Jacob Rees-Mogg – Blood and Porridge

July 10, 2024July 31, 2024

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4^th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result. This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years. It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government. They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

But first… A message for viewers in Scotland.

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine. As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me. Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith. To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster. The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway. But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show. And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’. And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’. This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs. And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland. Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories. When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls. When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015). For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile. Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party. (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.) And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally. While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried. Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast. That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017. What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories. If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long. Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership. I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029. Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

© BBC

Oh well. You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats. I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth. Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan… Oh, how I laughed.

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk. The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it. Far from it. Truss has been blaming everyone but herself. She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership. Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump. I do hope July 4^th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five. Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage? Don’t bet your life savings on it.

March 26, 2023March 26, 2023

Hapless Humza and heaven’s Kate

From wikipedia.org / © Scottish Government

From wikipedia.org / © ScottishPolitico

The devil and the deep blue sea. A rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. These are a few phrases that spring to mind when I think of the choice facing members of the Scottish National Party as they vote for a new party leader and First Minister of Scotland to replace Nicola Sturgeon, who a month ago announced her intention to resign from those posts and last week made her final appearance at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament.

Neither of the options offered as Sturgeon’s successor is particularly inspiring. There’s Humza Yousaf, current Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, and previously Minister for Transport and the Islands. And then there’s Kate Forbes, currently Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy.

Okay, there’s also a third candidate in the running, Ash Regan, former Minister for Community Safety. But, working on the assumption that the average SNP member has at least a couple of braincells in his or her head, I imagine Regan has zero chance of prevailing. Her big idea so far has been to have an ‘independence-readiness thermometer’ displayed in a major Scottish city. Plus, much of her support actually seems to lie outwith the SNP, i.e., among the opportunists, grifters, misfits, transphobes and Scottish-indy ultras who joined embittered former SNP leader, former Russia Today presenter and generally-accepted lech Alex Salmond when he set up the Alba Party as a way of getting revenge on Sturgeon and his old party (and secured 1.65% of the votes cast in the subsequent Scottish parliamentary election).

Anyway, onto the two real candidates. Yousaf strikes me as a bloke with his heart in the right place… But his performance in government has been patchy and he’s prone to making gaffes, most recently when he met with a group of Ukrainian women and inquired, “Where are all the men?” Okay, whilst being in charge of Health and Social Care in Scotland, he’s been under constant bombardment from Scotland’s newspapers, which are almost without exception right-wing, conservative, unionist and shite-holey – the Scottish Daily Mail, the Scottish Daily Express, the Scottish Sun, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Scottish edition of the Daily Telegraph. While their beloved Conservative Party has, in government in London, under the leaderships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, wallowed in mindboggling amounts of corruption and indulged in mindboggling amounts of incompetence, their response has been to shriek and scream that the Scottish government is equally, if not more, of a basket case. They’ve fixated on and magnified every fault and incompetence they can discover and never stopped to draw breath in their criticisms. Generally, their modus operandi has been, in the words of far-right strategist Steve Bannon, to ‘flood the zone with shit’. “Okay,” they seem to cry, “Britain is crap! But Scotland is even crapper! And an independent Scotland would be even, even crapper!”

From wikipedia.org

But I don’t think Yousaf has the dexterity, the gravitas and the general intelligence to establish himself the way Sturgeon did – who, though most of the mainstream media in Scotland hated her, was able to rise above their carping, convey a sense of competence, and convince everyone bar the most rabid Scottish Conservative that she was much more effective as an administrator than, say, the venal Johnson or the barking-mad Truss. Unfortunately, I can’t see how Yousaf will escape being portrayed by the media as a bungling klutz – in the same way that they succeeded in discrediting former Labour Party leaders like Michael Foot (supposedly a befuddled old fool who went to Remembrance services at the Cenotaph dressed as a scarecrow), Neil Kinnock (a Welsh windbag who tripped over on a beach and fell into the sea) and Ed Miliband (a two-kitchen-owning faux socialist whose dad hated Britain and who couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich properly). That said, I doubt if they’ll be able to absolutely demonise Yousaf like they did with Jeremy Corbyn.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare Yousaf’s troubled tenure as Health Secretary with that of Sturgeon, who held the brief for a couple of years when Salmond was First Minister. And if anyone says they don’t remember anything of Sturgeon as Health Secretary – well, that says a lot for her skill in keeping it a non-issue at the time.

