Pretty much the only pledge from her leadership campaign that outgoing prime minister Liz Truss kept was to ignore Nicola Sturgeon.
Neither the Scottish nor the Welsh first ministers were favoured with a phone call from Downing Street when Truss came to what is laughingly called power. Now our FM doesn’t even want to speak her, so there. Such is the rollercoaster of UK politics at the moment.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Truss didn’t get on the blower to Edinburgh, Cardiff or, indeed, Belfast, which arguably should have been the minister for the union’s first port of call.
She and bestie former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng rode roughshod over all our institutions, from the Office of Budget Responsibility – set up by George Osborne in 2010 to stop future Labour governments peddling La La Land economic and fiscal forecasts – to the newly formed cabinet of Liz cheerleaders.
But, here’s the thing. It’s not just her. This is simply the latest in a long row of whoopee cushions that the Westminster government has thumped its indolent backside down on since 2016, as it struggles to squeeze the square peg of Brexit into the round hole of economic and political reality.
Yes, it was idiotic to introduce unfunded tax cuts in the midst of a cost of living crisis. But, lads, Liz was just trying to make Brexit work – to reap the benefits of taking back control and ripping up Brussels red tape.
What else could she do? She can’t bluster incoherently like Boris Johnson and push on through, glistening with the Teflon sheen of unwarranted overconfidence. She’s neither the right sex nor the right social class for that.
Brexit will never work
Truss standing outside Downing Street in her nice blue dress, stumbling through her resignation speech, just six weeks after entering Number 10 is the Brexit project laid bare.
We wanted to be great again, only without doing the hard work that improves productivity. Boring, boring, boring. Cut taxes and let the good times roll
It doesn’t work. It will never work. It can’t work. Because you can’t be a great world power, commanding the waves and la-di-da and be a nasty little tax haven with light-touch regulation.
In truth, the UK can be neither. We could have been – we were – a moderately successful, mid-sized European country, and a useful, English-speaking gateway to Europe. But, nah.
We wanted to be great again, only without doing the hard work that improves productivity. Boring, boring, boring. Cut taxes and let the good times roll.
Which leaves us where? Well, here in the forgotten north, we’re obviously awaiting a phone call. Meantime, we need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Things are not going to get better in the UK. No amount of standing in front of giant Union flags, singing songs about kings and queens, can paper over the cracks that Brexit has created. This is terminal.
The star to which we’ve hitched our wagon is imploding. We need to get out.
Fiona Rintoul is an author and translator
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