I had to walk over to Moorgate this morning to visit the Vodafone shop to check on my mobile phone. I’d been getting odd texts from them saying things like your account is cancelled or you’ve used up your minutes. Then when I checked the website, it wasn’t true. And someone who called me mentioned that their phone said that they were calling Russia. Can a phone be hijacked somehow? The guy at the store fiddled around on the computer for a few minutes and said it must be a “computer glitch”. I wonder….

On the way back, I passed a guy in a monkey mask and a suit, carrying a large paper banana (about three feet long, followed by six more guys in masks and suits carrying a coffin. They did not seem to be willing to tell anyone what they were doing. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by grief. See the photo. The I got back to Old Spitalfields Market and discovered that it was London Cocktail Week and that the entire market area was being converted into twenty or more bars, each selling £5 drinks and publicizing different brands of booze. It may be a wild time in Shoreditch the next few days.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of politics here and the difference between the Conservative Party in the UK and the Republican Party in the US: Imagine a party that is not beholden to the Religious Right, largely because this is an essentially areligious country, and the issues of abortion and contraception and evolution are simply irrelevant or of little importance in getting elected. Imagine a party that is not anti-intellectual and anti-science and whose leaders, in fact, often have Oxford or Cambridge degrees. Imagine a party not controlled by an unreasonable gun lobby, since there really are no guns and everyone seems to like it that way. Imagine a party that, while completely in the pocket of big business and the wealthy, still believes in the value of government, since it is needed to protect the property of the wealthy, prevent fraud and things that would hurt legitimate business and provides a reliable vehicle for settling of disputes. That is the Conservative Party. (I picture the reverse being said by Rod Serling: “Picture this. A political party controlled by religious extremists and gun nuts, that is anti-intellectual and anti-science and that actually wants to tear down government. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.”

Of course, just because the Conservatives did not have to make Faustian pacts with groups like the Religious Right and the Tea Party and the NRA to get themselves elected, does not mean that they are not pretty awful in a number of ways. They may not be crazy, gun-toting, God-loving, fear-mongering racists, but the Conservatives are clearly aiming to push things back at least one hundred years. The want to cut taxes for the rich and for businesses. This is already a country without many regulatory protections (to help the free market) and their elimination will probably continue. They aim to smash labor unions once and for all. They want to cut every hole in the social safety net that they can, claiming that this alleged austerity will somehow help the economy. Image the editors of the Wall Street Journal having a chance to run a country and you’d have a pretty good idea of what they are like.

The one significant difference between the Conservatives and the Republicans that they don’t have issues like women’s health, guns, evolution, marriage equality or racism to use to scare and energize the middle and lower class, who, objectively have little reason to vote for them (although the whole immigration/fugitive thing will be interesting to watch). So they are forced to have some policies that go beyond looking out for rich people and corporations if they want to get elected. For example, they do not want to get rid of National Health Care. They are willing to spend money on infrastructure, which creates jobs (and is good for business). They are willing to come up with other bits of other bits of window dressing, especially since they think that the Labour Party is incredibly weak right now and that they have a chance to crush them and govern for the next decade. They may overreach and you can already smell the hubris. The right wing is certainly ascendant here right now. I suspect that a party like this would crush the Democrats next year in the US, but the Republicans have so lost touch with reality that the Democrats may survive.