From what I’ve seen of her, in purely political terms, Kate Forbes seems the most capable of the candidates. But there’s a big problem. She’s a member of the Free Church of Scotland and claims its tenets are ‘essential’ to her ‘being’ – which would be fine if her particular Kirk treated people from all walks of life non-judgementally, but it doesn’t, and Forbes has ended up saying some things that cross the line into intolerant, Bible-bashing crankery. She’s said she would have voted against same-sex marriage, and stated her opposition to the Scottish government’s trans-friendly Gender Recognition Act, and spoken out too against abortion and sex outside of marriage. This has put a lot of noses in the SNP out of joint. For instance, the party’s deputy leader in Westminster Mhairi Black, a lesbian who got wed last year, has tweeted that she was ‘incredibly hurt’ by Forbes’ stance on gay marriage.

Perversely, some right-wing commentators who, in right-wing news outlets, regularly castigate Forbes’ party have ridden to her defence during the controversy about her religious views. On February 23^rd, Fraser Nelson, editor of bilious far-right magazine the Spectator, wrote an opinion piece in the no-better Daily Telegraph under the headline PROTESTANTS ARE NOW HOUNDED OUT OF POLITICS, AS KATE FORBES HAS SHOWN. A day later, in Rupert Murdoch’s Times, the fogey-ish author and Evelyn Waugh wannabe A.N. Wilson penned a similar-minded piece entitled THE HOUNDING OF KATE FORBES SHOWS GODLESS SQUAD HAVE WON. And if the moral support of Nelson and Wilson wasn’t enough to drain all street credibility out of Forbes, and send it down a hole deep enough to reach Australia, the ridiculous Jacob Rees-Mogg got in on the act too. He wrote in a Daily Mail column that: “The last Scottish female public figure to be treated so badly for her religion was Mary, Queen of Scots, who was chased out of her country and eventually beheaded by her cousin Elizabeth for her Catholicism.”

From wikipedia.org

Oh, and the centre-right journalist and commentator Chris Deerin – director of the think-tank Reform Scotland, crooner with arthritic dad-rock band the Fat Cops, worshipper of Ruth Davidson and, mind-shreddingly, Scottish Editor for the supposed left-leaning New Statesman – has been carrying a torch for her recently too. Just in case the Kate Forbes Media Fan Club didn’t sound hellish enough.

Personally, I suspect the reason why so many personages in the right-wing press are currently batting for Forbes is because they’re licking their lips with anticipation about what might happen if she wins. They’d have a field-day reporting on the latest messes involving the First Minister of Scotland as, speaking her Free Kirk mind, she upsets gay people, trans people, unmarried mothers, women who’ve had abortions, etc. She could also very easily piss off Scotland’s sizeable Roman Catholic community, since the brand of old-school Scottish Presbyterianism she adheres to is not exactly known for its love of the Pope and the Church of Rome. And her social conservatism would probably mean the SNP’s current, informal governing alliance with the Scottish Green Party would end.

All in all, the Yousaf / Forbes leadership race looks like a lose-lose situation for the SNP and a win-win one for the right-wing mainstream media that would love to see the back of the party. Meanwhile, I have a feeling that a lot of people in the Scottish independence movement who’d expressed impatience, dissatisfaction and frustration with Nicola Sturgeon’s performance in recent years – well, apart from those bampots in Salmond’s wee faction – will soon realise how much they miss her.

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022

Britain gets Trussed

In a just world, the folk belonging to Britain’s Conservative Party would have been forced into mass exile by now, after foisting upon us the morally rancid Boris Johnson and the three years of lies, corruption, incompetence, embarrassment and disaster he presided over as Prime Minster. They made him party leader and PM in 2019, long after his myriad character defects had become public knowledge.

But instead, the Tory Party members have just elected another leader who will govern Britain from No 10 Downing Street. This is the gimlet-eyed careerist, self-publicist, charisma-vacuum and fifth-rate Margaret Thatcher impersonator that is Liz Truss.

Truss’s ascent to the top has seen many, convenient swerves in policy, belief and principle. From being an atypically-radical Liberal Democrat (at the 1994 Lib Dem conference she called for the abolition of the monarchy, which turned Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown into Paddy Meltdown) to being a hard-right Tory (in 2012 she co-authored the notorious treatise Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as ‘the worst idlers in the world’). From being an enthusiastic pro-EU Remainer (before the 2016 Brexit referendum, it looked like the Remain side was heading for victory and Truss wanted to be on the winning side) to being an enthusiastic anti-EU Brexiteer (the Leave side won… Quick, Liz, get on that winning side!) I know it’s an old cliché, but Groucho Marx’s observation, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… Well, I have others,” has never been truer here.

