Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

The nauseating PR seems so ridiculously quaint now; those genius adults were back in charge. How quiet it would be after a decade plus of Tory dysfunction and incompetence.

That this Labour government, with the drabbest weathervane leader imaginable, would faceplant into extreme unpopularity this quickly wasn’t much of a prediction. Giving Nu-Labour another chance was akin to re-heating a three-day old slice of Pizza. Even after the hangover from Tory austerity, reality has bitten with instant regret on the first bite – it’s rubbery cheese and a base that’s been desiccated into the consistency of concrete.

Even so, to be met with such an unapologetically bland brand of bi-lateral virtue signaling neo-conservativism and economically detrimental fiscal rules has been jarring. It has ensured ongoing austerity, wage stagnation for the masses, increasing government debt and declining public services, while enrichment for the political class and their multi-millionaire and billionaire benefactors continues unabated. No Labour voter wanted this.

It’s enough to make you indulge in the conspiratorial – that this bullshit is a deliberate cross-party political project to demoralize vast swathes of the electorate and make them check out from politics completely. Because nothing screams “get fucked, you plebeians are all irrelevant and have to suck it up, because that’s the way things work” more than punching down on the disabled and unemployed folks with mental health issues in the name of saving a few pennies. Don’t worry, the growth will come eventually (they haven’t told us how) to save us from more of these policies, honest.

For more and more people the capitalist consensus of the last fifty years is failing, having being fully ceded to privatization, deregulation and vulture capitalism. Productivity is laughably low. With Donald Trump mangling the established post-cold war geopolitical order, we now require new political and economic solutions. No political party is offering taxation reform that feels viable or sufficient enough to prevent growing wealth inequality and economic decline.

There’s a line from Mad Men that’s always stuck with me – “if you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”.

Much of the conversation seeks to revert back to halcyon era of Blairism. This is favoured by the centrist dads, your Alastair Campbell’s and Rory Stewart’s, and much of the legacy media and political class. All the talk over culture wars, mildly tweaking taxation policy, getting tough on crime and demonizing immigration is all a misdirection from how intellectually bankrupt neo-liberalism is. It’s all theatrics, and with the aid of the dreadful first past the post voting system, it makes the Conservative and Labour duopoly at Westminster a self-propagating cottage industry that has scant need to interact with or present new ideas to the general public.

It’s why the political experts offer no explanation for Labour’s polling collapse beyond feigned naivety or banalities – they’ve made hard decisions (not hard on anyone who matters) and their comms are bad (that’s because the policies are). It’s also a huge problem that many enter politics not for public service but for access to lobbying donations, consultancy side gigs, privileges and peerages and the taxpayer picking up the tab for London pads.

Knowing there needs to be change is one thing, how to change it and replace it with what is the hard bit. When a threat to the political order tries to emerge, see Corbyn, Brexit and Scottish Independence, the political class, and their sycophantic client media chums, go into self-preservation mode and ruthlessly gang up to crush it. Their aversion to the prospect of a Reform victory is not concern with the effects of Farage doing his pound shop Trump routine, they’re worried about retaining power, and access to the political gravy train.

Reform’s political narrative is a different deception – illegal immigration’s cost to the taxpayer being tethered to economic stagnation or the Britian I know is gone and Brexit hasn’t fixed it. Both are popular in part because empowering Reform would damage the current political structure and especially a political class that’s brazenly and unashamedly taking the piss. The former motivation is correctly inferred as racist and xenophobic. The latter a harking back to a time when things were less woke; football hooliganism and flares were en vogue, women could be groped and likely wouldn’t or couldn’t grass, the gays kept their pride private, there were less black and brown people, Jimmy Saville was only viewed as eccentric, Bernard Manning was allowed on the telly, you could smoke in pubs and Fred West was a good pint.

It’s easy to rubbish the aversion to social attitudes changing drastically and increased integration over the last fifty years as the atavistic gripes of pondlife and gammon. But this nostalgic pining is partly influenced by a logic that is often not articulated or analyzed by its opponents – things have declined economically in parallel with significant cultural changes during this period. Wages have stagnated, and things used to be affordable, mainly housing. I love to hammer cunty boomers for being Nimbys, Tories and self-interested home-owners. But even they understand financial security is becoming increasingly impossible for their children and grand-children.

The reaction to Gary Stevenson trying to introduce something new to the conversation, reforming the tax system to redistribute wealth back to the government and working people, is an interesting test case. That his tax wealth not work message is growing in popularity is encouraging, and it’s making some of the worst people imaginable nervous – the political class itself, but also the beneficiaries of their deregulation; cultish I’m going to get rich by trading Crypto from my bedroom truthers, non-doms, the super-rich and Thatcherite entrepreneurs are going after him because he wants to tax their growing wealth holdings. Others focus on his accent, or dismiss his claims about his abilities as a trader. These are concerning, as they’re symptomatic of a bitchy pettiness that lurks in the heart of the British psyche, an envy of assertive, confident expertise and folk not having the temerity to stay in their lane. Any new idea has to overcome this decadence.

You’ll notice very few can refute Stevenson’s analysis of the cause of the economic problems we have, or attack his track record of making correct predictions. It’s opposed with misnomers in a derisive patronizing tone – “it’s hard to tax rich people”, “they’ll leave the country”, etc. It’s all coda for “keep things as they are” with the subliminal message being “it’s working for us” and “there’s nothing you can do”.

That message can seem impossible to fight against when it’s coming from the current government, mainstream media, and virtually all of the opposing voices in the political realm. So, it’s up to us to demand the political and economic reform we want, not vote Reform or take what’s on offer. Because right now, the choices four years from now are looking pretty grim. If it isn’t clear to you yet, while we get poorer, the political and media class have never had it so good, and are not for turning.