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CP's avatar

Some of these takes make too much of the left wing - right wing divide. British voters aren;t like that. The man on the street is very very often way to the left of the far left of the Labour Party on things like banker bonuses and corporate taxes, and way to the right of the extremes of the Conservative Party on law and order, defence, asylum, issues relating to wokery etc.

I'm not sure there is much more to this story that Truss being a duff whose basic competence was not able to be trusted. She is a very, very odd character who was very plainly grotesquely overpromoted and who only got the job because she told the Party membership (which is about 160,000 wealthy, elderly rural type-people) what they wanted to hear about tax cuts.

The only person worth reading about how the British state operates, if that's the word, is Dominic Cummings. In particular his observation that the government does not control the government. Singapore on Thames is impossible, even if it were to be the headline policy of a government with a massive mandate because the deep state does not exist to do what it is told by ministers. There are umpteen officials who wield more power than any politician, arguably minus the Prime Minister. Truss' planned policies were quite mundane, really. She didn't try to halve tax, or abolish any meaningful taxes, or bring a flat income tax rate in, or anything even remotely akin. And still everything melted down.

We have big problems in the UK, but not any worse than comparator nations in Europe. The biggest missed opportunity has been that the deep state, with a couple of exceptions, has seen Brexit as a threat to doing things the same old way, rather than as Cummings did/does as a necessary but not sufficient step towards total re-wiring as a means of doing everything much, much better. Personally I hope specifically for the Conservative Party to cease to exist. I would prefer this fate for Labour as well but that's less necessary.

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John Alcorn's avatar

No one mentions austerity -- prudent cuts in inefficient, outdated, unwarranted, or corrupt government expenditures -- as a necessary element to improvement UK public finance.

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