The state we’re in

Our new prime minister has done an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper and has said something that seems very reasonable:

We can all agree on that, can’t we? The state can’t fix my car, cut the grass or put out the bins. But that’s not what Brand Rishi actually means. Sunak is a hard right libertarian who believes that not only can the state not fix all your problems, it shouldn’t really fix anything. And he doesn’t mean trivial stuff either. He means the big stuff that makes life bearable. He is preparing us for “eye-watering” cuts to public expenditure because his new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who as health secretary continued to smash the Tory wrecking ball into the NHS, has literally said as much.

Sunak and co are dressing-up their “difficult decisions” as if they are trimming the fat from the state; cutting out waste. Because we all know, don’t we, that doctors and nurses are lazy and underworked and if we get rid of thousands of them, the NHS will be more efficient at everything, except treating people. He must also mean the state cannot fix the grotesque underfunding of schools, so let’s sack thousands of teachers, too. And the armed forces? Who needs them? Go through every aspect of The State and you will find that Sunak doesn’t want to cut services to the bone because the Tories have already done that. He wants to start removing limbs.

It also needs to be repeated that the likes of Sunak do not live in the same world as the rest of us. He is worth circa £750 million, three quarters of a billion quid. No amount of cuts to public expenditure will affect his life one iota. I do not begrudge anyone working hard, succeeding in life and becoming well-off. Look at your own children: would you want them to do less well than you? Some parent you are if the answer is no. But by the same token, Sunak’s vast wealth surely makes it awkward to attack the living standards of the very worst off in society and even, come to think of it, the working and middle classes.

Sunak wants you to feel it’s inevitable that he’s going to make life harder for you, so when he does, you’ve accepted his post Osborne argument that “we’re all in it together”, except that we aren’t and never were.

I’ve started work at a food bank and I have seen in two short weeks how difficult, impossible in some cases, people’s lives are. The safety net is already ripped and tattered. Sunak proposes to remove it altogether. When I am helping hand out bags of food to desperate people, Sunak will be enjoying the brand new gym and swimming pool he has built next to his pile in Yorkshire. I am not saying he should not use part of his vast wealth to build what he likes but I am saying it’s not a good look to then plunge the very poorest people into poverty and destitution.

I don’t think Sunak is up to much as a politician. He was the chancellor who squandered something like £37 billion on a Covid track and trace system that didn’t work. He threw billions at PPE that didn’t work, wrote off billions. with his badly targeted financial package and literally killed people with his ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme in 2020 when he gave us money to go out to eat and spread Covid even faster than it otherwise would.

What he does have is an expensive spin operation, hence the Brand Rishi stuff. He is super smooth and always happy to pose for a photo (see above). It is not necessarily the case that you have to have been brought up in modest household with little spare cash in order to understand the lives of ordinary folk, but it sure as hell helps.

In two weeks, we will learn about Sunak’s plans to make us all poorer, all but the wealthiest people in society. Like him. It was always thus. And it was people like Sunak who trashed the economy in the first place – he was chancellor, after all – leaving people like him to pick up the pieces, which he will do with damning austerity.

Dark days are coming, my friends. And the poorer you are, the darker they will be.