Despite the forlorn claims of Creationists that the Theory of Evolution (TOE) is
a 'theory in crisis' which will soon be overthrown by their childish notion of
magic and the interventions of an unproven, unexplained magical entity which
makes chemistry and physics do things they couldn't do without it, in the real
grownup world of science, the TOE continues to be the basis for understanding
biodiversity, and continues to mesh exactly with what is known of climate
change, geographical history and the development of ecosystems and ecological
niches. This paper from the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain,
illustrates exactly that, and in effect is yet another casual and unintentional
refutation of Creationism.
If Creationism qualified as a scientific theory, and was taken seriously by
scientists working in the field, it would be the real 'theory in crisis', and
would have been so ever since Darwin and Wallace explained biodiversity as a
process not requiring intelligent agency, back in 1859 - hence the hysteria,
disinformation and anti-science rhetoric of its proponents who make a living off
the fears and superstitions of ignorant people and need them to stay that
way.
In this paper, the scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary history of
a group of lizards familiar to anyone who has holidayed in the Mediterranean
area of Southern Europe and North Africa - the green and wall lizards.
The lizards are from two genera, the Lacerta and Timon. Being
biologists the scientists looked at the factors that cause evolutionary
diversification - environmental and ecological change and how these dynamic
changes related to the genetic and phenotypic changes in the lizards.
It's hard to find a scientific paper these days that doesn't utterly refute the basic dogmas of Creationism. Take for example this paper which deal with the origins of the population of the British Isles at the end of the last Ice Age. There is no intention on the part of the authors to refute the Bible narrative Creationists adhere to, yet they do, simply by revealing the facts.
At the end of the last ice age, what is now the Island of Great Britain was still joined to continental Europe by an area of land, 'Dogger Land', now submerged beneath the North Sea, which stretched across from East Anglia to Holland.
During the glacial maximum, the northern two-thirds of the island and most of Northern Europe was glaciated and so it was repopulated when the ice retreated.
Traditionally, the first anatomically modern humans in Britain were assumed to be hunter-gatherer migrants from Northern Europe who became isolated when sea-level changes inundated Dogger Land and broke through the chalk downs at Dover creating the island of Great Britain, from which Ireland had been separated for hundreds of years. Humans along with the flora and fauna of the island reflects this repopulation over a land bridge from newly-repopulated North-Western Europe, in the immediate post-glacial period when sea-levels were still low enough to allow Dogger Land to be populated.
Fig. 1: Location, genetic ancestry and AMS date of individuals discussed within the text.
Surprisingly though, new research by researchers from University College London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute has shown that at least two distinct human populations, with different origins and cultures existed in Britain in the immediate post-glacial period. This conclusion came from an analysis of thee DNA from some of the oldest human remains so far discovered - the remains of an individual found in Gough's Cave, Somerset, England and an individual from Kendrick’s Cave, North Wales, both of whom lived more than 13,500 years ago.
New evidence points to the role of plate tectonics in early Earth’s release of internal heat and the swapping of geomagnetic poles.
Illustration by Alec Brenner
The surprising thing is not so much that Creationists ever existed. Given the power of the Medieval Christian and Islamic religions to coerce the population and force on them simplistic dogma from the ignorant and fearful infancy of our species, and to supress contradicting science, it would have been surprising it they hadn't existed in those days. The really surprising thing is that, despite the massive amount of information which flatly contradicts the childish superstitions and the advanced technological societies in which most of them live, there are actual adults, leading otherwise normal lives, who still believe that childish nonsense.
There really are grown adults who believe Earth was magicked into existence, as is. less than 10,000 years ago!
And these ignorant people exist despite evidence such as this paper, that there were continental movements, known to geologists as plate tectonics, billions of years before they believe Earth was magicked up by a spell from an invisible magician, the existence of which has never been explained, let alone demonstrated with evidence, and the modus operandum which has never been observed.
And, if that wasn't bad enough for the Creation cult, the paper even alludes to the geological clock that has been recording the magnetic reversals of Earth that have occurred 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.
The scientists led by Harvard geologists, Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, point out that the stability of the early Earth, where basically the same tectonic forces were working as are working still, means the conditions were conducive to the appearance and evolution of self-replicating systems we call life.
As the Harvard Gazette article by Juan Siliezar explains:
New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth’s crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The study also provides the earliest proof of when the planet’s magnetic north and south poles swapped places. The two results offer clues into how such geological changes may have resulted in an environment more conducive to the development of life on the planet.
The work, described in PNAS and led by Harvard geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust. Using novel techniques and equipment, the researchers show that some of the Earth’s earliest surface was moving at a rate of 6.1 centimeters per year and 0.55 degrees every million years.
That speed more than doubles the rate the ancient crust was shown to be moving in a previous study by the same researchers. Both the speed and direction of this latitudinal drift leaves plate tectonics as the most logical and strongest explanation for it.
“There’s a lot of work that seems to suggest that early in Earth’s history plate tectonics wasn’t actually the dominant way in which the planet’s internal heat gets released, as it is today, through the shifting of plates,” said Brenner, a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a member of Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab. “This evidence lets us much more confidently rule out explanations that don’t involve plate tectonics.”
Geologists Alec Brenner and Roger Fu, focused on a portion of the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the oldest and most stable pieces of the Earth’s crust.
Photo by Roger Fu
For example, the researchers can now argue against phenomena called “true polar wander” and “stagnant lid tectonics,” which both can cause the Earth’s surface to shift but aren’t part of modern-style plate tectonics. The results lean more toward plate tectonic motion because the newly discovered higher rate of speed is inconsistent with aspects of the other two processes.
In the paper, the scientists also describe what’s believed to be the oldest evidence of when Earth reversed its geomagnetic fields, meaning the magnetic North and South Pole flipped locations. This type of flip-flop is a common occurrence in Earth’s geologic history, with the poles reversing 183 times in the last 83 million years and perhaps several hundred times in the past 160 million years, according to NASA.
The reversal tells a great deal about the planet’s magnetic field 3.2 billion years ago. Key among the implications is that the magnetic field was likely stable and strong enough to keep solar winds from eroding the atmosphere. This insight, combined with the results on plate tectonics, offers clues to the conditions under which the earliest forms of life developed.
It paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.
