on taking the electoral poison (sunspots)

'rather than pushing their politics somewhere new, the covid crisis seems to have sent terrified tories back to their old beliefs – in small government, untrammelled business...'

well this is good (horsemouth opines) because there is no going back for them. having leapt over the abyss of brexit (admittedly in a number of stages and renegotiations meaning it can never really be 'done'), or perhaps it's jumped the shark of brexit, the tories were all set to reap a crop of voters disenfranchised for decades by new labour and the first past the post system. 

getting these voters on side (the red wall etc.) would have lead to systematic tory majorities but brexit also means losing the votes in the 'prosperous south' of anti-brexit tories (the kind of people who will hold their nose and vote lib dem). 

they have (in any event) spent the money on covid and committed to 'levelling -up' (attempting to twist the hand of the market to produce better outcomes up north), if they don't deliver on that now they will be 'reneging on their promises'. 

under covid they have enacted 'authoritarian measures' that they themselves couldn't keep to, and signed contracts for PPE and testing with people they probably shouldn't have (and all of this will slowly unravel and come to light). 

the temptation for the tories is to jump back to default thatcherite settings. to attempt to bank the economic gains of brexit (whether such things exist or not) by an outbreak of looting of labour value from the workers by deregulation and improvements in productivity. (brexit with an inhuman face if you will). 

horsemouth thinks such a manoeuvre is electoral poison (he therefore recommends it to conservative central office). the tories moral authority is weak, they have squandered it. 

a full 63% of tory party members want boris to carry on (if you'll pardon the pun). probably considerably less tory MPs want him to carry on but can they afford to wait until the local elections in may and decide whether to keep him or not on the back of that? 

horsemouth is having a third wave of giallo watching. he is moving on to the films of armando crispino ( l'etrusco uccide ancora, macchie solari). there was another etruscan filmed giallo horsemouth remembers (but he can't remember the title of it right now). here the track is ansimando (breathless?) from macchie solari (sunspots). mimsy farmer is working in the morgue, there is a wave of suicides in rome, allegedly caused by sunspots, for mimsy the dead keep rising up off the autopsy tables. the giallo podcast were keen on it.  

yesterday a wander round with TG. saturday a meeting up with howard. in his dreams horsemouth was attempting to save a small post-soviet nation (something about gasmasks).