THE TIME comes in every Badger’s life when they must tell it as it is.
This is such a moment.
Badger has a keen interest in politics and political history.
At different times, Badger has actively participated in party politics, been a member of more than one political party, debated, observed, written semi-learned pieces on political history, written for the newspaper, berated those who believe in decline, and mocked those who believe the future is roses.
But never – no, not ever – in all his puff has Badger seen a Westminster administration so comprehensively and publicly collectively soil itself in public.
To describe Liz Truss’s administration as a total shitshow is to miss a host of opportunities to compare it to a cesspit overflowing with turds and other events involving eruptions of raw faecal matter.
Boris Johnson, for his many glaring and obvious flaws – any of which should have debarred him for public office for life – never pretended to have much of a plan about everything.
Sure, there were declarations and announcements, but nothing approached a coherent plan.
Johnson’s administration followed the well-known path of politician’s logic: we must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do this.
In retrospect, the former PM’s incompetence, venality, lying, and back-stabbing duplicity appear markers of a golden age.
Boris Johnson was a vacuous, cynical liar – but everyone knew that.
We are now in the age of Truss.
Liz Truss and her (at the time of writing) Chancellor also have no plan.
What they have are a vision and faith.
In Badger’s experience, the downside of visions is that they’re often mirages.
As for faith: it requires neither proof nor logic to underpin it. You’re a believer no matter what, or you’re an unbeliever.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are so buzzed on the communal wine of free-market faith they’re beyond considering any other viewpoints that exist.
Faith requires the faithful to interpret reality in a certain way.
The problem is that reality is real whether you believe in it or not.
And no reality is harsher than political reality.
There is nothing wrong with tax cuts and lower regulation. However, their timing and presentation need political nous.
That’s why the PM’s ersatz Thatcher schtick doesn’t wash.
Her numerous faults notwithstanding, Margaret Thatcher was careful about framing her policies and the direction of her Government’s travel in ways a voter could understand.
It might have been tosh, but it was tosh that prepared the ground for policies: communication was central to Margaret Thatcher’s electoral successes and ability to connect with electors who voted for her against their collective interest.
Until the late imperial period before her fall, Thatcher’s communications team managed her well.
Once her communications effort fell abroad and she started communicating only with the voices in her head, her premiership was doomed.
The communications-centred approach persuaded people to “buy in” to policies with which they would disagree if they were just dumped in front of them like a cart full of fresh manure.
Liz Truss can’t even describe her economic policies in terms Liz Truss can understand.
And when it comes to delivering horse apples by the ton, she’s forgotten a lesson that her most effective predecessors knew well.
The policy is important, but communication is king.
Her core problem is that governments have limited life.
The Conservatives have been in power for 12 and a half years. Before that, Labour was in power for thirteen years. Before that, the Conservatives were in power for 18 years.
Superficially, that looks like a prolonged period of stability.
The stability is illusory.
The last forty-three years have been tumultuous, never more so than during the prolonged psychodrama within the Conservatives that predates Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to their leadership in 1975.
Since 1979, the UK has experienced social upheaval, strife, class conflict, increased economic and social inequality, more property ownership, consumer-driven capitalism, higher consumer debt, the erosion of old certainties, the rise of new ones, and those certainties’ falls in turn.
We are not a great power.
Our economic status rests on one fragile economic sector: when bankers sneeze, we all catch a cold.
Our armed forces are smaller than at any other time since 1945.
We do not produce enough energy to meet existing demand, let alone increasing demand.
Key social services across the UK are in chaos. The NHS and local government are cracking at the seams.
The cost of living is soaring, and wages, which have lagged behind inflation for more than a decade, are shrinking.
Our system for delivering pensions and welfare is the meanest and least efficient in Europe.
Our public services are owned by foreign governments or operated at the whim of hedge funds and offshore trusts.
That’s reality.
Never mind, though, readers.
Liz Truss is a true believer.
Her faith in the nonsense preached by free-market think tanks funded by American vulture capitalists and the sort of people who think universal healthcare is a pinko Commie plot blinds her to political and practical reality.
The PM is using the UK as a laboratory experiment to see how far the system can stretch before it ruptures.
Badger enjoyed science when he was younger.
The bangs, weird smells, flashes, and the sight of a middle-aged man gassing himself with chlorine never stopped entertaining Young Badger.
He learned many things. So much so that the space between Badger’s ears is packed with facts both useful and useless.
When a dead body decomposes, it exudes cadaverine, putrescine, indole and skatole, produced as microbes break down the body’s carbohydrates, proteins, and fatty acids.
Mixed with ammonia and methane, they give a decaying body its distinctive smell.
It’s the sickly stench of rot and decay.
That’s already settled around Liz Truss and her Cabinet of waxwork ghouls.
Regardless of how the membership voted, Liz Truss was the first choice of only 50 of her colleagues to succeed Boris Johnson.
She’s more Dolores Umbridge than Iron Lady.
The PM has the support of her parliamentary colleagues in the same way a chain supported the gibbeting of an executed person in the past.
Twisting in the wind, a rotting corpse hung in chains picked over by carrion, a punishment beyond death itself.
The stink of rot wafted and assaulted the senses of those passing by the decaying cadaver.
The question is how long her fellow Conservative parliamentarians can stand the stench.
And how long can we?
