Dear Duncan,
The fallout from the last few days in parliament seems to be spreading.
Well she resigned, Truss has gone, it was inevitable. Graham Brady the chair of the Tory 1922 committee visited her to tell her there were so many letters calling for her to go she could not stay. So she went. It’s a sign of how low the market’s opinion of her was that the pound actually rose in value after she resigned.
The scary thing is that there are a substantial number of Tory MPs calling for the return of Boris Johnson. If they do it’s a perfect example of the moral vacuum that is the Tory party. My god, what would we look like to the rest of the world? To re-elect a proven liar, lawbreaker, loose cannon, ill disciplined, entitled, egotistical, narcissistic, arrogant and dangerous person to the highest office in the land is insanity of the highest order.
This would be yet another nail in the coffin of the nation both abroad and at home. For the Tories to even consider this avenue is terrifying, he is a symbol of everything that is wrong with our country. He is the personification of the horrendous class system that is still rampant. Condescending, patronising, seemingly incapable of any form of self analysis. There is no sense of duty and service there, only a frightening ambition and a born-to-rule attitude that is destructive in the extreme. He and his peers are bringing about a retrograde society where dog-eat-dog will be the result. A country where there is no help for the less well-off, where being poor or at the bottom of the class heap is “their own fault”. Where to be poor or on a working benefit such as universal credit is to be a “scrounger”, to be denigrated. An appalling scenario.
Where tax is a dirty word, well how do we pay for the services we need as a country? That is what tax is for. Surely as a society we have a moral duty to care for the less fortunate than ourselves. Taxation is the most efficient way to accomplish this and from a basic principle of morality those with the most material wealth should pay the most. If I was wealthy I would even more than now (where I live on slightly more than the state pension and am about to be in fuel poverty) consider it my duty to help society to weather the storms of adversity by my tax contribution and also by my voluntary contributions to the country.
As an aside, when did having enough become anathema to the population? It’s a sad indictment of our world where the aspiration of so many is to worship the temple of the self. As Kennedy said, to paraphrase, ‘We should all ask not what our country could do for us, but what can we do for our country?’ An enormously powerful statement we should all take heed of. But the government should even more so. Sadly that does look to have fallen by the wayside. The culture of the self has come to dominate our world, a collection of individuals. To get back on track Boris seems totally incapable of grasping this concept.
He was the leader of a government where it was ok to castigate judges for their upholding of the law. Where it was proposed to ban strikes. Let’s face it the only way a person in work has left as a last resort is to actually get their message through to employers in this way. The right to protest is being eroded by the latest set of laws. If more than one person stands and is deemed to be creating too much noise? They can be summarily arrested, he allowed this tyranny to come into being.
Just what is this country coming to where a supposedly democratic party would even consider re-electing this sociopath? The very keystones of our society are under threat here from a radical neoconservative, reactionary section of society that seems to revel in destroying our democratic way of life to preserve their own avaricious, blinkered narrow perspective of the world.
Madness.
Andrew Bamforth
Holt, Norfolk
