Crocodile Tiers

143 more deaths reported in the last 24 hours and infections powering to rates not seen since last April. The government's failure is extracting a grim blood price once again. Though, disappointingly, recent polling shows the government are getting away with it. Their successful depoliticisation of the crisis continues apace, they are winning the necropolitics. This, despite mounting criticism of track and trace failures, corrupt contracts handed to Tory cronies, and now the new tiering system for local lockdowns.

Needless to say, the three alert levels have attracted plenty of comment on the social media platforms of choice. The highest level involves working from home, avoiding inessential travel, some help from local authorities and, of course, the miserable successor to dishy Rishi's furlough scheme. Eyebrows were raised when it came to the exceptions: schools, universities, and pubs ... serving food. A curious mix and no mistaking.

The Tory approach to the Coronavirus crisis was characterised at the outset by complacency and then incoherence. Not because they are uniquely incompetent, though Boris Johnson certainly is, but thanks to the contradictory interests pressing in on them. Just because the R number is galloping like an Ascot winner doesn't mean the Tories are about to change tack and, indeed, they have not.

On schools, there is some earnest handwringing about the consequences lockdowns have for pupils. The point about mental health and missing out on learning are well founded and backed by evidence. This begs the question if private schools have mitigated the impacts of closure for their pupils why the government hasn't provided extra resources to facilitate greater coverage of at-home tuition in state schools. Yes, children are largely spared the debilitating consequences of Covid-19, but they're as effective at spreading the disease as any adult. Refusing to countenance the closure of schools leaves a gaping hole in any lockdown. Why the dogmatic insistence, then? A balance of harms in which Covid infection is a lesser evil to the damage done to education? I'm not buying it. Over the summer it was crystal how opening the schools was a necessary step to get workers back into the workplace. In other words, the determination to restore labour discipline was front and centre. The same applies here. Keeping the kids in school even if workers stay off or work from home is vital for a rapid shifting down of restrictions. If children aren't at home, it's easier to get employees back in. Putting it simply, the health of class relations come first.

It's the same when we're looking at the situation in universities. In many places they're driving infections, not because students are irresponsible but thanks to the givernment's stupid decision to kickstart Covid's second wave by compelling a million young people to move around the country into communal residences and badly ventilated classrooms. SAGE advised shifting to online teaching to mitigate infections, but the Tories felt differently. They still feel differently. Again, it's not because they particularly care for students' education or even the health of universities themselves, which they think are manufacturers of anti-Tory voters. It's because of their coalition of voters. Providing accommodation to students is a significant slice of their landlord base, and property speculators aplenty have investments tied up in new halls of residences. The Tories are protecting their constituents. And this applies with the new tier. Not matter what happens, the universities will stay open. The health of rent payments come first.

And then we have the most egregious and transparently favours-rendered aspect of the top tier rules: pubs serving food can remain open as the virus runs rampant. If there are ways of interpreting this other than a thank you to Wetherspoon's Tim Martin, I've yet to see it. Unless a pie with a pint has mysterious anti-covid properties a glass sans accompanying noms lacks. Just prior to the EU referendum, Martin turned his pubs into Tory madrassas for old men. They sat round all day imbibing the rightwing propaganda etched onto the beermats and filling out the company literature, occasionally joined by the old windbag on a tour of his pubs. Martin contibuted to a coherence and firming up of the Tory vote, and allowing his business to carry on operating unhindered is their thank you. Sure, some other pubs are going to benefit, but the stupid food rule is going to drive many others to the wall. The health of close Tory allies come first.

It's frustrating. The politics of the Tories' coronavirus management are there to be seen, called out, and criticised. And yet in Keir Starmer's most forceful intervention yet, he still keeps away from the politics. A so-called circuit break lockdown is sensible, but won't work if it leaves holes-a-gaping on schools, colleges, and universities. And it won't chip away at the Tories unless Labour pushes the envelope and tries steering the politics of the crisis to issues where it's strong: support for beleagured businesses, attacking corruption, properly funding public services, and pushing its post-covid plan. The Tories, after all, are feeling confident enough to encroach on Labour's turf. Time to switch it up or have them switch us off.

