![]() It is like the story of The Monkey’s Paw: after so long demanding a Conservative leader committed to bold and decisive action, the one the party chose was a suicide bomber. There are fashions in economics as in all things outside the Conservative party, the rest of the world has firmly rejected the Seventies dogmas that brought Britain decades of stagnation and underinvestment - even in a far rosier international climate than the one we currently inhabit. When even the Telegraph warns that the ”Peronist policies” of a “a careless, ideological government” set on “a course of sheer madness” put “this country in serious jeopardy”, we can be certain that we are in a new era. ![]() Unfortunately for Truss and for the country, the international markets, the IMF, the Bank of England, and those notorious Left-wing radicals the Financial Times and the Economist recoiled in horror. To pay for her budget, and for its unintended consequences, the Government now looks set to slash spending on the infrastructure and research and development projects on which long-term prosperity depends. Her plan for massive borrowing relied on the faith of international opinion that it would be amply repaid by her simultaneous tax cuts for Britain’s very richest, and an economic boom occasioned by vague promises of future reforms. ![]() Alas, Truss’s faith in the markets is not rewarded by the markets’ faith in her: the invisible hand has already reached down to flick her from the history books. Yet on the other, baleful side of the ledger, we have been foisted with a career politician who seems to view the laziest Left-wing caricatures of Toryism as a political roadmap: a pure zealot of unrestrained capital with no vision of the good beyond libertarian think tank pamphlets and a burning faith in the might and power of the market’s invisible hand. There are, in his writings, elements of the “Tietjens Toryism” of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, whereby the paternalistic concern of the central character, the “last surviving Tory”, for social harmony and widespread prosperity delineate the point at which “the High Toryism of Tietjens the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left”. In King Charles, we have a post-liberal monarch who furiously rejects the marketisation of ever more aspects of human life. But more, the fundamental contours of British politics were exposed by the near-simultaneous accession of both the King and Liz Truss. The great spectacle of the Royal funeral achieved what state funerals are expressly designed to do: reassert the unity of the British nation in a shared, sacral ritual of belonging, beyond sterile rationality, as the tribe interred its fallen chief with great pomp and ceremony. The past few weeks have been a liminal period in British politics one in which we have been presented with real political choices for the first time in a long time.
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