Prime Minister Liz Truss has appointed Jeremy Hunt, an anti-Brexit MP who advocated China-style lockdowns and whose wife has actually presented propaganda shows for a state television corporation, as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The appointment of Hunt, who backed Rishi Sunak over Truss for the party leadership earlier this year — having been rejected by ordinary party members for the role by a landslide when he stood for it himself against Boris Johnson — signals she is highly unlikely to implement even the mildest of fiscally conservative reforms, with the establishment “blob” now in full control.
Hunt’s predecessor, Brexit supporter Kwasi Kwarteng, becomes the second-shortest serving Chancellor in history — the only Chancellor who held the Great Office of State for less time was struck down by a heart attack — after attempting to implement minor tax cuts as part of an emergency “mini-budget”, as Britain faces low growth and an energy and cost of living crisis.
In particular, Kwarteng had sought to abolish the top 45 per cent rate of income tax on earnings over £150,000.
It was a questionable priority, given the much more damaging effect of the 40 per cent rate of income tax on earnings from £50,000 to £150,000 as fiscal drag sucked the middle and even upper working class into it in ever-increasing numbers — but hardly radical right-wing economics.
Indeed, the top rate of income tax under the last Labour government, in power from 1997 to 2010, was 40 per cent right up until its last month in office, when it introduced a top rate of 50 per cent — cut to 45 per cent by David Cameron — as a kind of landmine for the Tories.
The headline tax cut was abandoned by Truss and Kwarteng in the face of a concerted campaign by central bankers, the establishment media, the political left, conservatives-in-name-only, and “the markets” — but not soon enough to save Kwarteng, summoned back from the United States of America to be sacked by Truss earlier on Friday.
As mentioned above, the fact that Hunt has been chosen to replace him signals that Conservative voters can likely expect no new, conservative policies ahead of the next general election, currently earmarked for 2024-25, after Boris Johnson, the supposedly libertarian Brexit buccaneer, proved to be a false messiah, prioritising a net-zero green agenda and increasing immigration while neglecting Brexit, raising the tax burden to its heaviest in 70 years, and letting the Channel migrant crisis run out of control.
Once a mannequin-like career politician in the style of David Cameron, in whose Cabinet he served, Hunt took on a more sinister sheen during the Wuhan virus pandemic, fighting to retain compulsory vaccine mandates for workers and lobbying for China-style lockdown measures behind the scenes, which would have seen citizens confined in isolation “hotels”, citing the experience of his Chinese wife’s family during SARS.
“I said that British people would never tolerate being removed from their homes and loved ones at which point you demanded I show you the evidence for that,” said Nadine Dorries, another former Cabinet minister, of Hunt’s lobbying in a testy social media exchange.
Hunt’s wife, Lucia Guo, was actually employed to present a show made by China International TV Corporation. Owned by the Chinese Communist regime, and Dove Media Guo presented a 2021 programme which “featured reports on the effectiveness of China’s pandemic response and about the beauty of the Xinjiang region without mentioning it is the site of ‘re-education’ camps for its persecuted Muslim Uighur population,” according to The Mail on Sunday.
Like all Tory politicians, he has been known to occasionally make noises about supporting tax cuts in principle and even implementing them at a future date in order to appeal to the Tory base, most recently during the race to replace Boris Johnson, when he suggested cutting corporation tax to 15 per cent — although it failed to get him anywhere near as far in the contest as in 2019, when he made the final two.
It is already clear that this is not how he will govern, however, with it already having been announced that the tax on businesses will in fact rise to 25 per cent.