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The Tories' Northern Discomfort

At the beginning of this year, the Tories were musing aloud about the new seats won from the Labour Party. What does this mean for the parliamentary discipline as a bunch of also rans and paper candidates who were never meant to win did? How can the party respond to constituents on the sharp end of their social security system, their landlordism, and their running down of the health service? This is a matter of some concern. Dave and Osborne's hammering of public services made life more difficult in Labour seats in the 2010s. Repeating the same would threaten the chance of a majority Tory government in 2024, so goes the wisdom.

This is the context for the appearance of a new Tory faction, the provisionally-titled Northern Research Group. Comprised of new entrant red wall MPs and led by Rossendale and Darwen's Jake Berry, its very existence suggests some Tories aren't about to take their leader's promises to level up the north at face value. You just have to look at the government's northern discomfort over its inconsistent application of Coronavirus quarantine measures and the ire this is drawing from local authority leaders irrespective of party affiliation. Time will tell if they are Hi-NRG and cause the government headaches down the road. Perhaps they might be able to provide answers for the question vexing Tory strategists: how can the party keep hold of these seats?

There have emerged three broad and overlapping schools of thought, which have jostled for space in the crowded and conflicted Tory imaginary since the election. The first is the most complacent: do nothing. Or, to be more precise, carry on carrying on. As one influential Tory argued in January, cracking down on social security is actually popular among the working class folk of their new seats so why stop? As for the stuff about transport infrastructure and dying town centres, who cares? Let them continue to rot. I suppose there is logic to these arguments: if social decay proved no barrier to the Tories winning depressed seats in 2019, who's to say they'll drag on efforts in 2024?

Then we have the culture war stuff, which several NRGies are keen on. Once Brexit is over, the Tories need fresh unifying hogwash to keep their coalition of voters excitable and pliant. Fulminating about handfuls of refugees in the Channel, or an armada of Spanish trawlers invading British waters like it's 1588, or giving students and luvvies a slap will do the job. Give them something to unite against, populist style.

Last of all, and the least likely outcome is the Prime Minister delivering on his promises. At virtual party conference, Johnson talked a good blue Jerusalem, a post-Brexit Britain as a green powerhouse. His was a vision of post-industrial areas thrumming to the sound of wind turbine and electric vehicle manufacture, while the rest of the country is carpeted with woodland. Who could possibly quibble at such a vision? Certainly not the left, from whom it was unceremoniously half-inched - including the 'green industrial revolution' slogan. Presumably new industry, new jobs, and with it new housing will cement the Tories in position for at least another two terms, after which the fate of the party is someone else's problem.

Ideally for the Tories, a combination of all three would do the business. This is certainly how the Prime Minister would like Boris Island to pan out - flash industry, cultural authoritarianism, and open season on (racialised) scapegoats. The biggest obstacle to realising this isn't the Labour Party, who one day might offer something more than managerial and process criticisms, but the Tory party itself. The incompetence shown throughout the Coronavirus crisis results not from generalised uselessness (which isn't to say cluelessness is entirely absent), but from balancing the conflicting pressures and interests from their elite and mass base. Build homes, but run the risk of depressing property prices and shrinking the renting pool. Open up the economy to get commerce flowing again, but place its elderly support in harm's way. Offer support to workers to get them through the Coronavirus crisis, but undermine the disciplinary effects of mass joblessness. Theoretically, nothing is preventing Johnson from ploughing through and delivering on his promises for the north. He has an almost unassailable majority and the prestige of winning behind him. And yet if he can't get a handle on Covid-19 with all the advantages he has, there's no reason to believe a post-pandemic programme is going to be any easier to deliver.

As things stand the new Northern Research Group are in for a busy, if panicky time. The government is going to flounder and fall short, and there will be real political pain. The question then is where are our plucky defenders of the north are going to be. Holding Johnson's feet to the fire of his pledges, or meekly shuffling to wherever the chief whip herds them. Thanks to the miserable record of Tory rebellions in recent years, we can hazard a good guess at what the answer will turn out to be.

Why do the Tories Hate the Arts?

