Let us start with the obvious – Rishi Sunak is a far-right, bad-tempered, vain ‘Richy Rich’ Tory. By the sloth of Scotland’s SNP, this nation of ours, our rights and liberty, may well be crushed by his schemes to see us shackled and force fed. The European parliament declared earlier this month that Hungary is not by any definition a full democracy. Elections take place, but European norms and democratic standards are systematically ignored. The EU calls Hungry an “electoral autocracy”. England cannot be far behind.
We are faced by the most hostile governments in my living memory, and I include Scotland’s government in that remark. They ‘detest’ the people. Once elected, they jettison key policies and sneak in new ones they know are unpopular or unwelcome but have the majority of seats to see them passed – and call it the democratic system.
The Tory party is the most right-wing I can recall since Thatcher, her awful tenure capped when she glad-handed the military dictator of Chile, General Pinochet, and Labour allowed him free passage home. Pinochet knew how to exploit the new religion of neoliberal economics used to tame his people, and those untameable, removed in the night to be shot. (With the help of the Ford Motor Company and their free trucks. Fords disliked union leaders in their factories.) Suella Braverman wants to put an ankle monitor on our union members and dissidents – out-doing Putin and his way of dealing with pains in the political ass.
And England’s Labour party shows no signs of rescinding Tory policies should it achieve power, certainly not under the right-wing leadership of Sir Keir – don’t stand in picket lines – Starmer.
The truly astounding aspect about Little Sunak’s new-old cabinet is that he offers authority to people who have, like himself, anticedents of the Windrush generation and British colonial brutality, the slave trade, to be blunt, doing to White United Kingdom citizens what was done to their ancestors, and all in the name of the wealthy power elite.
English Africans and Indians have joined the enemy’s ranks because it pays good money and lifts their status. They have become what they hated, the oppressors. They talk the same talk, they dress the same, they drive big limousines and live in big houses.
So far it is all about English laws, but the danger lies in Scotland’s national party either slavishly copying English laws, or coerced into introducing repressive policies. The SNP has form, viz-a-viz bringing in a ban on petitions, protests or debate held around our Parliament’s perimeter. Who thought a national party of Scots would censor Scottish nationalists?
As the crackdown on our freedoms intensifies, the list of our national ailments seems endless. But there’s one issue that can prise things open. George Monbiot explains.
SUNAK’S BRITAIN IS BROKEN
by George Monbiot
Before we decide what needs to change, let’s take stock of what we have lost. I want to begin with what happened last week. I don’t mean the resignation of the prime minister. This is more important. Almost all the media reported a scripted comment by the newly reinstated home secretary, Suella Braverman, about the “tofu-eating wokerati”. Astonishingly, scarcely any of them reported what she was doing at the time. She was pushing through the House of Commons the most repressive legislation of the modern era.
Under the public order 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. “Serious disruption” was redefined by the 2022 Police Act to include noise.
This is just one of a series of astounding measures in the bill, which has been hardly remarked upon in public life as it passes through Britain’s legislature. What we see here is two losses in one moment: the final erasure of the right to protest, and political journalism’s mutation from reporting substance to reporting spectacle. These are just the latest of our losses.
So extreme has inequality become, and so dangerous is the combination of frozen wages, lagging benefits, rising rents and mortgage repayments, soaring bills and food inflation, that millions of people are being pushed towards destitution. Unless something changes, many will soon lose their homes. In the midst of this crisis, we have been gifted a prime minister who owns four luxury “homes”. One of them is an empty flat in Kensington that he reserves for visiting relatives.
While Rishi Sunak was chancellor, the government repeatedly delayed its manifesto promise to ban no-fault evictions. Landlords are ruthlessly exploiting this power to throw their tenants on to the street or use the threat to force them to accept outrageous rent rises and dismal conditions. Had Sunak’s “help to buy” mortgage scheme succeeded (it was a dismal flop), it would have raised house prices, increasing rents and making ownership less accessible: the opposite of its stated aim. But this, as with all such schemes, was its true purpose: to inflate the assets of existing owners, the Conservative party’s base.
Public services are collapsing at breathtaking speed. Headteachers warn that 90% of schools in England could run out of money next year. NHS dentistry is on the verge of total collapse. Untold numbers are now living in constant pain and, in some cases, extracting their own teeth. The suspicion that the NHS is being deliberately dismembered, its core services allowed to fail so that we cease to defend it against privatisation, rises ever higher in the mind.
But Sunak appears determined only to hack ever further. Sitting on a family fortune of £730m, he seems unmoved by the plight of people so far removed from him in wealth that they must seem to exist on another planet. He is the oligarch’s oligarch, ever responsive to the demands of big capital and the three plutocrats who own the country’s biggest newspapers, oblivious of the needs of the 67 million people who live here.
After 12 years of Conservative austerity and chaos, the very rich have taken almost everything. They have even captured virtue. They now appropriate the outward signs of an ethical life while continuing – despite or because of their organic cotton jackets and second homes, their electric cars and pasture-fed meat, their carbon offsets and ayahuasca retreats, philanthropy and holidays in quiet resorts whose palm-thatched cabins mimic the vernacular of the people evicted to make way for them – to grasp the lion’s share of everything.
Corruption is embedded in public life. Fraud is scarcely prosecuted. Organised crime has been so widely facilitated, through the destruction of the state’s capacity to regulate everything from money laundering to waste dumping, that you could almost believe it was deliberate. Our rivers have been reduced to sewers, our soil is washing off the land, the planning system is being dismantled, and hundreds of environmental laws are now under threat. We hurtle towards Earth systems oblivion, while frenetically talking about anything but.
