No.260 - Disaster! We Need a General Election Now!

Dear James,

Yesterday Liz Truss sacked her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. We’ve now had four Chancellors in four months and four Prime Ministers in six years. However,  we’ve had only one party in power in the last twelve. That party - your party James - has presided over a catastrophic collapse of national self-confidence and International reputation that makes the developed world look on in bewilderment at the demise of No 10 Downing Street as the bastion of sound pragmatic government. Now it stands there, forlorn, lost, an old grey lady sitting, pondering how to extract herself from the quagmire of multiple crises, many of which have been of your own party’s making.

Poor Liz Truss was always out of her depth. An ideologue of the head bangers of the IEA, she wanted to become Thatcher Mark 2. She and her Chancellor, ‘working in ‘lock-step’, failed at the first fence. Kwasi Kwarteng’s two week old, ‘Mini-budget’ represented the end of a long line of deceptions upon which the Tory Party has been engaged since the notorious Brexit campaign of 2016. This latest confection was that a massive programme of tax cuts would ‘liberate’ our static economy and restore growth to 2.5% pa by 2024 all proclaimed without a shred of evidence. Last Wednesday, in parliament, she continued this lie, with your Party James sitting  glumly behind the beleaguered PM as Labour shouted ‘More. More!’

Liz Truss has just been the latest Tory leader to tilt at windmills. Like Don Quixote she refused to confront reality. She and Kwarteng took on the International financial system with a policy amounting to financial madness. This system, including the IMF,  looked on incredulously and then acted. UK borrowing rates doubled, the pound ‘rock and rolled’ and mortgage payers throughout the land watched their rates double and treble. And all this was inflicted upon the people by a person who was chosen by a tiny minority of the voting population.Truss was and is seen by a majority of our population as an illegitimate, incompetent, chancer. She cannot continue James. If Kwarteng had to go, so should she.

All this happens when a country attempts to reinvent its history. Instead of looking to the future it tries to restore the comforts and glories of an imagined past. In a world of challenging complexity, politicians everywhere are resorting to nostalgic nationalism to solve their various problems. Putin is killing tens of thousands of his own soldiers and Ukrainian innocents through his distortion of Russian history. In the USA Donald Trump and the Republican Party are trying to return America to a glorious white dominated past. In China Xi Xinping is currently attempting to finalise his total grip on power to bring back the glories of his imperial predecessors. The world is in a delirium of retrospective angst in which all these confrontations with reality end in tears. Mrs Truss and her colleagues, have the hubris and arrogance of a once great trading nation and the world has said, ‘But where’s the evidence that this will work?’. She was unable to respond because she has no evidence. She has only wishful thinking. And the market has found her out.

Evidence is the keystone to liberal democracy, James. Our laws are based upon it, our universities are rooted in it, and, to some extent, our constitution is grounded in it. Global financial orthodoxy, western legal systems and constitutions are what might loosely be called, ‘evidence based' systems built upon facts, transparency and the key principle that humankind, although flawed, must continuously strive to understand and build structures that ensure the fairest and most open systems of accountability and responsibility. Yet today James, our whole nation is watching what’s happening in Downing Street with bemused despair. Enough is enough. Our problems of growth are so much deeper than a question of tax rates. They are based on a history of class warfare, the deliberate continuation of an educational and social oligarchy and a free market capitalist system that mainly works for the top echelons of that system. True growth will only come from investment in inclusive education, and the notion that ‘big government’ can work if freed from the class distortions of old, the downplaying of confrontational politics and economic inequality and the liberation of those fundamental British values of fairness and pragmatism. James, your party is not fit to undertake such a challenge. It’s time for you to flee the stage!

Our nation needs a massive reset James. The Tory Party has had twelves years to create new directions and a fairer society and it has failed miserably in all respects. We’ve had Cameron, May, Boris and now Truss. Your party now lies broken, divided and split into a mass of warring factions. It’s time for real change.

We need a general election now!

BH - Your Concerned Constituent

To see all letters to ‘Dear James’, please go to dearjames.uk