You almost feel sorry for Rishi Sunak, he is up against probably the most inept opponent ever in the race for No 10 but he is going to lose because although he looks a better option, he is actually even more inept. Not only is he losing, he is personally boosting Truss’ campaign to ensure that he loses more emphatically. As I posted on Thursday, Truss is crashing and burning every time she appears at a hustings. His problem is that in between he helps to repair the Foreign Secretary by his own gaffes.
He is on video addressing Conservative supporters in Tunbridge Wells (or Royal Tunbridge Wells) in the High Weald of Kent, telling them the Tories inherited Labour's funding system that sent money to 'deprived urban areas' and he had started work on undoing it. They may have been Tory members but clearly at least one of them was a Truss supporter because they sent the video clip to The New Statesman :
This should be the end of his leadership campaign. I can’t believe he said it out loud in the age of smartphones pic.twitter.com/EzIWEHBEsz
— Nooruddean (@BeardedGenius) August 5, 2022
This is from a man who until a month ago, was the finance minister in a government whose regional policy was supposed to be about levelling UP. Instead he was diverting funds from “deprived urban areas” to places like Tunbridge Wells in the stockbroker belt. This is a gift for Labour in the next election.
This is clearly what those at the top of the party think as opposed to what they normally say in public.
I would be surprised if Labour’s TV ads need to show any Labour politicians at all. They are probably even now editing clips of Sunak specifically to be aimed at the red wall seats.
As Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges tweeted:
It almost certainly doesn't matter. But if Rishi Sunak were to somehow miraculously turn this contest round, this clip would probably hand Labour the next election on its own. https://t.co/CTlYplcHCb
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) August 5, 2022
A lot of commentators think Sunak will step down at the next election if he loses, which means he will step down at the next election. He is going to lose and lose badly which tells you all you need to know about the lack of talent in the Conservative party at the moment.
Both he and Truss are falling over themselves to offer the Tory membership every kind of mad policy including scrapping all those EU regulations - the ones every Tory leadership candidate promises to ditch but can’t actually identify. We are a long way down the rabbit hole.
Incidentally, the Guardian listed 10 things people didn’t know about Sunak and one of them is that he is a dyed in the wool Brexiteer, writing in 1997 in his school magazine that Blair “revels in the label of a patriot, but has plans for the possible breakup of the United Kingdom and membership of an eventual European Superstate. Already the New Labour rhetoric sounds worryingly pro-European and avid pro-Europeans are being sent to Brussels.”
"Worryingly pro-European" - think of the mindset behind that. He prefers Britain to be reassuringly anti-European. What did they teach them at Winchester?
He is one of those people who believe all the stuff they have ever read about the British Empire as being a cross between UNESCO, the World Bank and the Gates Foundation. They read Kipling and accept without question that educating savages and saving them from themselves was the driving ethos of empire rather than the English plundering riches at the expense of indigenous populations when might was right and the victors wrote their own history.
We may have been ever-so-slightly more benign than some other colonial powers who copied us but that’s not saying very much. Sunak actually thinks we are going to revive it all again, replace the UN and that the EU has been holding us back from our true destiny rather than propping us up.
A letter in The Times yesterday shows how wrong he is. It pointed out that nine of the world’s top ten most productive nations on Earth are either in the EU or operate to EU rules. Here it is:
Nice letter in the FT today pic.twitter.com/fdc4PxhZSU
— Caroline de Gruyter (@CarolineGruyter) August 5, 2022
I decided to check and found a website which supports this claim. It measures “productive” as being a country’s GDP (At Purchasing Power Parity or PPP) divided by the total number of hours worked.
On that basis the top ten are:
- Ireland
- Norway
- Switzerland
- Luxembourg
- Germany
- USA
- Denmark
- France
- Holland
- Belgium
Norway and Switzerland aren't technically in the EU but follow most EU laws (in Norway's case ALL of them).
So the letter appears to be true. Ireland is top while the UK (not shown) comes in at thirteenth place.
The Tory party is hell bent on pulling us out of the EU's orbit because they think we'll be better off but there is zero evidence not only that it isn't true, but that it is actually damaging the British economy as can be seen in falling trade and output coupled with rising inflation. These indicators are either directly (trade) or indirectly (inflation, falling output) caused by Brexit.
Makes you think doesn’t it? We have two gaffe prone, light weight non-entities vying to become the next prime minister pursuing a policy which is already making us poorer and they are pledging to pursue it with even more vigour than Johnson. God help us.
