A £900k paint job won’t hide your indifference to Britain, Boris

Make no mistake; the Conservative Party does not care about Britain. It is uninterested in where our goods are made, so long as the price is right, and only touts its love of the nation in a despairingly successful attempt to win votes.

Make no mistake; the Conservative Party does not care about Britain. It is uninterested in where our goods are made, so long as the price is right, and only touts its love of the nation in a despairingly successful attempt to win votes.

A red, white and blue paint job on the prime minister’s aircraft, to promote Britain after Brexit, does not change this.

To spend £900,000 on spin in the same week that (thanks to government policy) the pension triple-lock system is likely to be abandoned, more and more businesses across the country are shutting down, and families are becoming bankrupt, is extraordinarily insulting to all Brits.

Even on its own terms, however, it takes some stick to claim this paint job will help to promote Britain’s greatness; the plane wasn’t even made here. We make almost nothing now in this country – a reality which the Conservative Party has not only not pushed against, but has helped to bring to the fore.

If they really care about Britain, why don’t the Tories do something to change this, rather than paint over the problem?

This affair reminds me of our new, blue British passport. Heralded as a sign of our regaining of sovereignty after Brexit, the contract for production was given by the Tories not to De La Rue, a 200-year-old British company, but to a French company operating in Poland (at the loss of hundreds of British jobs). I doubt that De La Rue will even exist in another 100 years time.

None of this is surprising. Those Tories who backed Brexit did so not because they wanted to bring Britain’s vision closer to home. Rather, they wanted to look further out to the world. They sought cheaper imports from further away, rather than a boosting of British industry, and higher levels of immigration from across the world.

That’s a perfectly plausible position to take. But it is not conservative.