Alec R. Brenner lead author
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Today, the Earth’s outer shell consists of about 15 shifting blocks of crust, or plates, which hold the planet’s continents and oceans. Over eons the plates drifted into each other and apart, forming new continents and mountains and exposing new rocks to the atmosphere, which led to chemical reactions that stabilized Earth’s surface temperature over billions of years.
Evidence of when plate tectonics started is hard to come by because the oldest pieces of crust are thrust into the interior mantle, never to resurface. Only 5 percent of all rocks on Earth are older than 2.5 billion years old, and no rock is older than about 4 billion years.
Finally being able to reliably read these very ancient rocks opens up so many possibilities for observing a time period that often is known more through theory than solid data. Ultimately, we have a good shot at reconstructing not just when tectonic plates started moving, but also how their motions — and therefore the deep-seated Earth interior processes that drive them — have changed through time.
Professor Roger R. Fu,
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. USA
Overall, the study adds to growing research that shows that tectonic movement occurred relatively early in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and that early forms of life came about in a more moderate environment. In 2018, members of the project revisited the Pilbara Craton, which stretches about 300 miles across. They drilled into the primordial and thick slab of crust there to collect samples that, back in Cambridge, were analyzed for their magnetic history.
Using magnetometers, demagnetizing equipment, and the Quantum Diamond Microscope — which images the magnetic fields of a sample and precisely identifies the nature of the magnetized particles — the researchers created a suite of new techniques for determining the age and way the samples became magnetized. This allows the researchers to determine how, when, and in which direction the crust shifted as well as the magnetic influence coming from Earth’s geomagnetic poles.
The Quantum Diamond Microscope was developed in a collaboration between Harvard researchers in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) and of Physics.
For future studies, Fu and Brenner plan to keep their focus on the Pilbara Craton while also looking beyond it to other ancient crusts around the world. They hope to find older evidence of modern-like plate motion and when the Earth’s magnetic poles flipped.
In the abstract to their published open access paper in PNAS, the scientists say:
Significance
The modern Earth is geologically dynamic. Convection in its rocky mantle drives plate tectonics that reshapes its surface, and currents inside its metallic core generate a strong planetary magnetic field. However, it is uncertain whether these processes had begun to shape Earth in its deep past. Our measurements of magnetic signals preserved in 3.25-billion-year-old rocks provide the earliest quantitative evidence of both rapidly moving crust—a hallmark of plate tectonics—and a stable ancient magnetic field that episodically alternated polarity. These observations suggest that the early Earth was remarkably geologically mature from its surface to its deep interior, potentially contributing to stable surface conditions for the evolution of early life.
Abstract
The paleomagnetic record is an archive of Earth’s geophysical history, informing reconstructions of ancient plate motions and probing the core via the geodynamo. We report a robust 3.25-billion-year-old (Ga) paleomagnetic pole from the East Pilbara Craton, Western Australia. Together with previous results from the East Pilbara between 3.34 and 3.18 Ga, this pole enables the oldest reconstruction of time-resolved lithospheric motions, documenting 160 My of both latitudinal drift and rotation at rates of at least 0.55°/My. Motions of this style, rate, and duration are difficult to reconcile with true polar wander or stagnant-lid geodynamics, arguing strongly for mobile-lid geodynamics by 3.25 Ga. Additionally, this pole includes the oldest documented geomagnetic reversal, reflecting a stably dipolar, core-generated Archean dynamo.
Just another example there of how Creationism is refuted quite incidentally, simply by revealing the real world evidence with which it is of course entirely inconsistent simply because the people who made up the origin myths in the Bronze Age were entirely ignorant of the science. Incidentally, it's also an example of the way different strands of evidence mesh so neatly to support the idea that life originated on Earth several billion years ago, just as you would expect if the current theories were correct.
Even more amazing than the fact the otherwise normal people believe the childish Bronze Age Creation myths despite this sort of refutation, is that these same people are prepared to perform the most idiotic mental gymnastics to dismiss them, as though being ignorant of scientific evidence is something to take great pride in, because their mummies and daddies were also ignorant of them.
Recent research has revealed just how sneaky the designer of the SARS-Cov-2 virus that caused COVID-19 would have had to have been, had there been any truth in the childish Creationists superstition that there is a magic intelligent [sic] designer who designs these things.
Like several other pathological viruses and bacteria, SARS-CoV-2 can manipulate out epigenetic system for its own advantage. Briefly, the epigenetic system is a complex process for turning off those genes that are not needed in the specialised cells of a multicellular organism.
In fact, the existence of this complex process is one of the strongest arguments against any intelligence being involved in evolution because it is only needed because the cells in a multicellular organism replicate in exactly the same way as a single-celled organism, even though only a fraction of the DNA will be needed in any specialised cell, whereas a single-celled organism needs its entire genome to function. No intelligent designer who understood the basic principles of good design would come up with such a complex system when it should not be beyond its wit to design a system where only those genes needed by the specialist cells were inherited by them. Utilitarian evolution, on the other hand, is quite capable of coming up with something so unintelligent.
Back to the discovery of what the SARS-CoV-2 virus is capable of:
The following article from The Conversation by Lara Herrero, Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, explains the research and its significance. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article cam be read here:
Ray Comfort is an American multi-millionaire Televangelist, Creationist grifter who makes his money out of scientifically illiterate dupes in the Creationist cults, by posing as an expert scientist.
His latest piece of disinformation is his claim that the Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is an example of irreducible complexity because the trap mechanism could not have evolved. In the Creationist lexicon, ‘irreducible complexity’ is code for ‘the Christian god did it’, so the Bible is literal truth’.
Comfort has no qualifications in biology, or any science subject yet feels qualified to tell his marks that millions of working biomedical scientists have got things all wrong and he knows best. Posturing as an expert is a familiar Creationist tactic intended to deceive, or, as a Christian would put it, an example of bearing false witness. Nevertheless, he should be capable of even the most cursory of fact checking in the age of the Internet, but doesn't feel he needs to, as he knows his target marks never check what he says, so he'll probably get away with it. It’s the tactic of the snake oil salesman.
Had he bothered with fact-checking, however, he would have discovered the freely available scientific evidence that flatly contradicts and gives the lie to his claim. Not only is the evolutionary pathway of the Venus flytrap known, but it is a very nice example of Darwinian evolution.
But then Creationists cult leaders, like their members, have no interest in the truth. Their mission is to mislead those who eagerly send them money for disinformation that makes them feel important, with a special relationisp with the Creator of the Universe who made it all with them in mind.
And Comfort laughs all the way to the bank.
