Riding the tiger
Like the rest of the country, the government is obsessed with the history of WW2 but seems to have very little real grasp of what happened and why. One benefit from the World War was that safe and successful people, previously insulated from the lives of others, discovered from their experiences serving alongside such people what their lives were really like.
The Conservatives in particular remain convinced that Winston Churchill lost the ‘45 general election because of a left wing conspiracy to corrupt the stout yeoman of England with commie propaganda. Rather than millions of people seeing what could be achieved by a government that wanted to do great things and which could easily find the money.
Which brings us to the current government’s policies, people now know there is a magic money tree, that when the need is great the Treasury can find the money and that many aspects of UK life are massively underfunded.
Insisting that austerity must be re-introduced is economically illiterate but a Tory mantra. Feeding ever greater demands for more money is also economically illiterate but popular with the PM who craves attention.
This is a balancing act made far more difficult by decades of Thatcherite theories about doing more with less and never ending promises of tax cuts. It would be easier if the Conservative party admitted that government is very good at doing somethings and needs taxes to pay for those things.
Can it do that? I doubt it.
https://jonty.substack.com/