For anyone with any connection with or interest in the UK, the last few years have offered a deeply dispiriting spectacle, but it's one with a very obvious precedent.. Growing up in the London suburbs in the post-war era, one of my early memories of politics was the 1964 General Election. The Tories had been in power since 1951, and Labour leader Harold Wilson coined the phrase "thirteen years of Tory misrule" as one of his main election slogans. It worked and the Tories were booted out of office.
After spending most of my working life in Canada, I returned to live and work in the UK in 1998. It was in my mind to remain there for the rest of my days, but the election of David Cameron's Tories in 2010 filled me with trepidation, and a couple of years later we returned permanently to Canada. I don't even have a current UK passport any more. It turns out my fears for the future of the country were well-founded: I can't claim to have specifically predicted the disaster of Brexit or the clown-car politics of the last half-decade, but I was surely right to believe that the Tory party would prove totally unsuitable to govern the country in the modern era.
So here we are approaching a second "thirteen years of Tory misrule" -- well, one year to go -- and the situation grows more dire by the hour. Just before Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister, the excellent London blogger Diamond Geezer wrote that "The UK's worst-ever Prime Minister, who took over from the UK's worst-ever Prime Minister, will soon be replaced by the UK's worst-ever Prime Minister". Cameron to May to Johnson -- and now to Liz Truss, who makes her three predecessors look positively statesmanlike, no easy feat. And if you think that there surely cannot be anyone left in the Tory caucus who could be worse than Thick Lizzy, I simply suggest you Google "Suella Braverman".
Truss is now, as the old saying has it, in office but not in power. It is clear that the country is now being run by Jeremy Hunt, who took over from the useless Kwazi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer this past weekend. Hunt has promptly torn up the economic stimulus package announced with much fanfare but disastrous results by Truss and Kwarteng just a couple of weeks earlier. Hunt is a safe pair of hands, relatively speaking -- I mean, he's still a Tory -- but he has a hell of a job on his hands, and the early signs are that he is going to mess it up in the usual ideological Tory way.
The fatal flaw in the Truss-Kwarteng package was that it consisted largely of giveaways to the rich that were supposed to boost economic growth but were wholly unfunded. With the public finances in a mess because of the cost of COVID measures, bond and currency markets took fright; mortgage rates soared and Sterling briefly looked likely to sink below parity with the US dollar. Kwarteng tried to row back bits of the package but in the end Truss threw him under the bus -- or rather the plane, as he was in effect fired while on a late-night flight from a conference in Washington back to London.
Hunt will be introducing a mini-budget of his own at the end of this month. Even though he has scrapped most of the Truss-Kwarteng mess, there is still a large gap in the public finances to be addressed if market turmoil is to be kept at bay. Hunt is being very clear that things are going to be difficult: he is talking of "eye-watering" spending cuts and hinting at tax rises, two things which Truss had been adamant about avoiding but is now powerless to prevent.
So, here we go again. The Cameron government back in 2010 tried to deal with the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis through austerity measures, assuring the public that the fiscal deficit could be eliminated within half a decade. It never was, because as Tories never seem to understand, severe austerity measures cripple the economy and reduce revenues, making it all but impossible to balance the budget.
It seems certain that Jeremy Hunt will make essentially the same mistake and the outcome will no doubt be the same too. It promises to be a tough few years for the UK economy. Will the era of Tory misrule extend beyond 13 years this time? It's too soon to tell -- an election is not strictly necessary until 2024 -- but it seems quite certain that the awful Ms Truss will not be around for very much longer. Quite the legacy she will be leaving!
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