I have given up trying to understand what this Conservative Government
stands for. The heady days of the get
Brexit done 80 seat majority are well behind us and in front of us we see a
mediocre bunch of sycophants desperately buffeted by an increasingly effective
opposition, the press and, of course, social media.
Today’s scandal of yet another shirt-lifting Tory will
likely be “brushed aside” because, as the PM’s spokespeople will point out, “the
public are far more concerned with the cost of living crisis (or was it crime
or was it illegal immigration)?”
Boris is prone to brushing aside what he finds inconvenient. Quite content to hand out nuclear guarantees like
prizes at the school sports day, when told by people who know about these
things that he really must spend more on defence, he “brushed their concerns
aside.”
Meantime, the clamour for a windfall tax on the wicked
profit hungry energy companies becomes politically irresistible, according to
the press and the focus groups, that is.
But hang on a bit! There is a lot
that could come out in the potential unintended consequences of establishing the
principle of retrospective taxation. Why
stop with fat cat industry? What about
all those who earn a bit more than the rest of us? Imagine what a Labour Government would do
once the principle of retrospective taxation had been conceded?
Yet here we are, 6 years after the EU Referendum, and still
negotiating the terms of departure.
Whilst we should be embracing our new freedoms to increase, for example,
agricultural production through gene editing, using state aid to promote
innovation and growth, and extracting the energy we need from indigenous resources,
we are languishing in anguish, torn this way and that by focus groups and media
campaigns. And that is before the
monstrous waste of HS2 and the economically emasculating, nay suicidal, agenda
in pursuit of net zero.
We desperately need some leadership and sense of direction
if we are to avoid some of the dire economic and social consequences of the
current shocks to our cosy world. But
looking at the present front bench (and the opposition), I’m not sure I would
trust any one of them to run a kebab franchise, let alone a sovereign nation
with so much potential in the world. The
twin threats of Putin inspired nuclear destruction and potentially Weimar-like inflation
ravaging the whole world, leave little room for optimism. What we don’t want is the seriousness of our
situation to be brushed aside in favour of some unrealistic cakeism - Boris
Johnson is not the man for the moment.