Riders of the Storm - September 2022
"Well done Liz you smashed it hun!" Strap in for a wild ride in the darkest and funniest timeline. New PM. Queen dead. Pound sunk. Economy on life support. All in a month's work for the Tories.
In a debut (and presumably final) appearance, Joe Lycett blew the lid off a failed TV format. Laura Kuntberg’s new political pontification show won't reassure the thousands who are facing economic catastrophe and Lycett knew it. After years of comedic activism Lycett knows politics isn’t working and show’s like these are toothless and meaningless drivel. Little did we know that that was to be the last moment of collective mirth for the country.
After a rudderless summer, Britain welcomed the new leader it neither wanted nor deserved. Liz Truss was “elected” the new leader of the Conservative party by 81,000 Tory members. Over the summer Trusspot learnt that the less voters see of her the better chance she has come election season. Even her brief victory speech was marked by awkward silences and a faltering tone that is set to grate as much as the May-Bot.
Johnson left office as quietly as a whistling kettle left on the hob for 1100 days - the new purchase of which he suggested can save you from economic ruin. The clown finally left the stage, but not before threatening a return in the form of Cincinnatus, the Roman emperor who returned to power as a dictator.
Both Johnson and Trusspot flew in separate jets to Balmoral. Johnson to kiss the sky, Truss to “kiss the ring” of a skeletal queen. An unearthed clip from 1994, showed Leeds student Liz Truss telling ITV News the very idea of the monarchy was 'disgraceful'. How Liz behaved or what she did to the representative of such a disgraceful institution, we shall never know. Two days later Queen Elizabeth II was dead.
Mourning in broken Britain
When asked, are we anti-monarchy, we at DDUK reply that we are pro-democracy. An unelected head of state is the antithesis of democracy. Hereditary monarchy should have ended during the enlightenment. Its endurance, through to the present, is testament to the strength of public relations (previously known as propaganda) and the weakness of the human mind.
What brought thousands of people to the south of river Thames, to que for over 10 hours on average, in order to look at a coffin? Parasocial relationships - the kind of relationship that anyone who did not personally know Queen Elizabeth II thought they had with her - is the field of inquiry that anthropologists and philosophers will use as they interrogate the collective grief expressed in September 2022.
Many of those interviewed about why they were queuing could not express a clear pro-monarchy sentiment. Of the testimonies I heard, many expressed sentiments along the lines of, “I felt compelled to.” “I had to come here.” Few if any queuers expressed the sentiment, “the head of state has died, and I, as a loyal subject, am here to mourn”.
Their expressions were like a gap in the symbolic order. They know, deep down, that monarchy is an affront to freedom, the freedom we are told our predecessors died for. They know that concepts such as blood lines and the divine right to rule are bizarre anachronisms, in our supposedly enlightened times.
Republic does an excellent job in busting the myths about monarchy, such as they are good for tourism and thus the economy and exposing the horrific inequalities around property and land ownership. Not to mention their ongoing interference in politics when they are meant to be utterly neutral.
The period of mourning piled injustice on top of absurdity as people were arrested for holding up signs and threatened with arrest for holding up blank signs. Like something from Putin’s Russia, Priti Patel's new police anti-protest powers gave us a dark glimpse of the future in collapse.
Set up to fail?
The events of the second half of September have shocked even those inured to the rolling chaos of the UK post Brexit. ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’ “and there are months when you get a new PM, the Queen dies, and you crash the economy”.
Trusspot confirmed her cabinet of horrors, featuring hardline Thatcherites intent of stripping the last ounce of copper from this country and selling it overseas. She announces the return of trickle down economics and President Biden Tweets that trickle down economics has ‘never worked’. Her government overturn a ban on Fracking and the head of fracking company says that fracking won’t work in the UK.
The Treasury refuse to release the economic forecast before the mini-emergency-budget, much to the alarm of the “city” and the “market”.
Then, it happened. The UKs first black chancellor Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng held his fiscal event or aka mini-budget and promptly crashed the pound. Like a mirror of resignations during Johnson’s select committee grilling, with every word Kwarteng uttered the pound fell further. It was his very own Black Friday.
Trusspot and KamiKwasi, both co-authors of Britannia Unchained which produced the now infamous quote ‘Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world’ spent the following weekend fiddling while the pound burnt. KamiKwasi, caught outside on a grumpy walk in Whitehall, had no reassuring comment for journalists causing the pound to plunge again to as low as $1.035, virtual parity with the US Dollar. A record low and epic disaster for the economic history books.
On approaching the Winter of Discontent 2.0, UK citizens were very concerned about rising household bills. Now they fear for their homes themselves. Since the mini-budget 1,621 residential mortgage deals have been pulled from sale - a 41% fall and a further 1000+ mortgage products were also withdrawn.
UK Pensions were saved from the devastation of mass defaults when the Bank of England stepped into Britain's bond market to stem a market rout, pledging to buy around 65 billion pounds of long-dated gilts.
Trusspot, who had burrowed herself deeper than tic and evaded scrutiny for most the week, emerged on Thursday morning for some soft ball questions from local journalists. Another big mistake! Less concerned with “access” and manufacturing consent, the local journalists grilled Trusspot until she was charcoal.
Mortgages, no idea. Pensions, nothing. Fracking, clueless as to what local consent looks like. #ThickLizzie trended as the pundits struggled to process the charisma and intellectual black hole that now passed as Prime Minister. Surely this couldn’t be real. Was this an Op? Could Liz have been set up to fail? Did an exhausted ruling elite need a break from asset stripping UK PLC?
Galaxy brain takes included blaming, not only past administrations, but also future ones and declaring the IMF to be a woke leftwing terrorist organisation.
UK to cease trading and close down
It is painfully clear that something has gone wrong. Not just with the mini-budget, or austerity, or 12 years of Tory rule, or a deferential media, or unelected leaders, or unaccountable elites, but with the fundamentals of our system as a whole. The old certainties of this age are cracking. Covid did more than just accelerate the chaos. It dramatically brought into focus just how deep the inequalities in modern Western societies go.
The shock of catastrophes has often led to a radical reorganisation of societies and it may be that even in the uncertainty of these days the same impulse to imagine other kinds of future will emerge. We at DDUK are attempting to imagine genuinely new kinds of futures. Ones that have never existed before, but to do that, we as individuals will have to regain the confidence that we have lost in this frightened and uncertain time.
The psychological theories that tell us we are weak and manipulable are cracking. Perhaps we don’t need a head of state to “keep the country together” and provide “stability”. People are beginning to realise that anxiety and suspicion may just be the raw material for the technology corporations to feed off. It may be that we are really far stronger than we think.