#tufton street

[insidecroydon]

Kerswell's council keeps payments to top earners secret

Our Town Hall reporter, KEN LEE, on how Croydon’s backlog of unsanctioned accounts is being used as an excuse to disguise the latest round of top-level recruitment The Tax Payers Alliance, one of those deliberately opaque, far-right lobby groups from Tufton Street who exercise excessive influence over our law-makers without ever openly declaring who funds them, can now claim to be a more…

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

[mariacallous]

In the summer of 2022, when Liz Truss was about to become prime minister, I noticed that she was an admirer of Rick Perlstein, one of the great historians of modern America. 

Aspiring politicians like to tell the media about their favourite writers, even if they barely look at a book from one year to the next. It gives them a touch of class.

But there was no doubt in this case that Truss was sincere, and knew Perlstein’s work intimately.

She told journalists from the Times that she read “anything” Perlstein wrote. An interviewer from the Atlantic magazine saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf, the third of his four-volume series on the rise of the radical right in the United States between 1960 and 1980, and said it was just the kind of book you’d expect her to read.

Then there was a weird moment in an interview with the Spectator when  an anonymous spokeswoman for the Truss campaign, who sounded very like Truss herself, explained that her rival Rishi Sunak was failing to win over Tory members because he refused to pander to their prejudices. 

“If people think there is an imaginary river,” the source said, “you don’t tell them there isn’t, you build them an imaginary bridge.”

You can find that quote at the beginning of the Perlstein history of the US right in the mid-1970s that was on Liz Truss’s bookcase.  And it is highly revealing. Perlstein picked it from a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in the late 1950s. The Soviet leader told the then US vice-president that politicians must create their own reality by pandering to the fear in their supporters’ minds. 

“If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there,” Khrushchev said, “you don’t tell them there’s no river out there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.”

Truss, or someone close to her was saying that Tories did not want to face facts. They wanted their fantasies confirmed, which is exactly what she did — at enormous cost to the country.

I contacted Perlstein and asked what he thought of having the UK’s next prime minister as a fan.

Let me put it like this: he may have been her favourite historian, but she was not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. He found her astonishingly stupid.

”Liz. Can’t. Read,” he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites would crash the economy.

As they went on to do.

Truss’s notion that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves had been developed in the 1970s. The new wealth of the already wealthy was meant to boost the economy and tax base and trickle down to the rest of society.

In the fourth volume of his series, Perlstein covered the grifters who sold the idea of self-funding tax cuts and explained how dubious they were.

And yet here, 50-years on, was his devoted reader Liz Truss reading his history as a guidebook rather than a warning.

Why do terrible ideas refuse to die?

You could say in this case that Truss was so stupid she did not understand the past. This was Perlstein’s point.

Then there’s greed. If you want to proselytise for tax cuts for the rich, you will never be short of a paying audience, as the Tufton Street think tanks well know.

Finally, there’s deceit. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe that they will raise money for public services. The enterprise of pretending tax cuts are self-financing is a con designed to weaken state provision.

All three played their part in the voodoo economics of US conservatism and the disastrous reign of Liz Truss.

Here’s how…

Neo-liberalism was forged in the 1970s as the post-war Keynesian or New Deal consensus fell apart.

One of the new ideas that emerged was trickle-down economics.  Until then, the traditional conservative argument was that you needed to reduce spending or increase growth if you wanted to reduce taxes.

This was the case that Rishi Sunak put in his failed attempt to defeat Truss in the 2022 leadership contest.

But in the mid-1970s hucksters and ideologues maintained that there was no need to cut spending. The growth tax cuts inspired would more than cover the cost.

The Laffer curve suggested that there was a point where tax rises were counterproductive. People would turn down work if the state took too much of their income, although where that point was is always disputed.

Getting into these practical arguments misses the point, however. There was an exuberant eruption of voodoo economics in the mid-1970s, which had no concern for technical accuracy.

