022 at 6:51 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Ed Calipel wrote:
More of the mind-numbing, credulity-stretching same from Sunak.
The reversal on fracking is welcomed but it’s a purely political statement, certainly not a commitment to address the existential peril in any real way; sadly far from it.
...on October 26th, 2022 at 7:59 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, it looks very like a doomed effort to create a unified front, Ed, especially with the inclusion of the disgraceful – and so recently disgraced – Suella Braverman. I’ll be interested to see whether the Tories’ improvement in the polls will be more than a few percentage points.
As for fracking, well yes, it’s just a sensible return to the 2019 manifesto position, but as you say, it doesn’t represent any kind of effort to address what you so rightly call “the existential peril.” It really does seems that these people don’t pay any attention to any of the news regarding climate change – like this, today, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/26/atmospheric-levels-greenhouse-gases-record-high
...on October 26th, 2022 at 8:00 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Ed Calipel wrote:
Andy, the rhododendron are coming into flower here as are many plants that should be going into dormancy.
The grass has grown six inches in the last week; while the “government” plays infantile games to facilitate lining pockets whatever the cost.
...on October 26th, 2022 at 9:06 pm
Andy Worthington says...
I am so desperately hoping that some government somewhere will break ranks, and admit what’s going on, Ed, but I suspect it’s actually the premise of a fictional script. A government gets into power, and then, on day one, says, we’re going to drastically rewrite how our society works, because of the impending climate catastrophe, which will make the planet uninhabitable. You’re no going to like it, and, as a result, you can vote us out in 4 or 5 years’ time, but by then you’ll actually realise that we’re telling the truth.
Your account of the rhododendron and the growing grass is quite alarming, although not unusual. Because I’ve been cycling all year round for 10 years, I know what October is supposed to be like, and it’s not like this. It’s far too warm, in general, and sometimes hot, as in summer heat, and yet the media aren’t reporting it, and very few people, as far as I can tell, have even noticed. The default position, as usual, is that it’s nice to be having such ‘mild’ weather. I wonder how hot it will have to get, and how many crops will have to fail before people pay attention.
...on October 26th, 2022 at 9:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Ed Calipel wrote:
I know; social media is full of “it’s a glorious day”-type comments.
While there’s no turning back the damage done by humanity in essentially a microsecond of Earth’s time, it was good to
see a resurgence in wildlife during and just after the lock-downs, similarly the vast improvement in air quality. Both short-lived, as was much of the wildlife.
Vested interest is all that stops meaningful action but that vested interest is protected by the actions of the many who still see no conflict in supporting Nestlé or McDonald’s and the effect on their children’s future.
...on October 26th, 2022 at 9:47 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, lockdown was definitely a time of healing our relationship with the earth, Ed, however infinitesimally briefly in the grand scheme of things. London was so quiet. I heard birdsong in Covent Garden, the roads were largely empty (at the beginning, at least), the din and pollution of construction sites stopped, and people could only gather in parks, where appreciation of nature was almost certainly more pronounced.
Sadly, it all got forgotten so quickly. Now if you mention it, and can get people to reflect on it, they become quite wistful, I’ve noticed.
...on October 26th, 2022 at 9:48 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Robert Robertson wrote:
Andy, I would say that some urban wildlife has actually improved in my lifetime in many ways. However clearly bird song has declined. I remember being woken up by it in the nineties. In Lewisham. The biggest damage I think is in rural areas and linked to devastating habitat loss. As an RSPB and BTO member I read about this all the time. The reduction in biomass across the board is frightening and getting worse.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:42 am
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks for your perspective, Bob. It’s been good to see so much resistance from the RSPB and other conservation groups in response to the ‘investment zones’ proposals, and the planned scrapping of remaining EU laws, but sobering to realise how much habitat loss there has been since I used to spend time in the countryside in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:42 am
Andy Worthington says...
Robert Robertson wrote:
The reasons for implementing austerity are as Corbyn described. During his tenure he destroyed all arguments in favour of it and changed the national conversation. Suddenly every party was opposed to austerity. Except they weren’t. They were just waiting for the opportunity to reinstate it as the default paradigm. Make the poorest pay the most. Brexit has exacerbated our problems I agree, but elevating it’s importance blinds us to the reality that austerity was the default economic choice long before Brexit. Being in the EU didn’t prevent it after 2008. Neither did it prevent the market crash. We need to keep a perspective otherwise you repeat the mistakes of the second referendum campaign whose only achievement was to help the Tories win an election and guarantee that not even a soft Brexit was possible.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:43 am
Andy Worthington says...
I know what you’re saying, Bob, but Brexit still plays a massive part in our specific impoverishment compared to other countries. We need to be talking about the importance of the single market and the importance of freedom of movement, and how to restore both – with or without actually rejoining the EU.
You seem to think that opinions from several years ago are somehow frozen in stone, when the reality seems very much to be that buyers’ remorse is increasing year on year. More and more people can tell that Brexit isn’t working, and that it’s harming us, and the more people realise that, the more they’ll also realise that the Tories have been lying to us for six years.
I agree about the significance of austerity, but perhaps more people need to think about what Danny Blanchflower and Richard Murphy are saying: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/austerity-something-britain-simply-cant-28328555
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:44 am
Andy Worthington says...
