Tory leadership hopefuls Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have set out questionable visions of how they would govern Britain, with tax-hiking Sunak pledging tax cuts – someday – and “right-wing” Truss vowing to import even more migrant workers.
Sunak, until recently the outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has played a key role in rising the tax burden in Britain to its heaviest in 70 years, and committed to further tax hikes if wins the premiership — but, his leadership bid floundering, he now says he will slash income tax… in 2024.
“I want to make sure that we can pay for it, I want to make sure that we can do it alongside growing the economy,” Sunak told the BBC, insisting that he would not introduce tax cuts in the short term to ease the cost of living crisis, as Truss wishes to do, because he does not believe “embarking on a spree of excessive borrowing at a time when inflation and interest rates are already on the rise would be wise.”
Truss has argued that her tax cuts, targeted at things like fuel duty, would not be inflationary, and that Sunak’s high-tax regime will choke off growth by pushing the country into recession.
While tax-hiking Sunak claims he will actually reduce the basic rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 16 per cent, if only years from now, his supposedly “right-wing” rival has followed claims she will expand the government’s unimplemented policy to transfer illegal migrants to Rwanda with a commitment to boost the number of low-wage foreign workers even further, letting in thousands more migrants to work the country’s farms despite legal immigration already being extremely high.
The government introduced a scheme for more Britons to be able to do agricultural labour during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic but it was sabotaged by bosses, who listed job requirements such as fluency in Romanian which effectively precluded British applicants from being hired.
Other onerous conditions placed on supposedly “lazy” Britons included requirements to live in often shabby, shared on-site accommodation instead of being allowed to travel into work, separating would-be workers from their families. Crucially, this allows bosses to reduce their wage bill by charging for the accommodation.
British hopefuls with their own caravans and mobile homes also complained of being told they would not be allowed to stay in them.
Rather than address these issues, the Tory government dropped the scheme and increased visas for cheap workers from overseas, including Belarus and Russia.