Perlstein put it to me like this

“[With] conventional Keynesian – ‘liberal’ – solutions failing, all sorts of intellectual entrepreneurs on the right came forth with their solutions to the problem, as I narrate in Reaganland, a volume Liz claims to have read. [Of the] many solutions on the table, the one that prevailed was the one that all the actually half-way qualified experts on the right knew was nothing but a fairy tale on a par with Jack in the Beanstalk. [It was] devised by a dude whose only economic training, in his own description, came from learning to count cards at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. I wish I were making this up, but I am not.”

Perlstein was referring to Jude Wanniski, a journalist who did indeed coin the term “supply-side economics” in the 1970s after a spell working in Las Vegas. He attracted the attention of Reagan, Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes with his promise that the Laffer curve guaranteed that, if conservative politicians cut taxes, the economy would boom.

As Perlstein notes, Wanniski’s first piece promoting the idea in a 1975 issue of the Conservative journal Public Interest “lacked almost everything that made economic arguments convincing to other economists”. There were only four footnotes. No data. No formal models. Economists thought supply-side economics was a joke. It would take decades to recoup the money lost in tax cuts to wealthy people, they argued.

Milton Friedman, who was hardly a socialist, said the inflation that unfunded tax cuts would produce meant that supply-side economics was merely a “proposal to change the form of taxes” rather than lower them.  They would generate price and interest rates rises as indeed happened during the Truss debacle.

Alan Greenspan, who once again was a man of the right, who hung out with Ayn Rand no less, nevertheless said he knew of no one who believed that Arthur Laffer’s curve would magically turn tax cuts into increased government revenues.

And so it has proved again and again. Ronald Reagan’s administration provided the classic example. It cut taxes but the promised surge in tax revenues did not happen. All that happened was the national debt increased.

David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget admitted that "none of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," as the experiment played out. He rapidly came to the conclusion that the administration needed to cut spending to balance the books. But as he said in his The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed Conservative politicians preferred large deficits and an increasing national debt to cutting programmes their constituents liked.

Under Reagan, Bush and Trump they were happy to keep cutting. One of the features of US politics is that the national debt is as likely to rise under right-wing as left-wing governments,

Obviously, arguing that cutting the wealthy’s taxes was virtuous in itself pleased the wealthy.  It pleased Republican party donors in the 1970s, and it pleased the Tory donors who poured money into Liz Truss’s campaign in 2022.

But there is more to it than that.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal in 1976, Wanniski said the problem with the old right with its insistence on saving money was that it wanted to be Scrooge when it should be Santa Claus. 

It should deliver tax cuts, forget about the national debt, and sit back as a grateful citizenry showed their gratitude at polling stations. Left-wingers wanted to give taxpayer-funded goodies to their supporters. Very well, right-wingers should want to give tax cuts to theirs.

In the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the editor of Public Interest, was explicit that politics must trump economics. The political advantage tax cuts would provide to the Republicans was so historically imperative they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget.

“The neo-Conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums,’ he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.”

We are now in a moment like the 1970s. Taxes keep rising and Conservatives and indeed the rest of us have yet to come to terms with the cost of an ageing society. As anger grows, I doubt that Truss will be the last Tory to try to magic away reality and build an invisible bridge to a fantastical future.

[robertbrook]

Faith House / Tufton Street / London / September 2019

[scavengedluxury]

Why do I bother watching BBC Question Time? BBC News’ editorial line is just biased beyond repair. Every week they platform some far right bigot like Lionel Shriver or some other dark money ghoul from the Spectator, Spiked or Tufton Street.. Then you’ve got corrupt politicians like Robert Jenrick who took a £12k bribe from a property developer so he could rob the people of Tower Hamlets of £40m of tax. People who should be nowhere near public life. Put them in a Punch and Judy show with some pious centrists. Just a propaganda arm of the establishment. Legacy media in the UK is among the very worst in the world.

[publiusvirgiliamaro]

TERFs are becoming increasingly single-minded thanks to people like Miss Taliban Lover over there and Kellie-Jay Keene being so single issue and accumulating so much (explicitly fascist) support that TERFs who like, want (hateful) nuance and read (hateful) theory are essentially railroaded into either supporting fascism and misogyny or ceasing their vehement hatred of trans women. Guess which side they choose more often than not!

