What does the Tory Party think it is doing going against Liz Truss? - Bernard Ingham

Maybe I feel it more since mobility and breathing difficulties forced me to increase my level of care to round the clock last week. I was dreading the day. Instead, I am surrounded by kindness, support and a cheerful desire to help. I enter another world when I open the newspapers and turn on the TV.

It is not so much the pathetic idiocies of the wokerati infecting our national institutions, though that is more than enough for anyone. It is the fact that so many bodies are behaving counter-productively and either can’t recognise it or don’t care.

Take the Tory Party, both Parliamentary and rank and file. If they do not buckle to, as demanded by the saner element, and support their government they will surely lose the next election in two years’ time and abandon the nation to a deeply split and vacant Labour Party.

The party’s paymasters – the trade unions – would then call the tune and before we knew where we were we would feel the lash of the hard-Left.

It is a measure of the lack of Tory political acumen that has led to all the infighting over the first month of Liz Truss as leader. Michael Gove, Grant Shapps and Nadine Dorris are not merely revealing their stupidity but their cavalier approach to the nation’s interests.

Then we come to the anti-growth lobby that caused such a fuss over the Chancellor, Kwazi Kwarteng, cutting the top rate of tax from 45 to the 40 per cent that had served a Labour Government. Their objection to any measure that is likely to stimulate growth from easements of planning requirements to tax caps raises serious questions as to what they want out of life.

Economic growth is the only way to generally enrich the nation – I am afraid that the poor and profligate will always be with us – and stifling it is certain to make us poorer and ensure national decline, not just stagnation.

I sometimes wonder whether the anti-growth element are of this world. Don’t they realise that the pandemic cost the nation a cool £400bn and that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine has piled on the costs by causing a surge in fuel prices and the urgent need to defend freedom? How else are we to get the nation back into financial balance without growth?

This brings me to the environmental lobby – Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the variety of offshoots spawned by Extinction Rebellion - who have it in for all fossil fuels except apparently subsidised imported wood chips generating electricity at Drax

They cannot escape some responsibility for the present energy supply crisis. But the main blame lies with a succession of politicians and their advisers who capitulated to the environmental lobby’s zealotry. Now we are scrambling to restore the Rough gas storage field in the North Sea, to secure further offshore oil and gas exploration and production, start fracking and build nuclear power stations.

I am all in favour of cleaning up the atmosphere for health as well as environmental reasons. But the only practical and politically acceptable way of doing that is to have a healthy and growing economy. Otherwise, we face decline and will fall into burning anything handy, however environmentally dirty.

One-track minded environmentalists also need constantly reminding that they cannot have it both ways: in this dangerous world they will forfeit the freedom they need to campaign if they render the UK unable to defend itself.

This brings me back to the wokerati who every day are eroding our freedom, re-writing history and trying to eliminate all references to men and women, even ladies and gentlemen. They are hounding, abusing ‘cancelling’ and even ending the employment of anybody who takes a stand against their totalitarianism. Their methods are out of the top drawer of Putin’s dictatorship.

Don’t they realise, if they go on like this, they are virtually inviting Communist dictators to take over, having prepared the way by destroying our democratic values. Or is that what they want? We should be told.

All this demonstrates the utter confusion at the heart of so much of British society. And I haven’t even mentioned Scot Nats opting for ‘independence’ with penury. It’s a rum old UK.