Only a fool Mr Sunak …

There’s an unattributed quote that suggests that insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. Maybe its source is the same as the origin of ‘if you’re in a hole stop digging’.

Your predecessor and possibly most of your party don’t seem to understand this.

In her resignation speech Ms Truss said ‘… we set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit’ . Then in her final speech she said that ‘we need to take advantage of our Brexit freedoms to do things differently’.

There are few, if any advantages of ‘Brexit freedoms’.

You are not going to be successful in your job if you continue this line. I rather like this quote from a US commentator (David Frum):

‘The problem with the UK Tory party is not the personal defects of the captain. The problem is that you’re not eligible for the captaincy unless you agree it was a brilliant idea to scupper the ship in 2016- and can convincingly act baffled why it has been sinking ever since.’

If you want to be successful then you must not only bring stability but you also need to make it easier for the generators of wealth in our country, from the hospitality and healthcare sectors to the companies which export, to go about their businesses. Don’t choke off their access to necessary resources on the one hand or their routes to markets on the other. Start to do this by calling an immediate halt to further steps down the Brexit path.

There’s a good summary of what you might do in a perfect world in the Guardian website today (click here). Jürgen Maier’s current credentials are that he’s a vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, co-founder of the social enterprise vocL, and a former chief executive officer of Siemens UK so you’d think that his opinions are worth listening to.

Mr Maier (not Herr, he’s a British citizen) is clear. Brexit is built on ‘years of lies, policy blunders and incompetence (that) have severely damaged the UK’s reputation.’ He goes on

‘There is another policy option that no one yet has the confidence to reverse, and that is to rejoin the single market and customs union. It was the biggest lie of them all: that we could replace the economic upside of being part of the most advanced free-trade zone in the world. No independent trade deal can replace its economic upside. It is time to face up to this as a country.’

Be brave Mr Sunak. Do it!

But there’s a deeper malaise and understanding this means that Brexit is not the problem, just something that has made this worse. And that’s the longer term decline. Tom McTague writes in the Atlantic (click here) and says ‘the extraordinary political and economic crisis unfolding in Britain is not Brexit’s fault. But neither is Brexit entirely innocent.’

Mr McTague concludes:

‘If the country wants to succeed, it needs to stop obsessing about its reputation beyond its borders and the magical powers of Europe, and start obsessing about the systemic failures that are Britain’s alone and no one else’s.’

Our problem is that the glories of the past cannot be revisited and that the sunlit uplands of Brexit don’t exist. We’ve just got to make the best of the hand that we’ve got and throwing the EU card away severely weakens that hand.