No.262 - You Can’t Just Turn Off a Civil War.

Dear James,

It’s been a dizzying week. Our nation has looked on helplessly as the Tory Party civil war exploded all around us. Last Wednesday, Liz Truss resigned, her thankfully brief experiment on the British people, scuppered by the ‘orthodoxies’ of the global financial markets. Her ‘new era’ was over in forty four days. The day before, the Tory MP Sir Charles Walker had called her government ‘a shambles, a disgrace.’  He was sick and tired of this group of ‘talentless people’ putting their own personal circumstances above the national interest. ‘Hear hear!' to that.

Today we have a new Prime Minister, our third this year. Rishi Sunak has always been the most likely candidate for the top job. He has intelligence and degree of youthful charisma, qualities severely lacking in recent PMs.  You will be rewarded well for your loyalty James. However, a large majority of our population has been left helpless spectators as your Party has torn itself apart, squandering the last dregs of credibility before our very eyes. After twelve years of Tory misrule, the nation is frustrated and angry. How can our system allow a worn out government with the same old faces to just ‘pass the parcel’ each time a government fails? In very few other institutions in our country can such abject failure be allowed to happen without a total clear out of the perpetrators. Liz Truss crashed our economy just two weeks ago and Mr Sunak himself supported every aspect of the Boris circus for three years. No company Board of Directors would survive such a catalogue of errors and self inflicted wounds. They’d be out in a jot. But your party just shrugs it off, claiming legitimacy from a 2019 majority which has long since lost all relevance to the current situation. A majority of citizens of the UK feel suffocated by a system which does not allow voters a chance to speak for four years even in an existential crisis. Our nation can do so much better than this!

You can’t just switch off a civil war, James. Mr Sunak might say’Unite or die’ but all the ingredients of your civil war continue to exist and operate even if, for the moment, it is just below the surface, It’s no coincidence that your ‘Bruderkrieg’  erupted in full view at the Brexit vote in 2016. Although there is now a political ‘omerta’ concerning Brexit, the question of our relationship with Europe still haunts the nation. The promises you signed up to after 2016 James, of the huge benefits of ‘throwing off the chains of the EU’ and ‘regaining our sovereignty’ have failed to materialise. On the contrary, Eurostat figures put imports to the EU from the UK (ie. UK exports to the EU) falling by 25% between 2019 and 2021. The figures also show that services fell by 7% over the same period. Brexit has increased red tape, not decreased it. Mountains of paperwork  are now normal and so UK trade with Europe is no longer as frictionless and dynamic as before. And where is that increased trade with the rest of the world that Boris promised? A tiny free trade agreement with Australia, an even smaller one with Japan and that’s about it. Brexit has increased red tape, not decreased it. As Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, said last week: “Put it this way, in 2016 the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70 per cent.”

Last weekend the situation descended into total farce. Boris Johnson came home from the Caribbean in ‘white knight’ mode to reclaim his ‘right to rule’. Clearly angry after his recent defenestration he wanted revenge. Yet by Sunday evening he had thrown in the towel, claiming that that he was withdrawing in order the ‘save his party’.  The truth was he had got as few as 57 votes and had been humiliated. By Monday lunch time Sunak had been crowned the new king.

Yesterday morning on Radio 4, Guy Hands, owner of a private equity firm Terra Firma`, called for the Tory Party to face the truth about Brexit. He said the Party is split into many factions and has become ‘ungovernable’. Sooner or later, he added, we will have to renegotiate our relationship with Europe. Until we do that, we are on our way to becoming what we once were, ‘the sick man of Europe’. At last we had a senior Tory donor admitting the ultimate truth.

Churchill once said, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’. Well we now have the crisis of all crises created on that day of infamy in 2016 when a tiny and gullible majority of the population voted for Britain to leave the EU. Mrs May attempted to find a ‘good Brexit’ for the nation but failed. Boris Johnson ‘Got Brexit Done’ by nefarious means and Mrs Truss exploded the whole escapade on the hubris and arrogance of a Britain immune from the facts of international finance.

James, Mr Sunak will be just the latest PM without a mandate. The Tory Party is the cause of our problems and until the nation is allowed to vote in a general election, the problem will persist. The UK has been through hell and only an election, followed by a Commission of  Inquiry into the last seven years of misrule, will do. We must make sure that this tragedy never happens again so that the true genius of the British people is finally liberated - unhindered by nostalgic nationalism.

BH - Your Concerned Constituent