Sunak Backtrack: PM Admits All Campaign Pledges ‘Under Review’ and May Not Be Fulfilled

Rishi Sunak at the launch of his campaign to be Conservative Party leader and Prime Minist
Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

All commitments Rishi Sunak made to the public during the summer leadership contest are now under review and may not be fulfilled given that the landscape is “somewhat different” now, the prime minister’s official spokesman said.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was installed in Downing Street against the wishes of the Conservative Party membership by MPs last month after the coup conducted against Liz Truss, has now tasked ministers with reviewing all of the pledges he made during his failed leadership campaign.

“We are looking at all the campaign pledges and we are looking at whether it is the right time to take them forward,” the PM’s official spokeswoman said per Sky News.

“We need to take some time to make sure what is deliverable and what is possible, and engaging with stakeholders and with the relevant secretaries of state as well.”

“Obviously, those are pledges that were made a few months ago now and the context is somewhat different, obviously, economically,” she said, concluding: “We need to look again.”

The admission comes ahead of the release of the budget being prepared by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, the anti-Brexit, pro-China, lockdown enthusiast globalist who was instrumental in toppling the Truss government. It is expected that Hunt will look to raise taxes — already at a seventy-year high — by another £25 billion in addition to spending cuts of around the same figure to fill the so-called “black hole” in the United Kingdom’s public finances incurred during the Chinese coronavirus crisis.

While Sunak did campaign against Truss over the summer on a general platform of raising taxes — one of the chief reasons he was rejected by the Conservatives who made the choice in that race — he did pledge to cut the basic rate of income tax from 20 per cent to 16 per cent by the end of the decade as well as scrapping VAT on energy bills for up to a year.

When pressed specifically if the prime minister would commit to fulfilling the 2019 Conservative Party election manifesto — upon which his government was elected — pledge to not raise taxes, Sunak’s spokeswoman said that while he prefers a low-tax economy, “a lot of things have happened” since the election and “we are feeling effects”.

The comments from the PM’s office also throw into question one of his other chief pledges to the country, to “tackle illegal immigration”. During the leadership contest, Sunak unveiled a 10 point plan on immigration, which included promises to finally enact the plan to send illegal migrants to Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed which has so far been legal challenges in Brtian and at the European Court of Human Rights.

Suank also pledged to end the practice of housing illegal migrants in “expensive hotels” by putting them in different accomadations, including cruise ships. Currently, the government is spending £7 million per day in taxpayer funds to house asylum seekers, including illegal aliens in hotels across the country.

In addition, Sunak committed to setting an annual cap on the number of refugees accepted into Britain per year and to make it more difficult for people to qualify for asylum status by using the definition of a refugee laid out in the UN’s Refugee Convention rather than the standard of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Commenting on whether his plans on migration still stand, the PM’s spokeswoman said that while he is “definitely committed to the sentiment,” the government would not state which pledges would be fulfilled.

The admission that Sunak may backtrack on his pledges came just hours after he made his first public u-turn, announcing that he would travel to Egypt to attend the United Nations COP 27 climate change conference, just one week after stating that he would not attend.

In response to the government laying the ground for more u-turns, Reform UK leader Richard Tice said that Sunak was just “as bad as Boris,” adding: “Sunak is just another prolific Tory liar holding of office of Prime Minister”.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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