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Twitter, I think we can all agree, is many things. Humorous, angry, enlightening, vindictive – you take your pick. One thing it usually isn’t is profound. But then, once in a blue moon, you read something that stops you in your tracks. Yesterday was that day. It was in a tweet by the writer, actor and TV presenter Adil Ray. It went like this:
“It is absolutely freezing today. Heating bills are catastrophic. People will suffer like they have never experienced before. It’s unacceptable lives are severely at risk. Heat or eat? Should Sunak be addressing the nation? Where is he?”
It resonated because it’s all true. We know that we live in a country where nothing seems to work, where millions are in food and now fuel poverty, the NHS is in crisis and it feels like no one is in charge. We don’t elect prime ministers in the UK: they are chosen by the political party which wins a general election. In 2019, Boris Johnson became PM, followed by the hapless Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak. Truss crashed the economy in a few disastrous weeks, was booted out by her MPs and replaced without any kind of vote by Sunak who had lost the Tory leadership vote last summer to…er…Liz Truss. But they all have one thing in common: when the going gets tough, they’re nowhere to be seen. Surely as the senior politician in the land, Rishi Sunak should be front and and centre of our attention, but he’s not. He pops up at prime minister’s questions on a Wednesday lunchtime and then he disappears. Boris Johnson once hid in a large freezer to escape scrutiny. Sunak behaves as if he is a hostage, which in pure political terms he is, under direction from the barking mad right-wing libertarians who have taken over. That shouldn’t stop him being a leader.
My take on Adil Ray’s tweet is that things are much worse than Sunak realises. It’s not just because he is fabulously and, in my view, obscenely rich that he is so out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. Maybe it goes deeper than that. I find it hard to believe that Sunak, who once said he had no working class friends, has surrounded himself with people who were on free school meals or attended food banks; people who regard as success being able to put bread on the table. It is not the PM’s fault that he has lived a life of luxury and privilege, where everything was handed to him on a plate with a silver spoon. But he has not demonstrated at any stage that he understands people at the other end of the spectrum.
At the very least, Sunak should be visible, offering reassurance to a worried country, many of whom’s citizens are scared that they may freeze to death this winter or not have enough food to eat. Energy bills are twice what they were last year. Should he not be out there telling people that he will do “whatever it takes” a cliche he used all the time during the dark days of Covid, to make sure people don’t suffer or even die? For the umpteenth time, this is a rich country. There is plenty to go round. All that is stopping us is the will. Sunak’s absence from the stage clearly indicates that he doesn’t have the will. He certainly doesn’t have the empathy.
Trust me when I say people are fearful of what the winter will, not may, bring. Some of them are people I actually know. And, as I said earlier this week, there are people who work for the DWP who use food banks and claim the very benefits they pay out. If this is not a broken country then please show me one that is.
I’ll conclude with a common theme. I grew up in a poor lone parent household, with no heating except a single electric heater and we lived day to day. Back then, there were no free school meals and no in-work benefits. I was protected from most of it by my mother who passed up meals so I didn’t have to. Today, this is normal. And there are many millions of people in a much worse position than I was. I’m scared by what is happening to Broken Britain and I so wish we had a prime minister capable of putting the country back together again. But Sunak is a nowhere man, apart from popping out briefly today to announce we’re getting some new fighter aircraft and he wants to stop people going on strike so they can earn enough money for heating and eating. We deserve better from our leaders, certainly better than Brand Rishi. There’s no sign we’re going to get it anytime soon.
