Chinese Takeaway

Our rulers have no idea what to do about China. They had assumed the permanence of globalisation, of American hegemony, and of America as they had at least told themselves that they had always known it. Their impotent rage at the carve-up of the Chagos Islands is a portent of their discombobulation at the increasingly apparent rise of India. Yet they wish to adopt the Aadhaar system of digital ID. Leading to the Chinese Social Credit System. Their bamboozlement is complete.

Their economic model has moved even Ofcom to fine the privatised, foreign-owned Royal Mail £21 million for its late deliveries, a fine that will be passed on to customers and to workers rather than to shareholders or to executives. Their economic model is exemplified by Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman, whom Wes Streeting is therefore incapable of taking on, since his life's work is to complete Tony Blair's, Alan Milburn's and Paul Corrigan's privatisation of England's National Health Service, so that it can rip us all off as Big Vet had been ripping of pet-owners, only far, far more so. Their economic model is the one that leaves 50,000 doctors looking for work while Stephen Kinnock puts "job advisors", private and paid by "results", in GP surgeries to bully the sick and disabled into the suicide that Kinnock wanted the NHS to provide, "advisors" who will cost almost as much as Mone and Barrowman had stolen and were never going to pay back.

Hope does glimmer occasionally. The French have frozen the increase in their pension age from 62 to 64; yes, you did read those numbers correctly. In Britain, however, we moan about the triple lock, which puts money in the hands of the people who spend it and thus stimulates our consumer economy, as sickness and disability benefits do, and as the lifting of the two-child benefit cap would, all while declaring economically and politically the social and cultural value of the direct beneficiaries. So much for assisted suicide, so much for decriminalised abortion up to birth, and so much for the idea that the only way to engage marginalised communities is to deface something like Canterbury Cathedral, since they must be incapable of appreciating such treasures as they were. That is the attitude of Kemi Badenoch and of Bridget Phillipson, each of whom ought to know better. From certain backgrounds other than theirs, it is far more sinister, being motivated by a desire to keep those treasures away from those communities lest they inspire them as they have done in the past.

Although he himself does come from broadly that background, Jeremy Corbyn has always understood that. Those whom that terrified had to brand him a terrorist, so "unelectable" that they needed The Fraud to stop him from being elected. Albeit with even greater viciousness each time, Corbyn was the third successive Leader of their own party to whom they had done that. Even now, against Ed Miliband, they are planning to field Jeremy Clarkson as a right-wing populist impersonator when he was in fact a close friend and strong supporter of David Cameron, and now also of Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, who have moved to the Cotswolds as asylum seekers from Donald Trump.

And if Gordon Brown "destroyed the pensions industry", then his own generation seems to be doing all right in retirement. With both pensions and the price of gold in the news, the hoary old chestnut about Brown and the gold reserves is back, even though a sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency has no need of such reserves, even though no one objected at the time, even though none of this could have been predicted then, even though Labour won the next two General Elections, even though Brown became Prime Minister in that third term, and even though he might have remained so if he had been properly supported by those on his own side who instead refused to accept the legitimacy of any Leadership or Premiership except that of Tony Blair, but who would settle provisionally for Cameron.

They are now settling provisionally for Keir Starmer while preparing to replace him with Streeting, or Phillipson, or whoever. Starmer has picked a fight with his own bovver boys in the Crown Prosecution Service, so he may have to fall back on the despised trade unions and the despised Left as the Stuarts had to fall back on the despised Highlanders, to the utter ruin of both. What could Starmer possibly do to endear himself to the Left and to the unions? Well, Blair as Prime Minister met Jeffrey Epstein. People are expelled from the Labour Party for far less than that. And the problematic likes of Peter Mandelson, Jonathan Powell, Alastair Campbell with his investment in his son's dodgy football betting syndicate, and so forth, could be defied to go with Blair or never again bless the nation with their contributions.