The growing distrusst in the Tories

It’s day two in the court case that is only happening because the Conservatives and their Labour fellow travellers refuse to accept the democratic will of the people of Scotland as expressed through the ballot box in last year’s Scottish Parliament elections. As far as those parties are concerned Scottish democracy was a one off event which took place on 18 September 2014 when the Scottish people gave them the answer that they were looking for and apparently this meant that the Scottish electorate would not be permitted in any subsequent democratic event to deliver a result that was not to the liking of the Better Together parties, well who knew? certainly not the people of Scotland. If the Better Together parties had told us that a No vote in 2014 would result in giving them carte blanche to cancel Scottish democracy, the result of that referendum is likely to have been very different.

The mere fact that this court case is happening at all is proof in and of itself that democracy in Scotland is not safe as long as this country remains under Westminster’s lying and gaslighting thumb. What we have right now is a British Government which is insistent that the people of Scotland do not have the right to vote for another independence referendum to be held despite successive British governments assuring us that the people of Scotland have the absolute right to decide Scotland’s future for themselves within a union which we have always been told is voluntary.

The question has now gone to the judges to decide and it is likely to be some months before a ruling is given. In the meantime Scotland must endure the full brunt of the horror show that is this Conservative government, a government which Scotland didn’t vote for and which is hell bent on implementing catastrophic policies which no one voted for, not even those who were foolish or selfish enough to vote Conservative in the General Election in 2019.

Truss promised growth, growth, growth, and true to her word she has delivered, debt is growing, inflation is growing, mortgage and rent costs are growing, despair is growing, public anger is growing, the risk of a recession is growing, the detestability of the Tories is growing, and the number of people who wish they could go back to six months ago when they had never heard of Liz Truss is growing.

Just two people, Truss and Kwarteng, have tanked the U.K. economy and put mortgages and pensions at considerable risk. No mandate, no vote, no supporting evidence. This is the Westminster system, maximum power with minimum accountability.

The implosion of Truss’s leadership is not surprising, merely the speed with which it has happened. However Truss is only the logical and inevitable consequence of a Conservative party that has abandoned, truth, honesty and common decency and a Westminster system that gives almost unlimited power to a Prime Minster who can attain office purely on the say so of their party and without having to face the public in a General Election.

The crisis caused by Kwarteng’s utter calamity of a mini-budget has not been averted. On Friday the Bank of England will stop buying up government gilts yet Truss today insisted that her government will neither do a U-turn on its £45 billion package of tax cuts which preferentially benefit the rich nor cut public spending to make up the shortfall in government revenues which those tax cuts will create. Economists such as Richard Murphy have warned that there is now a very high risk of another catastrophic fall in the value of the pound, which will have a knock on effect in terms of higher prices for imports and above all for energy, which is priced in dollars on the international markets. Others have said that there is now no credible route out of this crisis which does not involve reversing the planned tax cuts or possibly even tax rises.

Either of those would represent a humiliating climb down for a Prime Minister who has only been in office for a month. Following her appearance at PMQs in front of a grim faced Tory party – and you know it’s bad for the Conservatives when even Andrew Bowie has that trademark smug smirk wiped off his face – Truss undertook a tour of the Commons tea rooms and later to address Conservative MPs at a 1922 Committee meeting in an attempt to bolster support for a leadership which is already failing even as it has only just begun.

Tours of tearooms and letters to the 1922 Committee, this isn’t a grown up Parliament, it’s bloody Hogwarts. Reports of the meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee on Wednesday where the Prime Minister tried to rally her MPs made for grim reading for her dwindling band of reporters, according to Jim Pickard of the Financial Times : One Tory MP said the overwhelming mood at the 1922 meeting was “sad”, adding: “It was just a terrible feeling of sorrow in the room.” That would be sorrow for themselves, not for the lives they are ruining. Self serving and self-regarding to the end.

The political editor of the Daily Mail, which did so much to inflict Truss on us, said that a Tory MP in attendance at the meeting said that Truss’s appearance “was like someone trying to light a fire using a magnifying glass. Using damp wood. In the dark.” So one of her more animated performances then. Another described her appearance as ‘funereal’ and replied Absolutely not” when asked if she had managed to reassure MPs worried that their party had made a terrible mistake by choosing her as leader.

ITV’s political editor Robert Peston tweeted: A” member of Truss’s own cabinet tells me Truss’s and Kwarteng’s governance is so dire that some Tory MPs would vote against her in a confidence vote, preferring even a general election that cost them their seats to the current economic chaos.” It seems as though the 1922 Committee want Truss gone as much as everyone else does.

This is unprecedented stuff about a leader who has only been in office for a couple of weeks and who should in theory be enjoying a political honeymoon. Should the pound tank on Friday as some have predicted there is a very real chance that Truss may not survive in office until the end of next week. The only problem is the damage that she might do before Tory MPs decide that losing their seats in a General Election is a more preferable option to the economic meltdown she and Kwarteng might cause.

I am feeling pretty fatigued today (Wednesday) and wasn’t going to write a new blog piece but today is also the second anniversary of my stroke, my ‘strokiversary’ and the two year mark represents the period after which it’s unlikely that any further recovery will be made. I still have significant disabilities which it now appears will be life long, but on a more positive note I am still very much alive, with a full set of marbles, and have started to tentatively dip my toe back into public speaking again, although I am completely reliant on transport being provided as I can no longer drive and using public transport is challenging and exhausting. It’s vital that campaigning for Scottish independence to get us out of this Westminster mess steps up a gear and I am determined to play as full a part as my partially functioning body allows.

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