Reeves’s “budget” – “liar” doesn’t do it justice.
Commentators need to up their game when describing this government.
SEAN WALSH
Imagine you are waiting on a biopsy result. Your doctor, who doesn’t seem to like you but pretends he does, has prepared you for bad news. It’s possible you’re going under the knife – worst case scenario.
Unknown to you he already has the results, and they aren’t that bad. Because he knows best, he keeps that good news from you, calls you in, puts on his game face, sexes up the data and refers you for surgery anyway. Because he can.
The doctor is not popular with colleagues. They gossip and brief against him. You find out about the medical malfeasance and confront him. He explains that the biopsy results did not take account of his policy of recommending surgery for all patients in your situation, the more invasive the better since you ask, and that he therefore “makes no apology” for the partial and (strictly speaking) unnecessary removal of much of your liver. Again.
When you point out, as you might feel entitled to, that this all seems like bad form he swaps the game face for the outrage one and tells you, loudly, that he’ll “take no lessons” from a patient who has been told more than once to take more fibre and cut out the sugar.
What would we make of such a quack? Do you think the word “liar” is strong enough.? Would “madman” not be better?
I suspect you know where I’m going with this. And while I concede that analogies and thought experiments are never perfect, I’m happy to duke this one out, point by point.
Rachel Reeves set aside the data given to her by the OBR to yet again plunder the assets and residual good will of everyone unattached to the ever-expanding client state. Based on numbers more imaginary than the square root of minus one she constructed a fake budget intended to crush the aspirations and creative potential of all of us. Because that’s what the welfare culture does: persuades people out of the habit of work thereby robbing them of an essential element of human dignity.
The availability of welfare is the mark of a civilised society; the ubiquity of it suggests a sick one. Pun intended.
Are we really saying that her political malfeasance can be chalked up as a lie or the breaking of a manifesto promise (does anyone still take those seriously?)?
This is not to say that lying is a trivial thing. St Augustine remarked that all lies are evil to some degree as they involve an assertion that the world is not how God says it is. Also, they tend to corrupt the general thinking of the person who tells them.
And that’s the salient point. This government has gone beyond lying. It’s now all-in for pathological self-delusion. Which is, as I say, worse than “mere lying”. They’ve reached the point of lying when honesty would be easier, which is when mendacity tips over into mental illness.
So Reeves is worse than dishonest, and her budget is worse than “unfair”. What about the apparently more damaging claim, often made these days, that they have broken the social contract?
As if that health scare wasn’t bad enough imagine now you’ve also discovered your new spouse has been cheating on you, pretty much since you were married just 18 months ago. “Discovered” isn’t the best word, come to think of it, because he’s not making any effort to cover up the infidelity. He’s sold off your jewellery (been in the family for about 1,000 years so there’s some good stuff there). When you are out in public, you’re increasingly finding yourself being very careful what you say. He doesn’t want you working but is happy to let you have a weekly allowance from your own trust fund.
When you confront him over the cheating, he doesn’t quite deny it but insists that it’s healthier for the marriage that way and if it makes you feel better, he’s happy to put a tracker on your phone.
Would we really want to say that the problem here is just the breaking of a marriage contract?
In less than 18 months this government has given away territory, introduced randomised policing, vaporised our borders, nationalised childhood, cancelled elections, made a cult out of genuine environmental concern, introduced de facto infanticide, is proposing medical experiments on children and has criminalised prayer.
It is now proposing to fast-track dissenters and critics and people it doesn’t like into prison by the elimination of trial by jury. It has systematically dismantled the traditional mechanisms by which it can be held accountable, not least through the regulation of speech. It now wants us to fund its spying operation against ourselves.
It has become, in short, an abusive partner who’s managed to get his name on the lease.
This isn’t “breaking a contract”. It’s violating a covenant. The idea that society is a contract is a liberal deception designed to make it seem like a snapshot in time when the truth is that it is a story told over centuries. This is Year Zero authoritarianism.
We need a more robust and thoroughgoing moral language to describe what these people are up to. They aren’t charlatans doing unfair things. They are evil.
This article (Reeves’s “budget” – “liar” doesn’t do it justice.) was created and published by Sean Walsh and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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