Carole Malone, described as a journalist, commentator and TV personality (although I've no idea who she is) has joined Daniel Hannan, Sarah Vine and Lord Frost in condemning the abysmal state of the nation after thirteen years ("Nothing works in this country any more - not the trains, not the planes, not the schools, not the immigration system, not the civil service. Nothing!!!") This isn’t perhaps that unusual, similar pieces pop-up regularly in The Guardian and the FT, but what is slightly surprising is that her article appeared in The Daily Express. Goodness knows what the readers (I use the word loosely here) make of it after seven years of being force-fed a strict post-Brexit diet of unalloyed Utopianism.
But even more, in the Daily Mail, the former Tory deputy chairman, party treasurer and pollster Lord Ashcroft writes: Broken Britain has to be fixed – regardless of whether Rishi or Keir is PM. He has polling that shows "more than seven in ten agreeing that Britain is broken and needs big changes."
I haven't checked all these articles but certainly Malone's and Ashcroft's don't mention the word Brexit at all. This is less surprising since they are all Brexiteers and their favoured project cannot be blamed for anything, can it?
On 22 June 2016, Ashcroft urged voters to leave the EU, saying: "The question is not whether the world’s fifth largest economy could prosper outside the EU – of course it could – but whether we should tie ourselves to a union whose ambitions are so very different from our own. Maybe our future governments will be able to protect Britain from the worst of them. But why take the risk?"
The 'risk' he is talking about is remaining in the EU, a bloc of advanced, modern, democratic Western nations, and what he referred to as "the ailing eurozone." I assume he never imagined that seven years on he would be writing an article about "Broken Britain" isolated from its neighbours and struggling.
One of the few concrete reasons he gave to leave the EU is that they "tell us what kind of vacuum cleaners we could buy" although he admits it's a "trivial example." I assume he used it because he couldn't think of anything more substantial. Who is demanding high-wattage vacuums? With energy prices at record levels, we can barely afford to pay for the small but highly efficient ones we have!
It can only be a small step before they make the connection between Brexit and the state of the nation. The government is packed with mediocrities and incompetents at best and for the last seven years they have been straining every sinew to make the "big changes" Ashcroft says are needed. Over the last four years, the government has been dominated by Brexiteers or politicians who were enthusiastic converts, Liz Truss for example.
Brexit has occupied every waking hour of the government and totally drained it of resources that could have been spent on improving the lot of ordinary people instead of worrying about how to exercise something as tangible as smoke, AKA sovereignty. It is becoming clear that we don't have a political class with vision or ability or even empathy with the voters. This is hardly surprising since UK industry has been afflicted with the same debilitating problem for decades.
The result is as they have all now concluded. Britain is disintegrating before our eyes in every conceivable way.
In The Guardian this weekend was an editorial well worth reading. It's about the slow rolling back of ambition as reality keeps getting in the way and...
"A pattern of discreet Brexit dilution is emerging. Each climbdown confirms hardline Eurosceptic suspicion that their dream is being betrayed. Mr Sunak is caught between a political obligation imposed by his party to pretend that leaving the EU was a great achievement and the economic requirement imposed by reality to palliate the cost of rupture from the continent. He can sustain this ludicrous posture only because the opposition is committed to a similar contortion – pledging closer proximity to the EU without substantial reintegration."
"This would be a manageable problem if the pain from Brexit were stable or likely to ease. But the opposite is true. Brexit was not an event, it set a trajectory. It is not an obstacle to be worked around, but a course to be corrected."
In 2016 Ashcroft said something similar. The "European Union is not so much an organisation as a process" and he asked what that UK-EU relationship could look like in ten, twenty, forty years’ time if we remained a member. Well, we won't know. He got his way and we left and now we know what the relationship is like after seven years and it isn't very good is it? And likely to get worse.
Our paths are diverging but voters now realise that they made an error in 2016 and the politicians are simply catching up. It's proof again that we have no visionary leaders, only followers of public opinion. If we want to change we need to keep up the pressure.
We also need to see through the empty promises, like this one from Jeremy Hunt:
"This country is going to have the most exciting, best paid, innovative jobs of the future".Chancellor @Jeremy_Hunt on the opportunities for young people in the UK & how this government will make this country a leader in the industries that will grow the fastest this century. pic.twitter.com/WHWVWG7sba— HM Treasury (@hmtreasury) September 3, 2023
It's always jam tomorrow isn't it? A bit of honesty wouldn't go amiss. He has no idea at all how to make this country a leader in the fast-growing industries of the future and doesn't have the resources if he did.
We are scheduled to pay £110 billion in debt interest in 2023, according to Fitch, the credit rating agency. At 10.4% of government revenue, that would be the highest level of any high-income country since it started gathering the data in 1995.
We could start by addressing that.
