2024-05-11 18:22:40
Tomorrow inflation will have disappeared, prices and the cost of mortgages will fall, and the current cost of living crisis will be history, like the pandemic; Tomorrow there will be no queues of months (or years) to operate in public health, educational standards will improve, and so will public transportation and infrastructure; Tomorrow the right immigrants will arrive in the country, neither one more nor one less, the perfect number to contribute to growth but without collapsing services; Tomorrow taxpayers will pay less taxes; Tomorrow there will be affordable housing for everyone, and productivity will skyrocket; Tomorrow Brexit will bear fruit and the UK economy will no longer be the one with the lowest growth of the G7 countries…
Many things have been said about tomorrow, but the general idea is that tomorrow will be another day, and we must live in the present. Carpe Diem. Like the thief in Herodotus’ fable, who, on the verge of being executed, proposes to the king that he forgive him if in one year he can make his horse sing, like Mr. Ed from the old television series. Tomorrow, tomorrow, orphan Annie optimistically sings while she scrubs floors in the Broadway musical.
The British Prime Minister trusts that between now and the fall “something will happen” to change the electoral tone
The British conservatives, after the blow suffered in the municipal elections last week, are more or less in that position, that of trusting, against everything that the meteorological forecasts predict, that tomorrow (probably November, when the country is going to the polls) the sun will rise. That voters will see the rainbow. And if they fail to remain in power – something that seems really unlikely – they will at least have a worthy defeat and avoid an overwhelming Labor majority.
In reality they have no other choice. After many intrigues, and despite the fact that the local elections have not been a stumble but a morrocotudo failure, in line with the most pessimistic premonitions, the Tories have resigned themselves to going hand in hand with Rishi Sunak to the general elections, and that anticipate them, as the opposition requests, nothing at all. They will rush the calendar so that the stars conspire in their favor and something happens to save them from the bonfire. May the king’s horse learn to sing like a Eurovision winner. The prime minister has few admirers, but changing leaders again (the sixth in eight years) would be a practical joke and would turn the most successful political party in the West, with 350 years of history, into a global laughingstock.
So no more conspiracies, no riots or rebellions (for now), and stick with what there is, which is Sunak. Of all his original promises, he has only kept one, that the public debt would be reduced. Otherwise, the economy remains anemic, illegal immigrants continue to cross the English Channel, and inflationary pressure is not going down enough for the Bank of England (which is independent) to reduce interest rates.
In view of this, the Tory leader has changed the cello and violin for percussion, and now promises that he will raise the Defense budget to 2.5% of GDP to confront the Russian threat, which he will manage to make them return to work and produce the three million Britons who have been living on disability benefits since the pandemic, and which will put an end to the “nonsense” of the mea culpa of colonialism, with common toilets for men and women, and different pronouns for people not binary.
But the impression is that citizens have made their decision and have stopped listening to Sunak and the Tories. When they are asked to summarize the state of the country in one adjective, the ones that come out of their mouths are “disastrous”, “chaotic”, “divided”, “broken”, “poor”, “expensive”… The polls with like a torture with the drop by drop, but the last blow has been the defection to Labor of the deputy Natalie Elphicke, who was not exactly from the moderate wing of the Party, but almost from the extreme right… In a biblical conversion, suddenly He declares himself a social democrat.
Goodbye to a possible return of Boris Johnson, goodbye to the coronation of Penny Mordaunt as leader, goodbye to all emergency exits, life preservers and parachutes. Whatever happens, it will be with Sunak at the wheel. When his friends told the thief in the fable that he was crazy, he responded: “In a year anything can happen, that the king is no longer there, that I am no longer there, that the horse is not there… or even that he knows sing” It is more difficult for voters to forget the legacy of the conservatives.
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