Liz Truss has a useful Critic piece on how so many politicians fail to offer serious analysis of past failures. It's also a reminder that political mendacity is failing, but nothing will change until this is accepted. At the moment we merely see more and more of it.
What Mel Stride should really be apologising for
The Conservative Party failed when it rejected change
There are few more fatuous acts in public life than a politician attempting to curry favour with voters by apologising for something for which they had no responsibility at all or opposed in the first place.
These acts are all the more preposterous when they fail to offer any serious analysis of the matter in question or gloss over inconvenient facts which would provide the public with a fuller and fairer account of what really happened.
So it was that we were treated to a brazen display of the genre on Thursday when Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride trooped along to the RSA (motto: “regenerating our world through collective action”) to trash my 2022 Growth Plan, otherwise known as the Mini Budget.
The whole piece is well worth reading as another pointer to the difficulties in the way of worthwhile political change and how unlikely it is that this will change.
Until Mel Stride and his allies admit the real economic failings of the last Conservative Government, the British public will not trust the party with the reins of power again. He should be repudiating the globalist, leftist agenda they pursued which has dragged our country down with the Conservative Party as collateral.
What is needed — and fast — is an acknowledgment of those failings and the need for wholesale reform of how our country is governed. Because nothing will ever change so long as the existing broken system and its acolytes remain in control.
9 comments:
There are several aphorisms that annoy me - like 'It is what it is'. What does that even mean?
But a similar aphorism does resonate with me - 'Nothing changes if nothing changes'. One that should be deeply engraved in the Conservative Party's attitudes, but currently is not.
Liz Truss was apparently too abrupt to win over her MPs. Arguably Kemi Badenoch is trying to change things and senses the need for general agreement first. But I suspect the Conservative Party won't change soon enough to win back support from the electorate.
DJ - 'Nothing changes if nothing changes'
I like that one, it could be aimed at the quality of Conservative MPs because it seems to be Kemi Badenoch's problem -
' MPs don't change if MPs don't change.'
Conservative Central HQ is one of the larger Conservative problems. Their power to parachute candidates into constituencies against the wishes of the Constituency Associations resulted in pinko groupthink taking control of the party. Delenda est CCHQ
"Until Mel Stride and his allies admit the real economic failings of the last Conservative Government, the British public will not trust the party with the reins of power again"
They won't need to trust them. It's perfectly feasible that the electorate could allow Conservatives in again if Labour are hated and Reform implode. That's pretty much what happened with Starmer. Politicians want to talk about the will of the people and a mandate, but the main determinant of their action is a desire for power by any means necessary. Gaining "trust" just makes their job easier.
decnine - it's not obvious why Constituency Associations tolerate it, but maybe those who won't just leave and only the spineless are left to welcome parachute candidates.
Sam - I agree, voting is about voting against not voting for. Trust doesn't come into it, it's one of the ways they try to make parties bland enough to be an option when it comes to voting against whichever party happens to be top of the loathing league.
Wrong people get into parliament in the first place, imho, AKH ... wrong criteria for entry.
James - I agree, standards are far too low with too little experience, too much ideology, too much dishonesty and so on. Most shouldn't be there.
I think history will be far kinder to Liz Truss than the current swathe of Lefty politicians (and I include the Tories in that) and media types are being. Her aim was correct, her execution poor, and also jinxed by events - having to deal with the fallout of the spike in energy prices after the invasion of Ukraine was an unfortunate bridge too far. As it turned out, the cost of the energy price cap subsidy turned out to be far less than at first expected, and would have made her budget figures far more rosy. By now we would be benefiting from cheaper gas from our own resources had fracking been allowed and given a rapid planning and development process to avoid too much bureaucratic involvement.
She also suffered from the failures of others, notably the BoE being asleep on the job and failing to notice that the entire pension industry was vulnerable to a rapid rise in interest rates causing its bets on gilt prices to blow up. Truss could have ridden out a slow rise in gilt yields (after all Starmer has presided over yields just as high and higher for nearly a year now - 10 year Gilt yields are currently higher than at the Truss peak, and no one is screaming blue murder about crashing the economy) it was the doom loop of pension funds losing money on their swaps, getting margins calls, selling gilts to get post collateral that drove the gilt market ever lower and yields ever higher.
Sobers - I'm sure you are right, history will be far kinder to Liz Truss than the current swathe of Lefty politicians. She is what an MP and particularly a Cabinet Minister should be, analytical and pragmatic.
She thinks the BoE engineered the gilts issue to undermine her and with the active approval of the Treasury. She's quite convincing about it too, especially when she says that the economic establishment is much more ruthless and ideological than we realise.
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