Foot down on the accelerator, high on dreams, the driver plunges straight at the concrete wall that she calls “growth”. Unfortunately, we’re all in the back of her coach, front seats filled with Tories shouting “Swerve!”, “Go right!”, “Go left!”, “This way!”, “That way!”, “Reverse!”, or “Jump!” But their useless indecision, ineffectual whingeing and fractured splits condemn us all to dash towards worsening crises. What terminal damage this moribund party can do in another two years doesn’t bear contemplating.
Impossibilism used to be a Trotskyite policy – to demand the impossible to break the system. That’s Liz Truss’s tactic, by cutting taxes – creating a £62bn black hole, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies freaking out the despised markets and trashing all the “orthodox”, acronymed stabilisers: the OBR, BoE, IMF, HM Treasury and BBC, as well as the “anti-growth coalition” that comprises most of the population. She told the 1922 Committee that “the ground could have been better prepared” for the mini-budget – only by digging a hole and jumping in it.