An earlier ploy by Comfort was to tell his followers that there is no gravity in space [sic], so this proves God wrote the Bible [sic]. A more famous one was to claim the banana is specially designed to fit in the hand as you eat it, knowing his cult won't understand the role of selective breeding in plant cultivation. As others have pointed out, it is equally well designed to fit in other orifices too.
Mind you, Comfort's own ignorance sometimes comes back to bite him, like the time he complained about the pain of an impacted wisdom tooth for which he needed surgery, not realising wisdom teeth and the problems we have with them is both evidence for evolution and against intelligent design, but then Comfort was blissfully ignorant of those things.
Anyway, back to the Venus flytrap; the following is the result of a few minutes search on Google - something Comfort can rely on his dupes not doing. It reveals a fascinating story of gradual evolution of the 'snap-trap' mechanism, including repurposing pre-existing structure which originally had an unrelated function.
The evolution of carnivory in plants is a specialised form of foliar feeding where the plant derives nutrients through its leaves in addition to any it obtains through its roots. It generally occurs in conditions where the soil is deficient in nutrients, such as in acidic bogs where water soluble nutrients, especially nitrates, leach out of the soil. It is believed to have occurred independently six times in the angiosperms, based on extant species, and possibly more in carnivorous lineages now extinct.
But it's not the evolution of carnivory itself that Comfort is trying to fool his marks with, but the 'snap-trap' mechanism which captures the prey.
As Comfort could have discovered in just a few minutes had he bothered to, the evolution of this mechanism probably occurred in a common ancestor of Dionaea and the closely related, Aldrovanda. Two studies in 2002 and 2003 and a further study in 2009, have shed light on how this occurred:
Back in 2013, I wrote a blog about the European Eel for Creationist children, not realising then that all Creationists think like children, or at least all Creationists you are ever likely to encounter on the social media. It is a good introduction to an article about eels in The Conversation by Dr Kylie Soanes, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia. My article was written in the days when intelligent [sic] design advocates were still hoping to get away with pretending ID was real science, not fundamentalist Christianity in disguise.
How The Eel Was Designed
The European Eel, Anguilla anguilla
The European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) is a wonderful example of how God, sorry, the Intelligent Designer works.
One day the Intelligent Designer decided to make a strange creature that looked like a snake, but which lived in water like a fish. He used gills like he had used for other fish so they could breathe in water and which He had decided not to use for some other animals which live in water, like seals, whales and turtles and He decided to include some small scales on their skin which don't seem to have any purpose because he designed them with a tough, slimy skin, but obviously these scales weren't there by accident.
But His most brilliant idea was how they were going to breed. He made it so they needed to spend many years living in rivers and lakes and places like paddy fields and even sewers to put on enough weight so they could go on a very long journey across the Atlantic all the way to the Sargasso Sea near America to lay their eggs, so the young eels have to travel all the way back to Europe again. This is obviously much more sensible than just laying their eggs in the rivers where they live, like most other fish do.
To make this journey, He designed eels so that, come the time for breeding, they strip their bodies down to the bare essentials - basically just the equipment for swimming, a large store of fat for the journey and a pair of gonads for reproducing. They have to take up to fifteen years getting fat enough before they do the journey and then they digest their own digestive system to make themselves lighter. This is obviously much better than needing to bother with eating on the journey through an ocean teeming with the sort of food they had been eating in the rivers they grew up in. As any experienced back-packer will tell you, it's obviously much better to be really big and fat before you start a long journey to save you having to bother eating on the way, and then doing away with your digestive system to make you lighter.
In fact, He brilliantly designed them to look like you would expect if they had once been sea-living at a time when their spawning ground was much closer to Europe but now someone had moved it all the way to America as though they were moving the sea bed around. The fact that very many of them don't survive the journey to the Sargasso Sea is all part of the plan obviously because this ensures that only those best at swimming to the Sargasso Sea get rewarded with breeding - and you can't say fairer than that.
He also made sure that they have no hope of ever returning once they've spawned because they can't eat and have used up all their fat, and He had another brilliant plan for them to go to all this trouble so most of their offspring would be eaten by other things on their journey back to Europe just as though their real purpose was to be food for other creatures.
Then, in a brilliant final move, the Intelligent Designer had the brilliant idea of designing a parasitic nematode worm which used to live only in a Japanese relative of the European eel but which He has now changed slightly so it now infects 80-100% of European eels, making it difficult for them to use the swim-bladders he had given them to make swimming easier, so the European eel is now an endangered species, as the number of young reaching Europe from the Sargasso Sea is down to a mere 2% of its former numbers in some places. But then who wants a lot of those ghastly slimy eels around, eh?
You have to hand it to God the Intelligent designer when He can come up with designs like that, don't you. Obviously, nothing like that could be produced by a mindless, natural, undirected, purposeless process like that silly Charles Darwin invented.
Now for Dr. Soanes' article, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:
Fig 1. The study region.
A map of Central Asia derived by the authors using data for annual precipitation (Worldclim [14]), surface water [15], and rivers (Hydrosheds [16]). The study region (encircled with black line) is shown with the region of Caspian catchment (enclosed with red line). Key mountain ranges, deserts, and bodies of water are labeled. The location of Amir Timur Cave that hosted stalagmite S-12-4 analyzed in this study is shown as red circle.
According to new research findings published in PLOS ONE, central Asia around the Aral Sea, East of the Caspian Sea, was the probable point from which early hominins spread across Eurasia, having migrated north out of Africa and settled in the now semi-arid steppes which were then periodically suitable for human habitation.
The study was conducted by a team led by Dr. Emma Finestone, Assistant Curator of Human Origins at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and which included Dr. Paul Breeze and Professor Nick Drake from Kings College London, Professor Sebastian Breitenbach from Northumbria University Newcastle, Professor Farhod Maksudov from the Uzbekistan Academy of the Sciences, and Professor Michael Petraglia from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
The team presents compelling evidence that this now arid area of Central Asia had periods when local climate change meant it was suitable for hominin occupation and that the record of flint tools patterns coincides with the evidence of this climate change obtained from stalactites in local caves.
According to a news release by Cleveland Museum of Natural History:
Wings of the painted lady butterfly, Vanessa cardui, modified by deletion of non-coding DNA sequence.
