Mind The Gap

 

At least he says he won't serve in her Cabinet!

On my wavelength at present, the ghastly Liz Truss is totally impossible to ignore. Her proposals demand attention, and that doesn’t mean approval. AND I have just re-noticed that she is supposed to be Foreign Secretary though any recent activity in that quarter is non-existent! It is also barely tolerable to contemplate around another two weeks of this languid lacuna in any meaningful government though Truss cannot be blamed for that. It’s just the way the Conservatives choose to go about electing a new leader. Sloooowly; ponderously; tiresomely slowly, while ignoring doing anything meaningful about the threats of inflation and cost of living hikes . And to what end? It looks like a Truss victory is in the bag; I can’t believe I have just written that!! One cheery note from a Truss victory, however, will be the almost definite defeat in the 2024 for the Conservatives.

But in the meantime, Liz’s trumpeted plans feature reversing rises in National Insurance and Corporation Tax which proposal she further embellishes by refusing to allow scrutiny of the details by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. The Tony Blair Institute has calculated that the N.I. cut would help the poorest tenth of households by 76 pence a month on average whereas the richer households in the U.K. will be better off by £93 a month. And presumably the voters in this leadership contest either do not know or do not care that “Almost 90 percent of the [N.I.] giveaway will go to the richest half of households” according to Stuart Adam of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Liz, in one of her poses.

There are fascinating figures available. The top one percent of earners take home an employment income of around £208,000 and this group of what one might call, ‘pretty rich’ number around 524,000 individuals to whom a 1.25 per cent N.I. reduction, will gift £2,445 per person, per annum. Apparently, the Treasury will be giving to this comparatively small number of people, around £1.3 billion which is a little more than Truss will be giving to the bottom 60 percent.[£1.1bn] Somehow, without invoking a class war, this hardly points to a just and fair society. This scenario was the reason why Sunak chose not to reverse his N.I. rise when pressured to do so by Tory M.P.s but raised the threshold for payment instead. Sunak commented on the Truss tax plans as ‘promising the earth to everyone’ and signalled he would not serve in her Cabinet if asked, while Michael Gove, a latecomer to Sunak-support, suggests she is taking ‘a holiday from reality.’ Gove adds, “I cannot see how safeguarding the stock options of FTSE 100 executives should ever take precedence over supporting the poorest in our society.” Dominic Raab meanwhile describes the Truss efforts as ' a suicide note.'

The British public too.
Wise words from Warren Buffet.

Paul Waugh on inews suggests that Boris's huge success in the 2019 election was, in part,  wildly successful because it came

Dominic Raab

 from his claim, which was believed, to be on the side of the ‘little guy.’ Waugh suggests that Boris’s much-trumpeted levelling up was effectively an admission that ‘trickledown’ economics did not actually work. But Truss’s economic plans plainly imply that they do; she claims that her tax cuts will ultimately benefit everyone because they will help jump-start the economy. And all this in the face of a huge bills emergency with frightening inflation [possibly up to 18% in a couple of months’ time] and fuel costs on the rampant rise, make not only her plans incomprehensible but her considerable support among Tory voting members, equally mystifying.

Third visit to Kyiv for Boris to meet admirer, Zelensky.
24/08/2022

Boris has just [24/08/2022] paid his third visit to Ukraine which prompts an unkind remark about his total lack of any Prime Ministerial action in Britain during the past several weeks. However, a little further study has shown that his fondness for posing in a safe war zone [Kyiv]seems to be founded on genuine feelings of protective fondness for both Zelensky and Ukraine and is one of the few strands of his job that he genuinely cares about. Johnson has now been presented with the Order of Liberty, the highest honour in Ukraine for foreign nationals. Zelensky avers that Boris is “a great friend of Ukraine”; It’s just that he is a total failure in British government even though many in his party still love him and would prefer him as P.M. rather than either Truss or Sunak! As I wrote above, ‘mystifying’!

Michael Gove

Karim Brohi, trauma surgeon,
Royal London

Post Script

Dr Karim Brohi, trauma surgeon at the Royal London, tweeted last weekend that there had been multiple admissions for suicide attempts, a continuing increase in such abuse as a result of financial pressures. Debt and economic hardship are leading to more domestic abuse, more alcohol-related injuries and more examples of multiple jobs causing tiredness and accidents.