Not all of the arts, obviously. Recalling the time when Sir George Young said "The homeless? Aren’t they the people you step over when you came out of the opera?", the arts are consumed and enjoyed by Tories too. Indeed, it is a component of ruling class reproduction. Art helps cohere our social betters around cultural practices typically not open to nor easily accessible by the uncultured hoi polloi. Secondarily it offers a living to the offspring of bourgeois dynasties if the family business isn't their bag. Big names open doors as a matter of right, while the unconnected and anonymous are cut out. This exclusion has tightened up these last 20 years as living standards have stagnated and social mobility has slowed to a crawl. If anything, the Coronavirus crisis is exacerbating poor state of affairs.

Earlier in the year, dishy Rishi received criticism for leaving many cultural workers outside the scope of the furlough scheme because large numbers working in the arts are self-employed contractors living from gig to gig. With no employer or steady income, the system the Tories set up was blind to people in these positions. As the government initially refused to do anything, the Arts Council raided its reserves and stumped up £160m in emergency funding. They were able to distribute over £100m in grants before the government announced a £1.5bn package in July, but it was clear Arts council support was a drop in the ocean. In April, 42% of creative businesses had an income of zero, for instance. The later round of funding, which responded to some concerns, offered grants of up to £3m to arts organisations - though not before some went to the wall. Furthermore, of this package only £2m was set aside for freelancers. Some cracks were papered over as yawning chasms were eft unfilled.

And soon we come to the end of furlough. Those organisations able to avail themselves of the scheme are looking at a huge wave of lay offs at the end of the month, something Sunak's slimmed down successor scheme is primed to do little about. For instance, his announcement in late September to partially subsidise wages only counts if an employee can work at least a third of their hours, which are covered by the employer, and both they and the government will cover the unworked hours. At a stroke, live venues will be destroyed because workers can't work and firms can't cover their wages. Only if they're situated in a place where additional local Coronavirus restrictions are in force does something like the old system come into play. In short, the Tories are precipitating cultural desertification.

Why? As Tim Burgess points out, you would think the economic numbers the arts and creative industries do would have the Tories as their biggest cheerleaders. Almost 300,000 jobs in music, performance, and the visual arts and a turnover of £5bn. Creative industries themselves were worth £101.5bn in 2019, with export earnings of £13.2bn in 2016. Post-Brexit Britain needs those monies, no?

There's a rule of thumb when talking about Tory policymaking and statecraft. If one of their governments makes a poor decision but rectifies on the basis of evidence and representations by the people affected, then fair enough. But if they keep making harmful choices, or do/don't do something in defiance of the evidence, then something else is happening. We're talking about the interests the Tories represent. In recent days, we've seen how the chancellor's Covid strategy is guided by ideology, which coincidentally maps onto several overlapping and contradictory interests and stakes the Tories express. This is no less true with the arts.

For one thing, there's basic prejudice. As Dominic Cummings reminded us on a Zoom conference with Sam Mendes, he said "the fucking ballerinas can get to the back of the queue." We see it too with Gavin Williamson's preoccupation with "low quality courses" in universities, which always happen to be the arts and humanities. This animus comes from a suspicion art is idling and indolent, which is fine if mummy and daddy are picking up the tab, but not so if below stairs people are having a go. Why should they have the privilege of going from gig to gig, or from show to show when there are strawberries to be picked and potatoes to be plucked? The Tories have long wanted to shake down the labour market to force people into low paying but necessary jobs, and refusing adequate support is one way of doing it.

An economistic explanation is far from the totality of the matter. Old Adorno was onto something when he talked about the liberatory potentials of high art, but this is a property common to the creative process. Creating something, a piece of music, a poem, designing a game, abutts the possible and expands its horizon, transforming the author in the process. This taking place on a mass basis is utterly crucial for 21st century capitalism, but is corrosive of the political settlement the Tories defend. For them, artistic production is the preserve of the (preferably bourgeois) few, and are content for the many to be passive consumers of mass culture. The prospect of millions raising their cultural horizons can, and does, popularise an antipathy to the stultifying and boring character of work. It raises the prospect of mass critique and, as we're on a Frankfurt tip, the possibilty of mass refusal a la Marcuse. Furthermore, creativity on a mass scale is inherently collaborative and spurns the proprietory character and atomism of the governance forms the Tories have inculcated and interpellated for the last 40 years.