Credit: Anyi Mazo-Vargas
This may come as a shock to devoted followers of the Creationist cult, but not to those leading Creationist frauds who specialise in misleading their credulous followers and understand full well that what they claim is designed to mislead and misinform, but scientists working at Cornell University have discovered that non-coding DNA modified from former 'junk' DNA, has a regulatory influence on how the genes which control the markings and colours on some butterflies wings express.
Creations have been conditioned to believe that there is no such thing as junk DNA since it all codes for something and that any change in function must involve an increase in the amount of genetic information (because a loss of information is always deleterious). Junk DNA is of course an embarrassment for Creationists as it belies the notion of intelligent design, and |Creationist dogma now says any mutation is detrimental because it moves the organism further away from the assumed initial perfection of magic creation, the ‘sin’ of ‘The Fall’ having caused ‘genetic entropy’.
Anyone working in the field of genetics will know both these beliefs are nonsense and not supported by the evidence because there are countless examples of advantageous mutations involving a simple substitution in a DNA codon where the number of codons remains the same, yet the meaning of the information changes. There are also countless examples of junk DNA which can be removed without loss of function, because even if the DNA in question is transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA), it does not result in an active protein being produced.
In the case of butterfly wing patterns, however, the controlling DNA doesn't even code mRNA. The researchers found that it acts like switches that can turn on or off a basic ground plan of markings, turning up some patterns and down others. In this way, evolutionary change can be rapid with small changes to this non-coding, regulatory DNA.
Since 2010, the major political issue facing the UK is the fact that the majority party, the Conservatives, is a divided party, at war with itself and bringing the entire country down with it, as the troglodyte reactionaries, yearning for the 'golden age' of 19th Century empire, instinctively oppose any moves to propel the UK into the 21st Century.
First we had the EU in/out referendum because David Cameron decided he was going to solve the problem of the Eurosceptics in his party, with an inept campaign built on the arrogant assumption that the electorate would vote to stay in the EU because Cameron said it was a good idea, not dreaming for one moment that the campaign by those Eurosceptics would be a new low in political populism.
Using the same lies and fake news tactics that got Trump elected, with one false promise after another and one dire warning after another, playing to the xenophobia of a people who had been subjected to about 20 years of anti-EU propaganda by the right-wing press, creating the perception of a country over-run by welfare-scrounging Eastern Europeans, living on benefits and free NHS healthcare while living in subsidised housing at the expense of the ‘real Brits’. The truth was that immigrants tend to work harder and pay more tax than the indigenous population, and essential services like the NHS and social care and the entire hospitality industry had become dependent on EU migrant labour.
There would allegedly be £380 million a week extra for the NHS by saving our contribution to the EU budget - a calculation that conveniently 'forgot' to take into account the money the EU gave back to the UK in the form of farm subsidies, regional development funds, the famous 'Thatcher' rebate, etc. Then there were the 100 million 'fanatical Moslem' Turks queuing to come to the UK and impose Sharia Law on us, when Turkey was admitted to the EU in a matter of weeks, despite the fact that Turkey was a long way from fulfilling the entry requirements and showed no sign of doing anything to meet them.
And of course there were the loony Brussels Bureaucrats legislating on straight bananas, banning British beer and renaming British sausages to offal tubes, because they hated us - all the imagination of a certain Boris Johnson who used to make up lurid populist stories to write as a hack journalist, rather than bothering with research and fact-checking.
Then we had the charade of Theresa May calling an election in a fit of reckless euphoria over opinion polls which forecast she would win a massive majority, only to conduct such an inept campaign that she lost the majority she already had and guaranteed the Brexit negotiations and necessary legislation would be almost impossible to complete by the exit deadline. The only reason for the election was that May didn't think her majority was large enough to be able to ignore the Eurosceptic faction in her own party. The result was an even bigger and bolder faction. And the hatred of a party that felt let down by a leaders whose job was to give them more power, not less.
That debacle was promptly followed by a government led by Boris Johnson who felt the rules didn't apply to him, as an over-privileged Old Etonian and Bullingdon Boy, even to the extent of lying to the Queen to get her to prorogue parliament to avoid a defeat in the Commons, only to have the Supreme Court rule the prorogation unlawful and invalid and order a recall of parliament.
The Bullingdon Club, class of '87
David Cameron (top left, second along), Boris Johnson (bottom right, first along).
Johnson's victory at the subsequent election was fought on the slogan 'Get Brexit Done', which should more correctly have been 'Get Brexit Bodged' as the result in Northern Ireland has shown. An effective tariff barrier now runs down the Irish Sea with Northern Ireland on the EU side of it – something that the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, led by Johnson, had declared unacceptable, but which suddenly became acceptable, to ‘Get Brexit Done’ at any price..
Now the previously unthinkable has happened and Sinn Fein is the largest party in Northern Ireland, so the Tory-supporting Unionists are refusing to form a power-sharing executive, with a Sinn Fein First Minister, and restore the devolved assembly. Northern Ireland, like Scotland, had voted 'Remain' in the referendum so the political pressure to reunite with the Republic is growing and making more sense politically and economically, as is the demand for Scottish independence. The result of Cameron's attempt to solve his party's internal problems could now be the break-up of the UK, leaving just little England with Wales as a discontented, alienated appendage, and Scotland re-joining the EU with tariff barriers and passport controls at the border, ending nearly 500 years of political union and an end to the United Kingdom as a single national entity.
And of course, Johnson’s inability to accept that the rules applied to him as well, resulted in Party Gate where he and his staff held boozy parties in 10 Downing Street while the rest of us dutifully obeyed the rules and stayed in our homes and avoided socialising during the pandemic lockdown. While the Queen sat alone in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Prince Philip, Johnson and his clique partied the night away, leaving the cleaners to clear away the empty bottles and clean up the vomit the next morning. Johnson then casually misled parliament about his part in the parties claiming variously that there were no parties, that he wasn't present and anyway he didn’t realise it was a party because no-one told him it was, despite receiving a fixed penalty notice when the Metropolitan Police had investigated the evidence, to become the first UK PM with a criminal conviction.
Deliberately misleading parliament is a serious breach of the ministerial code and an abuse of power which should result in his suspension from the Commons if he is found guilty by the Commons Standards Committee whose report is due out soon.
