UK Budget Fantasies and Obamagnosticism

Overheard last week, said by the Kim Cattrall character in an ancient episode of Sex and the City, shown last Wednesday (I think), on a free digital channel called “Fiver”. Quote:

“I don’t believe in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. I just believe in parties.”

In this particular episode, a politician tells the Sarah Jessica Parker character that he wants her to piss on him in the shower.

I can understand people being depressed about sentiments such as these, and portrayals of politicians such as this. But despising, on the one hand, politicians as they are now, and on the other hand despising the whole idea of cooperative, communal life and despising all argument about what form that communal life should take, are not the same thing. Arguing, in particular, that cooperation is the antithesis of compulsion is not the same as denying the need for or value of cooperation. But by defining actually-existing-politics as the only cooperative game in town, you can persuade yourself that hating actually-existing-politicians means necessarily believing only in nihilistic atomism. (See also this recent piece by me about, among other things, what Guido Fawkes believes in.)

Sadly though, people who one year are expressing extreme cynicism about politics will often, the next year, go mad for the latest version of the political delusion at its commanding-and-controlling taxing-and-spending worst, their cynicism and then mania being but different faces of the same urge to worship. This urge now centres (here in Britain as well as in the USA) upon President Barack Obama, the living embodiment, for now, of the claim that politicians can do anything, including make command-and-control tax-and-spend politics-as-usual work wonderfully well, if only they are heroic enough and eloquent enough, and if only they are ready to command, control, tax and spend even more. Some, such as me, are cynical about the entire political process as now organised, that is, cynical about the rules which govern it, such as that command, control, tax, spend are all perfectly fine. But anti-politics of other kinds is just disappointment that a particular politician, or particular clutch of or generation of politicians, is revealed as having feet of clay. The rules are fine; we just need politicians with nicer feet. We just need politicians who don’t, as it were, turn out to want to be pissed on in the shower. I say: wait for perfectly heroic politicians, while keeping the rules that are now such a temptation to them unchanged, and you wait for ever.

I further assume that the entire gang of producers, writers, directors, cast and crew of Sex and the City are, for as long as Obama-worship persists, either all of them Obama-worshippers, or else keeping very quiet about their Obamagnosticism (or very quiet about their Obamatheism).

Were those words just invented by me, I wonder? It turns out, not (I do love Google):

What’s true is that I’ve yet to feel comprehensive obamantipathy, obamangst, obamanimosity, obamanger or obamagnosticism much less obamatheism, but I definitely see obamapathy on the very near horizon.

Give it time, and many will be feeling all of the above. But, many of them will only be waiting for the next politician to worship.

Thanks,
Brian Micklethwait

The Battle of the blogs

As the congratulations are passed around the blogosphere after Guido’s victory over Damian McBride and Derek Draper, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is not a victory of the Conservative Party over Labour. This is a victory of People over Politics. And it’s a victory which should make all politicians, not just Labour ones, buck up their habits and start fearing the blogs. - Stuart Sharpe

"If you want to be a superstar blogger,
get in the papers but lose Labour an election -
you can just fuck off".
Derek Draper to other Labour bloggers, Sept 2008

The Daily Politics battle between blogger Guido Fawkes, and New Labour mouthpiece Derek Draper. Draper lost the battle.



Thanks to:
Guido Falkes
Ian Dale
Sharpes Opinion

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The Economic Stat of the day

The FT’s Westminster blog flags up this quite astonishing statistic:

‘The FT’s resident economics guru Chris Giles has a flabbergasting explanation of the scale of the debt the government is raising in the next two years: £350bn.

“That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”’

Normally, Prime Ministers who do not lead their party to an election victory and serve only part of a Parliament are mere footnotes in history. Brown will avoid that fate. But he will go down in history as one of the worst Prime Ministers this country has had since the second Reform Act.
350 Billion - just how much is that?

Thanks to Coffee House
And UKLP Blog

Daniel Hannan MEP: The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government

Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England, gives a speech during Gordon Brown´s visit to the European Parliament on 24th March, 2009.

Michael Hudson -v- Gordon Brown...who do you believe?

Gordon Brown wants to infect the leaders of the G20 countries with his Walter Mitty fantasies.* If he succeeds in luring them into his make-believe world the collective denial about the roots of the global economic crisis will mean the depression may well exceed the worst excesses of the ’30s.

The Prime Minister is scheming hard to transmit his tragic syndrome for when they arrive in London on April 2.Brown will cajole them into focusing on a narrow set of strategies. He wants them to think that the cause of the crisis is international – and entirely due to America’s sub-prime mortgage scandal. It isn’t.

If he succeeds, he will have conned these nations into misdiagnosing the problem. And that automatically means their “remedies” will be so far off the mark, that they are bound to fail.

“Don’t blame me, Guv”

During his visit to Washington, to bask in the reflected glory of Barrack Obama, Brown refused to apologise for his due diligence failures whilst he was steering the UK economy. Why should he? After all, there was nothing wrong with the British economy! Or so the Prime Minister would have us believe.

In the briefing for the G20 summit, Brown authorised an account that will for years to come be studied as a key document in the black art of state propaganda. This is how the UK is portrayed in Road to the London Summit:

“The global economy was growing strongly when the sub-prime crisis hit. In the UK, the economy was close to trend, inflation was close to target, public sector debt was relatively low and unemployment remained low. The US economy was the first to slow, but the crisis quickly spread to other advanced economies.”



* Walter Mitty is a James Thurber character who lived a life of fantasy. The name is now used to refer to an ineffectual dreamer.

Thanks to;
The Renegade Economist

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