UK politics – Common Infirmities

Concrete proposals

The UK government is taking its talking points from third-rate comedians. You can barely get a chuckle anymore with the tired joke template “No one talks about all the things we didn’t screw up.”

Now, with hundreds or even thousands of UK schools facing emergency closure because the government — and specifically Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor of the exchequer — drastically cut the budget for repairing the crumbling concrete that was cheaply put up in the 1950s and 60s that was only supposed to last 30 years, the PM is offended that nobody is talking about all the schools whose roofs haven’t collapsed. He said

There are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.

I’m waiting to hear the government focus more attention on all the millions of migrants who haven’t tried to come to the UK — indeed, on the billions of people who haven’t even left their home countries — rather than harping on the tiny percentage who have tried to cross the English Channel in small boats.

Satire is dead.

World-class mixed metaphor

Presumably the justice watchdog is of this breed:

Christian pastry

The Guardian reported recently on a dispute between Ryanair and the cultural authorities of the Balearic Islands over a traditional pastry called ensaïmada. This spiral-formed pastry is apparently rather bulky, and the Irish surcharge-generating firm has been charging passengers £45 to take their ensaïmadas onboard as carry-on luggage.

According to the article, the pastry is

made from flour, sugar, eggs, water and pork fat. It takes its name from saïm, the Mallorcan word for pig fat.

Pig fat? Seems like a weird thing to put into pastry. And indeed, the article goes on to say that an identical pastry called a bulema was made by Mallorcan Arabs and Jews before the Spanish conquered the islands in 1229. Needless to say — but the Guardian does need to say it — neither the Arabs nor the Jews put pig fat in their pastry. But the weird thing was that apparently the pig fat was added explicitly to “Christianise” the pastry.

The Catalan poet and painter Santiago Rusiñol wrote in 1922 that with the addition of pig fat, “the Moorish ensaïmada became Christian, then it became Mallorcan and then was transformed into a food for all of humanity”.

I’ve long found it bizarre the extent to which, just as much as many Jews and Muslims see not eating pork as a crucial determinant of their identity, so many gentiles see themselves as a mirror image, with positively eating pork as decisive for their Christian identity. For example, there was this article about how some French schools were refusing to serve any alternative to pork for school lunches.

Bacon and sausage school dinners are being used by rightwing politicians to hammer home what it means to be French. Court battles and vicious political spats have erupted as protesters warn that controversial menu changes are sending a message to Muslim or Jewish children that to be truly French, they must eat roast pork.

And then there were the repeated attacks by the British press on the Jewish Labour leader Ed Milliband for “failing to look normal eating a bacon sandwich”.

God is high above, and the free speech tsar is far away

Apparently, the UK now has a “Free Speech Tsar”.

This is about as encouraging as the Conservatives’ decision a few years back to appoint an “Antisemitism Tsar”.

I guess it’s a way of signalling that the real point of these positions is to smash the socialists…

Free speech in England

From The Guardian today:

A man has been charged over comments made during a proclamation ceremony for the king.

Thames Valley police said on Friday that Symon Hill, 45, of Oxford, had been charged with using threatening or abusive words, or disorderly behaviour.

It relates to comments allegedly made during the event at Carfax Tower, Oxford, on 11 September.

Two weird things: First, they refer to comments “allegedly made”, but Mr Hill has himself written to publicly avow his statements.

Second, despite the fact that The Guardian finds the indictment newsworthy, nowhere in this reporting do they bother to inform the readers what he said. His “threatening or abusive words” were “who elected him?” The Guardian is very concerned with its own freedom of opinion, but when reporting on a person clearly being criminally prosecuted for his political expression they are too timid to even report what opinions he was expressing.

Shameful.

Diwali sweets and the tofu-eating wokerati

I’m always fascinated by the way foods define people’s identities — their own and other people’s — and particularly how they are politicised, used to recognise one’s own folk and reject the Other. Bush-era attacks on “latte-sipping liberals” made a big impression on me (“sipping” was a good touch there — not just expensive coffee, but effeminate sipping), as did the scandalised mockery of Obama when he remarked in 2008 on the price of arugula. (According to some, arugula was also effeminate.)

I find the ethnic dimension particularly interesting. It is no coincidence that these two foods that lefties were ridiculed for consuming have Italian names. Jews, of course, have always been attacked for their exotic food preferences, as with the probably anti-Semitic attack on Ed Miliband for looking insufficiently natural when eating a bacon sandwich.

Nowhere is the political valence of ethnic foods more complex than with Britain’s Asian population. Whereas I grew up in the US thinking “Asian” meant by default Chinese and Japanese, in the UK the term refers primarily to the former colonies of Indian subcontinent. Hence the justified pride, in the whole country, in the Indian community, and particularly among the conservatives, in having the first prime minister from an Asian background.

