SO, THE bull has landed the contract to refurbish the china shop. Having printed £500billion of fake ‘money’ to bribe people out of the habit of work, Rishi Sunak has been selected (by whom?) to sort out the crisis generated by Liz Truss’s 45-day premiership. Or something.
Some of us might take a slightly different view, one more sympathetic to the unfortunate Ms Truss: that to treat the economy not as an organism which requires nurturing, but as a machine which can be turned on and off, might have less than optimal consequences. Sunak, of course, has his fingerprints all over that switch. He has subsequently suggested that he was sceptical about the lockdown strategy, a reluctance he expressed by completely going along with it.
Pace the lazy Westminster/media consensus, Sunak does not understand money. Money cannot be created ex nihilo, only God can do things like that.Rather, it emerges from the myriad, real-life exchanges which constitute the actual market, the one which cannot be reduced to the grubby operations of the City. If you create ‘money’ by fiat, you ignore its real nature. One result of this is that people lose confidence in it, which when you think about it is, in itself, a sufficient condition of inflationary pressure.
And so to that traditional theatre of the absurd: the reshuffle. Even by the standards of recent history, Monday’s performance was a doozy. It reminded me of the M C Escher lithograph Ascending and Descending which features an impossible staircase, and a set of identical figures who seem to be going up and down it at the same time. Think you’re descending, Ms Braverman? Think again, you’re actually on the way back up.
While we’re at it let’s give a shout out to Michael Gove, a man with a seriously impressive back story somewhat neutralised by a seriously preposterous front story. There is no doubt that Gove has a certain flair: to pull off the trick of simultaneously being deeply sinister and richly comical takes real talent. Gove has always reminded me of the classroom swot who insists he has not revised for the exam and then obscures his exam script so that the pupil sitting next to him can’t copy him. They say that all political careers end in failure; his just never seems to end. Anyway, congratulations to Mr Gove for having ascended the staircase to the job he had before he descended it.
None of this matters, of course. The farce of the last few weeks has been useful for the following reason: it has shown, to those prepared to look, that the mainstream media’s obsession with domestic politics is misplaced. ‘Domestic politics’ has become oxymoronic. Sunak, Gove, Braverman and the rest are, whether they know it or not, being puppeteered either by the deeper state or by globalist institutions, or (more likely) by a combination of both.
Is that a conspiracy theory? Yes, my theory is that there is a conspiracy, and the thing about theories is that they can be true. Some commentators, most notably Toby Young, resist that conclusion by invoking Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. To which the reply must be that as a methodological principle this is not axiomatically true.
Which is the simpler, and therefore better, explanation of the economic, social and political disasters that have taken a global form? That they are unconnected cock-ups or that they are the products of malign agency? Given the announcements of the likes of Klaus Schwab, and the confiscation of national sovereignty by the WEF, the WHO and the Davos types, why is it not simpler to prefer the latter explanation over the former?
People do not want to believe in the conspiracy theory not because it is intellectually incoherent – it isn’t – but because it is emotionally challenging. For this reason, the globalists (and we must insist on resisting the linguistic totalitarianism which is trying to have that word expunged) are odds-on to have their way, if they haven’t already.
Meanwhile the political class looks away and enjoys the useful distraction that is the theatre of the absurd, thinking that they are observing matters of deep significance, not realising that it is in fact merely the warm-up act.
