Mostly, American politics is poisonous. Even compared to the pernicious politics we've now got in the UK, where the members of the 'radical centre-left' third party form a nonsensical queue to support insane right-wing policies and attack those they are most politically close to, American politics as reported in Europe drips nauseating personal, immoral and bloody bile from both sides (but mostly from the right of the Republican party and from Rupert Murdoch's House of Evil Media and Invisible Mending).
So it's oddly nice to see the President of the United States getting the boot in too: to Murdoch's minions and also straight into the ludicrously bewigged face of Donald Trump. And I can't express the pleasure I feel at Trump sitting there, stony-faced and humiliated. Shortly after this singular drubbing at the hands of his Commander in Chief, Donny "Rugburn" Trump announced he was too much in love with his money to run for president after all. Also, he probably wouldn't look forward to that damn liberal media replaying this clip every single time he made a speech during the entire election campaign.
Live by the sword, Don, die by the sword. Dog eat dog. Shit or get off the pot. Various other trite phrases that you'd've trotted out had you run for president. And above all: you're fired.
In 1992, the Conservatives narrowly won a general election. This was not the expected outcome, least of all by the Conservatives themselves. Their manifesto was based on them losing but returning to power quite quickly, having sorted their internal problems out. Instead, they had to keep their crazy promises and have their internal battles publicly. One crazy promise was a vague commitment to privatise British Rail. BR was, by this time, the last big state corporation. It hadn't been touched before because, conventional wisdom had it, you can't privatise something that usually makes a loss and you shouldn't privatise something that will continue to require subsidies. This is what Mrs Thatcher believed; but she was gone and someone much less intelligent was now in charge (if you can remember who he was, please leave a note in the comments). British Rail was the most economically efficient railway in the entire world. It received the least subsidy from government of any railway in Europe, yet still managed to be seen as innovative and well-run by other railway administrations. Compared to attempting to make local trips in Northern Ireland or rural France, a BR train - even a crappy Pacer - was a dream. BR actually had very good industrial relations. Not perfect by any means, but national stoppages were very rare compared to both France and Germany of the time. To meet their crazy promise, the Tories turned to outside interest groups to find ways of privatising BR. Their initial ideas included having trains race between stations - the winner would get all the passengers - an idea that failed when they realised that there are very few places to overtake on a railway. The other bright idea was that fast and well-upholstered trains could be run for businessmen and rich people, whilst another company could provide cheap and cheerful services for secretaries (yes, the rail minister actually said that; that's what Tory government are like, you may now be noticing again). Eventually, it fell to the Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing, demented pack of liars and thieves masquerading as a pressure group (the modern successor is the much worse Taxpayers' Alliance) to decide that the best way to proceed was to take a hammer to BR and smash it into 137 pieces. Each depot became a Train Operating Company, even though that left the Hull to Liverpool trains being run from Newcastle. The infrastructure - rails, signals, ballast - was cleaved from the operations - trains, passengers - to create Railtrack, which the Tories promised solemnly would be kept as a public corporation, then privatised. Various departments in 222 Marylebone Road were turned into companies and flogged - many, like Red Star Parcels, being bought by a competitor and then simply closed down. The main aim of privatisation was to destroy the three railways unions (Aslef for the drivers, RMT for the guards and signalmen, TSSA for the managers and supervisors). It didn't quite work: Aslef helped to create a fierce internal market in the railways for drivers, boosting pay into the stratosphere. TSSA found that most of the bigger talent left the industry in disgust, leaving many vacancies for its members - even the ones who didn't go upward saw their pay and terms protected as the new companies looked under every stone for people with some knowledge of how to run a railway. RMT's signallers got massive share options in Railtrack to keep them