If Rishi Sunak wants to establish himself as a champion of drivers & ordinary families he needs to be bold — and fast
Step on gas
THE Tories cannot just limp on to the next election hoping something turns up. They need to be radical.
The suggestion that they won’t cut tax from its 70-year high should dismay us all.
A Labour Government would definitely not do so.
We might then be stuck for years with corrosive, eye-watering tax levels.
The Tories MUST act on that . . . and on Net Zero too.
Poll after poll shows the overwhelming unpopularity of fleecing the public in the zeal to end our carbon emissions.
Some 72 per cent of 2019 Tory voters in one new survey want the cost of living cut regardless of Net Zero.
Only seven per cent prioritise emissions.
Our various climate deadlines were fixed entirely arbitrarily and with no consideration for the exorbitant costs, now becoming horrifyingly clear.
Rishi Sunak must delay the phasing-out of oil and gas boilers, plus the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles, while staunchly opposing all Ulez-style, tax-hiking traffic schemes.
If the PM wants to establish himself as the champion of drivers and ordinary families he needs to be bold — and fast.
Land of sloth
A TOXIC mix of timidity and typical British red tape risks strangling the life out of the first properly conservative policy in months.
It is dead right for Welfare Secretary Mel Stride to end the abuse of sickness benefits by hundreds of thousands choosing idleness over work.
Except it now won’t happen till 2025 at the earliest.
By which time we may have a Labour Prime Minister who would NEVER cut benefits.
Mr Stride says he must first “consult” everyone involved.
Health assessors must be retrained and regulations laboriously altered.
What utter nonsense. This needs to happen NOW.
But this is our country today.
Anything takes years, or decades — and staggering sums — to plan, build or implement.
Even outside the EU we are paralysed by rules, by wokery, by fear of political blowback, by NIMBY voters and by an obstructive left-wing civil service.
And the competition abroad races ahead.
Blame game
THE schools concrete fiasco is “the Tories’ fault” even though Labour also had 13 years to fix it.
The catastrophic bankrupting of Birmingham is down to Tory cuts, not 11 years of grotesque mistakes by a Labour council whose new leader is on his hols.
The cost-of-living crisis is the Tories’ fault even though it is a global phenomenon caused by Covid and war.
See the pattern?
Everything is down to the wicked Tories even if it’s not. Or if it’s also, or even exclusively, Labour’s fault.
Do the Left really think voters buy into their “goodies and baddies” worldview?