The bookmakers’ favourite – by a long way – is a woman called Liz Truss. Obviously, I don’t know her personally and so my opinion of her must remain speculative, but on the basis of her manner and her intentions she appears to be a pretty nasty piece of work. The Tory party is already favoured with the nickname ‘the nasty party’, so if Ms Truss becomes leader we will have the dubious prospect of having a nasty leader of the nasty party. Oh, such fun.
What she says she intends to do if she becomes Leader (and therefore Prime Minister) is reduce taxation in order to stimulate the economy. That would be fine if we were living in ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times; we have a cost of living crisis going on which is really going to bite once winter arrives. And Ms Truss says she doesn’t agree with handing out allowances to help poorer people cope. She’s going to reduce taxes instead to solve the problem.
So who benefits from tax cuts? Well, it’s pretty simple really. The more you earn, the more tax you pay so the more you benefit from tax cuts. In other words, tax cuts largely benefit the rich. The poor on the other hand – the low paid, the unemployed, older people living on state pensions etc – mostly pay little or no tax because they don’t have sufficient income. And these are the very people who are going to be in greatest distress from generally rising prices and, in particular, the absolutely insane increase in power bills. This is the prospect facing the poor of Britain if Ms Truss wins the election to be the next Prime Minister.
So let’s look at another angle by asking who is entitled to vote in this election. Simple again – only the members of the Conservative Party are, and that amounts to between 160,000 and 200,000 people depending on which website you read. And even the higher number – 200,000 – amounts to mere 0.3% of the population.
And so I ask you: is it right in a so-called democracy that the British public should be forced to accept somebody like Liz Truss as Prime Minister on the whim of such a tiny minority of the electorate? Her current tenure will only run until the next General Election, of course, but that’s likely to be 3-3½ years away. It gives her plenty of time to do an awful lot of damage.
(Maybe there will be riots on the streets, but Liz already has that one covered. When one of her speeches was interrupted recently by protesters, she responded by saying that she will work to reduce the right to protest. So for ‘riots on the streets’, read ‘bloody riots on the streets.’ Where are we going?)
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