Meanwhile chums of ministers were awarded billion-pound contracts to supply hospital and care home staff with PPE which often never materialised and, if it did, was frequently sub-standard and unusable, even old used gowns gleaned from foreign hospital waste bins, with blood still on them. And when the scandals were revealed, a decision was quietly taken at senior government level not to bother trying to recover the money their chums had defrauded the UK taxpayers out of. Not a sign of any concern for the health-care staff whose lives had been put at risk because of the lack of adequate PPE. They were later to be rewarded for their dedication with an effective pay cut with a below inflation increase in salaries. The Nasty Party has shown its contempt for the people whom decent Brits had aplauded from their doorsteps every Thursday during lock-down. (Compassion is for softies!)
Now, having rightly decided Boris Johnson was unfit for public office, and experimented with a swivel-eyed idealogue with no political nous and the charism of a text-reading robot, in the form of the astoundingly inept, Liz Truss, who promised them the biggest bribe if she won, the party is again in open civil war over the next leader - the fourth since Cameron scuttled off to spend more time with his money, and left others to clear up his mess. Unbelievably, there is a very real danger that, if the notoriously greedy and selfish, Thatcherite rank and file get a vote, they could vote Johnson back in, believing he will be best able to deliver to them the extra wealth to which they feel entitled! Having made three monumental mistakes in a row, let's give the mistake before last another go!
It's almost as though the Tory Party has become addicted to self-harm because it feels irrelevant and unloved - at least it's right about something - but is electing yet another leader really the only way it can recover any semblance of its former sense of self-importance?
And this bickering gaggle of self-serving shysters for whom compassion is for softies and morality is in the bottom line of the balance sheet, feels no shame in asking the British people to give it five more years of power at the forthcoming General Election, so it can continue to run the country into the ground to serve dog-eat-dog disaster capitalists.
The following articles by Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University, Australia, give his assessment of the current situation and the Tory Party's responsibility for the mess. They are both reprinted fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original articles can be read here, and here:
Do not adjust your sets: with Truss gone, the UK is about to get yet another prime minister
Credit: Andy Rain/EPA/AAP
Ben Wellings, Monash University
British politics currently exists in a weird time warp. Like some bad special effects from an early episode of Dr Who, time and reality are bent and twisted – only this time it’s all sadly true.
This time warp operates in four main ways.
The first is that lots happens but nothing changes. Another prime minister has gone, but the same party, bereft of ideas, is still in office, clinging to power for its own sake.
It is a measure of the collapse of confidence among Conservative MPs that they fear electoral oblivion from what should be a quite unassailable majority of 71 seats in the current parliament.
The chaos of the management of the vote on fracking – a mischievous ploy by the opposition – should have been a comfortable backhander for the government. Instead, it precipitated the prime minister’s resignation. It’s as if the election victory of 2019 never happened, and we have gone back in time to when the Conservatives only had a slim majority.
The second way the time warp operates relates to the poverty of thinking throughout the party. The fact Boris Johnson is one of the favourites to return to Downing Street suggests how out of touch the grassroots members of the party are with the rest of the country.
The parliamentary party sees the grassroots members as a liability, and is keen to sideline them as much as possible in what will be a speed-dating version of a leadership contest over the coming week. Like Berthold Brecht said of the Communist Party of East Germany: the party needs to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
The third time warp is that the Tories now look like the “loony left” of the 1980s. Rather than being a party motivated by competently managing dull but important things like interest rates, it has morphed into an ideological fighting machine, tilting at windmills like the BBC and “critical race theory” (whatever that is).
Its ideological warriors sound like the inverse of beret-wearing, right-on Marxists from 1983: seeking to win an ideological war of position by capturing the commanding heights of cultural institutions like the National Trust. None of this helped the left in the 1980s. It is not helping the Conservatives now.
The fourth and last time warp returns us to an era before there was such a thing as the Conservative Party. During the 19th century, a group of men representing the interests of the landed classes and manufacturers eventually cohered into an organisation we would recognise as a political party. Time is now moving backwards, undoing this slow alchemy of centuries.
Much of the problem with British politics is indeed the Conservative Party. But it is right to ask if there is such a party in the singular anymore? The Conservative Party is riven with factions and overwhelming personal rivalries. It must be the worst place to work in Britain right now. But whatever the causes, it lacks a cohesiveness for even the most broad-church of political organisations.
Who will be the next Conservative leader? It’s slim pickings for a party bereft of ideas and waging ideological wars.
Credit: Jessica Taylor/AP/AAP
This will make choosing the new leader an impossible choice. Johnson is possible. He is a great campaigner, but that was back in 2019 before “partygate”. Rishi Sunak could run on an “I told you so” ticket but is a multi-millionaire, which would not go down well in the current context of the politics of cost of living. Penny Mordaunt has kept her nose clean during the Truss tenure, but lacks experience. Suella Braverman is the loudest ideological warrior and not popular among MPs or the British public, so will presumably win.
Finally, bending space as well as time, the United Kingdom has turned into “Britaly”: a Dr Moreau-like hybrid of Britain and Italy where the bond markets are in charge, growth is sluggish, and only one party is in government, although the personnel seem to change constantly.
This all might seem like an open goal for the opposition Labour Party, which after the election loss in 2019 had resigned itself to further decades of permanent opposition. But there is something to be lamented here. After the Republican Party in the USA, the Conservative Party is the oldest – and most successful – party in the world. Both parties have become riven with factions fighting what they see as existential ideological battles. The public in both countries suffers as a result.
It is time for the Conservative Party to have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. If they were in charge of their time warping trajectory, a return to a time before the lunatics took over the asylum wouldn’t be a bad place to stop and reflect.
The current turmoil in British politics needs to be understood not just as a response to Liz Truss’s short time as prime minister, but as the result of problems within the governing Conservative Party since it came to power in 2010.
The Conservative party is a group of about 180,000 people who tend to be wealthier and older than the average UK citizen. It was this group, more than Truss’s fellow MPs, who chose her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was also this group that endorsed the policies she tried to impose on the country, causing outcry from the populace and the markets.
This method of selecting the leader of the party needs to be changed. The current method was designed when the Conservatives were last in opposition (1997-2010). This means it was unwittingly designed for changes of leader while out of government.
Choosing the leader of the Conservative Party is strictly speaking a matter for the Conservative Party. This is fine when in opposition. When in government, a change of leader means a change of prime minister. This narrow franchise weakens the legitimacy of whoever becomes the new prime minister among the wider UK electorate.
Too much emphasis on leaders
The Conservative Party has also given itself up to an over-emphasis on leaders. This is part of the spirit of the times. But it is also the case that the prime minister is no longer “first amongst equals”. Instead, he or she plays an increasingly important part in why people vote for a particular party.
