'Shame on Rishi Sunak for rewarding bankers but leaving million kids destitute'
Here's a little insight into how this column-writing lark works.
You scour newspapers and social media, watch TV news channels, talk to your mates in the pub and listen to cabbies (when you’re really desperate) in the hope of finding a spark that will fuse topical stories into a bigger truth. Most weeks you have to unleash your imagination to create that bigger truth but sometimes it smacks you right between the eyes.
And you enjoy a “three bells on a fruit machine” moment. This week we hit columnist jackpot gold. On the same day it was announced the cap on bankers’ bonuses would be scrapped allowing millionaires to bury their snouts deeper into the money trough, a leading charity warned that more than a million children are living in “horrifying destitution” in our country with parents unable to afford to keep them warm, clean and fed. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 574,000 people were supported by foodbanks last year.
That’s up from 214,000 back in 2019, with one charity worker telling researchers: “We used to worry about foodbanks opening. “Now we’re worrying about foodbanks closing. That’s how bad it is in our country right now.” Many of those destitute people will have been reduced to that state by 13 years of welfare-slashing austerity deemed a necessity by the Tories because of the 2008 economic crash.
A crash which was caused by, you guessed it, the same bankers they now believe deserve even greater financial rewards. That’s despite the UK already having more millionaire bankers than every country in the European Union put together. What a perfect picture that painted in the week a multi-millionaire former investment banker celebrated his first full year in Downing Street.
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It showed exactly where Rishi Sunak’s priorities lie: rewarding those who least need rewarding in a country whose infrastructure and public services are falling apart and whose economy splutters along in first gear as the wealth gap turns into a chasm. And it is going to get worse over the coming year as Sunak tries to survive internal coups by giving in to pressure from his MPs to hand out “aspirational” tax cuts and further punish those on benefits, in the hope of bribing voters to let them cling on to their seat on the Westminster gravy train.
The damage successive Tory governments have done to this country through austerity, Brexit, unnecessary Covid deaths, the shameless rewarding of honours and public money to their chums, sleaze and fantasy economics is immeasurable. That we may have to wait another 14 months to vote out the second unelected Prime Minister their small band of right-wing activists have imposed on us is scandalous.
I just hope the British people have a long memory – and that they don’t forget how this shower of talentless, grasping, self-serving political pygmies held our country to ransom for their own benefit. How they promised to take back control but instead took millions of the poorest citizens back to the Victorian era. And I hope that memory ensures that they are never let back into power in my lifetime.
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