This blog has always been mostly about Ava-Jane interspersed with the odd political rant from me. And given that we are at a moment when there isn’t much to report on the Ava-Jane front (this is, of course, a very good thing) and we are in the midst of election fever with the likely outcome to be a first change in the ruling party in fourteen years, this should be one of those blog posts with a slant towards the the political rant tendency rather than a catch-up on Ava-Jane. I will sprinkle some Ava-Jane pictures into the blog to lighten things as she really has been a lot of fun recently and we have had a lot of fun hanging out together.
I think I might have gone in to the elections too fast and too early – this is going to be a long campaign and by Day 2, I had already consumed a multitude of podcasts about the elections and read all the newspaper articles (full disclosure – all Guardian articles). We still have five weeks or so to go and I may have burnt out already and am already beginning to feel a bit meh about the whole process. Now of course, I am much looking forward to watching the Tories lose the election, as they almost certainly will – they really are a rotting carcass of a party that needs to be relieved of power and to go away and take a very long hard look at itself but it is very difficult to get genuinely excited by a Starmer-led Labour Government. This isn’t really entirely their fault – they will be inheriting what can only be described as a shit show… well, I am sure there are many other ways that it could be described, many less potty mouthed than the way I chose to describe it but that’s the way I roll. And given the state of Britain’s waterways and coastal areas, a shit show is particularly accurate, if rude.
It’s hard to get excited about someone whose main promise to the electorate is modest competence. But following on from the premierships of Johnson and Truss who displayed varying degrees of both immodesty and incompetence, this seems to be a winning formula for Sir Keir Starmer. Admittedly Rishi Sunak was supposed to be swimming in those same waters of most competence but he was washed ashore by 14 years of immodest incompetence and ruled a party of incompetents, so he really didn’t stand a chance. He had to form a government from these incompetents with a very small gene pool to choose from, with most of the vaguely useful Tories either out of Parliament or out of favour for having advocated too strongly for competence. But he did himself no favours by appointing people such as Suella Braverman as Home Secretary or Grant Shapps as Defence Secretary – neither of whom are either modest or competent.
Starmer’s voice even has a ring of modest competence. It’s the same voice that I put on when I am reading Mr Neat of the Mr Men to Ava-Jane. His shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves has exactly the same nasal twang as he does, which makes you suspect they might share a voice coach who is deliberately tutoring them to sound as uninspiring as humanly possible. “Watch it there Keir, you almost injected a note of passion into that last speech. Rein it in a little Rachel, we don’t want to scare the horses – look what happened to John McDonnell.”
And essentially that is all we can hope for – a change of government, so that a bunch of fresh new people might be able to inject some competence into managing the decline of a decaying country. Much though I wish it were so, I can’t see Labour really being able to turn things around significantly.
All of Labour’s plans are predicated on them somehow kickstarting “growth”. They have committed to not raising all sorts of taxes while at the same time improving all of our crumblig services and they are going to be able to pay this because of all of sudden Britain’s economy is going to grow! But as I say, they are going to be inheriting a whole load of poo – there are various humongous bills coming up for all those things that have so scandalised us all of late: the Post Office Scandal, the Unpaid Carers Scandal, and the Infected Blood Scandal. They all come with capital letters and if there is any justice in this world, huge payouts. How are they going to pay for that lot? The doctors are on strike again – the certainly deserve a pay rise. How are they going to pay for that? The only real cash raising measures that Labour have announced is that they are going to put VAT on Public Schools and cracking down on tax evasion. Now, as the class traitor that I am, I am all for taxing Public Schools but it isn’t going get to get you any proper spondoolics. And as for cracking down on tax evasion… well good luck with that! Rishi Sunak was proposing that he would fund his National Service idea by cracking down on tax evasion and he only just cracked down on his own wife’s tax evasion halfway through his very brief premiership. (Brevity of premierships is a crowded field these days.)
So it’s all down to growth really. (Liz Truss was massively into growth BTW!) Rachel Reeves has made some sort of pledge that Britain is going to be the highest growth economy of the G7, which is an impossible pledge to make as it is entirely beyond your control given that she has no influence whatsoever on what happens to the economies of the other G6. What if Germany developed nuclear fusion and kept it to themselves? Are you going to outgrown them? The one stat that we have, and one that Sunak has been hanging onto desperately, is that as Britain’s economy has been in the doldrums for so long, showing some sort of growth can be spun as a positive. If you have shifted growth from 0% to 1% you are technically growing faster than a country that has gone from 6% to 6.5%.
But as Fo said the other day, is growth really what we want to be focussing on – what does it do to our planet? Fo’s right that growth means increased consumption and we are living on a planet that cannot sustain much more consumption. We could well grow ourselves into oblivion. So, hmmmm… I am voting Green and will go down with the Titanic with a vague and unjustified sense of smugness.
I noted down a couple of quotes from two separate articles in the Guardian last week which make you think.
If SUVs were a country, the IEA said, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of CO2, ahead of the national emissions of both Japan and Germany.
Wealthy white men from rural areas are the UK’s biggest emitters of climate-heating gases from transport, according to a study.
Sources:
So, in summary… Go Keir… Yeah!
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