Members-Only Article
I’ve been laughing at and really endlessly entertained by Liz Truss’s momentary pratfall Prime Ministership. There’s much discussion of the UK’s now apparently chronic political instability. There will soon have been five Tory Prime Ministers in the last seven years. In the 31 years between 1979 and 2010 the country had four Prime Ministers. Having “reclaimed its sovereignty” in 2016 with Brexit, the country is now firmly shackled to the judgment of the bond markets. I laugh at this chaos; you may laugh. It’s funny. But any laughter should come in the realization that all of this is the impact and inevitable collateral damage of the Brexit vote in 2015 in which the UK simply decided to light itself on fire for no reason at all.
Liz Truss was merely a foot soldier in this war for self-immolation. Perhaps the greatest single driver was none other than Boris Johnson, though his angling for the top job was delayed for a few years. And he was the one who actually finalized the deal. The political instability was driven by the mandate to enact a policy which condemned the UK to diminished wealth and trade, greater economic vulnerability and the real prospect of the eventual dissolution of the UK itself and do this in such a way as to be able to argue that none of these bad things would happen and that the result would be great. That effort required denial, continual deception and the eventual onset of those challenges once the first crisis arose which of course it did a few years later in the form of COVID.
