When A Government Is Not A Government

Last night we were treated to some of the worst scenes ever inflicted on the House of Commons, with government MPs browbeaten and allegedly manhandled and reduced to tears — by their own party’s officials. 

And the reason? Because they didn’t want to break their party’s manifesto pledge to ban fracking by, at the Prime Minister’s inexcusable insistence, voting for fracking. 

There couldn’t be a more stark and shocking reminder that this government was not elected. The Prime Minister, who replaced one who broke the law and is currently under Parliamentary investigation for alleged sleaze, has never faced a General Election as the party’s leader. Under her “leadership”, it has taken a sharp lurch to the right, with policies such as closing legal immigration routes and sending refugees to Rwanda, a country with a poor record on human rights, demanding photo ID for voters, which will disproportionately affect those on low incomes who have no car or opportunity to travel abroad and therefore do not have a driving licence or a passport, criminalizing protest that actually makes a sound, and banning people who have never committed any crime from attending peaceful protests. 

None of this has ever been voted for by the public, because none of it has ever been submitted to the public for a vote. 

This is not a legally-constituted government. It is a right-wing coup. And it cannot be allowed to stand. As I’m writing this, Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee is meeting with Liz Truss. He needs to understand that yet another Prime Minister the country hasn’t voted for, with the opportunity to take the country in who-knows-what direction that has likewise never been submitted to the judgement of the electorate, won’t cut it. 

We need a General Election. And we need it now. 

General Election NOW!

Exciting news - the petition for an immediate General Election has reached well over half a million signatures, and will be debated in the House of Commons on Monday! 

That’s not a reason to stop circulating it, though. We need to send the strongest possible signal to this government that we want the right to vote on its continued existence. The party’s lurch even further to the right under Liz Truss has not been sanctioned by the people, and the massive demonstrations that Enough Is Enough have proved beyond all doubt that the people don’t support it. 

And let’s not be fooled by Tory claims that no-one voted for Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair, either. The Tories were outraged, and claimed they never would do such a thing. Well, what’s another broken promise to a Tory government? 

But here’s the thing. Gordon Brown didn’t take the Labour Party and the country on a wild ride to an extreme position that the country hadn’t voted for, as Liz Truss has. And at least he knew something about finance. 

The more signatures we get, the more pressure it’ll put on Tory MPs to support it. We need 36 of them to vote for it (or twice that number to abstain, or just find somewhere else to be that day). 

Hopefully there are still some with a conscience, or at least the sense of self-preservation to gamble on earning enough respect for their actions to win their own seats back, but a lot may well depend on what they think the feeling in the country really is. 

So, let’s show them. Let’s go for a million signatures! 

If you haven’t signed already, please do. And, either way, please share the link on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere you can. Let’s make our feelings clear, and call on MPs (they work for us, remember!) to give us what we want - a General Election now! 

Never In The Field Of UK Governance

They promised we’d regain the sovereignty we’d never lost: they gave us empty shelves and rising prices. 

They promised Brexit wouldn’t affect our ability to export goods to the EU: they turned the county known as the Garden of England into a lorry park, and drowned firms in the red tape that we’d originally joined the EU to avoid.

They promised we would still be able to travel freely in the EU: they gave us queues for passport checks while EU nationals sailed through. 

They promised we could still study in the EU: they pulled out of the Erasmus agreement that permitted it. 

They promised us prosperity: they trashed the pound. 

They promised they would keep us safe from Covid: they delayed their border checks so long, they let it in. 

They promised us new hospitals: they tried to claim that old ones that had had work done on them were new. 

They promised “sunlit uplands”: they gave us threats of power cuts this winter. 

They promised us no border checks with Northern Ireland: now they want to give us “freeports” with customs barriers within the British mainland.

They promised us a lucrative trade deal with the USA: we got the snub that their attempts to tear up the Good Friday Agreement, of which the USA is guarantor, deserved. 

And these are just a few examples of the misery the Tory government has put us through. 

The majority of the country didn’t vote for them. The Tories under Boris Johnson got just 43.6% of the vote. Liz Truss’s administration (I’d hesitate to describe it as a government), way to the right of even his, has never faced the country in a General Election, and therefore has precisely none. 

As so many people came out on the streets last week to make quite clear - Enough Is Enough. 

In football terms, Liz Truss, you’ve lost the dressing-room. You need to go, and take your unelected right-wing cabal with you. 

We need a General Election, and we need it now. 

Because never in the field of UK governance has so much needless suffering been inflicted on so many by so few. 

