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Thursday 4 October 2018

Ground Shifts from under the Government Yet Again

Politics certainly has the ability to be unpredictable and the sheer scale of Theresa May u-turns yesterday was remarkable.  She hasn't admitted that austerity was a huge error but she appears to commit to more public spending from now on, which effectively means that she thinks Osborne's pursuit of a smaller state was a big error.

Even more startling is the commitment to more Council homes.  Selling off Council stock was a key part of the Tory election strategy from 1979 to the present day and she has just committed to more of them.  I wonder what Kit Malthouse, who thinks of Council tenants as second class people, thinks of that.

It is also notable for some of the things it did not say like addressing the collapse in social care, the growing financial crisis in local government, how the extremely restrictive immigration policies during her watch marry up with the Tory Conference theme of praising diversity, the onmgoing failure of Universal Credit and the holes in the UK's defence capabilities. 

It demonstrates how the underlying basis of politics is shifting and that a whole range of possibilities, including a second referendum, are possible.

The main limit of course is that national debt is much higher than it was in 2010 and all forms of Brexit will hit the economy, some of them very hard indeed.

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