Tory leadership candidates - Lord help us

To get some idea of just how low this country has sunk, you only need to look at the eleven candidates vying to replace Boris Johnson as Tory leader and prime minister. They are hardly inspiring. None of them would be recruited as teaboys or girls in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Never mind what you thought of her she at least surrounded herself with some powerful intellects - Heseltine, Howe, Clarke and Hird to name just four - unlike Johnson who needs sycophantic idiots around him to avoid looking even more stupid.

Things are bad but got even worse when I listened to Jake Berry MP and Lord Wolfson on Newsnight last night describing the gaggle as "brilliant candidates."  It's not just that they're all as dim as nightlights and dishonest to boot, they all supported Johnson during the months of rule breaking and corruption, many of them sitting around the cabinet table with him. The Tory party doesn't seem to realise just how daft it is beginning to look.

They are all in hock to the ERG and the hard right by committing to tax cuts - Lix Truss even suggesting she would do it from day one! 

Yesterday morning, I listened to Paul Johnson from the IFS on Radio 4 and he said:

“Relative to our west European neighbours, We still have relatively low levels of taxation and low levels of public spending and certainly if you look over the last 15 years, it’s hard to see taxes as our main problem, we’ve grown a lot less in terms of our income and productivity than most other west European countries despite having low levels of taxation and public spending.”

To reinforce the point, Ben Chu on Newsnight showed a bar chart comparing taxation levels to GDP and we were about halfway along:

Are the Germans less prosperous with 3% higher tax?  Or the French with 9%?  They are both more productive than we are by quite a margin.  There is zero evidence that cutting tax and public spending will somehow boost Britain's waning prosperity. I would suggest out of the 14 countries Chu listed, Britain is the only one suffering a prolonged decline in trade, GDP and productivity.

This is much like the deregulation argument, that if we have no regulations we will all become much richer.

At the moment, with tax levels the highest since the 1940s, public services are under enormous pressure with more cuts to come. We are borrowed up to the hilt and the debt interest payments are at record levels.

More than that, Paul Johnson also made the point that other economists have made, that cutting general taxes like NI or income tax will put more money into the economy and boost inflation, adding pressure on the Bank of England monetary policy committee to raise interest rates more or sooner than they otherwise would. Insane.

Ken Clarke thinks we're headed for a recession and this morning the BBC are reporting that retail sales fell again last month, the third month in a row that this has happened.  Things are starting to look very bad indeed.

On the candidates again, Javid is trying to defend his non-dom tax status before he became a politician and the current chancellor Zahawi is under investigation by HMRC over his tax affairs. Suella Braverman wants us to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Penny Mordaunt is known as Penny Dormant apparently. As for Kemi Badenoch - supported by Michael Gove by the way - who is she?  

There are rumours that Priti Patel will stand too.

I also understand the ERG are to 'interview' each candidate before deciding who to support. It's obvious that nobody actually wants a leader, they all want a figurehead that they can manipulate from behind the scenes. It's a repeat of Johnson's tenure.

I have to say this is what Brexit has done to us. We are well on the way to becoming a banana republic and bankrupt to boot.