the owl of minerva flies at dusk (and armies clash by night)

so to start us off the pentangle from german TV. 

it's a misty and grey morning. it may even be raining too. (it is raining). horsemouth is reading alan bennett's writing home  (but the intellectual bits on kafka and erving goffman you understand). bennett is, as a brit,  resistant to that continental nonsense. 

horsemouth watched some post-demo 'wandering round westminster trying to pick a fight' footage (so far so saturday night out in a small town).  it looked scary horsemouth was glad not to be there (in manchester it looked even worse).

it's just a lurch to the right (let's do the timewarp again) 

the way it seems to horsemouth is that the home secretary suella braverman called the right-wing mobs onto the street because she (and the prime minister rishi sunak)  couldn't get the police to ban the palestine ceasefire march like they wanted them to  - the police stood up to them because they don't have the political authority to do that yet (or not yet anyway). 

the (ex) hooligans promptly disgraced themselves by running around like it was match day. 

the blame will attach to suella braverman and she will probably be gone from the government soon (if not by the time horsemouth types this). 

braverman is preparing the ground for a 'lurch to the right' leadership campaign when the tory party loses the next election. she is just positioning herself, trying to be the change she wants to see. 

the interesting thing is that dominic cummings would probably advise them to do the rightward lurch. 

there is a distinct separation between the political elite of the uk and the streets/ the people - given the multilayered checks and balances  of the full political system (the electoral system, parliament, lords, judiciary, army, police, civil service, quangos, hedge-funds, industry, finance, the media etc, etc,) it would be a miracle if there was a direct connection (and if there was  it would be unlikely to last long).

the question is can the xenophobic right-wing populist vote break through using the current electoral system (in the current media climate) or can it only do this given a referendum?   sunak (you see horsemouth almost typed starmer) is economically quite right wing but wants to be seen as a  centrist safe pair of hands - he is planning for tory re-election in about 6 years time on a platform of 'a safe pair of hands from the centre'. 

horsemouth doubts the city is prepared to tolerate an outbreak of trussanomics without punishing the whole population again.  but of course a resumption of parliamentary business as usual will not automatically help the people of the regions , the inequalities and injustices that fuel the attempt to get populism onto the political agenda will continue.