Sunak should study meaning of fairness
I HATE to have my holidays disrupted. So I sympathise with Rishi Sunak, who is reported to have been planning to spend Easter in Santa Monica, in the £5.5million penthouse flat with sweeping views of the Pacific which he and his wife own (The Times, April 9).
Having clobbered ordinary workers with 15 tax rises totalling £1,060 a year including the hike in National Insurance which came into operation this week, and having pushed through the £20 a week cut reversing the previous increase in Universal Credit which will leave hundreds of thousands of people in absolute despair and increased other benefits including pensions by only 3% while inflation heads for 8%, and having introduced a meaningless buynow-pay-later loan scheme for gas and electricity bills while blocking Labour’s plan for an outright £600 a year reduction in energy bills by taxing the windfall profits of Shell and BP, he must have felt that the world was looking rosy.
While others are losing their homes because they can’t pay the bills, he and his family own at least four properties in Britain and across the world which have been lovingly chronicled by Hello magazine.
He even felt flush enough to donate £100,000 to his old school, Winchester College, where the fees are over £43,000 a year, although Government money for state schools is being restricted.
By claiming non-domiciled status for his wife, the family avoided an estimated £2million a year in tax, leaving them cash to burn while others are forced to choose between turning on their boiler and buying food because they can’t afford both.
Of course as Chancellor he could have plugged the “non-dom” tax dodge and released more money for public spending including the NHS, schools, benefits, heating bills, transport, and reversing the cuts in the Army, but he and his own family were benefitting richly from it, as have a number of other Conservatives.
But now it’s all turned sour, as revelations about this brazen example of one law for us and another for the Tories have disrupted his holiday plans.
Not to mention the further revelation that while guiding the economy of Britain for 18 months, he held a green card declaring him to be permanently resident in the United States.
Since he’s now forced to stay in Britain rather than walking on the sandy beaches of California, perhaps he could make use of the time by studying a dictionary. He could start with the word ‘fairness.’