sweet and the guards got their terms and conditions protected by law. BR itself worked to achieve these things as the clock ticked down to its destruction: it couldn't save the railway, but it could still defend its staff. What we're left with now is exactly what the Tories wanted. There is competition in the industry. It doesn't work, it was never going to work, and to make it look like it works, the government must throw billions of pounds at it, but they knew that would happen and it didn't bother them (not least because it would be Labour's problem after the next election in 1997). There is still a fierce internal market for skilled staff, with drivers now able to screw £50,000 and four-day weeks out of the operators: again, a prime example of how markets operate and something to be applauded. There was clearly some elastic in the fares system, and the market has now pushed up ticket prices way beyond inflation every year since BR was disaggregated: again, this is how markets are supposed to work and the Tories should be applauding what they've achieved. Of course, it now costs 400% more to run Britain's railways than it did to run British Railways. It costs a third more to run our railways than it costs to run the far-inferior and ramshackle SNCF classic lines. The government has to keep pumping money into the system just to have the trains run at all: if the amount they're prepared to pay is too little, the private companies announce they're taking their ball home with them and fuck off - as National Express has done on the east coast and First is doing on the Great Western. It turns out that running a railway for profit and running a railway for passengers are two completely different and unrelated things. If the government wants trains at useful times, it must either pay more now or renegotiate the contract (and pay even more) as it has had to do with First Great Western and Virgin. This is exactly what the Adam Smith Institute said would happen and wanted to happen. This is exactly what John McGregor, the ineffectual and deceitful Transport Secretary of the time, wanted to happen. The railways are now a market operation with a captive audience - the passengers and the government - and any business with a monopoly of supply will take the customer to the cleaners. This present unholy Tory government, however, for some reason doesn't like this market operating like a market. Well, it does, but it expected market forces to push prices down (when, in the history of privatisation, did any prices fall once the company was out of state hands?). To get the bill to fall, the Tories need to do something. Now, you and I know that the best way to save money would be to take the profiteering companies out of the system and merge the operating companies and the infrastructure company to create one organisation run at arms-length from the government. You and I both know that it would be best if that organisation was 100% owned by the state and run by a board of experienced railway managers. You could call it the British Railways Board, for instance. But the Tories don't want that: they say they want to cut costs across government, but they are lying. They're always lying. Tories lie. They have not changed. They want to cut services across government, which is not the same thing as cutting costs at all. That's why they're continuing to do mad things like buy replacements for Trident and fight unwinnable wars against people who will come to hate us. They're not cutting anything expensive, they're just withdrawing services from the people least likely to complain loudly enough to be heard - old people, the disabled, the unemployed, the low paid - saving them fuck all. To save money on the ludicrous railway market, the big plan is to force pay cuts on staff and reduce terms and conditions. Railwaymen should work longer and harder for less money and have their 10 instances of free travel a year taken away. That'll cut, ooh, fuck all from the system. It won't be any cheaper to run, since the money it frees up (very little money, actually) will be absorbed by the private companies, not by the government. The railways will be much, much less safe, too: but accidents are rare and it takes three or four before a government needs to react, making it the next government's problem (hurrah!). If the Tories were serious about saving money, they wouldn't be tinkering at the edges of the railways, they'd be reforming them from the centre. But they're not serious about saving money. They're just serious about putting working people in their place.
So, it was "no" after all. It wasn't a surprise, although it was a disappointment. And the post-mortems begin now, with the media busy asking "what now for the Left?".