JHB praising the taliban doesn't even surprise me, british terfism is insane fr. like they also praised ol Putin for supporting JK Rowling, they'll align themselves with anyone who shares their views. plus, converting TERFs to support other right wing BS is fully the end goal for "journalists" like Julia.

also, something that drives me INSANE is that a lot of terfism & culture wars in general here in the UK are being orchestrated out of the same building full of people behind the tanking of our economy and the climate change denial happening here and nobody seems to care. like we KNOW this because their address is PUBLIC. like the IEA, LGB Alliance, GWPF, Civitas and so many more fully just publicly operate out of or have offices situated in 55 Tufton Street and we KNOW the connections these think tanks have to the government and journalists and just... nobody cares.

these people all have the ears and eyes of so-called journalists like JHB. Julia interviewed someone from "Net Zero Watch" (an anti-net zero campaign group based in 55 Tufton St) on her TalkRADIO show! all these lot all follow each other on social media! like it's truly insane

[gwydionmisha]

It is not an accident that TERFs often spout the same antisemitic rhetoric as Neo-NAZIs and they share anti-trans and anti-Ace talking points.

[reachingforthevoid]

Doctor Who: Robot

I rewatched this serial on 27 February 2023. It’s a new season — the twelfth! — with a new Doctor, and a new credit sequence! Robot first aired on the BBC over the Christmas/New Year break of 1974/5, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen most of Tom Baker’s run of stories from this one.

We meet Lt Harry Sullivan, and Benton’s been promoted to warrant officer (but not in the credits). We also learn the Brigadier’s full name. Tom Baker is immediately the Doctor, just as his predecessors were — something I’ve not appreciated before but do now that I’m watching all this in order. 

Anyway, the plot sees Sarah as journalist visiting 55 Tufton Street the National Institute for Advanced Scientific Research while the Doctor and the shrinking UNIT fam investigate a series of disturbing thefts.

Yet again, there’s quite a bit in this story that resonates with things happening today… Kettlewell’s exploration of renewal energies (it's a shame that is treated like a joke), nasty authoritarian ideas under the guise of rationality (why do I have the impression that the neofascist Scientific Reform Society would be smack bang in the centre of the UK’s present government?), robotic/computer programming for evil purposes, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. 

[drtanner]

Every fishy Tufton Street startup with a transphobic goal is directly bankrolled by this awful cow, and SHE is directly bankrolled by YOU.

another reminder to stop buying/watching/reading anything JK Rowling associated

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

“The report was covered in the the Times, Daily Express, Daily Mail, the Spectator, and the influential conservative blog Guido Fawkes through both news reports and opinion pieces. The report was also shared by leading climate science denial groups, including Net Zero Watch, the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

However, the Civitas report has been criticised as inaccurate by several prominent climate academics and journalists. Simon Evans, senior policy editor at Carbon Brief, posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter) explaining the “embarrassingly wrong figures” published by Civitas and amplified by prominent media outlets.”

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Friendly reminder that the LGB Alliance, a self identified 'progressive' charity that claims to fight for the rights of LGB people (to be clear this is code for them being massive transphobes and doing nothing for LGB people) is based out of 55 Tufton Street, a well known far-right think tank. This charity claims to be protecting LGB people while aligning themselves with the alt right. Next time someone tells you that they side with the LGBA, this is who they side with.

Just so we're clear.

[imspardagus]

In the BBC Question Time Audience

Brian Bilston, the undisputed Bard of Twitter, or X as we now have to call it (though the thought of it makes me cross), was having a sort out of some of his old titles. This one caught my eye:

She couldn’t recall how she’d got there

She wondered who’d got her the seat

She’d hoped for the Vicar of Dibley

Or something they’d always repeat

But here she was stuck in the back row

While down there, so smug and remote,

A crescent of conmen were crowing

It made her feel sick in the throat

She sat as they first blamed each other

Then blamed all the immigrants next

Then unions, remoaners and teachers

She found she was getting quite vexed

The man who was sitting beside her

Multi-chinned, piggy-eyed, putty skin

Put his hand in the air for attention

And the camera zoomed eagerly in

“It’s them soft, lefty judges,” he blurted,

“Betraying the English each day”

She thought that someone might oppose him

But Fiona just nodded away

On the panel the Labour stooge started

But Fiona Bruce just cut him off

And handed the question to Nigel

Who looked pleased as a pig in his trough

“We’re hearing the voice of the people,”

He smarmed to a wave of applause

“We’re sick of elites in this country

 And boat people hitting our shores.”

