Rebooting the bastard machine

Columnists hail a new government even as it refines the same old cruelties.

Since his best friend, best man, and best source in government, Rishi Sunak, failed to become Tory leader and Prime Minister, Spectator political editor James Forsyth has had to swing behind Liz Truss. In his Times column this week, he assured readers that:

The Tories are now offering something very different from what went before; they don’t look like a tired party that has run out of things to do after 12 years in office.

The bastard machine’s been rebooted and it’s now operating according to a blueprint sketched out by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). Tim Montgomerie, who’ll no doubt be drummed out of the Tory magic circle for explaining the trick, tweeted after Kwasi Kwarteng’s quasi-budget yesterday:

A massive moment for the IEA. They’ve been advocating these policies for years. They incubated Truss and Kwarteng during their early years as MPs. Britain is now their laboratory.

It’s like The Manchurian Candidate if the sleeper agent wore a big badge at all times that read “I am a sleeper agent”.

Just over a year ago — in August 2021 — the IEA lost a two-year battle against LBC and its presenter James O’Brien. It complained to the media regulator Ofcom after O’Brien and his guest OpenDemocracy’s Peter Geoghegan correctly defined the IEA as a politically-motivated lobbying organisation funded by “dark money” and called one of the think-tank’s representatives “some Herbert” (again correct).

Ofcom rejected the IEA’s complaint of “unjust or unfair treatment” and it responded by publishing a blog post calling the ruling “bizarre” and claiming the decision “fanned the delusions of conspiracy theorists peddling smear campaigns.” The IEA still doesn’t disclose who funds it but they are certainly getting value for money now.

As are the backers of the IEA’s Tufton Street neighbours, the Centre for Policy Studies, whose director, Sunday Times columnist and Tory 2019 manifesto co-author, Robert Colville tweeted a tick list of policies he claimed his think-tank had inspired.

The headline of The Times’ so-called “in-depth” analysis of yesterday’s events says Liz Truss risks everything on her own dash for UK growth but she’s risking nothing. She has made it into Downing Street and has the guarantee of a post-politics live full of well-paid speeches and directorships. She knows that her premiership might only last less than two years so she’s approaching government like a giddy drunk driver.

The Times piece ends with a snapshot of Truss’ irresponsible joy:

On her first day in New York, hours after landing, she insisted on waking two of her reluctant aides at 6am and going for a run in Central Park. “She has been in government for so long and finally now she is the one in charge — and she knows what she wants to do. Of course she’s enjoying it,” they said.

It’s an anecdote designed to project the impression that “the Prime Minister has a lot of get-up-and-go”, but actually suggests the sort of unbearable person who’ll wake you up simply because they fancy a jog.

Over at The Sun, the leader column thunders Liz Truss has gambled on growth — but what alternative does she have? and says anyone objecting to yet another act of national self-harm is indulging in “hysterical rage”. It is the voice of Rupert Murdoch echoing behind a hollow chuckle at “owning the libs”:

… we have to salute a Government which couldn’t care less what the Left, or Twitter, think if its decisions are making Britain better off.

You see, Twitter isn’t the true voice of the people; that’s the leader column of The Sun.

In The Daily Mail, Andrew Neil pulls out the same line used by Forsyth and Lord Ashcroft:

After 12 years of Tory government we finally get a Tory budget.

Of course, The Daily Telegraph’s Alastair Heath — a man who couldn’t get more unhinged if he unscrewed every door in his house — was especially delighted. Beneath the headline Kwasi Kwarteng's Budget is a moment in history that will radically transform Britain — remember when John Betjeman called on those friendly bombs to “radically transform Slough? — he chunters:

… Liz Truss and Kwarteng are very much for real, and in revolutionary mood. The neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian, redistributionist obsession, the technocratic centrism, the genuflections at the altar of a bogus class war, the spreadsheet-wielding socialists: all were blown to smithereens by Kwarteng’s stunning neo-Reaganite peroration.

Heath’s barely damping down his erection because the “bogus class war” — which still managed to kill a lot of poor and disabled people — is over and the real one is back on. Down with even pretending to be egalitarian and don’t bother with redistribution, the proles will only waste the money.

Reaching for a Filofax and dreaming of a mobile phone the size of a housebrick, Heath is in a state of ecstatic 80s revival revelry:

[Kwarteng] wants to usher in a new Big Bang in the City and launch dozens of new Canary Wharfs on steroids.

He wasn’t the only columnist this week to evoke Canary Wharf as a totem of what must be done. In The Times, on the morning before the kwasi-budget, Emma Duncan bastardised the plot of The Long Good Friday then wrote:

[Bob Hoskins’s] character anticipated the frantic spate of building that was shortly to turn Wapping, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs into an eastern extension of the City. The impact on the local economy was dramatic. Tower Hamlets, the local authority into which those areas fall, has gone from being an economic basket case to having the highest labour productivity in Britain. The transformation was brought about not by a dodgy developer but by a smart piece of policymaking, which Liz Truss would do well to replicate.

Tower Hamlets is the most deprived borough in London. 56% of children in Tower Hamlets live in poverty. Life expectancy in Tower Hamlets is 4 years lower in Kensington & Chelsea. But productivity’s great so get out the party poppers! Duncan ignoresthat the “regeneration” of the Docklands forced hundreds of people out of their homes and businesses, and built inequality into the geography.

Bob Hoskins knew exactly what Michael Heseltine and the London Docklands Development Corporation were doing. In an edition of Omnibus, broadcast in 1982, a year after the quango was established, he explained:

They’re going to run a road right the way through the middle of [Wapping] separating the ‘water people ‘— the rich Wapping who live by the river — and the poor Wapping who live on the other side of the road. It’s called ‘regenerating the river’, bringing it back to life, making it a playground for the wealthy.

That’s what happened and that’s how it remains.

The ghouls of The Daily Telegraph are now lining up for another attack on the lowest paid; Daniel Hannan (“At last, a new vision of a prosperous Britain – not one hooked on handouts and subsidies”), Janet Daley (“Tories must not believe the Left’s lie that tax cuts are unpopular”) and the particularly odious Matthew Lynn (“… ’work’ in Britain seems to have been turned into an optional pursuit.”) among them

According to the Resolution Foundation, the kwasi-budget means someone currently earning £1m will gain £55,220 a year, while someone earning £20,000 will be just £157 better off. It’s robbing Peter not to pay Paul but to pour more coins into Scrooge McDuck’s vault. It’s Canary Wharf vs. Tower Hamlets for the whole country.

The word “gamble” is a common denomintator in the coverage, from the sceptical and even some of the true beleivers, but what’s missing from most analysis is and acknowledgment truth that Truss and Kwarteng are not the ones putting up the stake, or that the casino is already paying out for their backers.

The FT’s Sebastian Payne writes:

The economic gamble is not wholly cynical: a lower tax economy is something Truss and Kwarteng believe in, have been writing and arguing about for well over a decade (see the Britannia Unchained book, Free Enterprise Group, Free campaign groups). Now we’ll actually see if it works.

Commentators can treat the IEA lab experiment with the breeziness shown in that last line because politics and economics are largely a game to them. They are living by the river, not on the other side of the road.

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