The Conservatives supported Boris Johnson because he promised to “get Brexit done”. However, the 80-seat majority he won in 2019 gave the impression that the electorate was voting for a leader (Johnson) rather than a party (the Conservatives).
But if this new support was about Johnson and Brexit, rather than a more permanent switch to the Conservatives, it also meant it could not be counted on thereafter. This helps explain the urgency to oust Johnson and the poor reception for Truss’s policies.
Johnson’s new pro-Brexit supporters did not have the same political instincts as most Conservatives. This group of voters likes it when the government intervenes. They liked Johnson when he promised to spend money and address persistent inequalities between northern and southern England – inequalities exacerbated by the actions of Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s.
So, when he was replaced by Truss, who models herself on Thatcher, the support rapidly evaporated in the north, where memories of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike persist. In the leafy suburbs of the south, normally rock-solid Conservative voters have seen their mortgage payments and energy bills rise as a result of Truss’s “small state” ideology. They are not amused, and were already drifting away from the Tories as byelections held this year suggest.
The Conservative Party’s travails may be traced back to Boris Johnson and Brexit.
Credit: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA/AAP
No new ideas
Perhaps we should not expect a self-described conservative party to have many new ideas (after all, that’s the point). But the poverty of thinking among its leaders stands out. Brexit had a nostalgic element to it. The Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget was more 1980s than Stranger Things. Even the markets couldn’t take the retro infatuation with trickle-down economics.
The Conservatives are stuck in a place where all their ideas are from Britain’s past. In the Conservative Party mindset, the past does not operate as a helpful guide for the future, but as a point of destination. It is a security blanket in the chaos of their own making.
They show no sign of learning from all of this. The instinct of new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is to return not to the 1980s, but to the 2010s. If you don’t like trickle-down economics, you can have austerity instead.
Austerity is where the current Conservative Party began its time in office back in 2010. Back then, David Cameron promised to address what he called “Broken Britain”. Little did electors realise this was more predictive than descriptive. Cuts to public services punished the worst off while the government claimed “we are all in this together” (in the way that everyone may be on an A380, but some people are in business class).
If that’s a no to 1980s trickle-down economics, how about some 2010s David Cameron-style austerity instead?
Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/AAP
Admittedly, it has been hard to predict the mood of British voters. Brexit, another product of internal Conservative division and poor party management, bent political loyalties among the electorate out of usual shape. It was this voter volatility that led Theresa May to call an election in 2017 and lost the Conservatives a healthy majority, even though its vote share went up. This was the greatest miscalculation in British politics since as far back as the previous year, when David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum.
All of these problems are in some ways internal to the Conservative Party. Voters angered by austerity turned to the right-wing populist party UKIP, forcing Cameron to call a referendum on EU membership. To try to quell the low politics of the militant pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative party, Cameron gambled with the high politics of the UK’s membership of the EU, and lost.
To realise all the illusive and illusionary opportunities that Brexit should in theory create, its most ardent supporters latched onto Johnson to bring down May. Johnson created the parliamentary deadlock of Brexit and then appeared to solve this self-inflicted wound with an election victory built on shifting sands.
However, he soon became embroiled in scandal after scandal, and his behaviour was finally too much even for the vulnerable MPs in “red wall” seats to stomach. Then, just when MPs thought it was safe to go back to their constituencies, Truss damaged already weakening support in the “blue wall” seats in southern England with the mini-budget: perhaps the most spectacular own-goal since Jamie Pollock scored against Manchester City in 1998.
Finally, most Conservatives now think Truss should resign. Yet in a final fling of nostalgia – and harking back to the glory days of the first half of 2022 – their favoured candidate to replace her is Boris Johnson.
The Conservatives have lost sight of where their interests and those of the country depart. By falling back on old certitudes that are no longer fit for purpose, they are behaving like a party that is already in opposition.
Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The Conservative Party grass roots needs to learn to accept the fact that the "glory days" of the British Empire came to an end with Suez under Anthony Eden. The xenophobic Little England nationalists have taken 'their' country back and now don't know what to do with it.
It should come as no surprise that the Tory Party members will, given the chance, elect leaders that are unfit for public office, pursuing policies that benefit them but no-one else. After all, the interests of a parasite and its host rarely coincide.
The Conservative Party is the disease, not the cure.
Tory Party leadership contenders, 2022 (second try)
Since 2010, the major political issue facing the UK is the fact that the majority party, the Conservatives, is a divided party, at war with itself and bringing the entire country down with it, as the troglodite reactionaries, yearning for the 'golden age' of 19th Century empire, instinctively oppose any moves to propel the UK into the 21st Century.
First we had the EU in/out referendum because David Cameron decided he was going to solve the problem of the Eurosceptics in his party, with an inept campaign built on the arrogant assumption that the vote would be to remain in the EU because Cameron said it was a good idea, not dreaming for one moment that the campaign by those Eurosceptics would be a new low in democratic debate.
Using the same lies and fake news populist tactics that got Trump elected, with one false promise after another and one dire warning after another, playing to the xenophobia of a people who had been subjected to about 20 years of anti-EU propaganda by the right-wing press, creating the perception of a country over-run by welfare-scrounging Eastern Europeans, living on benefits and free NHS healthcare while living in subsidised housing. The truth was that immigrants tend to work harder and pay more tax than the indigenous population, and essential services like the NHS and social care had become dependent on EU migrant labour.
There would be £380 million a week extra for the NHS by saving our contribution to the EU budget - a calculation that conveniently 'forgot' to take into account the money the EU gave back to the UK in the form of farm subsidies, regional development funds, the famous 'Thatcher' rebate, etc. Then there were the 100 million fanatically Moslem Turks queuing to come to the UK and impose Sharia Law on us when Turkey was admitted to the EU in a matter of a few weeks, despite the fact that Turkey was a long way from fulfilling the entry requirements and showed no sign of doing anything to meet them.
And of course there were to loony Brussels Bureaucrats legislating on straight bananas, banning British beer and renaming British sausages to offal tubes - all the imagination of a certain Boris Johnson who used to make up lurid stories to write as a hack journalist, rather than bothering with research and fact-checking.
Then we had the charade of Theresa May calling an election in a fit of euphoria over opinion polls which looked like she would win a massive majority, only to conduct such an inept campaign that she lost the majority she already had and guaranteed the Brexit negotiations and necessary legislation would be almost impossible to complete by the exit deadline. The only reason for the election was that May didn't think her majority was large enough to be able to ignore the Eurosceptic faction in her own party. The result was an even bigger and bolder faction.
