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- Tue Apr 18, 2023 5:37 pm
#42702
Thought that this, in an emailfrom Open Britain, was pretty good :
Rishi Sunak has now been PM for nearly six months. Hardly the fresh start we were promised, his premiership has been stained by the same non-stop cycle of scandals, investigations, and inquiries that embarrassed the country under Truss and Johnson.
The Raab inquiry; Scott Benton’s cash-for-favours scandal; Sunak paying Johnson’s legal fees; Richard Sharp and the BBC; Matt Hancock’s leaked texts; Keeping the illegal Rwanda flights plans alive. Sunak is not just trapped by the ineptitude and corruption of his predecessors – he’s completely embroiled in their insular and out of touch world.
This week, a new scandal dropped that once again calls into question Sunak’s now infamous promises for “integrity, accountability and professionalism at every level”.
The PM failed to declare shares held by his wife, Akshata Murty, in a childcare agency that will receive a big boost from the government. Sunak and his wife stand to benefit from Jeremy Hunt’s budget, which offers payments to childminders of £1200 when they sign-on to childcare agencies like Murty’s Koru Kids (mentioned by name on the UK government website).
Following on from outrage about Mrs Murty’s non-dom tax status, her financial connections to Shell and Goldman Sachs, and Sunak family ties to tax havens in the Cayman and British Virgin islands – this simply reinforces Sunak’s image as a PM completely detached from the reality most people live in. Sunak is the first PM ever to come from the world of hedge-funds and venture capital – and (probably) the first to be married to the heiress of a global tech-giant.
Sunak never fails to display how out of touch he is. Whether he’s talking about his lack of “working class friends” or admitting that he’s taken money from deprived parts of the UK, he comes across as someone that lives in an entirely different reality.
This week, we saw it again with his “Maths to 18” plans. Downing Street reportedly had to ditch their social media campaign after the only spokesperson they could find for it later claimed Sunak’s maths education plan was “short-sighted, out of touch and grossly unfair on students.”
Westminster in 2023 is like a remote islet, growing more and more distant from our real lives and instead cuddling up to oligarchs, aristocrats, and billionaires. It’s a systemic problem that can only be resolved with serious reform. Merely voting in another party without a mandate to fix it is not enough.
It’s why I’m committed to ending FPTP, enforcing a strong and binding ministerial code, seeing off Tufton Street think-tanks, fixing campaign finance law, and bringing back our human rights in full force – and Open Britain is too. It’s the only way to bring this Westminster club back down to Earth.
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
