It’s the stupid economy

Expecting an intelligent debate on the economic policies best suited to the country during this general election was always going to be a big ask. The simple fact is that whoever wins is going to inherit a can of worms and despite all the promises and commitments from all sides, there is very little money left with which to fix things.

Fourteen years of Tory incompetence have seen to that. Even Labour are being less than honest about where all the money is going to come from to run the state after July 4^th – but the Tories and Reform are in a league of their own.

For a start I have lost count of the amount of money that the Tory party has found down the back of the sofa. Apparently National Service will be paid for by ending regional development funding, which was supposed to replace EU regional funding, a lose/lose for large parts of the country. But where the money for new GPs’ surgeries, booming defence spending and pensioners tax cuts and all the rest is coming from, I really have no idea and neither do they.

As for immigration – don’t get me started. Labour wants to limit it, but at least are talking about training the UK’s unemployed to fill the gaps that will be inevitably caused. Reform is just going to stop it altogether, or at least only allow in as many as emigrate; a better incentive to emigrate is hard to imagine, as without immigration the country will be in an even worse place. The Tory party wants to introduce central government-controlled quotas that will tell every sector of the economy how many foreign workers they can have and where they can work.

That the “party of business” is now suggesting that it should allocate workers to different firms or sectors of the economy would make even Boris Johnson blush. Or it would if he could.

The economy needs immigrants and so too does the NHS, care homes and further education; large parts of which would go bust without them. But just the idea of trying to run a government department that “allocates” immigrants is farcical. Stalinist central planning went out of fashion with the collapse of the USSR, or at least I thought it had. But no, the Tory party is planning to tell firms who they can hire, when they can hire them and presumably how much they can pay them too.

This is the situation you arrive at when you are desperately trying to outflank Reform by moving to the right. The Tory party has been trying to do this for years and it has been an economic and political disaster.

Remember – Brexit was supposed to solve all these problems. It was meant to reduce immigration, boost growth and leave the UK government with more money than it knew what to do with.

Strangely enough none of that has happened and now the so-called solution is more loony economics, more xenophobia, more state control of the struggling economy, and more autarky.

It is Brexit that has brought us to this, and even the Labour party cannot bring itself to mention the fact – but then why would it, when the Tory party and Reform are fighting each other to death over who can be dumber?

But whoever wins is going to have to do something, not just to fix the economy but to change the whole mindset of the UK. We can no longer afford to live in the fantasy island Brexit has created, the reality is grim and lying about it has to stop.