Hiding behind Ukraine to blame war for a cost of living calamity that started long before Putin’s invasion is shameless politics from a Conservative regime exploiting every crisis as an opportunity.
Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Michael Gove – they’re all singing from the same Tory song sheet.
“Not us, Guv” is the chorus from a party with a terrible economic record of low growth and high taxes.
David Cameron and George Osborne, with a record £12billon VAT jump and spending cuts, choked off the promising recovery bequeathed by Labour following the global banking collapse.
They then cynically blamed Gordon Brown.
Johnson used Covid as a smokescreen to obscure a Brexit tragedy the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts will be twice as costly to this country as the pandemic.
And the same Conservative charlatan and his gang now hope to con voters into believing sanctions and slaughter in Europe are why family incomes will endure the nastiest squeeze since the 1950s.
Numerous Labour MPs I spoke to fear the Tories might get away with it, Johnson getting lucky when the first casualty of war was Partygate and the second may be dodging responsibility for economic hardship.
Respected economists, including the Treasury’s own, were warning that living standards would be crashing, months before Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor knew it as they resisted calls to axe a National Insurance rise next month that’ll grab more than £200 from a typical worker, adding to the financial pain.
War is fuelling petrol pump prices and gas bills, but they were already going up.
With forecasters calculating households could lose £2,500 as inflation and taxes expand, the case for axing April’s tax rises is overwhelming.
War is a convenient excuse for Johnson and Sunak delivering yet another kick in the teeth to workers, families and employers.
Clearing the fog of war to expose Conservative culpability could make of break Keir Starmer and Labour’s hopes of winning power.
