Brexit legacy is just the start of incoming PM’s problems as cost of living crisis spirals
Boris Johnson has left the Conservative party in policy la-la land. “Cakeism” has run riot – vast, incoherent ambitions detached from political, economic and business realities. Thus the aim is to be “Global Britain” but an ultra-hard Brexit ensures shrinking exports, falling inward investment, dwindling financial muscle and inevitably global retreat.
Britain is to be a high-wage, high-innovation economy but there is only one hi-tech company in the FTSE 100, and no strategy to add any more. We are to be a science superpower but there is little chance when we are excluded from the biggest transnational scientific organisation on earth – the EU Horizon programme. There are targets to level up Britain’s glaring geographical inequalities but with scant resources – with what little there is directed at Tory constituencies.
As the cost of living crisis intensifies, the government consistently offers too little, too late. A mid-ranking European power must collaborate with others to have leverage over any significant policy area: instead, rancour, rows and delusions of a capacity to go it alone dominate. There are commitments to fiscal responsibility while simultaneously advocating more spending and lower taxes. It is an intellectual black hole.
The incoming PM’s problems start with the legacy of Johnson’s Brexit – the unchallenged, sacred verity of Conservative politics. But this allegedly “oven-ready” deal paid no attention to the realities of the 21st-century economy, now dominated by products and services that compete on their knowledge content, resilience and compliance with the highest regulatory standards. To exclude ourselves from the EU single market, which sets the standards for the whole of the EU, is thus a ball and
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