This was not because the bureaucrats betrayed them, or even the rather more credible excuse of the pandemic it was because the vision of Singapore-on-Thames was always a fantasy that would never be capable of uniting the nation behind it.Įveryone wants low taxes, but on the whole they also want top drawer public services, a credible military, a free at the point of use National Health Service, and triple-locked state pensions. They over promised and under delivered, and the presiding government is now about to reap the whirlwind. It was up to Brexit’s political cheerleaders to make something out of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, whatever the obstacles, but they failed. There may be some element of truth in what she says about Whitehall obstinacy and the shortcomings of non elected technocrats, but her take on events is essentially just a lot of paranoid nonsense straight out of the populist playbook, where an imaginary “enemy within” is created as a hate plank to channel the discontents of voters. Truss, by the way, campaigned for Remain, but then there is no zealot quite like the convert. What on earth happened? Why has the spirit of national renewal that Brexit was meant to give rise to fallen so woefully short?Īccording to Liz Truss, the former prime minister, it’s all down to the “deep state”, a suffocating conspiracy of bureaucrats and quangos that is determined to thwart the noble ambitions of elected politicians such as herself. Nothing seems to work, there are long waiting lists for almost every public service, there’s not enough housing to go around, and at a loss for solutions, our public discourse has degenerated into the demeaning bile of culture wars irrelevance. The two things may not be entirely connected, but being out on our own has failed to improve the mood. Wherever you look, there is a deep sense of malaise it is indeed hard to recall a time when people were more pessimistic about the future than they are now. Britain’s already burgeoning debt has Hunt, and any Labour successor, stitched up like a kipper with no way out. ![]() What is more, the IFS says, there is almost nothing that the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, can do to avoid these outcomes. Nearly eight years after the 2016 referendum, the reality is of a still deeply divided nation heading, according to new analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, not towards some kind of low tax, super competitive, economic nirvana, but the highest tax burden since the Second World War, with the state some 3 to 4 percentage points bigger as a share of national income than it was before the vote for Brexit. The dream was Singapore-on-Thames, a low tax, small state, lightly regulated economy that, freed from the shackles of European instruction, could thrive anew on the world stage.
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