It's the politics...
I’ve been covering the debate surrounding Brexit – the run-up to the referendum, its aftermath, the poisonous politics, and now the consequences of departure – for the best part of a decade.
And in one sense the point we’ve now reached in British politics comes as no surprise. It’s easy to dismiss the recent fiscal statement as a KamaKwasi budget, almost as an aberration. But many of the Brexit ultras have been campaigning for something like this for years.
Nor does it come as a surprise that a chorus of criticism is aimed at anyone questioning a huge gamble. The IMF is wrong. The Treasury was weak. The markets are panicking. Everyone else is a remainer.
Those speaking up on behalf of the government’s plans are all familiar names, veterans of past Brexit battles from a relatively small coterie – economists such as Gerard Lyons and Julian Jessop, politicians such as John Redwood and David Frost.
They’ve wanted low tax and deregulation, and a Singapore-on-Thames economic model outside the European Union, for years. They’ve hardly been hiding their light under a bushel.?
We know what they think, and we know what think tanks and pressure groups associated with 55 Tufton Street have advocated for a long time. The difference now is that their policies are being put into practice.
The IMF is urging a change of course. The US Federal Reserve has expressed concern. But it’s not so much the economics that really bothers me. It’s the politics.
Whatever you thought about Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, he knew how to win an election. We can argue about lies, half-truths and bluster. But Johnson asked the public for a big parliamentary majority, and he got one.
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That gave him a mandate to leave the EU, and to pursue his agenda of levelling up, Global Britain and boosterism.
But the new government has no such mandate for one of the most radical economic experiments in fifty years. Liz Truss didn’t even win the support of a majority of her own MPs, let alone fight and win a general election on the policies she is now trying to implement.
Fewer than a hundred thousand Conservative members voted for Truss as party leader, and even some of them – looking at their mortgage statements and at the value of the pound – may not have known quite what they were voting for.
That’s the system, you can argue. She simply played by the rules that were set by others.
Perhaps. I quite admire people who have the courage of their own convictions, even when I don’t agree with them. But you can’t govern a democracy without a proper mandate.
That’s why it’s the politics that concerns me. It doesn’t feel right. And it’s why I think – one way or another – this government is heading for a fall.