21 October 2022 09:30
History will remember Liz Truss’s tenure as the shortest of the 56 heads of government who took turns leading the UK, as well as the saddest.
But this is not the most relevant fact. If the house at 10 Downing street, the premier’s address in London, has turned into a machine to pulverize political ambitions, it is because the mission is clearly impossible, and it doesn’t matter if a demagogue without faith or law tries to do so. like Boris Johnson or an out-of-time reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher as Liz Truss …
The mission is impossible because it was to make Brexit a success, where the past six years show that British voters made the worst mistake of their lives when they voted yes in the 2016 referendum. it had joined by a majority to an ideologically tempting project, that of “regaining control”, as the Brexit champions repeated. But that project never got along with the reality of the country and the rest of the world.
Unrealizable plans
Brexit won thanks to a double illusion. The first is that of the false slogan displayed on London buses and which promised to invest in the health system the enormous sums that were paid to the European Union every week. The second is that of having wanted to believe in a “Singapore on the Thames”, a deregulated place that could attract capital put on the run by the Brussels bureaucracy. The illusion was all the more foolish if we consider that it was based on a wrong reading of the world and also hit unexpected events, such as covid-19 and the new cold (or hot, depending on the region) war.
London must coexist with all bearish indicators
Since then, several conservative premieres have tried to make an unrealizable plan work, unable to tell the British “we were wrong” because at that point it would have been their lies and their illusions that would have ended up in the crosshairs.
And so London has to coexist with indicators that are all bearish. The UK performs worse than any comparable country in the same situation, and there is only one explanation: Brexit.
The next prime minister will not be successful unless he decides to take a realistic turn, not so much to re-enter the European Union (it will take at least a generation to remedy the rupture) but at least to negotiate a relationship without ideological blinders with the 27.
The sinking of Liz Truss could serve to restore some sense to the conservatives. The Tories have already changed the nomination criteria to make Boris Johnson’s return nearly impossible, and that’s already something. If the Conservatives need more reasons to wake up, just take a look at the polls in which Labor have a 30-point lead. If the elections were held today, the Tories would not exceed 22 MPs. A collective suicide, in short.
Waiting for the next developments we can close with the sentence pronounced by King Charles III when he received Liz Truss in Buckingham: “Dear oh dear”, which we could translate as “oh mercy!”. Even the king is exasperated …
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)