Interestingly, this was emphasised by the King providing Diwali sweets (marking this week’s Hindu festival) when Sunak visited the palace recently. But these gestures of pride and acceptance are not extended to Asians and their foods when their heritage is not British colonial. Particularly striking was the attack in Parliament just last week by the Tory Home Secretary on the “tofu-eating wokerati”.

Hindus can be good Britons and eat Diwali sweets, but those who indulge in other Asian foods are foreign, most especially if they don’t even have the excuse of ancestry. At least the Chinese eat pork…

The Tories can’t get no satisfaction

Proving that despite having acquired UK citizenship I understand nothing about the country’s politics, chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng has been forced out after less than a month in office. I had loudly declared this to be impossible, given that his defenestration would be predicated on the entirely implausible notion that the government’s Three-Stooges-level economic policy had its origins somewhere other than the reptilian complex of Liz Truss’s brain. Apparently, she’s willing to make a play for that political fantasy.

Anyway, I note that there seems to be some hope that the predicament of the entire loss of confidence in this government jointly and individually might be evaded simply by making their policy announcements and changes sufficiently difficult to parse on a purely logico-grammatical level. It seems to be policy-making by double (at least) negatives. To wit:

According to the Times, Truss will abandon the cancellation of a rise in corporation tax from 19 to 25 per cent, as well as a number of other measures announced in the mini-Budget on 23 September. The government has already been forced into a humiliating retreat on scrapping the 45p top rate of income tax.

I had to read this multiple times to figure out whether the corporation tax would be going up or down, and I guess the Conservatives are hoping that in a few months’ time they can counter charges of “U-turn” with “You’re misremembering. We didn’t never change no policy direction turns.” They’re opposing Labour socialism with Marxist politics of the Grouchoist tendency. (See here and below.)

Scant progress

In the middle of an economic slowdown and a huge expansion in spending to reduce households’ winter fuel costs, the new UK government has just announced, in its new “mini-budget” its intention to drastically cut taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Not surprisingly, the price of UK bonds has plummeted, and interest rates have risen to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Guardian quotes international market experts from ING saying this was a “perfect storm” for the UK, as “global markets shun sterling and gilts.” They continue

Price action in UK gilts is going from bad to worse. A daunting list of challenges has arisen for sterling-denominated bond investors, and the Treasury’s mini-budget has done little to shore up confidence.

“Little to shore up confidence” is such an elegant bit of English understatement, so extreme as to amount almost to deception. Like “the expanded hours for flight departures at Heathrow have done little to improve the noise pollution problem for residents near the airport” or “Herr Hitler’s new ‘Nuremberg Laws’ have done little to shore up confidence in fair treatment among Germany’s half million Jewish citizens.”

The Queen’s two bodies

There’s something that baffles me about the public discussion of ERII’s legacy: Why do so many people feel comfortable lauding the late monarch as the (no longer) living embodiment of the nation when she’s waving to the crowd and dispensing Christmas bromides, but just a befuddled girl when her imperial government is committing crimes against humanity?

The cognitive dissonance is extreme: What kind of monsters would we be were we to be charmed by a person responsible for the murder and torture of thousands? Therefore she was not responsible. Therefore, implicitly — since she was responsible for everything — these crimes did not occur.

And just to be extra clear, I am not doubting the expert claim that Harold Macmillan lied like a rug to keep Her Majesty in the dark on the sordid details of the Empire, or lied to the public to pretend that he did. The living embodiment of the nation embodies its crimes as well as its virtues. She can’t embody the spirit of Paddington Bear, but be free of any taint of Hola. The victims of Her Majesty’s government are her royal victims, whether or not her mortal body participated, whether or not it was indeed aware.

The alternative is, monarchy is just bullshit, just celebrity culture with extra-fancy headgear. That seems to be the genuine belief revealed by the public’s response.

Don’t jump!

Britain’s presumptive next prime minister has been demonstrating the kind of top-drawer platitudes that the nation will be showered with after her investiture tomorrow:

“I have a bold plan that will grow our economy and deliver higher wages, more security for families and world-class public services,” Truss said in a statement, as the curtain came down on the often bitter race with her 42-year-old rival Sunak.

“If I am elected prime minister, I will never let anyone talk us down and I will do everything in my power to make sure our great nation succeeds.”

Now, this may be one of these Anglo-American language confusions (like the perennial embarrassment over “pants”), but when I hear the phrase “never let anyone talk us down” I think of an image like this: