Poor Rachel
In the winter of 2023, I had a chat with my father about where the UK was heading. Liz Truss had been deposed in a banker’s coup d’etat a year earlier and replaced by their man from Goldman Sachs. Unsurprisingly, this was not a popular decision with the voting public and was going to cost the Conservative Party very dearly in a few short years. We noted that the Tories had squandered their time in office with an 80-seat majority. They had back-tracked on their promises to voters, waffled on Brexit and they had instituted the “Boris” Wave. I’m not sure that influx shouldn’t be credited to Sunak, as he was the chancellor under good old Boris and it would have been his department that advised him that he could grow GDP by swamping the country with low skill economic migrants from the third world.
The gist of that conversation went along the lines that the Tories were not acting as described on the tin. They were not small “c” nor capital “C” conservatives. They were ideologically captured by globalist technocrats and had been since Cameron had his coalition government with the LibDems. Their fiscal policies were centre left. The UK welfare state was ballooning in cost; the country had shed its industrial capacity and was now propped up by the single legged stool of the City of London. UK tax rates were already too high and were crushing growth and stamping out innovation, and still the national debt was accelerating ever more.
We knew the clock was ticking on Rishi and he needed to call an election, despite being totally despised by the base that would normally support a candidate from the centre right. Starmer was certain to be our next prime minister with a large majority. I boldly predicted to my dad that Labour would have a political crisis and possibly start to fail by April of 2025. The reason I gave was simply; there will be no money in the kitty when they take office. They will not be able to placate their base without cratering the economy. The Tories have run as left wing a budget as is possible, giving Labour no space to out left them.
This is why poor Rachel Reeves is never going to succeed. She has been given her dream job and it turns out it’s a poisoned chalice. To be fair, I was expecting them to be in worse shape than they are by now, but the cracks are definitely showing. Poor Rachel and her boss will have to try to placate their insatiable base. This will not work, of course, and the country’s economy and Starmer’s government are very close to their next calamity.
It’s going to be long hot summer.
