I have been impressed by recent treatment by the NHS. But I know this is not universally the case.We need to understand that Kwarteng and Truss's "non-budget" (from a lexicon deployed as a trick, to avoid OBR review) is only stage one of the plan (oh yes, there probably is a plan).Stage two is "Oh look, we have no money. We will have to slash public spending to balance the books". And BANG. At as stroke, no more (or a greatly reduced) NHS (etc.) by a simple sleight of hand.This is not speculation. This was Truss, Kwateng's and those other two idiots, Raab and Patel's (and Chris Skidmore – who?) rant set out in an unresearched, lightweight and puerile pamphlet they jointly published in 2012. The basic premise is that British workers are uneducated and lazy, the European social democratic economic and welfare model is finished. The new age of authoritarianism, with no social or health safety net (welfare benefits, public pensions, and NHS), no employment, environmental and fiscal protections are now upon. Let the market rule. Ignore the lessons of 2008/9.This lot is intellectually lightweight, evidence adverse, and fetishly driven by an insubstantial but extremely damaging “free market” doctrine. It has taken them less than a month to trash the UK economy, requiring the intervention of the unelected Bank of England to save the UK economy from our government (maybe we haven’t quite yet “had enough of experts”).And who voted for these radical new policies? They attempt to disown the last 12 years of Tory government (in which Truss was an integral part) by constantly referring the themselves as “the new government” – but no election manifesto has been published, and nobody has had the chance to review, consider or vote for a "new government" or their radical (and dangerous) new policies (which they boast abandons “orthodoxy”) apart from a very unrepresentative 0.2% of the population who are members of the Conservative Party (including many who are not eligible to vote in UK elections because they under the voting age, or non-UK nationals resident overseas). That's not democracy.They cannot have it both ways. Either this government is more of the same, in which case they must take responsibility for the economic mess caused by their past policies, or they are a “new government” which requires a new mandate from the electorate.And - as an side - we still get lectured (here and elsewhere) about the EU being “undemocratic” (by people who have demonstrate that they have no understanding at all of how the EU’s democratic institutions work).
T P Howell ● 1452d