Johnson’s government was casually corrupt. Truss’s is systematically corrupt. She has chosen a cabinet that listens to the money, not the people. Her advisers come from dark money thinktanks: covertly-funded lobby groups, promoting the interests of oligarchs and corporations.🧵
Johnson was louche, lazy, venal, dishonest. He would strike any deal, however odious, to secure his position. But Truss and her entourage are fanatically devoted to one aim: ensuring that the oligarchs get what they want, regardless of the cost the rest of us might bear.
Johnson was disgusting, Truss is terrifying. Cold, shallow, mannered, stiff, but with the glitter of absolute certainty in pursuit of the most damaging policies imaginable in a nominal democracy.
She'll go as far as electoral politics allow in transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, in opening the floodgates for pollution and greenhouse gases, in dismembering the NHS, in persecuting asylum seekers and scapegoating others to distract from the impact of her policies.
The oligarchs she serves are insatiable. There is no point at which they’ll say: “we’ve got what we want now, thanks”. Everything must be pressed into their service. Thanks to the Pollution Paradox, the politics that serve them must become ever more corrupt and extreme.
You might think this cannot continue. The people will throw out these creeps at the next election. But if there is one thing the past 12 years have taught us, it’s that the billionaire press can induce people to vote for those who break their bones.
Starmer seems to think he needs only sit and wait. It might work. He might win simply by not being Liz Truss. But it’s a dangerous tactic. When people perceive that politics cannot meet their needs, they either give up altogether or are drawn to anti-politics.
You think it couldn’t happen here. But I do not find it impossible to envisage a victory by the far right in the UK, swarming into the policy vacuum left by corruption on one side and timidity on the other.
When inequality becomes extreme, those who seek power have one of two options: to contest it or to distract from it. The process of distraction – pointing to scapegoats and fomenting culture wars – is well under way. It paves the way for fascism.
History shows that when people see no prospect of relief, and when the machinations of power are successfully hidden, they become highly susceptible to the transfer of blame. They seek meaning and purpose in identities defined against others. Others who have done them no harm.
Who will be blamed this time? All the usual suspects. Muslims, Jews, black and brown people, asylum seekers, the left, unions, protesters, LGBTQ people, Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. Blame will spread like a cancer, and will attach to anyone except the authors of our misfortunes.
And remember: we are in the midst of a series of crises: the climate and ecological emergency, impossible rents and bills, the collapse of public services, the Russian invasion, the rise of global hunger ... None will be addressed by this government. Yet more wasted years.
This is why we need an Opposition that offers a real and inspiring alternative. We need hope: a positive vision of a better world, rather than a slightly ameliorated version of the current shitstorm. Starmer needs either to step up or to make way for someone who will.