The Tories hate the arts because they fear the arts. It's a gut feeling, but their instincts are correct. The arts are critical and unpredictable, refuses the containment of boxes to be ticked, and can raise our collective gaze from what is to what might be. Art comments on and strains the disciplinary limits of their system, and offers a reflective means for perceiving ourselves and our societies. Sensibilities unsuited for a vision of Britain in which workers are drones, and endless wage labour is the best the many can ever hope for. Limiting art, cutting us off from it, reifying it is inseparable from a managerial problematic for the preservation of their settlement. This is why the Tories hate the arts, and why they're supremely relaxed to see the country's artistic and creative infrastructure die. It's never a matter of economics and numbers. It's always about the class politics.

Darren Grimes and the Politics of Racism

Darren Grimes is a grifting little shit, and he'll be thanking his lucky stars Durham plod want a word under caution. This evacuation of a human being, who traded in his liberal principles after identifying a gap in the attention market for a pre-pubescent Ben Shapiro, is getting interviewed under caution for his podcast interview with David Starkey earlier in the summer. After years of racist provocations, Starkey's stream of racist invective did not pass without consequence. His job at Cambridge is up the swanney and his two-book deal with Harper Collins in the bin. About time.

But this isn't about Starkey, it's about Grimes. Whether he broke any laws interviewing a well-known racist, someone he described as a hero of his incidentally, and then publishied this conversation for the lulz, the clicks, and the column inches is a matter for the criminal justice system. However, what it is not is an attack on free speech. It's an opportunity.

Grimes and his hideous ilk keep pushing the racist envelope and edging back the frontiers of what is and isn't acceptable in public debate for entirely self-interested reasons. If nudge, nudge racist declarations provoke reactions, it's working. Social media storms, celebrity denunciations or, even better, some form of institutional intervention gives them profile, and profile is the currency of our moment. Preserving entitlement in the 21st century means playing the victim, and there's cash money to be made from crying about a liberal witchhunt and ostentatiously squatting on their ducking stool. Grimes will dine out on this for years to come as the truth warrior the cops tried to shut up.

Securing his prominence is clearly Grimes's main concern, and he can rely on a network of papers and high profle commentators to stick up for him. Even centrist weirdos and Blue Labour dunces are happily lending a hand, for some perhaps hoping a sliver of spotlight will briefly catch them. But ensuring Tory notables like Grimes stay notable is not the end game for the right wing culture war project at all.

Their project is to reduce and eventually eliminate the social costs of racism. They want to get to a point where casual racism and racist epithets are tolerated as an accepted part of public discourse. Libertarianism and free-thinking is thin cover for giving the right - the Tories, whatever Farage's next party is, other wannabes - the freedom to go full bore on divide and rule politics. The Tories, as we've seen time and again, depend on fear of the other to whip a viable electoral coalition into shape. Speech without consequence makes room for more outrageous claims, more division, and more and dragooning supporters on the basis of petrifying them. Why bother promise anything when scapegoating can do the election winning instead?

Presently, the right are somewhat stymied. Cultivating mass racism as articulated by the Tory press and leading politicians is dependent on dog whistles, on partially cloaking itself by sublimating into "genuine concerns" about immigration, saying Britain is a soft touch for refugees and, of course, moaning about "wokeness" and you-can't-say-anything-these-days. The right want to make racism a more potent weapon of divide and rule, and damn the fact this speech does have consequences - for those on its receiving end.

I don't care about Grimes. He's a gormless tool for a project determined to make British politics more poisonous and more polarised. If he does or doesn't do bird is immaterial. Racism can't be defeated by laws and putting right wing commentators on porridge. It's got to be challenged politically through argument, persuasion, and mobilisation. And they know, the Tories, the racists, and the rightwing ideologues feel the weight of history bearing down on them. The rising social costs of racism in the UK, underlined by widespread Black Lives Matter protests, is demonstrative of their weakness versus our growing latent strength, of an unstated and anti-racist commonsense that is part of the mundane, everyday fabric of social life for the majority of people. They push racism as its salience declines because, ultimately, they have nothing else. It's a desperate move. Our movements have them on the run, and if we keep pushing the weaker racism gets and, as a consequence, the more naked their politics of privilege becomes.

