As with Trump’s toadies, as with Putin’s advisers, Britain’s Brexiters by and large are appointed on two criteria:
1 Belief in the True Cause of Hard Brexit or that Ukraine Does Not Exist (real or fake belief, either is fine, the important thing is to craw-thump daily about it, and, every time you fuck up, double down, using the old extremist approach of: “if our Glorious Idea is not working, that’s because we’re not being extreme enough“. Which is another way to subvert conventional wisdom about the speed at which one should dig if one finds oneself in a hole.).
2 Blind loyalty to The Leader. Whether through inexperience and stupidity, or through fear, is irrelevant. Debate works best if we all agree with each other. That ensures our debates are only ever about egging each other on to new depths. No countervailing opinions are tolerated.
Predictably, as with Trump’s comedy-show in government, as with Putin’s continuing millitary cock-ups, the result is a succession of cluster-fucks, of which the Brexit government’s continuing acts of witless sabotage against the UK’s political governance and financial stability are just the latest example:
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued an extraordinarily critical statement of the UK’s growth plans, which largely relies on unfunded tax cuts, on Tuesday (Sept. 27). It’s the latest blow to the Trussonomics school of thought espoused by the three-week old UK government.”
“Bank of England launches urgent bond-buying programme to avoid ‘material risk’ to UK economy“
The current UK government are a bunch of witless extremists and spineless, opportunistic second-raters. They continually confuse theory and reality. Their guiding mantra appears to be: “never mind about it working in practice – the important question is whether or not it works in theory.”
LBC Radio’s James O’Brien had some grim fun with the various absurdities and inconsistenties of various Brexiter Tory responses to their latest SNAFU:
“Starting with author Andrew Lilico, James read out one of Mr Lilico’s tweets which said he was
“Embarrassed for the IMF. This is the IMF self-declaring as a left-wing body. The UK should now withhold its IMF contributions”.
“So,”, James joked, “it’s time to leave the IMF. Eventually we’re going to leave the solar system.”
Typically level-headed summation here by the Financial Time’s Janan Ganesh:
“Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) [even the writer of this blog is on his 5th start-up, ffs] she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim.
It isn’t.
The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.)
Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries. Some readers baulked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election.
Even I didn’t think she would trip so soon.
It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.”
Disjecta 