Tory clowns no laughing matter

THE SIGHT of Tory ministers jostling each other off stage as they stake their claims to be the next Prime Minister is a pretty sickening spectacle.

These clowns are making a circus out of governing the country – but nobody is laughing. Despite their failings, they have the born-to-rule sense of entitlement that makes them think they are the only people who can manage Brexit, and the economic aftermath.

Having given Britain its worst decade of growth since World War II, half the Tory party want the hard Brexit that would wreck what is left of our manufacturing industries.

Today Boris Johnson, the chief clown, arrives with a prescription that somehow setting Britain adrift in the world will lead to great riches. It won’t, it will lead to an offshore service economy with low taxes to attract the global companies that prowl the world in search of cheap labour.

When the economy stalls, as it has for years in this strangled Tory recovery, it is the poor who pay the price in terms of cuts to public services.

Figures showing a quarter of children in Scotland are living in poverty are a wretched reminder of the price of clowning around in politics. A deep sense of isolationism, xenophobia and nostalgia for empire has driven the splits of the Conservative Party to infect the whole of the country.

Combine that with the impact globalisation has had on job security and communities that had a working identity and we have the recipe for the social and political disaster that is being played out in front of our eyes.

To listen or watch just a little of what is coming out of the Tory conference, as the rivals buff their credentials to take over from Theresa May, is to know this is a party who have no answers, no energy and no solutions to the shipwreck they have caused.