Two groups of liberal-progressive Tories are pressuring Boris Johnson to “follow President Biden’s lead” and give all young people £500 in coronavirus recovery funds, which would cost the taxpayer an estimated £2.8 billion.
Last month, the U.S. Congress passed the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package, which contains the third round of $1,400 stimulus cheques.
The One Nation Caucus and the Tory Reform Group have urged a similar “Covid relief payment” to young adults, calling them one of those “worse hit financially by the pandemic”.
“The government should consider following President Biden’s lead and issue Covid relief payments for those worse [sic] affected by the pandemic. A £500 stimulus for every 18-24 year old in the UK, one of the age groups worst affected, would cost around £2.8 billion,” the groups suggested in the report published on Monday.
If the government adopts the proposals, it would add to Britain’s already-spiralling debt. The UK’s debt broke the £2 trillion mark for the first time in August, with the country’s debt worth more than its GDP, at 100.5 per cent, for the first time since 1961.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned months later that the government’s spending spree during the pandemic, including tens of billions in the furlough scheme, could result in massive tax hikes in the future.
Government borrowing between April and December 2020 was £271 billion, boosted by the near-recording-breaking £34 billion in December alone.
February saw the burden on the taxpayer hit a 70-year high. While in March, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said that the cost of coronavirus support for business over two years will have hit £407 billion, funded by £355 billion in borrowing, admitting that years of taxes are on the way to pay for it.
The Tory Reform Group, one of the groups recommending the youth stimulus cheques, is headed by Ken Clarke, the avid europhile who admitted looking forward to the British parliament being reduced to the status of “a council chamber” in the EU, and has patrons such as Michael Heseltine, who had the Tory whip suspended for backing the Conservative Party’s pro-EU rival ahead of European Parliament elections in 2019.
Damian Green MP is the vice-president of the Tory Reform Group, as well as the chairman of the One Nation Conservatives, which is comprised of around one-third of the parliamentary party’s lawmakers. The One Nation group last year rebranded itself from an anti-Brexit group to a caucus that seeks to stop the Conservatives from becoming too right-wing and which encourages Prime Minister Johnson to “embrace his liberal instincts”.
One Nation embraces other liberal causes other than handing out large sums in Covid stimulus, including high public spending on foreign aid and committing to climate change agenda projects, as per its recent report.
Speaking to Breitbart London about the groups’ drive for higher spending, the chairman of the Bow Group, the UK’s oldest conservative think tank, said that: “Spending money with total abandon is not the path to prosperity for anyone over the long term.”
Mr Harris-Quinney continued: “We will pay a very heavy price for it in the future in taxation, in inflation, and in the cost of servicing the debt. This is how we get to the ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ scenario the World Economic Forum want.
“It is very likely Britain will never recover from this crippling debt. Claims were made by project fear that Brexit will be what relegated Britain from the first world, but it will be our national debt that takes us out of the top tier of global economies and ruins the lives of our citizens.”
The Bow Group chairman also criticised the One Nation Tories for appropriating Benjamin Disraeli’s “highly socially conservative nationalist policy platform” of one-nation conservatism, when their brand is anything but.
“Like the Conservative Party itself, the One Nation Conservatives Group are merely hiding behind a name they have no claim to. It really should be called the Divided Anti-Nation Pro EU Socialist Group,” Mr Harris Quinney said.
“We call on the government to end lockdown, to urgently cut all unnecessary departments and spending, to level the playing field between small business and globalist corporates, and to balance the books to avoid future disaster. That is the policy programme the founder of One Nation Conservatism Benjamin Disraeli would have supported,” he added.