Installing a truss to support a structurally unsound building won’t stop the collapse. It needed so much more – something that should have been happening over the last twelve years.
Stability and Continuity. These two words have been completely missing over the last twelve years of a Tory regime that has led to crises after crises. No one is blaming a particular political party for the bank-led global financial crash, the pandemic or Putin’s madness that sees us plunged into an energy emergency just at the point where we can see some light.
However, we can wholeheartedly blame this regime for foisting the fourth PM in six years upon a politically weary country. The previous three were thrown out of office for their failures by their own power-hungry elites. The last three were put into office by the tyranny of a right-wing clique. It is not democracy in action, as many claim.
We can also blame the public health crisis, poor economic productivity, and the housing crisis firmly at the feet of the Tories. Standards of living have continued to fall against peer countries in all these areas – and are now set to get much worse.
We should be reminded of the very first word in this piece.
Not only are we now to match Italy for numerous PM’s in the last six years since the Tory’s came to power, but we’re also about to get to see the arrival of the fourteenth minister for housing, ninth for education, ninth for justice and eighth for work and pensions. Even the great offices of state have now had seven Foreign Secretaries, six Chancellors and five Home Secretaries walking through their doors.
The result of all this instability for just over a decade is that everything has got worse. From George Osborne’s catastrophic handling of the economy to the economic crisis that is Brexit – so toxic, most people steer clear of the subject completely to save their relationship with family and friends.
These failures of policy go much deeper than most of us appreciate and will take years, if not decades to recover from.
The culmination of this failure comes from a very worrying OECD report that states the UK is forecast to have the lowest economic growth of any major economy bar Russia next year – a country economically sanctioned by the West and locked in a fiercely expensive war with Ukraine. How did that happen?
Another flagship policy area with a vote-winning slogan destined for failure is ‘levelling up.’ The role of Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has only been active for 12 months – and the appointment of its third minister is about to be made. It’s already a political graveyard. There’s no money for it and no one is taking it seriously.
When Truss goes to the electorate to try and win some sort of mandate to govern – she’ll fail. It won’t necessarily be because she was a poor Prime Minister, as that is yet to be determined. It’s because she’s been set up by three previous incumbents who dramatically failed. It meant our so-called leaders permanently had their eye off the ball on public health, the economy and so on – whilst they fought internal battles.
Liz Truss isn’t just facing a country in meltdown. Investors are bailing out, evidenced by the cratering of our currency. The country is not ready for the huge challenges being thrown at it. The climate crisis, unbelievable advances in technology, cyber-security, international affairs and much more.
The world has changed a lot since David Cameron walked into No10 and started his ruinous project – the wrecking of Britain. I always said there would be a number of Tory PM’s because Brexit would kill them off one by one. Johnson, of course – a bare-faced, self-serving liar – was forced out because 60 of his own MP’s were sick and tired of hearing about his morality-trashing exploits that shamed our country on the international stage. At least Truss won’t be regarded as a global joke – that is until she decides to push the Northern Ireland Bill to its limits and enter Britain’s battered economy into a trade war with Europe. Of course, it doesn’t help being advised by dark-money think tanks with shady funding to shape national policy. It’s just more of the same. That’s why failure is now written into everything the Tory party does because they have become overwhelmed by it for so long. Of course, it doesn’t help them that the lies no longer resonate.
In an attempt to hold up this building with such severe structural problems – a ‘truss’ has been installed but the whole shaky house will soon collapse. It needed concrete footings to prepare for the future, not promises of sunlit uplands, milk and honey. We got none of the former and bucket loads of the latter. No matter how big the new grand plan is from our new PM – it won’t work; history now tells us that. Those acceptance speeches were all the same. From Cameron’s promises to fix ‘broken Britain,’ May’s fighting the social calamity of burning injustice and Johnson’s truly empty cliche ridden rhetoric of getting Brexit done – they’ve failed. Look at where we are now. Instability is the only constant – and we’ll all pay for it in the end.