No. 266 - I'm Back or What will History Make of the Lost 13 Years?

Dear James,

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been away. No matter! I’m back. For me and most of our country, last year’s climactic debacle of the Liz Truss’s mini-budget exploded the myriad of Tory myths that have been showered upon us for the last thirteen years. Exhausted and craving distraction from the swerves and u-turns of a party riven from top to tail by right wing fanatics, public schoolboy thuggery, political clowns and one monstrously out of touch Boudicca figurine, the majority of the British public have thrown up their hands in disgust. We’ve had enough James! Time’s up! You’ve been found out! Even die hard Tories have at last seen the light. Better start checking those small ads in the local paper perhaps?

What will history make of the last thirteen years I wonder? In my own humble view it will be seen as a political aberration in which a nostalgic group of older generation Tory politicians lost touch with the the basic values of middle Britain and persuaded sufficient number of us to take a gamble and ‘go it alone’ in the world. That ‘experiment’ in all its crazed forms has now gone. In today’s earthquake by-elections,  the nation has delivered its first verdict on the lost ‘thirteen years’. In Mid-Bedfordshire the Conservative candidate suffered a 20.5% swing to Labour to remove the Tory stranglehold for the first time since 1931. At 23.9%, the swing was even greater at Tamworth overturning a Tory majority in the last election of more than 19,000 votes. Today key parts of the nation have spoken James and even you must feel the the ground tremble beneath your political feet?

From the Osborne’s slashing of the welfare state post-2008, through Cameron’s disastrous decision to allow a referendum on Brexit, to the failed attempt by Theresa May to mitigate the marginal 2016 Brexit result through to the choice of a political clown to run the country for three years and onto the climactic idiocy of Liz Truss’s forty five days of mayhem, your party’s legacy will go down in political history as an exercise in post-colonial nostalgic arrogance. Little Englanders glimpsed a chance to regain our glorious place in the world, ‘the party born to rule’ threw off its need to behave intelligently before the thinking hoards of the European Union and the clown of clowns predicted the ‘sunlit uplands’ of a post-EU future for us all! And once you realised that none of that worked, you chose an ex-Goldman Sachs bean counter to do what bean counters do best, namely to cut major infrastructure projects, to reverse climate change policies and to suggest that everyone should study maths up to the age of eighteen! Wow!

It’s all so very sad James. Our country has been subjected to a self-imposed nervous breakdown which has left us economically and politically exposed in the world. For most of the last thirteen years our fundamental weakness has been low productivity. There are many reasons for this but one of them is the unwillingness of foreigners  to invest in our country. Who would put money into a nation which had three prime ministers in one year, four Chancellors of the Exchequer in just as many months; where the benefits so far of the new post-Brexit ‘opportunities’ add up to less that 1% of GDP; where our Supreme Court found our government guilty of illegally proroguing parliament for political gain; where the latest prime minister axes the major high speed train project designed to counter that other long term political weakness in the nation, the north-south divide. And where the same man has lately been labelled ‘Doctor Death ‘ by a respected medical expert at the current Covid Inquiry’, for creating the disastrous ‘Eat out to Help Out’ campaign in the middle of the Covid crisis in 2020. The list is hardly comprehensive James but gives a flavour of the quality of government since 2020.

And you, of course, James have presided over all this chaos, swerving with every change of policy, u-turning with every hand break turn, churning out the required Head Office spin no matter how egregious the subject matter. Our best politicians were once seen as having ’principles’ James. I’m afraid that the only principle I can  detect in your own career is that of survival.

I’m back James, because some of the readers with whom I share my messages have been encouraging me to re-enter the fray. In 2016, your party gave up on the real Middle Britain values of common sense, fairness, tolerance and goodwill to all. There’s change in the air James. It’s good to be back!

Now, about those small ads…

BH - Your Concerned Constituent