It sometimes feels like Rishi Sunak must be the unluckiest man in British politics. An instinctive small-state Conservative, he was forced, by the coronavirus pandemic, to be the chancellor who handed out money on an unprecedented scale. He describes himself as a tax cutter, yet – entirely against his will! – he found himself introducing what other Tories like to describe as “the highest tax burden in 70 years”. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact he has more money than God you could almost start to feel sorry for him.
And now poor, helpless Rishi has found himself doing the exact opposite of what he always wanted to yet again. He’s socially liberal and his pitch to be leader of the Conservative Party was basically that he was the moderate, sensible one. Unfortunately it turns out that the Tory members don’t want either of those things, so he’s trying again, and is rebranding himself as the panderer-in-chief.
So, in the last couple of weeks, he’s promised to ban all construction on the green belt. This is certainly a bold pitch for a man who’s building his own private swimming pool in the middle of a housing crisis, but it fits with the prejudices of the Tory membership, so out it came. It also, helpfully enough, gave him a segue to the next section of his stump speech, which concerned the ill-defined modern evil of wokery. “What’s the point in stopping the bulldozers in the green belt,” Sunak asked, “if we allow left-wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values?” Alan Partridge would be proud.
Perhaps the area where the illiberal arms race dynamic in Sunak’s campaign is most visible, though, is immigration policy. Since the leadership contest warmed up, he’s vowed to double the number of foreign criminals Britain deports. He’s said that “no option is off the table” to stop migrants crossing the Channel, and has promised to make the government’s proposals to deport refugees to Rwanda work. He’s also said that the number of refugees the UK accepts should be “determined by need”, which seems to misunderstand something fairly fundamental about the concept of refugees.
You hardly need to be Machiavelli to parse all this: Sunak is losing to Liz Truss, who is backed by Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and while we don’t know much about the Tory membership it’s hardly a huge stretch to imagine them to have a greater appetite for right-wing culture war nonsense than the electorate at large.
There’s an outside chance Sunak’s tactic will even work: a poll published on Monday by the Italian company Techne suggested he was just five percentage points behind Truss and, to be fair, if he wins after the likes of Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat backed Truss in the hope of preferment that would be very funny. Even if he does, though, this strategy of attacking foreigners and young people can’t be doing much for his chances of winning a general election. And if he doesn’t win the leadership – because of his performance at the Treasury; because, in times of trouble, the Tory membership always opt for Thatcher cosplayers – he’ll have ruined his reputation forever. Sunak could have chosen to lose with honour and dignity. Now, we know he has neither.
I’ll put this as bluntly as I can. The man is a cunt.
He’s a spineless rat who is in his final, desperate death throes. It’s infuriating that after all this he’ll face no repercussions, just leave the UK to live the rest of his life in luxury as we all spend the next decade suffering.
The tiny little manlet will just put his PR hype machine on overdrive.
He, it, has singularly redefined failure. I have trodden in cat shit I respect more that it.
If reputation was a value he was already minus 10, absolute disgrace if him or that other idiot become PM.
Seriously, I supported him at the start of the contest – as the best of a bad bunch.
Around 10 days ago I was growing less supportive. In the week after that it went to “I hope that cunt dies”. What the fuck is he thinking?
I can’t help wondering if what’s really happening is the Tories are trying to see how Tory they should be. Truss is the lower end and Rishi is the higher end. It’s a test of the public dressed up as a leadership contest.
Has it?
My opinion of him before this was “rich, shady, businessman” my opinion of Truss before this was “incompetent”.
My opinion of them now is that they’re both malicious, bigoted far right crooks, but they are playing to their audience who clearly like that.
Their reputation outside of their party’s voters has been destroyed by a rightwards dash, but not within, so if there’s a rightwards dash that’s happened it’s inside the Tory party’s voting base.
Which is unsurprising, really, the Tories took up the mantle as the Brexit party, taking in UKIP voters and politicians and mirroring their hard right populism and policies.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Amongst whom? His reputation was poor amongst left wing voters because of his handling of the economy while Chancellor and his wife’s non-dom status. Tory voters will either see this as a slight misstep, assuming they believe his spin on tackling rural poverty, or they were already supporting Truss. It is far from disastrous and he can recover from this, sadly.
