Sunak must not revert to type after war is over

WE’RE all socialists in a crisis, just as there are no atheists on an plane about to crash.

But we must stop this Conservative government reverting to bad old cutting ways when this crisis is over.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak finally grasped that tens of billions must be spent protecting wages and livelihoods to save jobs and businesses. And that move is a repudiation of Torynomics.

Yet victory will be temporary if Covid-19 in 2020 is followed by choking austerity that strangled a stronger recovery after the 2008 global banking collapse.

Labour Left-winger John McDonnell’s pointed quip that the Tories are now also Marxists underlines the hollowness of Boris Johnson’s election claims that Labour would bankrupt the UK.

Sunak being forced to borrow more than Gordon Brown in the financial crisis, and debt spiralling above £2trillion, is as necessary as it was a dozen years ago.

TRAGEDY

With 30% knocked off the FTSE100 and unemployment poised to soar, Brown and TUC chief Frances O’Grady were on the side of the angels. The fear is Johnson and Sunak will repeat the mistakes of David Cameron and George Osborne – who wrongly blamed rising deficits 12 years ago on spending on nurses, teachers and the poor to justify self-defeating Tory squeezes on pay and services.

History repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce, as McDonnell, the vindicated Marxist, reminded me in the recent past.

Johnson has conveniently embraced the public intervention and regulation he ideologically decries but it isn’t his get-out-ofjail-free card. Labour’s likely next leader Keir Starmer must pin Johnson’s fatal errors on him.

People may die because of the unprincipled incompetent in No 10.

While health and emergency workers risk death to save others, Johnson had to be pushed by French PM Emmanuel Macron into finally shutting pubs.

Tories and the Right try to evade scrutiny and accountability, batting away legitimate questions by screaming the Left play politics.

But socialists will win the peace after the war on coronavirus by refusing to be intimidated or silenced.