I hope the reduced band of Conservative supporters have a nice time at their party conference in Birmingham.

I saw on the news that the Tory Leader arrived and told the media that this is a different Conservative party from the one that existed a couple of years ago. She is right, it is a lot smaller. They have lost a lot of Councillors and MP’s.

I am tempted to suggest that they now call themselves “New Conservatives”. It will be a long time before the public forgive them for their performance in Government and all the sleaze and internal fighting.

Unfortunately the policies all seem much the same. Do you remember the Boris Johnson mantra that Britain had to “take back control” ? I think a lot of people bought into that idea, as if the European Union was somehow replacing our own government.

The fact is that it was the Conservative policies that meant we all had a lot less control over so many things in our day to day lives. Privatising the water industry meant we are all having to pay a monopoly for a terrible service that regularly pollutes our rivers and seas.

Instead of having a public transport system that delivers for people, we had a broken up bus and train system that runs for profit, not for society.

Starving local authorities of vital funding that means they can’t maintain our roads and pavements doesn’t seem a lot like “taking back control”.

Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster and all polling points to the fact that most of the public agree. However, the Conservatives are still wedded to the idea that we are somehow better off, having lost 4% of our economic output every year since.

Nobody thinks that we are better off looking to the USA as a reliable and supportive economic power.

The current government is a very long way from perfect but it is having to sort out the legacy mess of the Conservatives in so many ways, whether it is overcrowded prisons, a damage probation service, a farming industry on its knees, a greatly reduced defence…. I could go on.