Turns out it's not the economy, stupid
Maybe culture war is handy for preventing us from noticing who really runs things
The original working title of this post was What Britain's shortest-serving and most spectacularly shit Prime Minister revealed about 'democracy'.
It reflects on how 'the markets' - not British voters - decided that Liz Truss shouldn't be allowed to do what she wanted to do.
The surprise to me about Truss's downfall wasn't that some anonymous bond traders disapproved of her approach and made sure everyone knew.
It was that this is just accepted. They did it because they could. And no one seemed to think that this was remarkable.
A lifetime of hearing about how 'the markets' feel about this that and the other has quietly updated our software in the background so that we aren't remotely perturbed by the fact of Truss's toppling in this way.
That this is how it really works and who is really in charge personally snapped into focus for the first time.
The exact moment of this perspective shift came when I was reading a piece by one of the 'sensibles', as I call them; well-connected pundits who fall squarely in the anti-boat-rocking liberal democracy camp.
Having long embedded a narrative, which earns you the slur of 'populist' if you question it, they can openly describe how things are without anyone batting an eye.
Here's that moment.
It's an observation about what Rishi Sunak might say about public finances this month. [Note for overseas readers: Hunt is finance minister, Kwarteng is his short-lived predecessor. We call them Chancellor of the Exchequer because, oh never mind. The OBR is a quasi-independent overseer called the Office for Budget Responsibility]
Barring any unexpected problems Sunak’s first big test will be the fiscal statement on November 17th. It’s unclear exactly how big a sum the Treasury are trying to identify in additional revenue and spending cuts – they have a tendency to brief the worst case scenarios – but it’s somewhere between £35-£50bn. The aim is for Hunt to be able to say that by 2027 government debt will be falling as a percentage of GDP and there will be no deficit in day-to-day spending. These are arbitrary targets and the OBR forecasts that they will be based on will be wrong, as all economic forecasts are. Had Truss and Kwarteng not so spectacularly spooked the bond markets there would be no need to hit these numbers exactly. But now the prevailing mood is that the traders must be appeased at all costs.
[Emphasis mine]
Here's the full piece those lines are lifted from. Depressing reading if you're British and still labouring under the belief that it might be possible to choose governments that might take radical action to improve everyone's material circumstances.
Traders must be appeased. This is SO just how it is that I never even noticed it before now.
The single mention I've seen of this fact as being even worth mentioning as a remarkable thing came from a non-political writer. (Bonus - it links to lascivious gossip about Truss's sexual predilections, which are much more interesting than Boris Johnson's vigorous vanilla shagging around and propagating various kids by different mothers). It's also lovely writing, which I recommend for the joy of reading.
I'm grateful to Sam Kriss for mentioning it because I thought I was alone. No one else seemed to be noticing the scope of the big lie that your vote really matters when it comes to significant economic reform. Obviously, pundits gaily skip past this, because it's just understood.
It probably doesn’t bode well for everyone rubbing along together, minimising their differences of perspective on other matters, because 'culture war' turns out to be the only politics that means anything. Because the economy, stupid, is largely off limits. It’s like the bit of your home appliance covered with a sticker warning you that it’s non-serviceable.
It's not so much that a veil has been lifted. It's that the veil is the substantive reality.
So, social culture is the only current in political life that an electorate has any real hope of influencing.
On this account I'd say we can expect culture wars to ramp up in inverse proportion to our influence on the economy.
Initially I felt a bit cheated, realising this. But there’s always a silver lining and it makes me more sanguine about what happened in 2019.
I joined Britain's Labour Party to support the much loved but even more widely reviled Jeremy Corbyn, when he went to the country proposing investment in infrastructure, instead of continuing to make the worst off pay for the problems created by financial elites. Replacing the dangerous idea of austerity with the quaint idea of building things instead of crushing people appealed to me.
Truss's toppling suggests that a Corbyn government would probably have been destroyed by the markets anyway.
Plus, I can’t imagine he’d have been allowed to get away with his idea of not selling weapons to horrible regimes either. What voters actually wanted would have had little to do with what he'd have been able to do. Voters? Way down the pecking order on really consequential decisions.
People voted for Britain to leave the European Union, largely because they wanted less immigration. Brexit was touted as a people’s uprising and a rare example of ‘elites’ not getting their own way.
Then the people who led the charge for Brexit set about planning to increase immigration, because that worked for their economic objectives.
I've ended up thinking that modern general elections exist for one purpose only; to create just enough of an illusion of influence to secure consent to be governed. That's it. [Note: even this is no longer working in the US, since half the country now refuses to accept that a President from either camp was legitimately elected].
It's not much different here in France. A budget that doesn't command the support of enough elected representatives to be voted into law has been pushed through anyway, using executive powers. French media is talking about a potential bromance between Rishi Macron and Emmanuel Sunak (pun intended), two debonair rich ex-bankers of similar age and handsomeness. I can certainly see it.
If I seem fed up about all this, I'm not. The Markets are gods now and I need them to be happy so that I can afford to eat, stay warm and do the nice things I do. Sunak will do his best to keep The Markets happy and so will Macron.
I don't like it and many people will be immiserated, but that’s how it is.
Housekeeping
I'm noticing that audio content receives less engagement than the written word.
Not sure how to interpret this yet.
I’ll survey readers soon to explore what you'd like more - or less - of from Rarely Certain. Probably via the new Chat feature, when Substack rolls it out to Android too.
The message that your vote doesn't count was shown with Truss too. It was well known she was preferred by the members at large while the parliamentary members wanted Sunak. Lo and behold, the suburban members picked her, and the parliamentary members set about undermining her. I don't claim to understand the economics of her policies, but I can see that they didn't give her any chance to try.