A five-point plan

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Politicians seem to revel in having multi-point plans, and the probable future Prime Minister is no exception, even if he hasn’t yet quite managed to formulate it in those terms.  Perhaps I can help a little by distilling his recent statements to a few short points:

1.    He will withhold payment of monies which are legally due to the EU unless they agree to break their own rules on the single market and abandon a member state, namely Ireland.

2.    He will immediately start negotiations with the US for a trade deal to come into effect by 31^st October, even if starting such negotiations is a direct breach of treaty commitments to which the UK has agreed.

3.    He will unilaterally apply the rules of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs to a situation in which they can only be used where there is an agreement in place - without first coming to such an agreement.

4.    He will tell Trump that instead of the UK following US food standards, the US will have to follow UK standards.

5.    He will cut taxes whilst at the same time increasing expenditure and committing to reducing public debt.

All of the above will be achieved by a generous application of optimism and determination, by being nice to Trump, and by believing very, very hard.  What could possibly go wrong?

In other news, some of the defeated leadership candidates are apparently already gearing up their campaigns for the autumn Tory leadership election.

If only he had had some influence...

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One of the problems with ‘New Labour’ was that they seemed to believe that the answer to everything was more legislation.  It didn’t always achieve very much, but it looked like decisive action was being taken.  The reason that it’s a problem is that passing legislation doesn’t necessarily change very much, and many of the ‘new’ crimes created by Labour could easily have been prosecuted under existing laws; what was missing on occasions wasn’t so much the necessary legislation as the resources.  Still, it made for good headlines at the time, which was all they really wanted.

I wondered yesterday whether the outsider in the Tory Donkey Derby isn’t in serious danger of falling into the same trap with his promise to pass new legislation to abolish illiteracy.  I’m not sure what such legislation would do or why it’s required.  I assume that he’s not planning to criminalise illiteracy (although with the Tories, one can never be entirely sure), so what would any such law say?  If the problem is poor teaching or lack of resources, there are already means of addressing those issues, and severe learning difficulties won’t go away because the law says so.  Just because one of the few things that governments can do (although the current one has struggled even with that) is pass new laws doesn’t mean that new laws are the right answer.

The aim – that every citizen should be able to read and write – is noble enough, and it is a disgrace that a country like the UK lags behind many much poorer countries in ensuring that the aim is achieved.  I wonder who might be to blame for that situation.  Isn’t it a pity that someone like Hunt who can see the problem hasn’t been a member of a government which could have taken action to fix it if it had wanted to over the past seven years?  Oh, wait a minute…