England is Theirs.

As an Englishman in exile I am interested in England. What a strange place it must be. Yesterday the Prime Minister - and I would make a better Prime Minister than the current incumbent and, make no mistake, I would be a terrible Prime Minister - doubled-down on her ideologically pure notion not to tax rich people, pour les encourager des autres. Today Kwasi Kwarteng decided that he was - in fact - going to tax rich people after all, and that that's the party line now. "We get it, and we have listened." says the newly humbled chancellor of the exchequer, in direct contradiction to the Prime Minister's position less than 24 hours earlier. 

As aggravating as that political-red-top-faux-cool-chillax-yeah phrase is - it's a Johnsonian affectation that sits awkwardly with the non-personalities of Kwarteng and Truss - what it really means is "we are aware that destroying the economy pursuing an ideological phantom while our hedge-fund pals make fortunes off the destruction of the pound looks a bit off. So we're backing away for a while. But we will be back later on with some more totally egregious nonsense. Don't worry, that's totally our bag, man."

Lovely vox pop interviews on the BBC. Everyone thinks Kwarteng should go. Last week they would have taken a bullet for the boorish oaf, but popular fancy is mercurial, almost as skittish and flighty as "the market", which seems to approach each yawn and hiccup in the economy like Shaggy approaching a g-g-g ghost. Meanwhile "This Morning" has consumer features where experts advise people to save money by putting on a jumper and turning down the heating this winter. 

It's the pragmatism that gets you. The matter-of-factness. Magazine shows thinking its a good idea to tell people to use hot water bottles and extra blankets to avoid dying this Christmas. The passivity of it. Is this the Blitz spirit? Making do and mending? Up against it, again? Time to pull your socks up and put your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel. We can take it. But its not a war is it? The government are doing this. They're not bombs smashing the East End, they're thick posh fuckers in bad suits, carving everything up for their friends. They're asset stripping the nation. It's piracy. When there's nothing left they will be insulated from the cold by their Scrooge McDuck style bullion basements, and you'll be a bundle of frozen rags watching Phillip Schofield explaining the nutritional content of moss and ash. 

I'm reading Michael Bracewell's wonderful "England is Mine" again. It's a book I've had for twenty years and is a primer for anyone interested in a romantic, mythical England - England as Arcadia. It's an examination of the peculiar assumption the country, the people, has about itself. Fair, decent, slow-witted and unflashy. Respectful and respected. An ordered society - accommodating to a degree - but wary of change, of noise, of showing off, of people getting too big for their boots. It is a nation as a perfect interwar village, with a village shop called village shop because what else would it be called? There are four pubs - all doing well - where they know your usual, and your usual is immutable and unchanging, just as the village is. There are ducks on the duck pond and the smell of new mown grass, and everything is in its right place and all is well with the world. It is why Brexit was an inevitability. And it doesn't exist. It has never existed. Things were not better twenty years ago, or twenty years before that, or twenty years before that. The English have always been greedy, selfish spivs and they love a bit of flash and a lot of noise. They have also always had quite a lot of sex. 

But England persists in thinking the average person is a fore-lock tugging, virginal John Mills. Minding his Ps and Qs, not putting himself forward, listening to both sides of the argument, but like a lion when roused (not sexually roused, obvs). 

England is delusional. It's mad. It keeps voting Tory because it always has, and it wants to pull the ladder up. It knows it's rights, somebody else can pay - it's looking out for its FAMMLY, cause, at the end of the day, that's all that matters. It wants the NHS, it wants the BBC, it wants decent, affordable public transport, but it never votes for it. It sees itself as quiet, respectable, generous and reliable, while acting like a drunken, Victorian workhouse proprietor. 

STOP VOTING FOR THEM. They want to take your future from you. There is no "trickle down". They will keep the money - because of course they will. They too are English. They too are looking after their own. The romance of merry England.