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The Rise and Fall of Corbynism

Here's Owen Jones talking about things so I don't have to write about things tonight. In his discussion with Novara's Ash Sarkar, Owen chats about his new book, This Land, on how the Corbyn movement took off and why the opposition from without and the contradictions within gave us last December's painful outcome.

Keir Starmer's Trade Union Dramarama

At a stroke, Labour is set to lose £700k worth of funding next year. This follows Unite's decision to cut its donation to the party after the large "shut up and go away" payments made to the so-called Panorama whistleblowers. Seen as a shot across Keir Starmer's boughs, Len McCluskey warned the party must stick with leftwing policies or receive less monies. Fair enough, you might say. And why not, unions are the self-defence of organised workers. They're not a piggybank.

Truth be told, Keir's success in eschewing the left has proved successful so far - if you judge success by the metrics of the Tory press playing nice, good personal ratings, and the slow collapse of the Tories' polling position. As discussed here many, many times, an opposition ostentatiously going out its way to not be too oppositional and saying nothing policy-wise is quite deliberate. And by the yardstick the leadership have set themselves, it's working. Though of late there has been a frecon of a change, less a nod and more a wink to the left. Last week, on the occasion of Black History Month, Keir said this should be on the school curriculum. Later, he reiterated his commitment to the Corbyn-lite pledges that sealed his leadership deal, including higher taxes for the well off.

None of this is enough. Weighing the politics of Starmerism, the balance is visibly, undeniably tilted toward the status quo. Even banging on about Tory incompetence instead of challenging the politics of Covid-19 isn't the cleverest. This blunts the Labourist critique of what the Tories are doing, and disarms the party when Johnson is replaced by dishy Rishi or another horror off the Tory benches. But for the pointy heads on the Labour right, this is totally fine. The numbers speak for themselves and moving left threatens to undo the work already done. In fact, some will be very happy with Len's criticisms of Labour. They despise trade union leaders who insist on speaking out when affiliation fees are misused, so their ears are closed on that score, but seeing Len is a bogeyman of the Tory press, having him criticise Keir sends a message to those soft Tories who like the cut of the Labour leader's jib but find Len and the strawmen confections of trade unionism off-putting. It hammers home the fact of Labour's "new management".

As this blog has argued before, you don't need to go back to Tony Blair to understand Keir's strategy. It's a rinse and repeat of what Ed Miliband did a decade ago. Having won the leadership on a weak but nevertheless recognisable social democratic offering, Ed immediately pivoted to the right, accepted Tory commonsense on the deficit, debt, and the "need" for some cuts, and kept tightlipped about policy for the next couple of years. Remember how opposition to the introduction of the bedroom tax was slowly and painfully extracted from him? The danger is that, in many ways, Labour's position now isn't as advantageous as it was then. The Liberal Democrats were in government, eliminating a mercurial third party alternative to the Tories, and the debacle of Labour's leadership of the Better Together campaign in Scotland hadn't yet manifested. In the early 2020s the party is hobbled by this disaster, and the LibDems are back as competitors in swathes of seats - though the possibility of a deal with their new leader can't be discounted.

Under these circumstances, Labour needs its left. Awkward trade union leaders and #StarmerOut trolls all. Present triangulation has, as a by-product, contributed to the decomposition of Labour's left. As people are put off, they leave. But this carries with it a negative multiplier. In 2017, the size of the party became an electoral factor in and of itself thanks to the scale of the activism it directed at the election, and the fact Labour was so large practically everyone knew someone who was a party member who'd be making the face-to-face and immediately familiar case for putting Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. This feat was not repeated in 2019 for a variety of reasons, but the more people the party sheds its weight diminishes faster than even a Johnson crash diet can achieve. It reverts back to the pre-2015 type, a free-floating party with little to nothing anchoring its policy propositions.

