Comment on Autumn Statement Mark 2.
*The Manchurian Candidate who has recently taken over No 11 – and, by the looks of it, No 10 too! – delivered the second-longest suicide note in history with the presentation of his in-all-but-name first Budget.
You couldn’t make it up; really, you couldn’t! As his wife looked on, the smug Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt, our – alleged Conservative – Member for South West Surrey, delivered a crippling blow to the middle classes and the UK. His so-called Autumn Statement drove a coach and horses through the Tory party’s claim to be on the side of those who work hard, try to look after themselves and their families and save for a rainy day and their old age.
Did he care? Did he hell!
The Manchurian Candidate robbed the middle classes – the backbone and the engine room – of this once great country and the Tory Party – by dragging more and more of them into the higher rate 40p tax bracket.
In doing so, he has gleefully stomped all over the aspirations of millions of hard-working people with sizeable reductions in Capital Gains Tax Allowances – halving them and halving them again from £12,000 to £3,000 – deliberately designed to hit small investors.
He claimed he was a ‘Compassionate Conservative’ whilst urinating all over the golden geese that pay for all this compassion.
He threw yet more money into the grossly inefficient NHS’s black hole without demanding reform to ensure that money is well spent. He refused – yet again – to cap care costs for those with long-term conditions, such as dementia, and had the cheek to bang on about the Pandemic which he, one of the country’s longest-serving Health Secretaries, left this country so ill-prepared for, despite being warned, repeatedly, that he was sleepwalking into a dire situation when – not if, but when – a pandemic struck!
At the same time, he froze the defence budget when there is a war in Europe and the strong possibility of war between China and Taiwan on the horizon.
The Waverley Web is not against wealthy men holding great office; it firmly believes in a government of all the talents, but what The Manchurian Candidate revealed is that, as a very wealthy man, he has compassion for the poor and underprivileged but none whatsoever for the middle classes, whom he is prepared to rob blind to bolster his own ‘Compassionate Conservative’ principles.
Whilst most of his young SW Surrey constituents struggle to get on the local housing ladder and reel from rising interest rates, Buy-to-let Jeremy has an impressive property portfolio. Both he and his side-kick in No 11, Rishi Sunak, are entirely insulated from the struggles faced by millions of people on middle incomes. The Hunts own a Pimlico Pad, a country retreat in Hambledon (how on earth did he get planning consent in a field in The Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty?) and seven buy-to-let flats in Ocean Village, Southampton – where properties can change hands for as much as £1,200,000 for a penthouse apartment.
And, looking at his constantly bobbing head and smug smile as he delivered a death blow to the middle earners in Parliament, one has to wonder whose pulling his strings. Could it be his Chinese wife who presents a TV show for China’s state-run media that has been accused of ‘whitewashing’ the Communist Party’s human rights abuses?
What is abundantly clear is that our MP was determined to deliver an unimaginative doom-laden Autumn Statement devoid of vision and carefully crafted to strike fear into the hearts of Middle Britain – the engine room of the country’s prosperity. He kicked his Size 10 boots in the teeth of those who work hard and try to shift for themselves, preferring instead to throw more money yet at the unreformed NHS, which he, as health Secretary disincentivised for years.
He did nothing yesterday to incentivise growth or increase productivity; he devised a demoralising plan that depressed the strivers and assisted many skivers. As Sarah Vine stated in today’s Daily Mail – a Tory-supporting paper, please note! –
“he offered up not one sliver of hope, not a single bright idea and hasn’t the emotional intelligence to realise that the country needs to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.”
Thankfully, The Manchurian Candidate faces a crisis of his own with the prospect of his hitherto safe constituency being cut in half, hopefully propelling him out of politics in the forthcoming general election. No doubt he doesn’t care and, for that reason, is happy to torpedo the UK economy and its people.
Jeremy Hunt – boundary changes are ‘terrible for me personally’