Clearly someone’s told Rishi Sunak that all this stuff his party has been spouting for ten years about helping those “just getting by” has no political capital and won’t keep him in power beyond the end of the year.
So the new mantra is “squeeze the poor to feed the rich” which many believe is what has been said in the private members clubs of St James and Mayfair since 2010.
Let’s remind ourselves what the deal has been to date. We started with “austerity”, an idea that we could all tighten our belts to get us out of the financial crisis that had been created by over exuberance in the banking sector. That led to a lot of civic amenities being closed and a lot of people on benefits , finding their benefits were cut, Austerity was a tax on the standard of living of the less well-off , though Boris Johnson was happy to tell us “we’re all in this together”.
Lately we have been told we are adjusting to the new post-Brexit , post-Covid economic paradigm where yet again it is the poor that are holding back tax-cuts to the rich, cuts that presumably will incentivise the rich to make Britain richer (the old adage is money makes money). This is another idea that goes down well in the clubs to St James and Mayfair.
It also goes down well in constituency committee rooms and at party conferences. The current Conservative party is a coalition of people who don’t seem to like each other very much and like their electorate even less. It is held together by a common purpose to stay in power , rather than any great vision for Britain. It is rife with corruption and is generally despised by the public for its antics.
With such headwinds facing him, Sunak has to turn to the one idea that seems to bring everyone behind it and so the headline.
But in the real world, his party is not like that. The people who I have worked with – Opperman, Trott and now Maynard are not greedy opportunists but people who have tried to improve the take up of pensions credit, to sort out the administrative problems of the State Pension and are trying to level up pensions so that we all save with a common purpose, dignity in retirement.
So which Conservative party are you asking me to vote for?
I think it very unlikely that I will vote for a Conservative politician at the next General Election, but if I did, it would be for the candidate and not the party.
The Conservative Party is currently in a doom-loop where its only hope is that the millions it annoys with headlines like this – don’t turn up to vote and the constituency of Telegraph reading wealthy and aspirants to affluence, do,
I have voted once for Conservatism , because the alternative was class-war politics that I don’t get on with. The conservatism of Theresa May appears less destructive than the alternatives I have been presented with.
If Sunak had taken the path towards the compassionate one-nation conservatism I have seen in conversations with Opperman, Trott and Maynard, I would have followed him.
But if he is re-treading the pathway to social division and regressive taxation that this headline suggests, I will have none of it.