This matters, because it makes Labour's job of winning much more difficult. With huge votes piled up in the big cities, some Labour people might be tempted to think this doesn't count. The party can afford to lose tens of thousands of left wing and radical votes in the urban centres if it means getting back socially conservative former Labour voters and liberal centrist voters in the marginals. I know this is what their attitude, I've heard it with my own ears. This perspective is utterly self-defeating. The people they sneer at and think don't count aren't just present in the big cities, they're spread across the country. Not evenly, but enough in enough places to make a difference between whether a seat stays or becomes Labour, or doesn't. The precarious workers, the immaterial labourers of our changing working class are everywhere, and cannot be taken for granted. Not voting is an ever-present threat to Labour.

Perhaps, following the Ed strategy, we'll see a pivot back to soft left policy in the future. But this will likely be diluted just as his pitch was by compromises with Tory positioning and clever, clever efforts at triangulation. It didn't work then, and it's unlikely to do so while the underlying political economy of voter polarisation persists. This means making choices: acknowledging colourless managerialism is almost at the end of the road, and start making political criticisms of the Tories to contest the ground now on which the election will be fought later, or carry on alienating significant swathes of the base, making it much harder to win them back when the party really needs them. This is what needs to be done and, unfortunately, I have very litte confidence Keir Starmer and his inner circle of wonks, nerds, and evil bastards understand the dynamics of Labour's support, let alone the need to switch it up.

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Boris Johnson's Blue Jerusalem

Who will become the most influential British politician of the early 21st century? Might it be dishy Rishi with his nice line in suits and political vapourware? Is Dave's Brexit legacy doomed to cast a shadow over the next few decades? Or does the title belong to Boris Johnson himself, the mastermind of the greatest Tory electoral triumph since the 1980s? The answer is ... none of these men. It's not even a Conservative politician. No, it is the unconscionable one. He whose name must be mentioned in conjunction with rites of Tory exorcism. Jeremy Corbyn is of which I speak, and if you don't believe me have a look at the contents filling up Johnson's conference speech.

He tried hard to distract from his inspiration. There were attacks on imaginary leftists who see in the Coronavirus crisis an opportunity to grow the state. There was a vigorous defence of the private enterprise that delivered all the PPE shipments and praise for their innovative and can-do attitude. Tory activists were ostentatiously thanked for seeing off the socialist beast in December, and sideswipes aplenty at lefties, with Priti Patel receiving praise for riling up human rights lawyers. It's almost like politics is a game to these people.

There were the trademark Johnson moments with the self deprecation about his weight, (aged) pop culture references, overlong words and haha funny metaphors. These soared off the back of other Tory favourites, like the opportunities Brexit has opened up, the blue passports, moar fisheries, and control of the borders. Crowd pleasers were refusals to apologise for British heritage, such as statues of problematic slave-holding worthies, and singing one's lungs out along to Rule Brittannia. No opportunity to thumb the old nose at the imaginary enemies hell bent at doing down Blighty can ever be passed up.

Having doused his rhetoric in deepest blue, Johnson's big reveal was a programme unashamedly half-inched from Corbynism's 2019 vintage. Front and centre is the green industrial revolution. Excuse me, what? This was the phrase he used, having been carelessly abandoned by Labour's new regime, and he talked up harnessing renewable energy, particularly wind, to produce millions of green jobs over the coming decade. Complementing this was the widely derided Corbynist tree planting programme, the investment in new technology to drive productivity, and high falutin talk of raising pay across the board. Also interesting was a scheme to expand home ownership to younger people with government advancing low deposit fixed rate mortgages to first time buyers - a belated effort at winning enough over to keep their future electoral prospects on the road. Looking around the appreciative churps of establishment comment, no one has picked up on the very obvious influence behind Johnson's rhetoric.

On the one hand, going all magpie over Labour's 2019 manifesto reflects the deep hole British capitalism is in. Even Johnson had to refer to its long-term structural problems, and they cannot simply be allowed to fester for ever. Not least because egregious inequality, blocked property acquisition, and a diminution of opportunity are pregnant with future electoral threats and, yikes, the possibiluty of disorder. It also shows how despite the denunciations of Corbyn, his Labour programme came not to bury British capitalism but save it, and its passage into Johnsonism underlines this fundamental truth. And yet this is Johnson we're talking about, the most shameless of Tory liars and peddler of piss and wind. Past behaviour suggests his New Jerusalem, another trope ripped off from Labour, is another rhetorical trick, an horizon stretching no further than the end of his second conference speech. A case of believing when we see it, and even then watching out for the catches should they ever materialise.

