Scrutable

Welcome to the future, fuckos

What do we reckon about PMQs then? Probably a victory for Truss, I'd expect. First one is usually okay, and she's not bad at the dispatch box.

f.ck me why is Theresa Villiers

Tbh it's fairly low energy, which isn't really a bad thing. But at least she's answering questions.

From t'other thread:-

Opti wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 06, 2022 6:28 pm

This is quite some cabinet she's assembling.
This could be fun.

It's ironic that a Party that seems to spend all its time claiming that simply believing in British (English) exceptionalism will get us through whichever skip-fire they've thrown the country into this week and that the amazing genius and resilience of the British (English) people will somehow find a way of defying economic gravity and build a world-beating 21st Century economy through some combination of the blinding white-heat of bleeding-edge fruit-preserve innovation*, selling gollywogs* and sh.tting in our drinking water ...

... and then once again they unveil another cabinet of vile mediocrities who can't even exit a room they've literally just entered, without assistance.

*and where possible combine the two.

Funny one, that exchange. Truss got the wolf cries of "MOOOOOOOORE" towards the end, but the message that tax payers will pick up the cost of borrowing rather than taxing excess profits is one Labour clearly hopes to make land.

It should also be noted that a number of the Cabinet were back-benchers under May which leads to the horrifying conclusion that they were considered, at the time, less-competent than even Chris f.cking Grayling!

The dregs of the barrel are long-gone, the wood has long splintered, Johnson took the last of the foul-smelling mud underneath with him so Truss is now reduced to scooping out loathsome handfuls of Victorian-era cracked pots and fossilised turds.

Little waster wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 07, 2022 11:24 am

It should also be noted that a number of the Cabinet were back-benchers under May which leads to the horrifying conclusion that they were considered, at the time, less-competent than even Chris f.cking Grayling!

Well, they were considered less competent than Chris f.cking Grayling, but only by the person who appointed Chris f.cking Grayling in the first place. So that judgement is not hugely reliable.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 07, 2022 11:16 am

Funny one, that exchange. Truss got the wolf cries of "MOOOOOOOORE" towards the end, but the message that tax payers will pick up the cost of borrowing rather than taxing excess profits is one Labour clearly hopes to make land.

Starmer laboured the point for sure.

It seems inherently sensible to me to offset the extraordinary profits against prices to reduce bills. AIUI energy companies can still have profits and reduce costs for consumers - they're not mutually exclusive.

I could understand allowing energy companies to retain those extraordinary profits if they were being re-invested into energy generation so we didn't need to import at all, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Seems we're about to get a big slice of trickle down economics... mainly in the hope it will shore up investment lost due to Brexit? That seems to be the unsaid part, that essentially they're looking to make it cheap enough to operate here that dealing with red tape or hoops to jump through are worth the pain.

Trickle down economics hasn't worked anywhere else, it won't work here.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 07, 2022 11:16 am

Funny one, that exchange. Truss got the wolf cries of "MORDOR" towards the end, but the message that tax payers will pick up the cost of borrowing rather than taxing excess profits is one Labour clearly hopes to make land.

FIFY

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 07, 2022 11:16 am

the message that tax payers will pick up the cost of borrowing rather than taxing excess profits is one Labour clearly hopes to make land.

A rather strange message. "Taxing excess profits" means that those taxed are tax payers, so the cost will be paid by taxpayers either way.

I suppose you're right in a way, but also at the same time you know what I mean.

Truss is elected on a manifesto of taking less money from the well-off, and that is just what she is going to do. And is quite unashamed about it.

Just at a time when really we need to do the opposite.

It's interesting to see what the markets think. The pound has been gradually sliding against the Euro since about the beginning of March. graph The Euro is probably a better comparator than the dollar, which has been growing in strength of late for its own reasons. When Johnson resigned, there was an uptick that regained most of the 4 months prior loss. Then as it became clear where the election was going, the pound slid rapidly away against the Euro. And today is a little below where it was at the beginning of July.

OMG what did Truss do to the queen?

bolo wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 08, 2022 1:39 pm

OMG what did Truss do to the queen?

She's been playing the long game since that LD conference in 1994.

I think she got the idea from the famous assassination attempt on the King of Qin as recounted by the 2002 Chinese epic Hero.

It's a deep state dark ops in case she f.cked up PMQs. It'll be Attenborough next week.

