Baby You’re A Rich Man

I’m not a ‘soak the rich’ lefty. I’m someone who believes passionately in a meritocratic country, whereby everyone has a chance to get on, regardless of their background and that aspiration and hard work is rewarded. That I also believe in a welfare state does not change that view. We can all pay for that with those who can afford more having to pay more. All well and good. So, it shouldn’t matter that our next prime minister is twice as rich as our late Queen, right? In some ways it doesn’t matter, but in other ways it does.

Rishi Sunak, for it is he, is worth the best part of three quarters of a billion quid. He has luxury homes in Yorkshire, London and Los Angeles. He has made his fortune in hedge funds but now chooses to eke out an existence as a politician, earning a tiny fraction of what he did before. So, he’s either doing politics as a hobby or he believes in public service. What’s it to be?

If he becomes our next prime minister, he is likely to make enormous public spending cuts. These will massively and disproportionately affect the less well-off. Increasing energy bills may mean the closure of the community owned swimming pool in his Richmond constituency but it will not bother him because he has recently installed his own heated pool and gymnasium attached to his mansion. When asked about the type of bread his family likes, Sunak explained they buy all kinds of bread. Meanwhile, millions literally struggle to put any sort of bread on the table and have to use food banks. Can one of the richest men in Britain preside over a government that will make poor people poorer?

In terms of politics alone, he can. When David Cameron was PM and George Osborne his chancellor – multimillionaires both – with the assistance and connivance of the Lib Dems, they introduced punishing austerity. They ran down the aforementioned services, in particular the NHS, making the lives of – yes, you guessed it – the less well-off more miserable. It wasn’t a great look, but they got away with it until Cameron handed the keys of the country to disaster capitalists who took us out of the European Union. Subsequent PMs have merely made things worse. Now we have the grim prospect of a man with more money than God – well, King Charles, anyway – telling us we must be made poorer while the likes of him can keep getting richer.

Sunak can do this one of two ways. He can work for the whole country, repairing public services and ending poverty or he can turn his back on the very weakest in society and allow them to freeze and starve to death, or whichever comes first. If he chooses the latter, I do not see how he can succeed.

Whether or not Sunak was a self-made man (he wasn’t) or that he married into a family of Indian multibillionaires (he did) won’t matter if he works for all of us. But recent history shows he won’t and he will continue to attack the lower orders who were not handed a first class education at Westminster School and elite universities.

Because it’s going to be about fairness. If Sunak cuts tax for the rich, it will not be a good look. If he cuts services he doesn’t use, it will not be a good look. Those looks do matter. Given the cavalier way in which he shafted so many independent, freelance workers during the Covid crisis “because they don’t usually vote Conservative” shows, I fear, his true side. The twitter hashtag #NeverRishi has been very popular for a reason.