Ideology, Class, and Coronavirus

Picture the chancellor. Strolling through a restaurant without a Covid care in the world. In one hand there balances the thin gruel of the patchy support packages. The other tray, however, appears more weighty. Under the cover's polished dome sits something steaming, but this particular dish carries nothing of sustenance - except perhaps for the yellowing Tory grassroots, as ever crying out for Thatcherite fertiliser. Indeed, under the cover we find a generous dollop of fiscal contraction, cuts for the poorest, and the promise of austerity renewed. At least not yet. As far as Rishi Sunak is concerned, the first dish is the unappetising starter with the main dish - the "need" to balance to books - reserved for the main course in the medium term.

At the Tories' glitch-hit virtual conference, Sunak tried his hand at an old Boris Johnson trick: burble the hyperboles while offering little to nothing. The "overwhelming might" of the British state will be brought to bear on joblessness. Neither will the government cease "trying to be creative" to get the country out of the hole the Tories dug well before the pandemic was a tinkle in an errant bat's eye. There is such a thing as hope too, the chancellor told us and, thanks to the imminent end of the furlough scheme, there is the promise of a "pragmatic" respone to difficulties ahead. Over-promising and under-delivering, he's Johnson's apprentice alright.

At the start of all this, Sunak declared ideology must come second to handling the emergency, but at every step Tory pecadilloes and shibboleths have intruded and overdetermined their cackhanded strategy. They have mismanaged the crisis, caused tens of thousands to die unnecessarily and lumbered more with the lingering, unknown consequences of long covid. It's an instructive lesson in how ideology isn't free-floating hoohah or a set of fake ideas about the way of the world. They are demonstrative of the Tory concern with the health and wellbeing of one thing: the complex of class relations their party is embedded in, and will defend to its last.

Consider the evidence.

Why, no sooner had the Tories announced the furlough scheme, did they openly mull cutting and closing it? Likweise, as Job Centres closed, dole sanctions regime was suspended for 90 days. Yet amid sky rocketing unemployment and vacancies evaporating, the Tories couldn't wait to reintroduce the tranche of conditionalities and penalties in early July. Why? The answer is tediously predictable. Workers need to work, the labour market must churn, and they have to be reminded not to get too comfortable. While plenty of Tories think British workers are a pampered, malingering bunch of shirkers what they fretted over most was the breakdown in labour discipline and with it decades of carefully nurtered biopolitical strategies. In this case, the ideological distaste for state support of workers entirely coincidentally lined up with the everyday management of the working age population. Funny that.

Then we see everyday the debacle of test and trace and outsourcing to obviously unsuitable service providers. As we know, it's been an article of Tory faith since Thatcher onwards that private is best and the public sector is overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Apparently, the competitive pressures of market discipline a priori assures the efficacy of business over anything Whitehall mandarins and local government workers could cook up. Johson and friends are proven true believers in this credo. As far back as June, the Tories had contracted businesses to the tune of £1.7bn, and we have a mess of screwed up apps, two loads of track and trace failures, and egregious misreporting of daily infections. Once again, might the ideology of private sector efficiency, undoubtedly really believed by many Tories, have some sort of relationship to sundry businesses benefiting from Coronavirus contracts backing the Tories, throwing money at them, and chummy social relationships with leading party cadre?

