WORDS LURCH TO THE RIGHT
BRIAN Silvester has previously suggested that the Tories need to replace Boris Johnson with a true Conservative MP. Bearing in mind Boris Johnson himself removed a number of Tory MPs from the party, including the former MP for Eddisbury, voters might be forgiven for asking just which Conservative Party they are going to be supporting when faced with the ballot paper at an election.
He seems to want to lecture the Conservative Party on who is and is not a true Conservative, and offers a confusing variety of demands to address the cost of living crisis.
It’s good to see however that he agrees with Keir Starmer and the Labour Party that householders should be helped with rising fuel costs by removing VAT from domestic fuel. A promise Boris Johnson made as part of the Brexit campaign, a promise Boris now seems to have inadvertently forgotten.
The rest of his letter recommends a lurch to the right, but the Conservatives are already the most extreme centre-right party in Western Europe and are way out of line with the public.
His attacks on green levies to decarbonise our energy supply and tackle global warming risk making us more dependent on fossil fuels, and thus more exposed to world prices for them.
It’s precisely because of levy-funded investment in non-fossil fuel sources of energy such as wind and solar power that we are generating a lot of electricity from renewable sources in Britain, creating jobs here and reducing our exposure to Vladimir Putin’s malign influence on the world gas price.
He then criticises the level of taxation under the Conservatives which he claims to be the highest since 1945. But taxes are not high because we have wonderful public services – they are worse funded here than in the rest of Western Europe.
It’s because 40 years of free market policies started by Margaret Thatcher, and a deindustrialised economy run for the benefit of the financiers in the City of London, have given us poorer productivity than most European countries.
The Economist magazine rates Britain’s economic recovery from Covid as 22nd out of the 23 countries they examined. The national debt doubled in the 10 years from 2010 under the Conservatives, that is before Covid had been heard of.
Taxes are high under this Government because they are following failed policies, and because they will not tax the rich, everyone else has to pay more.
Phil Tate