That debacle was promptly followed by a government led by Boris Johnson who felt the rules didn't apply to him, even to the extent of lying to the Queen to get her to prorogue parliament to avoid a defeat in the Commons, only to have the Supreme Court rule the prorogation unlawful and invalid and order a recall of parliament.
Johnson's victory at the subsequent election was fought on the slogan 'Get Brexit Done', which should more correctly have been 'Get Brexit Bodged' as the result in Northern Ireland has shown. An effective tariff barrier now runs down the Irish Sea with Northern Ireland on the EU side of it – something that the Eurosceptics in the Tory Party, led by Johnson, had declared unacceptable.
Now the previously unthinkable has happened and Sinn Fein are the largest party, so the Tory-supporting Unionists are refusing to form a power-sharing executive and restore the devolved assembly. Northern Ireland, like Scotland, had voted 'Remain' in the referendum so the political pressure to reunite with the Republic is growing and making more sense politically and economically, as is the demand for Scottish independence. The result of Cameron's attempt to solve his party's internal problems could now be the break-up of the UK, leaving just little England with Wales as a discontented, alienated appendage, and Scotland re-joining the EU with tariff barriers and passport controls at the border.
And of course, Johnson’s inability to accept that the rules applied to him as well, resulted in Party Gate where he and his staff held boozy parties in 10 Downing Street while the rest of us dutifully obeyed the rules and stayed in our homes and avoided socialising during the pandemic lockdown. While the Queen sat alone in Westminster Abbey at the funeral of Prince Philip, Johnson and his clique partied the night away, leaving the cleaners to clear away the bottles and clean up the vomit the next morning. Johnson then casually misled parliament about his part in the parties, despite receiving a fixed penalty notice when the Metropolitan Police had investigated the evidence. A breach of the ministerial code which should result in his suspension from Parliament if he is found guilty by the Commons Standards Committee whose report is due out soon.
Meanwhile chums of ministers were awarded billion-pound contracts to supply hospital and care home staff with PPE which never materialised and, if it did, was often sub-standard and unusable, even old used gowns gleaned from foreign hospital waste bins, with blood still on them. And when the scandals were revealed, a decision was taken at senior government level not to bother trying to recover the money their chums had defrauded the UK taxpayers out of. Not a sign of any concern for the health-care staff whose lives had been put at risk because of the lack of adequate PPE.
Now, having rightly decided Boris Johnson was unfit for public office, and experimented with a swivel-eyed idealogue with no political nous in the form of the astoundingly inept, Liz Truss, who promised them the biggest bribe if she won, the party is again in open civil war over the next leader - the fourth since Cameron scuttled off to spend more time with his money, and left others to clear up his mess. Unbelievably, there is a very real danger that, if the notoriously greedy and selfish, Thatcherite rank and file get a vote, they could vote Johnson back in, believing he will be the best able to deliver the extra wealth to which they feel entitled!
It's almost as though the Tory Party has become addicted to self-harm because it feels irrelevant and unloved - at least it's right about something!
And this bickering gaggle of self-serving shysters for whom compassion is for softies and morality is in the bottom line of the balance sheet, feels no shame in asking the British people to give it five more years of power at the forthcoming General Election, so it can continue to run the country into the ground to serve disaster capitalists.
The following articles by Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University, Australia, give his assessment of the current situation and the Tory Party's responsibility for the mess. They are both reprinted fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, The original articles can be read here, and here:
Do not adjust your sets: with Truss gone, the UK is about to get yet another prime minister
Credit: Andy Rain/EPA/AAP
Ben Wellings, Monash University
British politics currently exists in a weird time warp. Like some bad special effects from an early episode of Dr Who, time and reality are bent and twisted – only this time it’s all sadly true.
This time warp operates in four main ways.
The first is that lots happens but nothing changes. Another prime minister has gone, but the same party, bereft of ideas, is still in office, clinging to power for its own sake.
It is a measure of the collapse of confidence among Conservative MPs that they fear electoral oblivion from what should be a quite unassailable majority of 71 seats in the current parliament.
The chaos of the management of the vote on fracking – a mischievous ploy by the opposition – should have been a comfortable backhander for the government. Instead, it precipitated the prime minister’s resignation. It’s as if the election victory of 2019 never happened, and we have gone back in time to when the Conservatives only had a slim majority.
The second way the time warp operates relates to the poverty of thinking throughout the party. The fact Boris Johnson is one of the favourites to return to Downing Street suggests how out of touch the grassroots members of the party are with the rest of the country.
The parliamentary party sees the grassroots members as a liability, and is keen to sideline them as much as possible in what will be a speed-dating version of a leadership contest over the coming week. Like Berthold Brecht said of the Communist Party of East Germany: the party needs to dissolve the people and elect a new one.
The third time warp is that the Tories now look like the “loony left” of the 1980s. Rather than being a party motivated by competently managing dull but important things like interest rates, it has morphed into an ideological fighting machine, tilting at windmills like the BBC and “critical race theory” (whatever that is).
Its ideological warriors sound like the inverse of beret-wearing, right-on Marxists from 1983: seeking to win an ideological war of position by capturing the commanding heights of cultural institutions like the National Trust. None of this helped the left in the 1980s. It is not helping the Conservatives now.
The fourth and last time warp returns us to an era before there was such a thing as the Conservative Party. During the 19th century, a group of men representing the interests of the landed classes and manufacturers eventually cohered into an organisation we would recognise as a political party. Time is now moving backwards, undoing this slow alchemy of centuries.
Much of the problem with British politics is indeed the Conservative Party. But it is right to ask if there is such a party in the singular anymore? The Conservative Party is riven with factions and overwhelming personal rivalries. It must be the worst place to work in Britain right now. But whatever the causes, it lacks a cohesiveness for even the most broad-church of political organisations.
Who will be the next Conservative leader? It’s slim pickings for a party bereft of ideas and waging ideological wars.
Credit: Jessica Taylor/AP/AAP
This will make choosing the new leader an impossible choice. Johnson is possible. He is a great campaigner, but that was back in 2019 before “partygate”. Rishi Sunak could run on an “I told you so” ticket but is a multi-millionaire, which would not go down well in the current context of the politics of cost of living. Penny Mordaunt has kept her nose clean during the Truss tenure, but lacks experience. Suella Braverman is the loudest ideological warrior and not popular among MPs or the British public, so will presumably win.