Her victory comes after a summer-long leadership contest that felt as interminable and punishing as Johnson’s premiership did. The eight candidates confirmed on July 12^th were less than inspiring. They included far-right, culture-war-obsessed moon-howlers like Kemi Badenoch and the self-aggrandising Suella Braverman. There was Nadhim Zahawi, estimated to be worth between 30 and 100 million pounds, who once claimed nearly 6000 pounds in taxpayers’ money to light and heat the stables on his estate in Warwickshire. And there was Johnson’s former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who makes Zahawi look like a pauper. Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty – reckoned, thanks to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – allegedly sit on a fortune of 730 million pounds. During the leadership race, a 2011 video was dug up wherein a young Rishi boasted about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…” Really, Rishi? “Well, not working class.”

Eventually, the field was whittled down to two competitors, Truss and Sunak, and on September 5^th, after a soul-destroying two months of never-ending hustings, debates and idiotic ‘I’m-more-anti-woke-than-you-are!’-type bickering, the results of the party-membership vote were announced. It worked against Sunak that, by resigning as chancellor in early July, he helped set off the events that led to Johnson’s downfall. Thus, he was regarded by many (obviously dementia-stricken) Tory members as the Judas who’d done for their beloved Boris. And while I’m absolutely not implying that anyone in the Conservative Party is racist, there’s a teensy-weensy possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Sunak’s ethnicity might not have worked in his favour either.

Mind you, Truss didn’t win by the landslide that many people had expected. She secured just 47% of the support of those eligible to vote. Amusingly, days earlier, there’d been speculation that as PM she’d change the rules of any future referendum on Scottish independence, making it compulsory for the pro-independence side to get the support of half of all eligible voters to win – anyone not bothering to vote would be automatically counted as a ‘no’. If she’d applied that goalpost-shifting rule to her own leadership election, she’d have lost.

Now Prime Minister Truss has announced her new cabinet. Looking at the, er, talent that’s featured in the cabinet, the future for Britain – beset by a cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, war-in-Ukraine crisis, Brexit crisis and climate change crisis – looks bleak indeed. Appointees include Braverman as Home Secretary, a post previously held by the demented Priti Patel, though Braverman has the potential to make Patel look like a bleeding-heart liberal in retrospect. She’s expected to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke snowflake Winston Churchill. Indulging in brazen, lefty virtue-signalling, Churchill declared, “In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” This will enable Braverman to get on with the business started by Patel of sticking newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and flying them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’.

Elsewhere, getting the portfolio of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is the cobwebbed, monocled, top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg, surely history’s most Dickensian villain not actually devised by Charles Dickens. In the past, Rees-Mogg, whose fund-management company Somerset Capital Investment puts money into oil extraction and coal mining, has vowed to squeeze ‘every last cubic inch of gas’ out of the North Sea; called fracking ‘an interesting opportunity’ and likened its damaging geological effects to ‘a rock fall in a disused coal mine’; deliberately misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to back his claims that efforts to combat climate change are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unaffordable’; and, yes, blamed offshore windfarms for the rising cost of fish and chips. With him in position, the likelihood of Britain honouring its pledge to achieve net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 is about as great as the likelihood that the famously stuck-up, affected and pompous Rees-Mogg has ever tasted fish and chips.

Meanwhile, casting a rotund shadow over everything is Boris Johnson, who hasn’t gone away. It’s widely assumed that Johnson and his followers – in Trumpian feats of delusion and reality-denial – believe that the British public still love him. Also, they believe it’s only a matter of time before Truss slips up and Johnson, ‘a prince across the water’ like a not-so-bonnie Bonnie Prince Charlie, will return to the fray, become PM again, save the Conservative Party and save the country. I imagine Johnson and co. are already conspiring to facilitate Truss’s slipping-up, and sooner rather than later.

To conclude on a Scottish note… On September 5^th, in her painfully inept victory speech, Truss paid tribute to Johnson by claiming he was ‘admired from Kiev to Carlisle’. This was meant to elicit a round of applause from the audience, but Truss was so flat of tone and lifeless of gaze that the audience didn’t get their cue and several moments of tumbleweed-infested silence ensued. Carlisle is the most northerly town in England, which suggests that for once Truss had got something right. Beyond Carlisle is Scotland and no one there can stand the sight of Johnson – not even the Scottish Tories.

And the next morning, in Boris Johnson’s farewell speech as PM, when he wasn’t comparing himself to Cincinnatus (the Roman statesman who retired from office to lead a quiet life on his farm but then, when duty called, returned to Rome to lead again – as a dictator, though Johnson didn’t mention that bit), he compared himself to a booster rocket: “Let me say that I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific.”

Boris Johnson calls himself a rocket? At last, he’s said something that people in Scotland would agree with. He’s a rocket.