‘Ben’ Couchen succeeded for the Tories, but with the aid of unrepeatable bungs from central government.

‘Andy’ Street failed, if only just, in the West Midlands.

‘Rishi’ Sunak is universally acknowledged as a political disaster who is bound to fail.

There is no one else.

All the attempts to brand the Tories as anything but what they really are - a nasty, openly racist, far-right party with contempt for the majority of people - are failing. The adherence to a culture of indifference to people, the planet, and anything that matters to a person who can think about more than money, has destroyed this party.

What now? Can it recover? Should it recover? And if so, what as, and what should it espouse?

Even if it did, should the twenty per cent or so of its true believers ever again have the right to control the political narrative of a country where most are repulsed by what the Tories think?

And to where should that majority look for ideas when it is clear that Labour is almost as bereft of them, which is the only thing that might still give remaining Tories hope?

Where now for politics that matters in other words?

Seeking to answer that question is why this blog exists, is my best answer.

I posted this video on YouTube this morning:

In case the link does not work for you, it can be found here.

The transcript is as follows:

Advertising is meant to make you unhappy. That is its single sole objective.

The whole of the advertising industry exists to make you feel inadequate. Isn't that obvious? What it's trying to tell you all the time is that whatever you have, however well off you feel, you could feel better off if only you had whatever it is they're trying to flog to you.

You need the latest iPhone.

You need to go on holiday, wherever they're saying.

You need to buy this financial product.

You will be insecure unless you buy their insurance. Whatever it might be, they are trying to make you feel as though there's a better world over there, which you didn't even know existed until they blasted it in front of your screen, onto your radio, or wherever else you might see it.

And the fact is that most of the time you don't need any of that stuff because you were already feeling okay before this happened. And they have tried to undermine your well-being by creating a sense of dissatisfaction with where you were. Now, that's really important because this process of making you feel inadequate does of course drive our material growth.

When we look at the whole of the fashion industry, it is of course effectively driven by advertising, continually presenting us with different images of how we want to look. But the consequence is we have vast quantities of clothing now being sent to landfill sites, clogging up not just this country but because we export a lot of that waste to many developing countries as well.

We have waste in the form of excess energy because we're trying to buy all these new products and throwing away perfectly workable ones.

And perhaps worst of all, we're all - well, not all of us, but a lot of us - are getting into debt to actually buy these products because there is a form of pernicious agreement between the advertisers, the producers and the finance industry that whenever you buy something, you will be offered credit to make payment for it - keeping you in debt and therefore in hock to the finance companies, the banks, and so on of this country and elsewhere.

You are therefore not only meant to be miserable because you haven't got what you want, but you're also meant to be in debt, forcing you to stay on the treadmill to buy more of the product, the service, whatever it is they're trying to sell.

Is that a wise way to run an economy? Personally, I don't think so. I believe we have to change if we're going to become sustainable. And the quickest and easiest way to achieve that goal is to say that advertising is not a universally good thing. Most of it isn't. In fact, except for the small ads in newspapers, I can't think of anything that is.

So, we should stop tax relief being provided on expenditure by large companies on advertising and we should stop them being able to reclaim VAT on the advertising costs charged to them by those who broadcast these things.

Are there consequences? Yes. It will change the way that we see and consume media. I have no doubt about that. We have to, therefore, rethink that issue.

But the world will be a better place because there'll be less waste, we'll be more sustainable, and, ultimately, we will be happier because we won't be told all the time by everything we see and hear that we are inadequate.

I posted this video on YouTube this morning:

In case the link does not work, you can watch the video here.

This is the transcript:

Inflation always goes away. Now, that's an extraordinary claim to make, but I can show you it.

This chart, produced by an American central bank called the St. Louis Fed - which always produces amazing economic statistics for those who want to look at such things - is actually a reproduction of research undertaken by the Bank of England, which shows the inflation figures in the UK since before 1200. I don't mean before midday. I mean literally from 1200, 800 years ago.