Finally, bending space as well as time, the United Kingdom has turned into “Britaly”: a Dr Moreau-like hybrid of Britain and Italy where the bond markets are in charge, growth is sluggish, and only one party is in government, although the personnel seem to change constantly.
This all might seem like an open goal for the opposition Labour Party, which after the election loss in 2019 had resigned itself to further decades of permanent opposition. But there is something to be lamented here. After the Republican Party in the USA, the Conservative Party is the oldest – and most successful – party in the world. Both parties have become riven with factions fighting what they see as existential ideological battles. The public in both countries suffers as a result.
It is time for the Conservative Party to have a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. If they were in charge of their time warping trajectory, a return to a time before the lunatics took over the asylum wouldn’t be a bad place to stop and reflect.
The current turmoil in British politics needs to be understood not just as a response to Liz Truss’s short time as prime minister, but as the result of problems within the governing Conservative Party since it came to power in 2010.
The Conservative party is a group of about 180,000 people who tend to be wealthier and older than the average UK citizen. It was this group, more than Truss’s fellow MPs, who chose her as leader of the Conservative Party. It was also this group that endorsed the policies she tried to impose on the country, causing outcry from the populace and the markets.
This method of selecting the leader of the party needs to be changed. The current method was designed when the Conservatives were last in opposition (1997-2010). This means it was unwittingly designed for changes of leader while out of government.
Choosing the leader of the Conservative Party is strictly speaking a matter for the Conservative Party. This is fine when in opposition. When in government, a change of leader means a change of prime minister. This narrow franchise weakens the legitimacy of whoever becomes the new prime minister among the wider UK electorate.
Too much emphasis on leaders
The Conservative Party has also given itself up to an over-emphasis on leaders. This is part of the spirit of the times. But it is also the case that the prime minister is no longer “first amongst equals”. Instead, he or she plays an increasingly important part in why people vote for a particular party.
The Conservatives supported Boris Johnson because he promised to “get Brexit done”. However, the 80-seat majority he won in 2019 gave the impression that the electorate was voting for a leader (Johnson) rather than a party (the Conservatives).
But if this new support was about Johnson and Brexit, rather than a more permanent switch to the Conservatives, it also meant it could not be counted on thereafter. This helps explain the urgency to oust Johnson and the poor reception for Truss’s policies.
Johnson’s new pro-Brexit supporters did not have the same political instincts as most Conservatives. This group of voters likes it when the government intervenes. They liked Johnson when he promised to spend money and address persistent inequalities between northern and southern England – inequalities exacerbated by the actions of Margaret Thatcher’s governments of the 1980s.
So, when he was replaced by Truss, who models herself on Thatcher, the support rapidly evaporated in the north, where memories of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike persist. In the leafy suburbs of the south, normally rock-solid Conservative voters have seen their mortgage payments and energy bills rise as a result of Truss’s “small state” ideology. They are not amused, and were already drifting away from the Tories as byelections held this year suggest.
The Conservative Party’s travails may be traced back to Boris Johnson and Brexit.
Credit: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA/AAP
No new ideas
Perhaps we should not expect a self-described conservative party to have many new ideas (after all, that’s the point). But the poverty of thinking among its leaders stands out. Brexit had a nostalgic element to it. The Truss-Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget was more 1980s than Stranger Things. Even the markets couldn’t take the retro infatuation with trickle-down economics.
The Conservatives are stuck in a place where all their ideas are from Britain’s past. In the Conservative Party mindset, the past does not operate as a helpful guide for the future, but as a point of destination. It is a security blanket in the chaos of their own making.
They show no sign of learning from all of this. The instinct of new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is to return not to the 1980s, but to the 2010s. If you don’t like trickle-down economics, you can have austerity instead.
Austerity is where the current Conservative Party began its time in office back in 2010. Back then, David Cameron promised to address what he called “Broken Britain”. Little did electors realise this was more predictive than descriptive. Cuts to public services punished the worst off while the government claimed “we are all in this together” (in the way that everyone may be on an A380, but some people are in business class).
If that’s a no to 1980s trickle-down economics, how about some 2010s David Cameron-style austerity instead?
Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/AAP
Admittedly, it has been hard to predict the mood of British voters. Brexit, another product of internal Conservative division and poor party management, bent political loyalties among the electorate out of usual shape. It was this voter volatility that led Theresa May to call an election in 2017 and lost the Conservatives a healthy majority, even though its vote share went up. This was the greatest miscalculation in British politics since as far back as the previous year, when David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum.
All of these problems are in some ways internal to the Conservative Party. Voters angered by austerity turned to the right-wing populist party UKIP, forcing Cameron to call a referendum on EU membership. To try to quell the low politics of the militant pro-Brexit wing of the Conservative party, Cameron gambled with the high politics of the UK’s membership of the EU, and lost.
To realise all the illusive and illusionary opportunities that Brexit should in theory create, its most ardent supporters latched onto Johnson to bring down May. Johnson created the parliamentary deadlock of Brexit and then appeared to solve this self-inflicted wound with an election victory built on shifting sands.
However, he soon became embroiled in scandal after scandal, and his behaviour was finally too much even for the vulnerable MPs in “red wall” seats to stomach. Then, just when MPs thought it was safe to go back to their constituencies, Truss damaged already weakening support in the “blue wall” seats in southern England with the mini-budget: perhaps the most spectacular own-goal since Jamie Pollock scored against Manchester City in 1998.
Finally, most Conservatives now think Truss should resign. Yet in a final fling of nostalgia – and harking back to the glory days of the first half of 2022 – their favoured candidate to replace her is Boris Johnson.
The Conservatives have lost sight of where their interests and those of the country depart. By falling back on old certitudes that are no longer fit for purpose, they are behaving like a party that is already in opposition.
Ben Wellings, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Monash University
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
The Conservative Party grass roots needs to learn to accept the fact that the "glory days" of the British Empire came to an end with Suez under Anthony Eden. The xenophobic Little England nationalists have taken 'their' country back and now don't know what to do with it.
It should come as no surprise that the Tory Party members will, given the chance, elect leaders that are unfit for public office, pursuing policies that benefit them but no-one else. After all, the interests of a parasite and its host rarely coincide.
The Conservative Party is the disease, not the cure.
