It’s Westworld UK

WHISTLE IF YOU EVER NEED CARE New Treasury head’s fantasy over freeports

THE end of austerity is nigh! Again. We have heard this before, from no better authority than the last Prime Minister Theresa May.

It’s been a bit like the reported death of famous American author Mark Twain who, very much alive, commented wryly that stories about his demise “have been greatly exaggerated”.

That’s how it’s been with austerity – the Tories’ ideological way of punishing the poorest for the failures of the bankers. Until now.

In the Budget, to be delivered in just over a week, the final rites will be read.

Under Boris’s instruction the new No10 Puppet Chancellor Rishi Sunak will give us the clearest picture yet of the kind of government we will be dealing with for the next four years.

It will bury not just austerity but Thatcherism, the economic credo which has been the guiding light of the Tories for almost 40 years. So Boris would have us believe.

We should be more wary.

Sunak believes it. That’s why he was a shoo-in for the job from which humiliated Sajid Javid was unceremoniously given the boot.

Key to the Budget will be the creation of ten freeports throughout Britain.

These are sort of economic Wild West areas where anything goes except the laws regarding tax, financial regulations and planning.

These states within states could be, according to an analysis prepared by Sunak several years ago, generators of investment, jobs and trade.

Oh how Boris must have swooned when he saw in that report the magic

PROMISES over immigration have never had much of a link with economic policy or reality.

They are purely political – dog whistles tuned to the racist instinct of voters who might lean that way.

As migration has slipped down the league of measured phrase “rebalance the economy” – now the mantra on the wall of every room in Downing Street.

He must have been positively drooling when he got to the bit that said: “The stark divide between the economy of London and that of the North is one of the most pressing policy changes facing the UK.”

There’s my Chancellor, said the election-focused PM, conveniently forgetting he already had one.

But Javid hadn’t got the memo. Even voters’ interests we’ve not been hearing too much from the dog whistlers lately.

Boris has just given them a fanfare with the biggest change in immigration laws since the EU created free movement across borders 30 years ago. There will be an earnings threshold of £25,600 for “unskilled” workers.

Note to PM on NHS starting salaries: nurse, paramedic, midwife and radiographer – £24,200. Care assistant (the people who look after us in old age) – £17,600.

Just saying. if he had, he would have stood up for as a blood brother to Boris. So the the legacy of his heroine Margaret Budget will promise to open the Thatcher – low taxes, low, preferably spending taps, tear up – to a point – the minimal, public spending and a rules and switch some tax advantages balanced handbag (sorry, economy). between North and wealthy South.

He was, after all, his own man. With It will put off the Tory manifesto the emphasis now on the pledge of balancing the national budget

Sunak, who was Javid’s Treasury and appear to splurge on the NHS, Chief Secretary, knew there’s nothing crime and social care. “Levelling up”, that quite proves you are your own man with more to come. like undermining your boss and waiting A promised land, which will leave for the right moment to make a power Labour playing catch-up if they don’t grab. Not so much a puppet of No10 convincingly show that it’s bogus.