And there is the question of how to pay this. Contrary to Tory dogma, UK state finances spring from the magic money tree in the Bank of England's garden and from borrowing. In both cases they're created and later paid back through taxation (in the case of the Bank, the debt is entirely bogus considering it's an institution of state). The waffle about tax funding public services fits ideological constructs around belt tightening, responsible spending, and disciplining the ensemble of state bodies from the parish council to ministerial office. Having previously labelled public debt a Frankenstein's monster of government "profligacy", Sunak's talking up of careful spending and having to pay back later readies a new dynamic suggestive of future austerity - though given the country's dilapidated state, this will be discretionary spending of the most discretionary kind. Money for pet infrastructure projects and the Tories' mates (as per above), but nothing for our rotting public realm. Just like the schemes unveiled earlier this year in those pre-Covid halcyon days. Small statism, the holy grail of post-Thatcher Toryism, coincidentally underlines everything we've talked about so far. It justifies further rounds of cuts to Universal Credit, the refusal to back anything the Tories feel is politically suspect, and imposes the obligation of debt as the commonsense of the age.

It's abundantly clear the disaster of Tory mismanagement is because their priorities are skewed by the (oft contradictory) pressures bearing on them, and their class instincts and interests as mediated by their ideological precoccupations. It's not enough to slap the label of incompetence on the Tories. It's far worse than that: their incoherence and recklessness, whether it's bumbling Boris or dishy Rishi fronting them up, is guided by one principle: the protection of the British oligarchy, no matter how many have to die.

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Away with the Anti-Semitic Trope

Few things are more exciting than landing on Mars, right? It would be a stupendous technological achievement, the culmination of 60 years' worth of space exploration and a significant step to industrialising the solar system. Setting aside the superlatives, the sad truth is it's probably not great fodder for a Netflix televnovel. There's only so much that can be done with five people in a cramped tin can for six months. The latest Hilary Swank vehicle, Away, proves the point.

10 episodes of overwrought tedium was inevitable, I guess. And the producers of the show have tried getting around this in two ways. Moments of high tension, such as the ship's solar array failing to deploy necessitating a risky spacewalk, and the water reclaimation unit breaking down. Combine this with health issues suffered by our cast of astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts, such as space blindness and a nasty, infectious fever. The action is supplemented by family dramas back on terra firma. Hilary's hubby suffers a stroke and spends the season rehabilitating, keeping him away from his very important job at ground control. And her 15-year-old daughter pseudo-rebels by getting a boyfriend, riding dirt bikes and, whisper it, having sex with him. Going for much complex emotional content, one of Hilary's fellow astronauts confesses to having feelings for her just as her friend admits to having the hots for hubby to, um, hubby. Being good Americans of fine moral standing, both spurn the advances. I guess adultery on top of under age sex was too much for the showrunners.

The show does have a handful of commendable features. The production values are very high and they pull off weightlessness convincingly. The crew is fittingly multinational (American, Indian, Russian, Chinese, British) and multi-ethnic. All characters are three-dimensional, with the taikonaut Lu Wang refusing to conform to the wooden stereptypes afflicting Chinese characters. And in line with the wave of woman-led drama the place of women at all levels of the space programme is acknowledged - a far cry from the (admittedly period) Apollo 13 and the pre-2010s centering of men in science fiction programming. Laudable as all this is, it doesn't make Away any good. The space bits are too hackneyed and predictable, and the human interest stories tiresome. Though very different, The Expanse shows both can be fruitfully combined.

Yet there is something else about Away that cannot escape comment: an egregious anti-semitic trope that could not simply be coincidence. In episode five, Space Dogs, Misha, the Russian cosmonaut, attempts to reconcile with his daughter by putting on a puppet show for his grandkids back on Earth. Roped in to assist is Kwesi, the English-Ghanaian botonist. It just so happens Kwasi was raised by, and identifies with his Jewish adoptive parents. Okay, coincidence then? But when you consider Misha is played by Mark Ivanir, an Israeli actor, it starts looking a bit suss. Put it like this: they got the one Jewish character and the one Jewish actor to play at puppeteering. This is underlined in the final episode, Home. At ground control Kwasi's mum turns up in the family room in anticipation of the touchdown. There she is greeted by another character as, um, the "mother of the puppet master."

Hyper sensitivity thanks to recent history? Possibly, but it does seem too much of a coincidence to have these two characters do a puppet show and one of them, in the absence of relevant context, being referred to in terms of a well worn anti-semitic trope. So, as well as junking the opportunity for producing a decent drama, Away carries a big racist question mark with it.

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Boris Dlugosch ft. Roisin Murphy - Never Enough

Dancing shoes: on.