The Hidden Danger

It’s been a great few days, hasn’t it? The massive turnout at the #EnoughIsEnough rallies just over a week ago, the Benny Hill theme playing outside the Tory Party Conference, the Tory attempt to lean on the local police to get the music stopped, which backfired badly with the terse comment that “This isn’t Belarus”, and the polls showing that if a General Election were to be held right now there would be what commentators called a Tory Extinction Event. 

And a contact poll’s suggesting that support for the government has dropped still lower and is currently down to 15%, and Keir Starmer is now odds on with the bookmakers to be the next UK PM. 

But here’s the hidden danger. The General Election will not be held right now. It won’t be held tomorrow, and it won’t be held next week. Even when Parliament (at last!) resumes today, it would take 36 Conservative MPs to cross the floor to force a General Election. 

Given the news this morning of the need for a third intervention by the Bank of England to deal with “a material risk to UK financial stability” (the Bank of England’s words, not mine) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ warning of up to £60 billion of cuts to what’s left of our living standards, that may be less unlikely than it was just yesterday. But even if it happens, a General Election takes time to arrange. 

And what’ll happen in the meantime? A lot of Tory voters will think better of it. They’ll persuade themselves the party’s going to find a better leader, see the error of their policies, maybe even develop a social conscience, or at least remember how to add up costs and benefits. 

And even if they don’t, the habits of a lifetime will kick in. Those who were only swayed towards the Tories by the promises of 2019 may well go back to their previous allegiances, but those who’ve always voted Tory will find it hard to vote for someone else this time. 

And, especially, they’ll find it hard to vote for Labour. They always do. 

That’s why, no matter what the polls and betting markets say, we still need a Progressive Alliance. The reason why we have a Tory government right now (and why we’ve had so many of them in the past) is not because the country wants them — even in the so-called landslide win in 2019 they only got 43.6% of the vote. That’s not impressive. 

The reason why they are in government’s because the non-Tory majority of voters, as so often before, was so divided. In seat after seat, if the anti-Tory vote had been combined, the Tory candidate would been sent packing, in many cases minus their deposit. 

We cannot risk that happening again. 

The country can’t afford another four years of a Tory government happy to starve the poor to profit the already-rich. To shred the rights of working people. To tear up laws on health and safety, welfare and food standards. To scrap our online privacy in favour of “Big Data”. 

And, worst of all, to privatise the NHS. 

If the party leaders won’t, or because of the way their constitution’s written perhaps can’t, agree not to contest seats where another anti-Tory candidate has a better chance of winning, then we’ll simply have to do it for them. We need to vote for the non-Tory candidate best-placed to take the seat. That may not be the candidate we would most like to vote for. This time around, that’s not the point. 

Before we can make any kind of progress out of the quagmire this government has got us into we need to get the Tories out of power, and to do it we need co-operatate with those from other parties who feel likewise. 

There’ll be Twitter accounts to follow that will show which non-Tory candidate in each constituency is the one with the best chance of winning the seat. 

You’ll be doing a massive service to the country if you’ll vote for yours. 

An Open Letter To Conservative MPs

 

Dear Conservative MPs, 

Allegations are coming in from a multitude of sources that (no, don’t worry - it’s not another sex scandal!) some of you have been texting each other with comments about the government which suggest that you don’t enjoy watching them torch the country any more than those of us who’ve had to decimate our grocery shopping and daren’t switch the heating on do. 

If that’s true, here’s a way that you can find a place in the history books for helping to save the country from the Government of Zero Talents, instead of being its enablers. 

Make no mistake about it - you are going down in history as one of those two things, so why not choose the selfless one? 

Here’s all you have to do. 

1. Start a WhatsApp group (and we all know that you’re familiar with those!), or join one you’re invited to. 

2. Do not invite any member of the Government Front Bench. There’s no point. They’re complicit in what’s going on. They have to be, or they’d have spoken out by now. 

3. Invite your friends to join, and ask them to invite theirs. The only qualification is that they have at least some semblance of a backbone. 

4. Say publicly that Parliament should be recalled. It’s hardly an unreasonable suggestion when the country’s pension funds were only saved from total wipeout as a direct result of the Government’s own policy by the desperate intervention of the Bank of England, is it? A letter to the PM signed by all of you would be ideal. 

5. When Parliament finally does meet (and I’m assuming that after all this time MPs can still find the Debating Chamber), there are two steps you can take. If the mini-Budget is debated, vote against it. If it’s not, call for a Confidence Vote, then vote against the Government. If you want to make it really dramatic, cross the floor. You don’t need join another party if you don’t want to. Just declare yourself an Independent. 