On the face of it, a good question. But the question we should be asking is "what now for the Right?". It's not being asked by anyone and attempts to ask the question directly to the Tories in the aftermath of the elections and referendum have been answered with one line: "it's a major defeat for Labour". They've said this so often that even the left-wing press have bought this lie. The BBC, trying so hard to be neutral that it tipped over into being anti-AV, have also bought the lie; as the AV result came in, a stupid (but sadly off-camera so I don't know who she was) BBC reporter poked a microphone at Ed Miliband and said "You've staked your reputation on this result, haven't you?". Well, the Tories have been saying that - Ed hasn't. He never staked his reputation on it. But the BBC have bought the lie. Make no mistake, Labour could have done better at the elections - but only if the Tories had done worse. The collapse of the Liberal vote benefited the SNP in Scotland (Labour's share held, but the swing from the Liberals to the Nats overwhelmed them); it benefited Labour in Wales and the north of England; and it benefited the Tories in the south of England. This is all pretty normal and is exactly what happened when voters deserted the SDP/Liberal Alliance during the damaging and protracted merger negotiations of the late 1980s. We don't really need to worry about Labour - they're holding their own, given it's just over a year since they lost power nationally (it took them 18 years to be in this position last time; it took the Tories 13; a year and 'holding your own'? Not bad at all). We do need to worry about the Tories: the collapse of the Liberal vote and their victory in the AV referendum has convinced them they have a mandate for what they plan to do next. The Liberals, in disarray, won't be willing or able to stop them, either. So, what's next for the right? Well, first up, AV is gone, but the other half of the Act is still there and in law - the gerrymandering of the constituencies. On the face of it, making all constituencies equal sounds a very good idea. In practice, it's impossible as natural boundaries prevent it. The way round that is to ignore the natural boundaries, creating weird constituencies with nothing in common, like the proposed Mersey Riverside cross-river constituency taking in areas of Wallasey and Liverpool, two towns that hate each other. To make this work, the Boundary Commission has been told to stop the in-depth, neutral public enquiries it makes and to start rubber-stamping constituencies with equal electorates as proposed by the local parties. The party with the strongest local organisation will get to choose. And that party is always the Conservative Party. This means that, barring a miracle, the Tories will win the next election. Next is the long-promised reform of local government (an unrepresentative mess) and the House of Lords (ditto). This is being presented as the Tories' gift to Nick Clegg, something for him to do to while away the long, long hours alone in his office. The problem is that most of the Tories are perfectly happy with local government and the Lords, especially since Cameron flooded the upper chamber with Tory peers last year. Already, the Taxpayers' Alliance-run NO2AV campaign have said that the "no" vote is not only "a ringing endorsement of First Past The Post" (it isn't) but also the vote was "a rejection of Lords and local government reform" (how could it possibly be?). Reform simply isn't going to happen. Then, the Right owe Rupert Murdoch a favour. He has been allowed to takeover BSkyB, creating a media monolith that will be competition-proof. After the next election, the BBC is doomed (so the sucking-up to the present government was pointless, Mr Thompson), as another favour to Cameron's preferred Christmas dining partner. Often mooted in private is a cherished Tory goal of further trades union 'reform'. The plan, so far as it has spread outside of the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, is throw so many hurdles in the way of any strike - principally by making it punishingly expensive for the union involved - as to make them impossible. Couple that with a rollback of working conditions improvements, a hold on the minimum wage (plus new exemptions for any industry that calls for them loudly enough) and a drastic cutback in the workplace powers of the Health and Safety Executive and we're soon to lose most of our rights as workers. Finally, there will be a slow drift back to the regressive, repressive social legislation of the 1980s. Already the Tories have let Nadine "Nutjub" Dorries test the water with a Ten Minute Rule Bill designed to stop girls getting useful sex education and instead be taught to keep their knickers on. This is the start of something; whilst pressure groups have been seeking to make sex education inclusive of gay and lesbian interests (coz, like, we're born gay, we don't develop it like back acne in our late teens), the Tories are looking at cutting it back. They've accepted that we shouldn't see same-sex kisses before the watershed. We have bigoted 'faith' schools decrying homosexuality to their impressionable charges and a growing trend of young gay people killing themselves. These things are all inter-related. And the Right is seeking to make it worse. This is a centre-left country. We've been a centre-left country since the Second World War. The British people have always been fundamentally 'conservative' when it comes to public social matters, but they've started getting more liberal - indeed libertarian - over the past 15 years. The Brits have a sense of fair play and like seeing that everyone gets an equal go. This is what the Tories want to change, not least so that everyone will properly know their place. This is what the Right will do next. And what will you do to stop it?