Remember Alf Landon, please
Hands up everyone who knows who Alf Landon was, or even Frank Knox. No?
Oh dear, how sad for the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates for the Republicans in 1936. Admittedly it was a tough job, but someone had to do it and they did win 2 states, which against FDR at the very height of his popularity was no mean feat.
But it was the most lob-sided affair in American political history. Not helped by the fact that Mr. Landon did virtually no campaigning and instead stayed at home.
A strategy which must be looking ever more attractive to Mr. Sunak. Surely there is some domestic crisis that demands his attention, or maybe he desperately needs to take personal control of No. 10’s paperclips?
The Tory campaign just goes from farce to tragedy, having your personal assistant make a quick £500 on the date of the election and being overtaken by the Neo-Nazis is bad enough, but where are the supporters, the cabinet ministers and the big beasts of the party, if not by the PM’s side, where are they all?
I cannot imagine how hard it is to get up every morning, knowing you are going down to a defeat so large your party will probably not survive in its current form and trying to rally the few troops who bother turning up to fight on.
But then the Tory party has had this coming for years, instead of being conservative it has adopted ever more radical economic policies in an attempt to prove its far right, ideologically driven, selfless, greedy millionaire backers that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Monetarism, austerity, trickle down economics, ever loser labour laws, less job security, ever higher property prices, less regulation, terribly managed privatisations, ever worse benefits, Brexit, Trussenomics, tax cuts for the rich, money laundering for rich foreigners, and all the rest.
None of them worked, all were pushed by secretive and powerful interests that the Tory party kow-towed to.
No one now remembers Alf Landon, Mr. Sunak must now be praying for the same result, please just some obscurity. But he doesn’t deserve it, Landon stood against a tidal wave and knew it was a lost cause.
The Tories and Mr. Sunak still think they deserve to win.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
This reckoning was inevitable and 14 years too late.
The financial crash put an end to Thatcher/Reaganism as a working policy. But it survived because Osborne persuaded the public that this global event was because, pre crash, the Labour government budget deficit reached £35bn or so, an amount present governments could only dream of, and because in the US Obama let the bankers design the recovery policy.
Over the last 14 years we have seen different Tory Frankensteins try to shock life into the rotting carcass of a 1980's ideology. America it seems, still has quite some way to go and may need to go full Ayn Rand before it comes to its senses. For Britain, the concern that we were perhaps very stupid voting for Brexit has fatally wounded the credibility of neo-liberal orthodoxy. And now Labour can only whisper of its demise.
But I wonder whether its all too late anyway. New modelling suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation may be nearing its tipping point, and its steady slowing could show it has gone already, which will manifest its terrible effects progressivey over the next decades. Its then all over. The sheer madness of economic policy making over the last 40 years is breathtaking. And all for what? A holiday in the med, a car, and a new kitchen.
Maybe Mr Farage will win 2 seats and quickly be forgotten? One can only dream