The beauty of it is that if you co-ordinate your efforts there’s not a lot the Government can do about it. They can’t pick you off one by one. It’s what trade union members might describe as solidarity. 

Yes, you’re going to risk your job, but distancing yourself from the incompetent dogmatists in charge just now may save you at the next election. Otherwise, unless your constituents are mainly millionaires, you could be out for good. 

And with pundits talking last night about a potential Conservative extinction event, I’d suggest your job’s in jeopardy already. 

But I’m going to give you credit for some altruism, and hope it’s even more important to you that you’ll help to save the country. 

Sincerely,

Alix Chaytor. 

A Sense Of Hope Renewed

An exciting sense of change hangs in the air. The Labour Party Conference has voted for a change in the voting system from First Past The Post, which managed to land us with an authoritarian right-wing government with a landslide majority of seats despite getting a paltry 43.6% of the vote. You can call that situation lots of things. Democracy would not be one of them. 

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens already support the alternative, Proportional Representation. In fact, the Tories are the only mainstream party left in England that doesn’t! You don’t think that could be because under PR with 43.6% of the vote they wouldn’t be in power, do you? Because if you do, you’re not alone! 

In itself, of course, it’s far from a sign of hope that recently-appointed Prime Minister Liz Truss is already running neck and neck with Boris Johnson for the title of the worst UK PM ever. 

What is a good sign, though, is that it hasn’t taken people long to see through her. She might have looked much more presentable at Westminster Abbey than her predecessor (and at least she didn’t get sent back by officials for trying to claim more precedence than she was entitled to!), but with the able assistance of her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, she’s already managed to tank the economy so badly that the country’s pension funds were within hours of going bankrupt. 

This would probably have won her the Worst PM title outright, but mercifully for the rest of the country the Bank of England stepped in with emergency support in time to stop it happening. 

Another sign of hope in this mess is that despite her refusal to recall Parliament to allow this disastrous attempt at a mini-Budget to be debated, local radio came to the country’s rescue, and a number of broadcasters were granted five minutes each to question her. As one listener put it on Twitter afterwards, he’d never known anyone be involved in eight car crashes in one morning before. I’ll post links to the interviews. I think you’ll like them. 

A repeatedly-trending Twitter hashtag says it all. 

#EnoughIsEnough 

We have been patient long enough. 

We have accepted being lied to. 

We have accepted broken promises. 

We have accepted price hikes. 

We have accepted empty supermarket shelves. 

We have accepted seeing queues at food banks, and people in work not having the money to feed and clothe their families. 

We have accepted the NHS being so disastrously under-funded that it’s very clear the plan’s to sell it off and let a US-style commercial insurance model bankrupt anyone unfortunate enough to have an accident or fall sick. 

But we’ve had enough. 

We’re no longer going to stand for being told that if someone’s job’s not paying well enough to let them heat their homes they ought to get a better-paying one (who on earth would stay in that situation if they could do that? And what chance have you on a zero-hours contract? Or if you’ve been fired and rehired at a lower rate of pay for longer hours?). 

We won’t accept that anyone’s entitlement to run a business profitably in this country should depend on whether they belong to a WhatsApp group shared by the Tory élite. 

We’re not accepting being told that tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics will benefit the rest of us. Of course they won’t. If Margaret Thatcher couldn’t make that work, how on earth can this lot? 

And even if they could, why should the “many” be expected to content ourselves with just a trickle, while the “few” hang on to the entire reservoir? 

Hope is stirring in the air. People are demanding a recall of Parliament and a General Election. Now. 

For the first time, according to a poll that came out yesterday, 56% of voters want to see some form of Proportional Representation, which will no longer enable a minority share of the vote to triumph over a larger but divided opposition. And for good measure, another poll shows that even without PR there’d be what commentators are describing as a Conservative extinction event if an election were to be held soon! 

The scale of that may well be just a temporary reaction, of course, but it’s the first time it’s happened to any party in this country, so we’re already in uncharted waters. And it seems that no-one trusts this government to navigate them.

So, after years of despair and dread, there are signs of hope. And that’s what this blog’s about, and why it has the name it does. It’s taken from Emily Dickinson’s lovely poem which begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” 

At long, long last, that bird’s song is rising above the clamour of a government that’s treated us too cruelly for far too long. 

And we have hope.