Meanwhile the country falls apart and the vandals who destroyed the place corruptly elevate their wealthy donors into parliament.

Can we not see the problem here? Are we blind?

If we even had a proper set of data on just how wealthy the ultra wealthy are, this would be a start. Instead we have useless ONS "survey" data that significantly undersates wealth and economists defaulting to newspaper reportage from the Times Rich List in order to refute calls for a wealth tax.

Frizinghall?

If the current government isn’t final proof that the British press cannot be appeased by craven, wormlike obsequiousness and unquestioning obedience, then I wonder what it would take. Should we just put maybe four newspaper editors in charge, and let them fight it out? It’d be less tiresome.

Do we or do we not live in a country where these awful people got their way at almost every major decision point of the century so far? We do! Is it good? No, it is a national calamity. Are they sorry? No they’re not, they’re *absolutely furious* that they haven’t got more and worse.

It doesn’t make any difference whether the public are getting second hand inhalation off the BBC and Radio Norwich, or whether they’re honking it pure straight out of the crackpipe. It is all the same. A great Nordstream horseshit incitement pipeline, blasting 24/7 into every home in the land.

Uplifting music for the end of times.

The media & politicians have fallen victim of this idea that "the economy" is something that exists outside of actually lived reality. A budget ends up being judged "left" or "right" not on the basis of the values it speaks to, or vision it helps to deliver, but on how elegant it is in a csv.

The same happens across the western world and I think it is very much to do with the ideas underpinning the Washington consensus. Take the US - you had Biden officials talking up how good the economy was on paper, alongside people literally dying at the price of goods in the grocery aisle. >>

Put simply, politicians and the public are victims of a spreadsheet discourse about the economy.
One dominated by "fiscal rules", "headroom", accountancy think tankery and "how will the gilt market react".

Put simply, there's no meaning in any of it. All humanity, all meaning is abstracted out >>

The prob for Labour is they need to be talking about more than immigration to win over Reform voters. Those people are not coming over to you. You don't beat Reform by raising the salience of issues that are core to Reform's unpersuadable base.