In other words, it’s not just a general election we need, it’s a complete rethink of who we are and where we stand. It’s not just proportional representation we need, but radical devolution to the lowest possible levels at which decisions can be made, accompanied by deliberative, participatory democracy. It’s not just new lobbying laws we require, but a comprehensive programme to get the money out of politics, ending all private political donations, breaking up the billionaire press and demanding full financial transparency for everyone in public life. We should seek not only the repeal of repressive legislation, but – as civil disobedience is the bedrock of democracy – positive rights to protest.
All this now feels far away. Jeremy Corbyn offered some (though by no means all) of these reforms. Keir Starmer offers none. Though Labour MPs voted against the public order bill, his only public comment so far has been to endorse its headline policy: longer sentences for people who glue themselves to roads. But if the Labour party or its future coalition partners can persuade him to agree to just one aspect of this programme, proportional representation, we can start work on the rest, building the political alliances that could transform the life of this nation. Without PR, we’re stuck with a dysfunctional duopoly, in hock to the billionaire press and the millionaires it appoints to govern us. We cannot carry on like this.
NOTE: George Joshua Richard Monbiot, born 27 January 1963) is a British writer and Guardian newspaper columnist, known for his environmental and political activism. He is the author of a number of books. Monbiot grew up in Oxfordshire and studied zoology at the University of Oxford. He then began a career in investigative journalism, publishing his first book Poisoned Arrows in 1989 about human rights issues in West Papua. In later years, he has been involved in activism and advocacy related to various issues, such as climate change, British politics, loneliness and rewilding. He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.[2] Monbiot was awarded the Global 500 in 1995 and the Orwell Prize in 2022.
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Grouse Beater 
Reblogged this on Ramblings of a now 60+ Female.
Outlooks and Expectations
George Joshua Richard Monbiot was born in 27 January 1963. I was born on 8.4.1957 and I’m now a retired person who used to be a self-employed DSA ADI (Driving Instructor); we are very different people from different countries… Most of what I’ve just written will be understandable to Mr Monbiot, of course; however, there really are differences in each other’s outlooks.
He writes about “the government” – I presume he means the London government; and nowadays, that is more questionable than ever before. Generally speaking, the ‘UK’ is really NOT the ‘United Kingdom’ that our parents recognised. My personal opinion isn’t important here; however, it’s increasingly obvious that Scotland’s public opinions are more in favour of recognising and perhaps supporting Scottish Independence.
However, when this archipelago known as ‘Britain’ is considered, it seems logical to many of us that the nations/areas within the Union – the UK was formed more than three centuries ago – can be peacefully ended any time soon. Anyway, ‘keyboarding opinions’ are only one element of peaceful behaviours and have inherently limited results. Comparatively speaking, a large public gathering or march is almost impossible to ignore… We can expect to see and hear more of this in future.
“The truly astounding aspect about Little Sunak’s new-old cabinet is that he offers authority to people who have, like himself, antecedents of the Windrush generation and British colonial brutality, the slave trade, to be blunt, doing to White United Kingdom citizens what was done to their ancestors, and all in the name of the wealthy power elite.”
Yes GB, just as the pigs displacing the humans in Animal Farm the browns & blacks are replacing the whites in Westminster.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
If anything is going to change, then it must be done from the bottom up, with a return to consensus politics. Yes, GB, the latest few governments have been getting consistently worse and more autocratic and totalitarian (and I include the SNP government in that). It has been the politicians who have enabled all the corruption and graft to happen because they have been the mouthpieces of one section of society only – the big business/City enclave that continually demands that its voice be heard and policies enacted to suit it. The wee folk never really get a fair deal, but for a few years from the late 1940s to the 1970s (barely thirty years) we saw genuine efforts to pull people up, educate them, house them adequately, provide long-term employment, etc.
The Tories were always sitting in their web of deceit like a fat, black spider, ready to pounce and confine the fly (us). They hated social change that helped the lower orders and waited their time to pounce. Even Thatcher, whose policies have led to this dystopian era in which we live, lacked the imagination to see ahead. Her policies looked good to Tories/capitalists, and, though she must have known the pain they would cause ordinary people, she was far too invested in her own rightness to listen to reason. However, she did not foresee the devastation to the UK those policies would bring, nor did she foresee the extent of the collaboration between the elected representatives and Big business/the City to the extent that only London and the South-east had the slightest chance of making a go of it.
The rest of the UK, especially, Northern and Midlands England, and Scotland and Wales, not to mention NI, were all left to flounder in a sea of corruption and theft of resources. We live in a kleptocracy, led publicly by our politicians (the majority of them) with the money men hiding in the shadows. Our salvation has to lie in understanding that, for too many people, destroying the UK, and Scotland, is paramount. It is not accidental or a mistake. Stonewall and its Scottish allies are the vanguard of a rapacious new form of right-wing capitalism that has allied itself to the far left, whose purpose is to undermine all the supporting struts of a liberal-conservative Western consensus, to weaken it and allow it to be sucked dry, like that unfortunate fly trussed in the web. The politicians in all the mainstream parties are the enablers. Why? For the filthy lucre. Once the GRA reform, the vanguard legislation, passes, the laws will be attacked in ways and with such ferocity never witnessed before in modern history. But, hey, what do I know!
duncanio: do you think that the 2nd/3rd, even 1st, generation of Tories are not assimilated? I would say that they are bi-cultural, and, therefore, are striving to better English than the English themselves. Not disagreeing with you because I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but, listening to Sunak et al, they sound typically English/British in language, thought processes, outlook, etc. It seems to me that more and more, immigrants at the higher echelons of society – if we can call them that – are ‘universal’. Russian emigres are another example. Few English MPs would be willing to be so hard-faced about present-day immigration, but these children of immigrants seem to feel no such constraints. Their attitude to Scotland is also eerily similar to that of many of their white English neighbour MPs – contemptuous.