The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Rishi is ignoring what is blindingly obvious to us all: the Tories are now beyond help
It has been another week of contradictions in Toryland: 13 years, 8 months, 27 days and counting. First, we had the spectacle of Rishi Sunak announcing a ban on disposable vapes on LAD Bible, of all places.
For those unfamiliar with LAD Bible, it is where blokes go for the “bantz” of viral videos with captions like “My ex-wife tried to kill me” and “I ate my friends to survive”. Think ConHome meets
Personally, I’m all for it but the Prime Minister? The former Winchester head boy is many things but he is not, and never will be, “one of the lads”. A self-proclaimed Thatcherite extending Nanny State’s apron strings on a clickbait website for rebellious teenagers? Something’s not quite right here.
The second antithetical came with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s suggestion that Labour would leave bankers’ multi-million pound bonuses uncapped and consider cutting corporation tax once… sorry – “if ” – elected (Sir Keir Starmer is taking nothing for granted, except the parents of private school children). It came after former Tory donor Richard Walker, the (privately educated) boss of budget supermarket Iceland, on Monday accused the Conservatives of having “failed the nation” as he announced his defection to Labour. Good luck paying the school fees, chum.
What next, Jeremy Corbyn to become chair of Momentum Friends of Israel? Diane Abbott to take over from Rachel Riley on
If the sight of stoney-faced Nicola Sturgeon blubbing her way through the Covid Inquiry was not discombobulating enough, we also had to bear witness to the topsy-turvyism of Jeremy Hunt declaring that he wouldn’t be cutting taxes much in next month’s budget, after all – less than a fortnight after comparing himself to Nigel Lawson. Perhaps he got confused and meant Jack Lawson, the former Labour MP and trade unionist? We will find out on March 6.
With the Conservatives facing what is predicted to be an extinction-level electoral event this autumn, it is frankly extraordinary that some bright spark in No11 actually suggested briefing “smaller tax cuts” this week – and even more staggering that the Chancellor followed this kamikaze advice. Yet we are living in the sort of alternative reality that allows Hunt to bang on about “fiscal discipline” while presiding over the highest tax take in peacetime and soaring government spending. This week we learnt that HMRC is to levy more than £100million in fines after an estimated 1.1 million people missed the January 31 tax return deadline. Tens of thousands more people will need to file selfassessment forms for the first time this year because of the Treasury’s decision to freeze income tax bands until 2028. And still state spending continues to skyrocket.
Yet the parallel universe we now inhabit was probably best summed up by Lord Forsyth this week when he expressed his incredulity that a Conservative government was even entertaining the idea of a UAE takeover of the titles and magazine. The seemingly exasperated Tory peer and former Scottish secretary, said: “For goodness’ sake, it is an absolute no-brainer that you do not wish a national newspaper to be owned, however indirectly, by what is proposed. Why should it take so long for Ofcom and everyone else to come to the obvious conclusion and put us all out of our misery?”
Good question. Urging Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer to “hurry up” in ruling the deal a dud, Baroness Stowell, a former Tory leader in the Lords, added: “It seems to most people that the reasons for objecting to this deal are quite fundamental and on points of principle, not necessarily points of technicality, and it shouldn’t require a great deal of her time for her to reach her decision.” Quite.
Sadly, what is obvious “to most people” doesn’t appear to be evident to the Government, which perhaps explains why an Ipsos Mori poll this week revealed that just 20 per cent of British adults are “satisfied” with Sunak. If you think that’s bad, consider that 31 per cent were “satisfied” with John Major ahead of his 1997 wipe out. The survey also revealed that the current administration has never been viewed as more capable than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. Eek. Disposable vape, anyone?
It is obvious to most people that the idea of any foreign state owning Britain’s last remaining broadsheet newspaper is a profoundly terrible idea. It is obvious to most people that government spending and taxes must be significantly reduced for the country to grow again. It is obvious to most people that net zero is completely self-defeating if it makes people colder and poorer while enriching the likes of Russia and China. It is obvious to most people that the UK cannot sustain immigration adding six million people to the British population over the 15 years from 2021 to 2036. It is obvious to most people that the NHS needs complete reform – and that at a time of unprecedented crisis and the highest waiting lists on record – doctors and nurses should not be allowed to go on strike. It is obvious to most people that anti-Semites calling for “jihad” should not be permitted to march on the streets of Britain. It is obvious to most people that Muslim pupils shouldn’t be allowed to pray in the playground of a secular school. It is obvious to most people that schools shouldn’t be teaching children that biological sex is mutable. It is obvious to most people that a convicted sex offender who has twice been denied asylum should not
The Prime Minister visited Haughton Academy in County Durham to talk to teachers and pupils about vaping
be allowed to stay in the country because he has “converted to Christianity”. It is obvious to most people that foreign judges shouldn’t have the power to overturn domestic legislation laid down by our democratically elected MPs. But on and on it depressingly goes, as if we are living in some sort of common sense-defying doom loop.
And it is blindingly, bleeding obvious to most people that none of this should have happened under a Conservative government. We could have accepted the high tax and spend, nanny statist, hug-a-jihadist, let in a million a year schtick from Labour.
But all this happened on the Conservatives’ watch. It is all very well the Government arguing that Labour would be even more hopeless. That’s probably true; don’t forget this women-can-have-penises brigade of Greta Thunberg devotees have proposed to deliver “a decarbonised power system” by 2030. In seven years’ time, we could be facing blackouts across most of the country, at least for those who have a house to live in. Our shortfall of around four million homes is going to get much worse if we continue with our open borders delusion.
The trouble for Team Sunak is that “most people” are genuinely looking at the state of things and asking themselves, how can it get any worse?
Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer for Zaka, an Israeli religious organisation that collects remains of the dead for burial, said one woman, half-naked from the waist down, was shot in the back of her head and found with a live grenade in her hand. Other victims had nails hammered into their private parts.
Equally disturbing, however, were the words of Ashley Waxman Bakshi whose 19-year-old cousin Agam Berger is still being held hostage in Gaza. “You can clearly understand our worry with every minute that passes when our women and girls are in the hands of these monsters, if they were able to do this in eight hours or 12 hours on October 7,” she said. “They have been there for 117 days. What if they are pregnant?”
The barbaric brutalisation of Israeli women by Hamas is nothing short of a crime against humanity and it is not just wrong, but morally repugnant, that so many of the death cult’s useful idiots continue to deny what has happened, even in the face of mounting evidence.