“i stress, i dont believe economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.” – Boris Johnson
Has it though? The people who don’t like him didn’t like him before. Those who love his rhetoric will still love him. In between has he lost any support? I keep reading articles about how bad people like him are and how the Tories are losing support, people regret Brexit and so on. But nothing changes. When decisions come to be made whether at Westminster or at the polls people like Rishi seem to emerge unscathed and again we’ll get articles saying how bad these people are and the cycle will continue. I hope someday the tone of columns like this will carry over into reality. Sunak and Truss can do whatever they like, the tories have carte blanche to push the boundaries of being fucking awful and be left unchallenged. I don’t even know if Starmer stands against any of this.
>Sunak could have chosen to lose with honour and dignity. Now, we know he has neither.
Bloody hell, anyone with a reasonable brain could have told you that long ago.
He shouldn’t have any reputation as he’s been the Chancellor for years and we’re now in the greatest economic crisis since the Second World War. It’s crazy that people would support him. How can you support the Chancellor that has led to the introduction of “warm banks”?
But a lot of people will agree with him on the ECHR and immigration issues. The working class have had enough of mass immigration, gang crime and falling wages, meanwhile we apparently have no sovereignty to stop attempted “asylum” entries (having already passed through the whole of Europe). The system isn’t working.
The ECHR has been a constant hassle regarding whole life sentencing, and the Conservatives+LibDems were demonstrably weak on crime when they abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection.
The man is willing to destroy any liberties we have left for power.. he is a cunt
He’s a cunt and he clearly does cuntish things, the cunt.
Great. Can’t wait for Truss’ rightward dash to not be shown just as much from now until election but to actually feel it when she’s elected.
What a time to be alive.
I have to stop reading these posts because they’re just fucking depressing.
He will watch the light go out in our eyes as he squeezes his thumbs into our collective trachea, breaking what cartilage is left and we suffocate under his panting, sweating mass. And the moment that happens, his mind will be reeling with what delights he can treat himself to with whatever spoils he can find at the bottom of our ransacked pockets.
He’s bring dragged to the right due to Liz Truss having success appealing to the right. Therefore if you think Rishi is bad, you need to fear Liz Truss. Let’s remember who the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg, Nadine Dorrus and Boris Johnson (albeit privately) support. Hint, its not Rishi.
I really hope Rishi wins as the alternative is so much worse.
I read this in *The Guardian* so large dose of salt needed, but the polls they reported on suggested that Rishi and Liz are making the mistake of assuming voters are as far right as the MPs, but actually the MPs who voted them onto this stage are waaaay more right-wing than conservative voters are.
So it seems Rishi is pandering to the MPs, but also seems he’s doing worse in polls, which would track with their positions.
I said it once and I’ll say it again. He’s an over-rich, out of touch piece of shit.
100% tax on Sunak and his billionaire wife. Put all that money into deprived areas. The man is a disgrace and should be jailed.
He’s also wee. It’s not that he’s short though because that’s a trait he can’t change and should not be mocked for it however it is weird that he goes so far out of his way to appear tall. It’s weird and doesn’t sit right that a potential future PM is so insecure about something so ultimately unimportant.
Your most honest Tory, ladies and gentlemen.
BP profiteering has made them record profits.
Normal UK citizens can’t afford food or energy.
Sunak and his wife own BP shares.
The problem is, it’s not the politicians who are in charge. Look at the last prime minister, look at his cabinet. There’s not a politician among them. There’s not one who has any real idea what they’re doing either. And none of them really have any policies other than the meat they give to their fucking base.
And that meat is given to them to dish out by the ones who are really in charge. The donors, the backers and the moguls who run the press. They want nothing but more control, money and power but we blame the fuckwits on the telly because they’re cosplaying at being grown ups and are willing to take the blame while they take their bosses shilling.
It’s the people behind the politicians who tell these idiots what to do and say. It’s them who keep us divided and blaming each other. And it’s them that are making billions of pounds of profit while we are deciding if we want to freeze or starve this winter.
And all the while we have elections where we just vote the same popular idiots in. And nothing changes.
We need change. Change from a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t represent us.
We need alternatives and we need to start making these cunts accountable.
Until we do, nothing will change. We’ll get poorer and more isolated, and all the while they’ll bring in laws to make it illegal to protest, to organise in the workplace, to protect ourselves from what is fast becoming indentured slavery.
