I don’t know what standard party conferences are judged but on 5 October the BBC called it “a showcase of dysfunction and division” characterised by “indiscipline and mutiny”. The same day The Guardian listed a series of skirmishes, several of them involving cabinet ministers, on a wide range of matters including the 45p tax band, allegations of (or denial of) coups, political errors and the need for an election, as well as a number of personal comments including about “shutting up” and “dirty linen” which have the distinct whiff of unfinished business from a previous playground spat.  Sky News described the event on 3 October as being “shrouded in gloom.” Hannah White, writing in The Institute for Government website on 4 October, listed five reasons why Liz Truss has lost trust, which included misusing her cabinet, rejecting evidence and avoiding scrutiny. This is all after just one month. No honeymoon for Liz.

Even her discussions with her Chancellor were poisoned with different views about whose idea the 45% tax cut had been. And she couldn’t even get the music right, Mike Pickering of M People being “livid” that she’d used Moving on Up as her entry song. How dismal can you get than appropriating stolen and false emotions as a keynote moment? Welcome to the world of political party conferences, I guess.

We must remember that the people gathered in Birmingham were all members of the Conservative Party and that it was exclusively this group that voted for her. The MPs didn’t have her as their choice. The country hasn’t been asked. These aren’t opinions but matters of fact.

This article in The Conversation gives a fairly up-beat assessment of her speech, although does start off with the reminder that it was delivered against a backdrop of “of economic chaos, open party warfare and polling that shows she’s on course for a spectacular election loss.” It makes mention of her references to levelling up and Brexit, two issues which served her predecessor so well at election time; also to the fact that she repeatedly “spoke directly to the British people.” As for her relations with the Chancellor, she confirmed that they were “in complete lockstep.” I’d not heard that word before so looked it up. Merriam-Webster defines the phrase as meaning “in perfect or rigid often mindless conformity or unison.” The main buzz-word, though, was “growth.”

At about 25 minutes, the speech was pretty short by the standards of these these things. She certainly couldn’t wait to get off stage: most speakers need to be dragged away from the mic. Perhaps she felt enough had been said already.

• The PM has dealt with much of the opposition in advance by doing two things. The first was to say that there are two parties – “growth” and “anti-growth”. The second was to brand “anti-growth” as bad and make a box into which all its adherents will be placed, the better to deal with them collectively. She’s even named these enemies as “the anti-growth coalition”. Not very snappy or original: but one must make allowances as it increasingly seems that English is not our PM’s first language.

So who are these manifest enemies of progress? They include, as The Guardian reports, people who lived in “north London townhouses” and got taxied to the BBC studios to express their views” as well as “Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the militant unions, the vested interests, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction Rebellion” and Greenpeace, who interrupted her speech with a demonstration.

• This rather Trumpian list has the air of something that could have gone on for longer but was only cut short by Twitter’s character limit. I’m interested to know what “the vested interests” mean, coming from someone with her educational and commercial background. “Talking heads” presumably refers to anyone who writes or says anything, in any media, about politics. “Brexit deniers” I presume is a shorthand for “people who think that Brexit might, perhaps, have not conferred all the promised benefits.”

What about the rest of them? The Green Party, non-Unionist parties in Northern Ireland and Plaid Cymru for starters. Why stop there? Why not add those who have found the various actions of the two Conservative governments since 2019 in some way troubling and are therefore reluctant to offer it unqualified support; those who are instinctively sceptical of political slogans and generalisations; those who feel that her definition of “growth” in the long-term is irrelevant if they cannot get through the next couple of years; and those previously loyal Tories who now need to pay higher mortgages as a result of last month’s idealogical experiment, referred to as the mini-budget? There may be others, but perhaps that might do for now.

• There’s also a much deeper point at work in her use of “growth” as a definition of national success. GDP and GNI are measures of wealth created by an economy. Human behaviour tends to make these also measures of consumption as the money we have tends to be used to buy things that in turn need to be made. The axiomatic assumption is that more production (and thus consumption) is good and that the reverse is bad. Like sharks, we must move forward or die. If we don’t have the money now then we can borrow it, so that we may consume more. As the crash in 2008 (and others before it) shows, an alternative view might be that we are all trapped in a massive global Ponzi scheme.

• It’s perhaps not so much the creation of wealth as what we choose to do with it that’s the problem. As interest rates rise, many who have money to spare might want to invest it in government stocks, including Premium Bonds or National Savings – safe but unspectacular. I, however, would feel reluctant to do this given that the government is currently borrowing money  to fund tax cuts. Also, the tax it does raise can be promised for one thing but spent on another.

The PM said in Birmingham that the British people “knew best” how to spend their money. She also re-affirmed her faith in the workings of the market. Let’s accept these two points and see where they takes us.

If we’re going to be given more money there are things to spend it on other than a new mobile or a cruise holiday. Things such as green infrastructure, the railways, our leaking water pipes and, above all, the NHS need serious investment but the government seems unwilling and unable to provide this: and even if it did promise to do so it’s doubtful if it could be trusted to follow it through. Nor does this jive with the “lean state” aspiration.

Fine – let the public pay for these. What would be needed would be bonds paying a decent rate of return, the proceeds of which would be used exclusively for these or other investments. They would need to be run without any government interference, which would also ensure that the timescale of activity wasn’t the current “vision” period which is normally fixed on the next election. These matters are, or ought to be, apolitical. If Truss is really serious about the “small state” then this would be a way of putting it to the test. At present, funding for these important things is promised, or not (and then actually provided, or not) largely for political gain. Some things are too important to be left to the shifting will of politicians. As the last month has shown, the shifting can happen all too quickly.

• Consumption also needs to include digital transactions. A vast amount of time, money and electrical energy is spent on uploading images or data we’re never going to see again to the cloud, or downloading apps and their upgrades that we don’t really need. This article in The Conversation suggests that data centres consume more energy than does the aviation industry. How many blurred photos of our cat or copies of copies of emails to people we’ve lost contact with do we really need?

• All of this is less serious than what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia. According to the BBC, Putin has said he will “stabilise” and “calmly develop” the situation in the areas of this foreign country which he has decided is now his. I think we all know what these phrases mean. Nuclear stuff? Anything’s possible.

• I was astounded to learn that Oliver has been the most popular boy’s name in Britain for the last eight years. I only know one Oliver of my generation but, on thinking about it, quite a few of the younger people I know have that name. Noah is now the most popular: appropriate given the levels of flooding that an increasing number of us will experience due to climate change.

• There are many appalling human injustices in the world but the one that always gets me right in the solar plexus is one that involves discrimination against or persecution of woman. Organised religion is always in the dock on this one in my book as, without any particular exception I can think of, it has been a brilliant way for over-educated middle-aged males to determine what should or should not be regarded as correct. So hats off – or scarves off – to the people in Iran who have been protesting following the death in police custody in September of a young woman who was arrested for not wearing a head covering. What awful nonsense religions are if this is the best face they can portray. On this evidence I’ll take my chance with Pascal’s Wager and say “rubbish to the lot of you…”