“So not a deal of Rooseveltian ambition ? Perhaps not. As both the FT and union boss Len McCluskey acidly observed, Roosevelt’s New Deal spawned mega projects such as the Hoover Dam; [Boris] Johnson’s list includes the reannouncement of repairs to a bridge in Sandwell.”
- Simon Wilson on ‘Boris Johnson’s New Deal’ in MoneyWeek, 10th July 2020.
There is a pivotal sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Having been herded into an army helicopter near Wyoming’s Devils Tower with a number of other seeming eccentrics, electrical maintenance worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) suddenly twigs that the cover story they have all been fed by the government – an accidental toxic nerve gas spill – is just that, a cover story. He takes off his gas mask and encourages his fellow masked passengers to escape. While they stare wide-eyed in horror, he gratefully gulps in lungfuls of oxygen and tells them,
