I am about to leave the UK for two weeks and I will be astonished if Liz has not been trussed up like a turkey and hurled out the front door of 10 Downing Street by the time I return. Then it is over to either Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak to finish the job: administering the coup de grâce to British industry, the economy and any degree of self-respect we have left as citizens of a failing state.
Watching the current Prime Minister Liz Truss in the House of Commons sitting next to the current Chancellor, who never blinks, while he systematically dismantles the financial statement she had requested of Kwasi Kwarteng, was excruciating. She had the same look on her face as I had at school when the teacher tried to explain trigonometry. She could tell he was speaking in English, but seemed not to understand what he was saying. I wonder if she even realised that this was being beamed across the world? The Spectator summed up our current situation beautifully last week with a cartoon which showed the BBC issuing a warning to foreign viewers that ‘they may find the next item hilarious’. And that was prior to the sacking of her first Chancellor.
Liz Truss has always had a slight ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ look to her. She still has that look, except that she no longer looks as if she would get out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. She traipses in and out of Downing Street between meetings and on an off stages, looking like someone who has been dosed with Rohypnol. It truly is a pitiful sight.
Now, in terms of economic policy, we are back where we started. The markets seem to have regained confidence and the pound is now worth three zlotys instead of two. I have never studied economics, but I do have the ‘lived experience’ of suffering under all manner of attempts to balance the books in this country. It strikes me, from my non-expert perspective, that it matters not what we do with taxes and interest rates. As long as we remain wedded to pouring money into the bottomless pit that is the NHS, financing a war that may well end up with a nuclear strike on London, stuffing our children’s heads full of the nonsense that passes for education these days, and incentivising indolence, we will still be on the hamster wheel of tax and spend ad infinitum.
And we must not forget the ‘pandemic’ which saw us pay people to do nothing, fill MoD warehouses full of Chinese ventilators that are still there, build Nightingale hospitals that were never used, and purchase container loads of face masks that everyone knows don’t work. We also rolled out a hugely expensive programme of vaccines that nobody needed, did not work anyway and are now leaving many people wishing that they only had Covid to contend with instead of debilitating side effects; assuming they are not already dead.
‘Thank God, at least we had a Conservative government’ I hear some people say, and ‘can you imagine what it would have been like under Labour?’ My advice to them is just to hold that thought; we are about to find out.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