Paul O’Hanlon wrote:
Very good article Andy. How long will Rishi (RICHi) Sunak last? Over the past few weeks everytime I switch on the TV news there is a new Prime Minister. I’ve forgotten half the names already. The one thing that amazed me was that there was serious or at least half serious talk of Boris Johnson becoming PM again after the outrageous scandal of ‘Partygate’. Politicians of all stripes represent the rich and not the ordinary worker. Two thirds of MPs are millionaires and ex PM Liz Truss will get a pension of £115,000 a year. It has been said that politics is the shadow cast on society by big business and what is really needed is a People’s Parliament. The clocks go back an hour this weekend and the coming winter could be very harsh for the needy. The US government is proud of blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline on which so many European countries depend for heat. Worse than political shenanigans, bad though they are, is the frightening spectacle of a nuclear conflict in Eastern Europe. So let’s all freeze and starve in order to hurt Putin? I disliked May, Johnson, Truss and am no great fan of Sunak. Starmer is simply another Tory in the style of Blair. What about the issues of Guantanamo and Julian Assange? Can we expect much sympathy from Suella Braverman? I doubt it very much. It looks like there is one solution – revolution!
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:45 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, it’s all looking rather bleak, Paul, but it’s the climate crisis that’s going to overwhelm everything else in just the next few years. As I noted above, I’ve been cycling every day for the last ten years, and there’s never been an October like this. I’m still wearing shorts, on some days it’s hot like summer, and the media isn’t even reporting it. And in the meantime, the failure of governments to stick to the targets agreed to a climate summit after summit is truly alarming. A new UN report shows that current pledges will “lead to an increase in emissions of about 10.6% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels”, as the Guardian explained, even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “estimated that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by about 45% by 2030 compared with 2010 levels, to give the world a chance of staying within 1.5C.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/26/current-emissions-pledges-will-lead-to-catastrophic-climate-breakdown-says-un
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:45 am
Andy Worthington says...
Paul O’Hanlon wrote:
Andy, as Media Lens has pointed out in their latest release it is what is not being reported is the issue – including climate change. There was silence over the US/NATO blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline and sadly no mainstream coverage of either Julian Assange or the continuing abomination of Guantanamo. I’m dreading the coming winter – could a nuclear war break out in Eastern Europe? Hope you’re well, Paul.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:46 am
Andy Worthington says...
I have to hope that the ‘mutually assured destruction’ element of nuclear weapons prevails, Paul – that any act of nuclear aggression will be met with the same in return, so no one wins. However, it remains troubling that there isn’t consensus in the west on seeking a negotiated end to this war. I see that there have been major protests against NATO in various EU countries – but that’s not reported here, of course, and they’re probably also subject to a media blackout in the countries where they take place. Criticism of NATO seems to be one of the most prominent of the western media’s many taboo subjects.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:47 am
Andy Worthington says...
With perfect timing, a coalition of 40 charities and campaigning groups – including Oxfam, Save the Children, Greenpeace, the New Economics Foundation and War on Want – has just launched ‘Stop the Squeeze’, a campaign with three demands: higher taxes on wealth, affordable, clean energy for all, and a rise in incomes and benefits so that everyone can afford to live. https://www.stopthesqueeze.uk
...on October 27th, 2022 at 9:48 am
Andy Worthington says...
David Knopfler wrote:
Perfect timing indeed, Andy.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 10:01 am
Andy Worthington says...
And on the same day that Shell has reported quarterly profits of $8.2 billion, David. Windfall taxes are urgently needed on these kinds of massive unearned profits, but the government also needs to urgently review the energy costs paid by consumers. As the Guardian noted today, “oil prices have fallen from their highs of $120 a barrel of brent crude in June to current levels of about $95 a barrel, while natural gas prices have also dropped and are about 70% lower than their peak in late August.” And yet, funnily enough, these massive lowered costs don’t seem to be translating into lower bills. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/27/shell-doubles-its-profits-to-95bn
...on October 27th, 2022 at 10:01 am
Andy Worthington says...
David Knopfler wrote:
Andy, I think it’s coming in some form or another – it has to – the pressure on Hunt to deal with a 300 billion black hole in their annual budget is remorseless.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 10:39 am
Andy Worthington says...
Most reports I’ve seen suggest that ‘black hole’ is £35 billion, David. I’m not sure where you got your figure of £300 billion from. I do, however, think that it’s worth paying attention to economists like Danny Blanchflower and Richard Murphy who refute the absolute notion of a ‘black hole’ in a country that has the ability to introduce quantitative easing at times of crisis. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/austerity-something-britain-simply-cant-28328555
None of this, however, should detract from the need for windfall taxes – on energy companies, but also on banks – as well as stepped-up efforts to tackle corporate tax avoidance and tax evasion, as well as increased taxes on the wealthy. Hopefully we’re reaching a point where it’s longer acceptable to try to use the poorer half of the population to support the wealth of the undertaxed or the untaxed rich. Austerity was a disaster under Cameron and Osborne, but the situation is so much worse now, with so many millions of people unable to afford to live.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 10:40 am
Andy Worthington says...
Meanwhile, the Suella Braverman scandal was ratcheted up several notches yesterday after Jake Berry, the Tory Party chairman under Truss, told TalkTV that her sacking six days ago, prior to her reinstatement by Sunak, wasn’t because she had broken the ministerial code, but because she was responsible for “multiple breaches of the ministerial code” after “sending confidential information to a private address, sending it to an MP, attempting to send it to the MP’s wife and then accidentally sending it to a member of parliamentary staff.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/26/suella-braverman-return-after-security-breach-defended-by-james-cleverly
Hopefully, this dreadful bigoted woman’s days are numbered, but it really would be preferable for her to be dismissed because she appears to think that there is nothing more important in life than sending the most desperate and vulnerable people who seek to get to the UK in small boats to Rwanda, and imposing savage prison sentences for people who superglue themselves to roads to highlight the ever-worsening climate catastrophe.
...on October 27th, 2022 at 10:41 am