28 comments
It sometimes feels like Rishi Sunak must be the unluckiest man in British politics. An instinctive small-state Conservative, he was forced, by the coronavirus pandemic, to be the chancellor who handed out money on an unprecedented scale. He describes himself as a tax cutter, yet – entirely against his will! – he found himself introducing what other Tories like to describe as “the highest tax burden in 70 years”. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact he has more money than God you could almost start to feel sorry for him.
And now poor, helpless Rishi has found himself doing the exact opposite of what he always wanted to yet again. He’s socially liberal and his pitch to be leader of the Conservative Party was basically that he was the moderate, sensible one. Unfortunately it turns out that the Tory members don’t want either of those things, so he’s trying again, and is rebranding himself as the panderer-in-chief.
So, in the last couple of weeks, he’s promised to ban all construction on the green belt. This is certainly a bold pitch for a man who’s building his own private swimming pool in the middle of a housing crisis, but it fits with the prejudices of the Tory membership, so out it came. It also, helpfully enough, gave him a segue to the next section of his stump speech, which concerned the ill-defined modern evil of wokery. “What’s the point in stopping the bulldozers in the green belt,” Sunak asked, “if we allow left-wing agitators to take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values?” Alan Partridge would be proud.
Perhaps the area where the illiberal arms race dynamic in Sunak’s campaign is most visible, though, is immigration policy. Since the leadership contest warmed up, he’s vowed to double the number of foreign criminals Britain deports. He’s said that “no option is off the table” to stop migrants crossing the Channel, and has promised to make the government’s proposals to deport refugees to Rwanda work. He’s also said that the number of refugees the UK accepts should be “determined by need”, which seems to misunderstand something fairly fundamental about the concept of refugees.
You hardly need to be Machiavelli to parse all this: Sunak is losing to Liz Truss, who is backed by Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and while we don’t know much about the Tory membership it’s hardly a huge stretch to imagine them to have a greater appetite for right-wing culture war nonsense than the electorate at large.
There’s an outside chance Sunak’s tactic will even work: a poll published on Monday by the Italian company Techne suggested he was just five percentage points behind Truss and, to be fair, if he wins after the likes of Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat backed Truss in the hope of preferment that would be very funny. Even if he does, though, this strategy of attacking foreigners and young people can’t be doing much for his chances of winning a general election. And if he doesn’t win the leadership – because of his performance at the Treasury; because, in times of trouble, the Tory membership always opt for Thatcher cosplayers – he’ll have ruined his reputation forever. Sunak could have chosen to lose with honour and dignity. Now, we know he has neither.
I’ll put this as bluntly as I can. The man is a cunt.
He’s a spineless rat who is in his final, desperate death throes. It’s infuriating that after all this he’ll face no repercussions, just leave the UK to live the rest of his life in luxury as we all spend the next decade suffering.
The tiny little manlet will just put his PR hype machine on overdrive.
He, it, has singularly redefined failure. I have trodden in cat shit I respect more that it.
If reputation was a value he was already minus 10, absolute disgrace if him or that other idiot become PM.
Seriously, I supported him at the start of the contest – as the best of a bad bunch.
Around 10 days ago I was growing less supportive. In the week after that it went to “I hope that cunt dies”. What the fuck is he thinking?
I can’t help wondering if what’s really happening is the Tories are trying to see how Tory they should be. Truss is the lower end and Rishi is the higher end. It’s a test of the public dressed up as a leadership contest.
Has it?
My opinion of him before this was “rich, shady, businessman” my opinion of Truss before this was “incompetent”.
My opinion of them now is that they’re both malicious, bigoted far right crooks, but they are playing to their audience who clearly like that.
Their reputation outside of their party’s voters has been destroyed by a rightwards dash, but not within, so if there’s a rightwards dash that’s happened it’s inside the Tory party’s voting base.
Which is unsurprising, really, the Tories took up the mantle as the Brexit party, taking in UKIP voters and politicians and mirroring their hard right populism and policies.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Amongst whom? His reputation was poor amongst left wing voters because of his handling of the economy while Chancellor and his wife’s non-dom status. Tory voters will either see this as a slight misstep, assuming they believe his spin on tackling rural poverty, or they were already supporting Truss. It is far from disastrous and he can recover from this, sadly.
