He has chosen his path - Boris Johnson redrawing lines of what it means to be a Conservative
The prime minister has broken two manifesto promises in an afternoon as he increases National Insurance to raise money for social care and pauses the triple lock on pensions.
'The Machine,' they exclaimed, 'feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.'
E.M. Forster - The Machine Stops (1909)
Yes Boris Johnson is redrawing the lines of what it means to be a Conservative. In one sense it means becoming Blue Labour as many have been pointing out for some time.
In a more significant sense it means taking the Conservatives beyond party politics into the bowels of the Machine, where there are no longer any democratic exits. Where there are no exits at all apart from catastrophic collapse.
7 comments:
A college principal I used to work for once said to me"Any fool can run a successful college if they are given unlimited funding".
That doesn't seem to be the case with the NHS, though.
I've said for some time that the only way out of the never ending conveyor belt of more taxation, public spending, and the infantilization of the masses as wards of the State is a catastrophic collapse of the entire current economic system. We don't vote ourselves out of it, as even if we did the wishes of the voters would be ignored by the political classes. It only stops when the State's printing press stops working, or rather no-one will accept its output any more. And when that happens the sh*t hits the fan big time........
@ Sobers
It doesn't matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in. If our elected representatives actually managed the Civil Service, the Quangos, the institutions of the great and good, then there might be some point to it.
Had Boris announced that HS2 would be halted after the first section had been completed and that the BBC licence would be scrapped then it might have been seen as a bit (a very small bit) of a pushback against the Civil Service Machine. But no.
He's not remotely interested in doing the right thing. They have a hold over him.
Sam - I bet it doesn't really apply to a successful college either.
Sobers - that's my main concern, particularly when I consider the grandchildren. As you say there seems to be no way back now. Although unexpected trends could crop up and change the general direction, it isn't easy to detect what they might be.
DJ - yes Boris needed something else apart from Brexit and ditching HS2 and the BBC licence could have boosted his reputation for radical reform. Yet we may be too far gone for even that to work.
James - as with all of them. Buried by the establishment.
Any fool can run a business in the good times. It is probably an advantage to be a fool; not held back by fear of risk when the odds are favourable. It is a crisis that exposes the reckless and incompetent.
djc - I don't know about that, in my time I've encountered people who couldn't run a business in the good times. Well qualified people too.
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