Look beyond Brexit wreck to the future
RSHORTLY after the fall of France in 1940, a small government committee convened in a modest room just off Whitehall. It was to discuss what was seen as the inevitable forthcoming invasion.
Not the invasion of Britain by Germany’s all-conquering panzers, but the invasion of continental Europe by allied forces to re-take Nazi-occupied territory and defeat Hitler. It says something for Britain’s unquenchable martial spirit – and bottomless commitment to freedom – that such a meeting took place at all, just as the Blitz was about to begin and what would be a long road of defeats and setbacks stretched to an infinite horizon.
Almost 70 years on, today’s battered and bruised Conservatives can take a lesson from history. No matter how bad things seem in the here and now, it is vital to plan with confidence for a brighter future.
So as most Tory MPs contemplate the smoking ruins of their Brexit shambles, it beholds some inner sanctum of clear-headed optimists to look beyond the wreckage. Not to an invasion – but to an election.
The next general election will be, I submit, if anything of even more importance than resolving Brexit now. Why? Because if the Tories lose, we are in for five years of Marxism and anti-capitalism; a destructive and nihilistic politicaleconomic regime the like of which this country has never seen.
A tremulous, unconfident, Corbyn-lite Conservative election manifesto threatens: it will not cut the mustard. A pale imitation of the hard-left policies Jezza and his capitalism-loathing chancellor have in store will simply bemuse voters. They’ll be tempted to vote for the real thing – and spend the next five years bitterly regretting it. The Tories need to return wholesale to their low-tax political
Rroots, confident, unabashed and unafraid. Incredibly, British taxpayers are being hammered even more brutally than during the socialist Seventies. This is absurd.
Theresa May should be ashamed that her government – a CONSERVATIVE government – is currently milking the country with the highest tax levels in 50 years.
Remember Cameron’s pledge to cut the hated inheritance tax for all but the very rich?
That was back in 2015, and the Tories saw an immediate and game-changing leap in their poll ratings. Couples leaving up to a million pounds worth of capital in their wills could be confident their children would receive every penny, and not see vast sums of their parents’ life savings funnelled off to the Treasury. The electorate loved it. But the promise was rescinded in a sudden bout of fiscal cowardice and taxes steadily increased instead.
Time and time again it has been proven that governments with the courage to lower taxes see an increase in revenue to the Treasury. Why? Because voters are happier to pay reasonable taxes, and so fewer try to avoid them; with more of their own money in their pockets, people are willing to spend more and the economy gets a boost; inward investment goes up, and that creates jobs and raises salaries. Cut business taxes and watch foreign investment pour in too.
Look across the pond. Donald Trump honoured his tax-cutting manifesto pledges – the US economy is soaring. The Conservatives can rise, Phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Brexit blaze with a triumphant return to their core values; their very reason for being. They have to.
Otherwise quasi-communism awaits and Britain, God help us, will turn its back on prosperity and join the Venezuela Club.
ENJOY your traditional Christmas dinner while you can. I confidently predict that the feast Dickens so lovingly described in A Christmas Carol will be soon be deemed an outrageous example of the new thought crime: cultural appropriation. Yup. Your bronzed turkey and crisp roasties are about as British as kangaroo cutlets. Exeter University say only the glazed carrots are Blighty through and through.
Turkey? Nicked by puritans from native north Americans. Spuds? Lifted (literally) from South America. Parsnips? Pinched by English pirates from the Eastern Mediterranean. Brussels? Don’t ask.