Changing times...

While Labour promised change during the election it seems to have reverted to an old Labour ‘tax and spend” approach that is no recipe for the other thing promised ‘growth”. Hard to see in the recent budget how growth is going to be delivered if the overwhelming sense is that spend will be mostly in the stubbornly unproductive public sector.

In the USA fair to say change is coming at the speed of a Musk rocket to Mars. There is no script. Nothing to suggest that politics in the USA will be changed in unimaginable ways. With Republicans, unusually, on top of Presidency, Senate and Congress this is not 2016.

Whatever scale of political earthquake Trump represents in the USA the tremors are sure to be felt far and wide, not least in Europe. The Labour Party may be torn between a Trump policy that is favourable to the UK, at the same time as Labour wanting in its bones to segue towards the EU.

In Northern Ireland the Protocol presents an added complication. A vote ‘consenting’ to the Protocol is to be held before the end of the year, yet the Protocol is barely implemented in significant ways. How can there be consent to something when the consequences are still unknown (maybe that is deliberate) and when Unionists trigger a review by not consenting, how is it possible to ‘review’ the Protocol that is not yet fully implemented?