What you see is that the chart shoots up and downwards in the early eras on the left hand side, and gradually it tapers down so that these days we have much smaller oscillations when it comes to inflation.

The peaks are smaller than they used to be, and there are almost no negative troughs, i.e. we don't have periods of deflation in this country now. But the critical point I want you to note is, that after any inflation spike, there's a downturn.

Now historically, that downturn was almost invariably a period of deflation. In other words, real prices fell.

Now that, in the last century or so, is not the case. After a period of inflation, real price. changes fall, but prices don't go back to where they were. So, over the last century or so, we've had a period of steadily rising prices. But it's still true that after any period of inflation, really quite quickly, excepting periods of world war, prices return to relatively low levels of inflation.

And the critical point to note is that all that happened when we didn't really have a central bank who did anything whatsoever to control inflation.

The Bank of England might have been created in 1694, but it didn't get a mandate to control inflation until 1998. So, for the vast majority of the time that that chart was being plotted, there was no central bank raising interest rates, trying to control inflation, setting a 2 percent target, or any of that other nonsense that Governors of the Bank of England now talk about.

And yet inflation went away, anyway. And that's because markets always correct for the panics that create inflation in the first place.

Inflation is almost always created by a panic. There's a shortage caused by plague, pestilence, war, you name it, something's gone on in the world. Trade has broken down, and therefore there's a shortage and prices go up.

Once we get over the panic, we realise that actually the world did not end as everybody thought it would.

Remember the toilet roll crisis of March 2020 everyone went out and bought toilet rolls as if there were never going to be any available ever again. Well, it's exactly that sort of panic multiplied by an enormous factor that creates the shortages in world markets when a big event like the outbreak of war happens and market traders panic and try to buy things as if there will never be wheat, oil, gas, fertilizer, or anything ever again.

There were toilet rolls after March 2020. There has been oil, gas, wheat, fertilizer, and everything else since March 2020. The prices, once the traders realised that they had simply panicked inappropriately, went back to normal. They didn't necessarily go back to the price that they were in March 2020, but they certainly returned to a very normal level.

Inflation went away.

We did not need interest rate rises.

We did not need austerity.

We did not need the Bank of England telling us that none of us would do a pay rise.

We did not need them to say to the government that they should not be spending because they had to pay interest - extra interest - instead.

No. We just needed to wait for the markets to stop panicking. But instead, we had the Bank of England doing something quite different. They put in place policies that were designed to exploit the situation where inflation had started so that the wealthy became wealthier because money was moved from most ordinary people who pay interest to those who have very large sums on deposit.

That, again, is something we do not need again. Inflation goes away. It's a lesson we have to learn. And until the bankers do that, frankly, we shouldn't be giving them any power over our economies at all. Because they use that power wholly inappropriately and against the public interest.

As the Guardian notes this morning, this is the current state of the UK's football premier league:

There is, I promise, good economic reason for noting this.

The bottom three clubs in the league will be relegated at the end of the season, which is now just three games away. And it so happens that all three of those clubs now facing the likelihood of relegation were promoted from the second-tier league, the Championship, just one year ago. After a single season in the top flight of English football, they will very likely be returning whence they came.

The economic point that I am making is a very simple one. As is apparent to anyone who follows football, the English Premier League acts like an oligopoly. In other words, the well-established clubs within it make sure that it is organised to their advantage. They do, as a result, collect vastly more revenue than anyone else in the football. Their players are remunerated at extraordinary levels that would be exceptionally difficult to justify without this oligopoly power. In economic parlance, they earn rents on top of any reasonable level of reward they should enjoy. And, as is all too commonly the case when oligopoly exists, there are massive barriers to entry into this market, as the likely relegation of all three clubs that were promoted into it last year makes abundantly clear.

The current UK government has suggested that the UK needs a football regulator. I agree. One of the things that it needs to do is to control the abuse of market principles by the most powerful football clubs in the country. I am not anticipating that any such thing will happen. The idea that fair competition might prevail is, I think, very unlikely to win the support of those who might lose out as a result.