Rishi Sunak to tour UK town halls. Who will bother to attend?
Let’s answer the question straight away: Sunak’s town hall tour will be attended by a list of known Tory Party members who like his policies and can be relied on to give good quotes to press people like me.
To be clear: Rishi Sunak is planning a New Year tour of UK town halls, at which he aims to spread the good news (ha ha) of his tenure as Tory prime minister.
He’ll be crowing about having succeeded in halving inflation last year – even though he never had to lift a finger to do anything about it; inflation was certain to drop and he has no right to take any credit for it at all.
He’ll also point to figures showing that “illegal” channel crossings have fallen by more than one-third, in a year when “illegal” migration has risen across Europe – even though the autumn and winter have been excessively stormy, meaning such crossings have not been feasible.
And he’ll say the Tories are returning to their tax-cutting traditions with a 2p cut in National Insurance, that was announced in the autumn statement last November. That’s not a lot of good if it drains the NI fund. And wouldn’t it be better to use that money on economy-boosting initiatives that put more earned money into people’s pockets?
A Tory source said: ‘We need to keep recovering the economy so that we can cut taxes not just now but in the future – that is the aim.’
The problem with that is, the UK’s economy is not recovering. So we may assume that Sunak will be trying to gaslight us all with similar rosy predictions as well.
‘You will hear more and more from the PM about the contrast between what we are doing and what you would get from the Labour Party, who would saddle us with higher taxes, more immigration and a bigger welfare bill.’
This will be more gaslighting. Labour’s record shows lower taxation than the Tories’ current level, and lower immigration with faster processing of asylum-seekers and refugees.
If Labour’s social security bill was higher, it was because Labour did not cut payments and try to deny them to people who deserved them, simply to make tax cuts for people who were extremely rich and did not deserve them.
This junket will be nothing more than a public relations sham; fantasy politics to hoodwink the Tory faithful.
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Please come to my town, you effing banker, I’m too old to trek to London to kick off