“i stress, i dont believe economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.” – Boris Johnson
Has it though? The people who don’t like him didn’t like him before. Those who love his rhetoric will still love him. In between has he lost any support? I keep reading articles about how bad people like him are and how the Tories are losing support, people regret Brexit and so on. But nothing changes. When decisions come to be made whether at Westminster or at the polls people like Rishi seem to emerge unscathed and again we’ll get articles saying how bad these people are and the cycle will continue. I hope someday the tone of columns like this will carry over into reality. Sunak and Truss can do whatever they like, the tories have carte blanche to push the boundaries of being fucking awful and be left unchallenged. I don’t even know if Starmer stands against any of this.
>Sunak could have chosen to lose with honour and dignity. Now, we know he has neither.
Bloody hell, anyone with a reasonable brain could have told you that long ago.
He shouldn’t have any reputation as he’s been the Chancellor for years and we’re now in the greatest economic crisis since the Second World War. It’s crazy that people would support him. How can you support the Chancellor that has led to the introduction of “warm banks”?
But a lot of people will agree with him on the ECHR and immigration issues. The working class have had enough of mass immigration, gang crime and falling wages, meanwhile we apparently have no sovereignty to stop attempted “asylum” entries (having already passed through the whole of Europe). The system isn’t working.
The ECHR has been a constant hassle regarding whole life sentencing, and the Conservatives+LibDems were demonstrably weak on crime when they abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection.
The man is willing to destroy any liberties we have left for power.. he is a cunt
He’s a cunt and he clearly does cuntish things, the cunt.
Great. Can’t wait for Truss’ rightward dash to not be shown just as much from now until election but to actually feel it when she’s elected.
What a time to be alive.
I have to stop reading these posts because they’re just fucking depressing.
He will watch the light go out in our eyes as he squeezes his thumbs into our collective trachea, breaking what cartilage is left and we suffocate under his panting, sweating mass. And the moment that happens, his mind will be reeling with what delights he can treat himself to with whatever spoils he can find at the bottom of our ransacked pockets.
He’s bring dragged to the right due to Liz Truss having success appealing to the right. Therefore if you think Rishi is bad, you need to fear Liz Truss. Let’s remember who the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg, Nadine Dorrus and Boris Johnson (albeit privately) support. Hint, its not Rishi.
I really hope Rishi wins as the alternative is so much worse.
I read this in *The Guardian* so large dose of salt needed, but the polls they reported on suggested that Rishi and Liz are making the mistake of assuming voters are as far right as the MPs, but actually the MPs who voted them onto this stage are waaaay more right-wing than conservative voters are.
So it seems Rishi is pandering to the MPs, but also seems he’s doing worse in polls, which would track with their positions.
I said it once and I’ll say it again. He’s an over-rich, out of touch piece of shit.
100% tax on Sunak and his billionaire wife. Put all that money into deprived areas. The man is a disgrace and should be jailed.
He’s also wee. It’s not that he’s short though because that’s a trait he can’t change and should not be mocked for it however it is weird that he goes so far out of his way to appear tall. It’s weird and doesn’t sit right that a potential future PM is so insecure about something so ultimately unimportant.
Your most honest Tory, ladies and gentlemen.
BP profiteering has made them record profits.
Normal UK citizens can’t afford food or energy.
Sunak and his wife own BP shares.
The problem is, it’s not the politicians who are in charge. Look at the last prime minister, look at his cabinet. There’s not a politician among them. There’s not one who has any real idea what they’re doing either. And none of them really have any policies other than the meat they give to their fucking base.
And that meat is given to them to dish out by the ones who are really in charge. The donors, the backers and the moguls who run the press. They want nothing but more control, money and power but we blame the fuckwits on the telly because they’re cosplaying at being grown ups and are willing to take the blame while they take their bosses shilling.
It’s the people behind the politicians who tell these idiots what to do and say. It’s them who keep us divided and blaming each other. And it’s them that are making billions of pounds of profit while we are deciding if we want to freeze or starve this winter.
And all the while we have elections where we just vote the same popular idiots in. And nothing changes.
We need change. Change from a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t represent us.
We need alternatives and we need to start making these cunts accountable.
Until we do, nothing will change. We’ll get poorer and more isolated, and all the while they’ll bring in laws to make it illegal to protest, to organise in the workplace, to protect ourselves from what is fast becoming indentured slavery.
Fuck this system.