Sunak is right on tax cuts — only ‘idiot’ would disagree

Sean O’Grady, The Independent

A new Eden, literally, to be created in Morecambe. Women’s changing facilities miraculously to appear in every single rugby club in Northern Ireland. A new chimp house at Twycross Zoo. The sense of a country levelling up was supposed to be palpable. But it ended up with the prime minister under investigation by the police for a fixed penalty offence (again — what’s he like?).

Quite a few didn’t like him using an official jet to gad about the country promoting his schemes — the railways are running, for a change. And now he’s getting slagged off for calling the great British public, aka voters, aka his employers, “idiots”. He also upset the Tory mayor of the West Midlands for making local authorities take their “begging bowl” to Michael Gove so they can buy a new bus shelter. Four PR blunders in a single day — and they say the British have a productivity problem!

Only three months into his premiership and its getting a little like the final days of Gordon Brown and Theresa May — nothing he tries to do seems to go quite right. An accident-prone “narrative” is developing, thanks also to hapless walking disaster zones such as Nadhim Zahawi, Steve Barclay and Suella Braverman, who recently decided to lecture an 82-year old Holocaust survivor. Strikes and U-turns on wind farms, fracking, housing targets and online safety punctuate gaps in the news agenda if there’s an absence of gaffes.

The tragedy is that Sunak is doing about the best job on the economy he can, as a Tory in the dire post-Brexit circumstances he and his party have created. When he called the voters idiots, he was actually trying to pay them a compliment. He was trying to treat them like adults. To be fair, then, what he said was: “I’m a Conservative, I want to cut your taxes … I wish I could do that tomorrow, quite frankly, but the reason we can’t is because of all the reasons you know. You’re not idiots, you know what’s happened.”

He was addressing an audience of proud Lancastrians deeply grateful for their new Eden of the North, but somehow the implication that they were simpletons crept into his remarks. Imagine, for example, if the King sat down for the next Christmas message and told his people “you’re not idiots, you know palaces cost a fortune to maintain”; he wouldn’t be monarch for very long.

Still, Sunak is right; though he should really be directing his message to the hard-right of his party who cling to the fantasies that gave us the Truss premiership, the Kwasi Kwarteng budget and the twin sterling and gilts crises of only a few months ago.

It seems the Tories and their remaining supporters, or at least a faction of them, have learned nothing from the blunders of last year. Unfunded tax cuts do not unleash Britain’s potential for growth — which is badly stymied by a labour shortage and loss of European markets. What unfunded tax cuts unleash instead is inflation, a devalued pound and higher interest rates.

Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are right about that. It seems clear that the “slimmed down” budget in March will contain no tax cuts. Tory MPs are jittery, ahead of local elections in May that promise to be a humiliation.

So the old religion of indiscriminate tax cuts still attracts the faithful. Magical thinking isn’t dead on the Brexity wing of the Conservative Party, where even now some imagine Boris Johnson can rise from the dead and perform miracles for them.

Sunak now has to deal with yet another factional group among his MPs — the Conservative Growth Group. This is being run by former levelling up secretary Simon Clarke and former environment secretary Ranil Jayawardena, two youngish men whose promising cabinet careers were briefly boosted by Liz Truss and were then summarily sacked by Sunak. Must have hurt. Their inaugural meeting was attended, discreetly, by the Tories’ other lost leader, Liz “Growth. Growth. Growth!” Truss. They will be nothing but trouble for Sunak and Hunt. Some might think them idiots.