Vote Boris, Get Jeremy Corbyn.
If only the Conservatives had made this a bit clearer during the general election we would all have had a much better idea what to do: sell the house, quit the job and move to another country because, clearly, Britain has no great post-Brexit future after all.
I can’t believe I’m having to write Britain’s epitaph so soon after the joy and jubilation of Brexit Day but look at what Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ are offering a bemused nation:
Higher taxes (Mansion tax, pensions raids, etc)
An explosion of grand, unaffordable, and pointless infrastructure projects
No more cooking or heating with gas
Elevation to the House of Lords for MPs who opposed Brexit
More green levies and regulations
How is any of this nonsense materially different from the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ Britain would have experienced under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour?
I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that Boris Johnson’s Tories are the most extreme left-wing Conservative administration in the party’s history. Under cover of Brexit and in the guise of reaching out to all those working classes voters in the Midlands and the North, the Conservatives are rolling out radical measures so aggressively Socialistic that it makes Tony Blair’s benighted era look like Margaret Thatcher’s heyday.
There’s nothing wrong with radicalism in itself.
Britain was in sore need of a dose of radicalism after the drift of the Cameron and May years, to rebalance the economy away from crony capitalism towards entrepreneurship, away from administrative state and towards the free market.
What it also needed, after the conservatism in name only of Cameron and May was some real conservatism.
How weird is it, for example, that after a decade under ‘Conservative’ rule, Britain now has the highest tax burden in over fifty years?
Sure, if you want to, you can find many a squishy conservative in name only commentator explaining why free-market solutions aren’t the answer and why actually what Britain now needs is more government spending and more taxes to address social inequalities with a new kind of Red Toryism.
Which might be more plausible an argument if Britain hadn’t already been languishing for a decade under the kind of Red Toryism that these expert commentators are advocating as something new and different and never-tried-before…
If Boris Johnson had one job — besides delivering Brexit, obviously — I’d say it was to put as many miles as possible between himself and the failed economic and sociopolitical models of his failed predecessors.
He should be looking at HS2 and going: “I would rather take an eternal vow of chastity than ever associate myself with that crappy idea dreamed up chancer George Osborne and bat-shit crazy fruit loop Andrew Adonis, one that has failed every conceivable cost-benefit analysis.”
He should be looking at tweets like this from one from Amber Rudd and going: “God’s teeth, whatever we do we must make sure from now on that all our cabinet positions are decided on merit and NEVER by playing the leftist identity politics card game that this idiot no-hoper of a disastrous Remainer ex-Home Secretary is trying to foist on us!”
He should be looking at CCHQ’s decision to censure Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski for the ‘crime’ of attending a conservative conference and going: “This has got to stop. We cannot carry on doing the left’s work by attacking our own people for holding conservative views as we did so shamefully with Sir Roger Scruton.”
Instead, he seems to be going in the exact opposite direction.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are heading for disaster — and not even by accident. They’re actually deliberately, cheerfully setting a course for disaster and expecting us to applaud them for doing so because apparently — or so they seem to think – it’s what we all voted for.