Tory leopard won’t change his policy spots

FOR almost 24 hours I was on cloud nine because the biggest drag on this country was being removed.

Then the realisation that Tory party members would have the final choice of PM plunged me into deep concern.

Around 47 million people are entitled to vote in a General Election, but there are only around 160,000 Tory Party members and it is they, not the 47 million, who are going to choose our next Prime Minister; the same ones who chose Boris Johnson.

To make matters worse, 86 per cent of Tory Party members are in the top social group, and we can be sure they regard the rest of us as scroungers.

My depression was further deepened to hear that Rishi Sunak is the Tory Party’s favourite for PM – a man who had to be pretty well forced into helping those who were drowning in the rising costof-living crisis.

When Boris Johnson was made leader of the Tories, no thought was given to the fact that the man was not a competent chief executive but more a pied piper who would lead voters away from Jeremy Corbyn.

The Tory Party is a Brexit party, and their actions mimic the belief that Brexit is working.

When Covid broke out, we compared our performance to other poor performers like Italy and Spain, because we wanted to say we were doing better out of the EU, when we could have reduced Covid deaths by over 100,000 if we had learnt from SARS-experienced countries.

We keep being told we can only reduce VAT because we are out of the EU – Spain has reduced VAT on household energy bills from 21 per cent to 10 per cent, and last year they levied a windfall tax on energy suppliers.

Sunak is a wealthy Tory leopard who will not change his economic policy spots.

We are in hopefully time-limited difficult circumstances and we need temporary changes of policy to suit, not more Tory austerity.

Roger Watts, by email