Rishi Sunak has murdered the principles of Conservative success
sir – Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a masterly Commons performance on Budget day. In contrast, Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition, delivered an exceptionally poor response.
However, one had to sympathise with Sir Keir’s dilemma. He had to choose between trashing policies that embraced Labour’s traditional economic approach, and giving support to a government that his own members hate with a vengeance.
Thus the “Conservatives” got away with murder. Murder of the economic and fiscal principles at the foundation of their political success during the last two decades of the 20th century. I fear that Thatcherism is, finally, dead. This is bad news for Britain’s future (which, following Brexit, ought to have been among the rosiest on the planet).
How tragic that Boris Johnson should have done so much to free us from the dead hand of EU bureaucracy, only to throw it all away with his timidity in the face of the pandemic. Now millions of us on the moderate
Right are faced with a choice between two versions of social democracy. John Waine
Nuneaton, Warwickshire
sir – Those who feel we have never had it so bad since the Sixties might remember that, under Labour in the Seventies, with Denis Healey as Chancellor, inflation was so high that prices in the supermarket rose weekly. Catherine Castree
Fetcham, Surrey
sir – It seems that everyone wants the Government to spend more on things like Covid, the NHS or transport. However, everyone wants someone else to pay for it.
John Agnew
Willerby, East Yorkshire
sir – “The young face life-altering carnage,” writes Sherelle Jacobs (Comment, March 4).
I started paying income tax in 1968, and until 2015 was helping the country to repay its First World War debt. I did not complain that I had to contribute to the cost of a war fought decades before I was born. My generation also had to pay off Second World War debt.
That those now alive have to expect the cost of fighting Covid will fall on our shoulders, spread over the years ahead, is natural, fair and sensible. Ralph Godley
Lincoln
sir – The financial consequences of the pandemic seem to be similar to about 10 years of a Labour government. John Dupont
Clevedon, Somerset
sir – I had assumed that on Budget day the Chancellor would be carrying important documents from Downing Street to Parliament in his little red dispatch box. I am irritated to see that, like most actors with on-screen luggage, he decided to carry an obviously empty case. It’s impossible to act as if it is full; it just looks silly.
Jo O’grady Bristol