“We’re sick of kowtowing to Frenchies,”

Said the man with the Huguenot name,

“We beat all the Krauts two wars running,”

Like he’d been there, had skin in the game.

The man at her side bawled “Too right, mate”

“This is not what I fought Nazis for.

To let bloody towelheads and Gypos

Take jobs we won’t do any more.”

The Tory harrumphed his approval

Nige grinned like a cat with the cream

The Labour stooge looked at his papers

The Tufton Street twat sat and beamed

And this was the point that she panicked

And shaking she rose to declare

“I just want to say he’s not with me,

…  And I’m not with him, if you care.”

The silence that followed was heavy

The director yelled “Cut”. Bruce looked peeved  

They stopped the recording that instant

And somebody asked her to leave

As she walked to the bus she felt angry

The lies buzzed like flies in her head

She went back to her bedsit in Croydon

To watch Mrs Brown’s Boys instead.

Iain M Spardagus

August 2024

[sortyourlifeoutmate]

Farage’s falsehoods threaten lives. We have to do better. Liberal legacy media flagellates itself when inaccurate. The reason my last column didn’t mention the Legitimate Grievance Riots was because I’m now filing six days early so the legal department can protect me, and the paper, from my incoherent “jokes”, having recently received a request for correction from a former Tufton Street commentator, and wrangled over the wording of a complaint from Mumsnet. It’s only Monday. By the time you read this you might be on fire.

- Stewart Lee

[hjohn3]

The Leader of the Opposition

Rishi Sunak’s Bizarre Political Strategy

Source: Open Democracy

By Honest John

IT’S HARD to believe that it was just nine months ago that Rishi Sunak became leader of the Conservative Party and therefore, absurdly, the fifth Tory Prime Minister in thirteen years, and stood in front of Downing Street to promise the British public “professionalism, accountability and integrity” after three years of debauched corruption under Boris Johnson and gimlet-eyed ideological lunacy under Liz Truss. In those heady autumn days there was real worry on the Labour front bench and hope on the part of right wing political opinion not infected by the corroding virus of the Johnsonian cult, that “Rish!” (as he hilariously termed himself in last summer’s leadership contest), might give the Tories once again the opportunity to re-invent themselves - to sweep away the putrid remnants of Johnson’s legacy and to despatch Truss’ “ideas” back to the Tufton Street parallel universe from whence they had escaped. Sunak could basically tell the electorate despite nearly thirteen years of Tory rule that there was actually nothing to see here and could we all just start again, please? Indeed, in late 2022 and early 2023, pollsters detected a “Rishi bounce”, as Labour’s opinion poll lead narrowed to a ‘mere’ fourteen points. Could Sunak be the man to do it again? Could the billionaire tech bro from Silicon Valley cut through to the public, reassure the Blue Wall that “normal” Toryism was back and shore up the sliding Red Wall by, improbably, reassuring its voters he understood their pain and that levelling up would at last be delivered?

Alas, no. After that initial bout of optimistic public curiosity about the relatively politically opaque Sunak, he has revealed himself to be as bereft of ideas as his party: his low bar “pledges” in danger of 100% non-achievement; his Austerity 2.0 budget restricting any serious management of, or investment in, the post-Brexit economy; and he appears paralysed in the face of an inflation that refuses in any meaningful way to subside, and public services finally buckling under the damage of Cameron-era austerity and the final collapse of the Thatcherite economic model. As a result Labour have re-established a 20 point opinion poll lead, safe Conservative council and Parliamentary seats fall to whichever party can defeat the Tories and Keir Starmer is forecast to achieve a General Election victory on an epic scale, one that could reduce Tory representation in the Commons to less than 200 seats. Is Rishi downhearted by this collapse of personal and political support, in which his leadership and his party’s approval ratings are now lower than those of Boris Johnson when he was forced out by the Tory parliamentary party on the grounds that that he was, well, unelectable? Not at all. Rishi has a plan. His new political strategy is to pretend he is the Leader of the Opposition.