I wonder if we will come to hate Truss as much as we hate Johnson. Have you seen the clip of her cabinet though? Oh my god. I thought they couldn't do worse than Johnson did and then she appointed them. Is there a single one who isn't a near-fascist nutjob whose only saving grace is that they are as incompetent as they are evil? I've just read the actual list and OK, some of them have a second saving grace: nobody has ever heard of them, and probably never will again.

I mean this lot and Charles the sodding third. I despair.

"come to"?

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 08, 2022 6:30 pm

"come to"?

QFT

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 08, 2022 6:30 pm

"come to"?

Hmm. I don't hate her as much as I hate him yet. My mind can be changed as new evidence comes in. I just don't think the hatred will ever be quite as visceral as it is for Johnson. He's not just a crypto-fascist, he's also absolutely disgusting in every single other way. Truss looks like an alien and I'm certain her thought processes are as vile as Johnson's, but her behaviour is (until now) a bit less awful.

She's a terrible human being but she's currently seeming a little bit less dreadful than Johnson, it is pretty close though.

Johnson wasn't a crypto-fascist by conviction, it was just what worked best to keep him in power.

This is not much consolation, to be honest.

nezumi wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 08, 2022 6:42 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 08, 2022 6:30 pm

"come to"?

Hmm. I don't hate her as much as I hate him yet. My mind can be changed as new evidence comes in. I just don't think the hatred will ever be quite as visceral as it is for Johnson. He's not just a crypto-fascist, he's also absolutely disgusting in every single other way. Truss looks like an alien and I'm certain her thought processes are as vile as Johnson's, but her behaviour is (until now) a bit less awful.

She's a terrible human being but she's currently seeming a little bit less dreadful than Johnson, it is pretty close though.

Truss doesn't have the Johnson/Trump/Farage skill of charming/beguiling people into supporting her, of telling bare-faced lies and people either believing them, or believing the intention that lay behind them if they realised they were lies.

So she may prove less dangerous.

Though over in Venezuela, Maduro likewise utterly lacks the charm/beguile/charisma of his predecessor Chávez. But his party was by then so in control it didn't matter any more. He has remained in complete control, despite a destruction of his country's economy by political methods, on a scale that hasn't been seen since the Khmer Rouge, Stalin's collectivisations and Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Anyway. Back to the real issues.

There was a video doing the rounds today of some Australian mournhub commentators who didn't know who she was when she got to the church.

They did figure out she was "some kind of local dignitary", though.

Eta https://www.theguardian.com/politics/vi ... oyal-video

I am reminded that John Major was a prime minister of low charisma and effectiveness. Despite being the Grey Man, he won an election, largely, it is generally believed, because the alternative was Neil Kinnock. At the time we despaired at the incompetence and unprogressive attitudes of ministers like Norman Lamont, Michael Howard, and John Selwyn Gummer. But Lamont got ditched, and overall Major's cabinet appointments look like good news in comparison to what we have had recently. Subsequent home secretaries, for example, have made Michael Howard look like a pussycat.

It was a dire period economically. House prices fell (in real terms) pretty much throughout Major's administration, just starting to pick up by the end of it, showing that he didn't do very much to repair and resuscitate Britain either from the mess he inherited or what he added to it. But overall, the Major administration didn't do so very much to screw up Britain, by recent standards.

But the direness of the period was grey, like the man, rather than the major crises of Thatcher and 2008 onwards. Major had the fortune that he dealt only with relatively low-grade misfortune. This was part of the economic "Great Moderation", a period of near-continuous global growth, for all that Britain went through some downturns on the way. And the economic mess he inherited was largely seen as Lawson's fault. And if Major didn't do very much to cushion those who suffered greatly from the unprecedented level of repossessions taking off when he took over, he managed to make it look outside his control. And after Thatcher, we were inured to a hard-hearted state.

The subsequent great crisis of the period was falling out of the ERM. Lamont was spokesman for that, but he surely wasn't acting entirely off his own bat, so we should give Major a share of the blame. They wasted vast amounts of money enriching speculators, more than all nationalised industries had lost in all of history up to that point, by trying to fend off the inevitable. But by today's standards, that was small change, and a modest crisis in broader context.

So, perhaps, the real danger of, and to, Liz Truss is that she lives in much more interesting times.