Worries

The Uber driver was chatty. Very, vary chatty. The journey was pretty short. From Homerton Hospital to our house, but he filled it with chat. Schools, hospitals, economics and the nature of London. Why, he wondered, are London people so unfriendly?

I muttered something about fear, and stress, and Brexit.

As a drafted this post, it started to veer all over the place. To improve it (I hope) I'll to get straight to the point, and expand on the following background points in the endnotes. You can read them if you get that far. Or not.

• I am hot, grumpy and a bit depressed [1]
• The Conservative Party is useless, and out of ideas [2]

So, the promised point. As I said, the Conservative Party is useless. However, they will, one hopes, be out of power in 2 years. The really important point (in my view) is is the Labour party any better? By this I don't mean "morally" better. We can take as read that they won't seek to deport Asylum seekers to Rwanda (right? right...?). What I mean is, the nation is, to be blunt, rather up against it. Is Labour in a position to act? Does Labour understand the size of the challenge, and does it have the cojones to act at the scale needed? 

In 1997 Tony Blair inherited a growing economy (the Q before he was elected GDP grew 1.8%, the biggest single Q growth since 1986), low inflation (<3%), low electricity prices (the gas-for-gas meant there was oversupply of coal generation which in turn meant super-low margins for electricity wholesalers). There wasn't a housing crisis. Our EU membership meant low trade barriers and easy access to labour, highly skilled and less skilled. Most of all, perhaps, the mood in the country was really optimistic. I remember "Things can only get better". People believed. Maybe Sherringham and Shearer had made the nation happy. Maybe it was Jarvis Cocker. Maybe it was Liam bloody Gallagher. Maybe it was really strong, moving storylines on Neighbours, Eastenders, Corrie and Brookside. I dunno. But we believed. You could feel it.

Kier Starmer and Labour are not, to put it likely, to be dealt such a strong hand. Aside from economic uncertainty and (seemingly inescapable) trade barriers, the country doesn't believe. Yes, as covid shows, when push comes to shove, the vast majority of people will put up with any amount of sacrifice if they can see a better day at the end of it. People are, I think, fundamentally decent, and people will, if inspired, do remarkable things.

I guess I'm building towards the point where I say "This isn't 1995. It's more like 1945."

And in 1945 we (not me, obvs) elected Clem. As a reminder, the Attlee Government

• Created the NHS
• and National Insurance (sickness, unemployment, pensions)
• Abandoned poor law in favour of comprehensive support, beyond NI, for those who needed it
• Built not just council houses (though they did) but also the started New Towns 
• Created British Rail
• Expanded family allowance and access to education

Not only did they do all this in only 4 years (all of the above was done by 1948), but they set the direction of the next 40. A consensus, which more or less continued to Thatcher, was established. If you look at the list above, it is (to my mind, at least) impossible to understand how transformational and important that programme was to ordinary people, and most importantly, to the poorest and must vulnerable.

It's not actually 1945, but if a Labour Government can build a new country out of the shattered remains of a war, with 450,000 dead and entire cities in ruins, it does not seem to me beyond the bounds of possibility that an incoming Government could be equally transformational. Things are bad. They aren't "Coventry is a smoking husk and there are shortages of food, raw materials and working age people" bad.

Ultimately the future of this country depends on whether Labour they seek to transform the UK with a bold, ambitious rebuilding programme, or just triangulate through meaningless platitudes like "efficiency", "technology" and "spirit of enterprise"?

If the latter, they deserve everything coming to them in the 2029 GE. Though we, sadly, don't...

And their weird thing is, if Labour go to the country with a transformational plan of investment, house building and a closer trading relationship with the EU, they might actually find that people actually want to vote for them as opposed to just voting against the Tories.

[1] It's hot. It's far too hot. As someone who works on climate change, has worked on climate change pretty much my entire working life, heatwaves in major cities and forest fires all over the world are a depressing example of our failure to reduce emissions. This is not the end point I keep reminding myself. Emissions are still increasing. We are, at the very best, only halfway towards peak temperatures. The 1.5 degree target has sound moral, political and scientific rationale, but we have already passed the point where it could be achieved. You simply can't decarbonise the planet quickly enough to reach it, and if we "overshoot" then - baring an invention that hasn't been invited yet - we won't be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations substantially. The energy requirement is vast. Solar radiation management - reflecting the sun away from the earth - is a mad, dangerous scheme with known and unknown consequences which we should go nowhere close to. We probably will, mind you...

This wasn't meant to be a post about climate change. It's just that climate change in my face, on my doorstep distresses me. You can understand the science, but seeing it play out is horrifying. Plus it's too damm hot to sleep, and if I drink any beer I get a headache.

So this post is meant to be about the national mood in the nation, but should be taken with a pinch of salt, in that I, and K, are both wandering around the house in a miserable mood wondering when it will all end. (The boys have never been happier I am pleased to report).

[2] The quality of the Conservative Leadership debate, both in terms of the general performance of the candidates, and their specific inability to articulate any concrete actions about the issues we face, is woeful, and unsurprising. The Cabinet was specifically selected on the basis of compliance, hatred of the EU, and inability. 'Conservative' economic ideas have been reduced to reducing taxes and removing regulations. Like, presumably, the regulations designed to prevent a repeat of Grenfell, or keep shit out of rivers, or stop another banking crisis. (and if not those regulations, then which ones, specifically?) 

Liz Truss is a walking embodiment of the rot at the heart of British Conservatism. She states, correctly, that the economic status quo is undesirable. She then serves up content free word salad. Not a single policy. No sight of a plan. Boris Johnson's claim to have a fully costed Health & Care plan was more convincing.

So, whoever our next PM is, there is zero chance of any useful change of direction on housing, energy costs, environmental degradation, the NHS, the Criminal Justice system, or 'levelling up' (which I would replace with 'tackling inequality wherever it is found'. The UK will doubtless get more unequal up to the next General Election.