Another round of excuses shows the government will blame everyone but themselves

Who is to blame for the atrophy at the heart of Britain – high inflation, low wages, stagnant growth, rising NHS waiting lists, the ongoing catastrophe of Brexit red tape?

This government’s answer is always that it is someone else’s fault.

“We had strikes…that is the reason waiting lists are going up,” Rishi Sunak says on the NHS, ignoring the fact that waiting lists started rising virtually from the moment the Conservatives took office in 2010.

“The world is going through a rough patch,” says chancellor Jeremy Hunt as bad economic news stacks up, turning a blind eye to the Office of Budget Responsibility’s assessment that the damage done by Brexit – a 4% hit to GDP – is of the same magnitude as the pandemic and the Ukraine-induced energy price crisis.

On immigration, Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson says his party have “failed” because “we have got the lefty lawyers, we have got the human rights campaigners, we have got the charities. Everything is against us.” This passes over the truths of the situation: successive Conservative regimes have for unsavoury reasons set unachievable goals and having weaponised fear and loathing for asylum seekers in the pursuit of votes, now double down on disaster rather than admitting what is increasingly obvious – Britain needs more migrants, not fewer, to fill gaps in the workforce.

Who is really to blame for this mess?

It isn’t the unions.

It isn’t lefty lawyers from North London.

It isn’t refugees.

It isn’t Remoaners.

It isn’t the civil service ‘Blob’.

It isn’t the BBC.

It isn’t Brussels.

It isn’t the tofu-eating wokerati.

It isn’t Just Stop Oil.

It isn’t the European Court Of Human Rights.

The country has gone wrong because we have the wrong government. Everything in its locker has been tried, and everything in its locker has now failed. Tweaks won’t save us. Only change will.