IT’S being reported that if, as seems probable, Liz Truss does become the next Worst Prime Minister that the UK has had in the modern era, Suella Braverman is likely to be the next Home Secretary and Jacob Rees-Mogg is to be appointed as the new head of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

This comes in the middle of an energy crisis and monthly energy bills that are threatening to exceed half the full state pension and more than half of the typical amount received in Universal Credit.

Truss hasn't even officially won the Conservative leadership yet but she's already proving just how dreadful she will be in office. May, Johnson and now Truss show that allowing Conservative Party members to select the prime minister with no input from the wider electorate is demonstrably the worst possible way to choose a prime minister and all by itself proves that the Westminster system is irredeemably broken.

We'd statistically have a much better chance of choosing a decent Prime Minister if we lined up all the House of Commons in a row and randomly threw darts at them, which would also be considerably more entertaining than the tedium-fest that the Conservatives have subjected us to for the past month.

Imagine looking at Rees-Mogg and his record of ludicrously out-of-touch statements, his affected Victorian aristocratic demeanour and his complete detachment from the lives of ordinary people and thinking: "Yes, that is the man who should have the Cabinet position in charge of energy policy during a catastrophic rise in energy prices that threatens millions with penury."

If this report is true, it confirms that the right-wing of the Conservative Party which has seen fit to put Truss the play-doh Thatcher in office does not merely have an arrogant disregard for ordinary working class people and for families scraping to get by on meagre benefits – it actively detests them. Rees-Mogg is the kind of Tory whose solution to the energy crisis will be to tell people to put on an extra jumper or to pile more overcoats on the children's beds while the profits of the energy corporations continue to soar.

These are not serious appointments, this is not a serious government. The only serious thing here is the amount of trouble that we are all in. Above all, this means that the Conservatives are not a serious political party, but rather are an outfit dedicated to state-level trolling of the poor, the working classes and the disabled.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson continued in his flight from responsibility with a flight from reality by insisting that the UK is not “broken” but that it has “everything going for it”. Everything, presumably except a government that actually cares about the struggles of its citizens. France has capped energy bill rises to 5% and Germany to 23%, but in the UK, energy bills are continuing to soar to levels which are simply unaffordable for many households.

Yet neither of the Conservative leadership candidates has any realistic plan to deal with this crisis. All we get are hints that Truss might reduce VAT and abolish green levies which will do little to reduce energy bills and will disproportionately put more money in the pockets of those who have disposable income, precisely those least likely to fall into crisis due to soaring energy costs. 

Electricity prices in the UK have risen much more steeply than in the EU, reaching almost double the European average. Experts say that the structure of the UK's fully privatised energy market, a product of Conservative privatisation, carries much of the blame. 

When the Conservatives privatised the utility companies and the railways, they assured us that it would unleash competition, creating greater efficiency and driving down prices for the consumer. It's clear by now that all that was unleashed was corporate greed.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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