Not fazed by the fact that banging on about Britain’s “broken immigration system” - run by the Tories for thirteen years - for the last twelve months has not shifted the dial on the government’s dire poll ratings one iota, Sunak has seen hope in the unexpected Conservative win in the Uxbridge by election and decided that running against government policy (like ULEZ) could yet save his political bacon. Even Rishi can appreciate that the government blaming the Tories for the country’s ills might be a slightly weird look, so he has hit on the wizard wheeze of blaming the hell hole that is modern Britain on the Labour Party.

Sunak’s entire political strategy is now to campaign against the green policies his own government introduced, commitment to net zero by 2030 now replaced by Rishi as “friend of the motorist”, unlike Just Stop Oil-supporting Labour and its preposterous Green Prosperity Plan; to brief against the Bank of England’s interest rate rises despite only weeks ago Sunak praising the Bank’s determination to bring down inflation by, yes, interest rate rises; to claim Labour are thwarting the ability of a government with an 80 seat majority to enact its anti migration legislation, that has already been passed into law, due to Labour’s disgraceful collusion with “lefty lawyers”, and to blame record NHS waiting lists on Labour’s trade union paymasters bringing services grinding to a halt and holding patients to ransom. Poor Rishi, he could do such good if it wasn’t for that darned Labour Party thwarting his every move.

This whole approach is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly depressing. Government tactics have become a reactive game of sub-fascist rhetoric, blame and mendacity to try, somehow, to persuade the public that voting Labour at the next election will ruin all the good things the Tories have visited on the country over 13 years in office and prevent them from getting on and “finishing the job”. The whole campaign is as bizarre as it is funny and will as ineffective as it is nasty and childish. There are indeed limits to voter prejudice and credulity: their lived experience of shopping in a supermarket, of trying to get a GP appointment or an NHS dentist, of going on holiday in a burning Europe and the sheer horror of seeing effluent being poured into Britain’s waterways and shorelines by under-regulated water companies has told them all they need to know about the truth of Tory Britain. No amount of migrant-baiting and new oil drilling licenses can alter the fact day to day life for tens of thousands of people is basically rubbish. The Conservatives and their execrable right wing media mouthpieces can continue to broadcast their bile out of Radio Nowhere, but no one is listening to the cant and broken promises any longer. Hapless Rishi may yet achieve a status not reached by any of his predecessors, despite stiff competition. Sunak may be looked back on by political historians as the most ridiculous Prime Minister in recent times.

9th August 2023

[graywyvern]

( via / via )

"The truth is, if I stand here and rail against Tufton Street, but continue to walk around with a plastic bottle in my hand, then I have failed to do even the smallest thing a citizen is called upon to do, in a climate emergency." (via @mjohnharrison)

"Castilian

Velasquez took a pliant knife And scraped his palette clean; He said, 'I lead a dog's own life Painting a king and queen.'

He cleaned his palette with oily rags And oakum from Seville wharves; 'I am sick of painting painted hags And bad ambiguous dwarves.

'The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl, Their locks are looped with rain. I will not paint Maria's girl For all the money in Spain.'

He washed his face in water cold, His hands in turpentine; He squeezed out colour like coins of gold And colour like drops of wine.

Each colour lay like a little pool On the polished cedar wood; Clear and pale and ivory-cool Or dark as solitude.

He burnt the rags in the fireplace And leaned from the window high; He said, 'I like that gentleman's face Who wears his cap awry.'

This is the gentleman, there he stands, Castilian, sombre-caped, With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands Miraculously shaped."

--Elinor Wylie

Sem título.

"True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world." --@simone_says_en

Rake's Swallet.