Ross Clark Ross Clark

Rishi Sunak is not stealing from the poor to give to the rich

Until this morning this had been Rishi Sunak’s week. While Liz Truss found herself trying to talk her way out of her rapidly-abandoned policy for regional pay boards – which she accused others of misrepresenting but couldn’t seem to explain herself – Rishi Sunak emerged the surprise winner from a show of hands among Sky’s hand-picked audience last night. But no sooner had Sunak started his comeback than he was knocked down with an embarrassment of his own: the New Statesman obtained footage of him boasting to an audience in Tunbridge Wells last Friday that:

I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this receive the funding they deserve. We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour party that shoved all the funding into depressed urban areas. That needed to be done. I started the work of undoing it.

Sunak has himself to blame for his loose words. It is never going to be a good look when a wealthy former chancellor poses as a reverse Robin Hood taking from the poor to give to the relatively affluent. But much though the Conservatives’ enemies might love to think that Rishi dreamed up some secret formula that reallocates money from Toxteth to Tunbridge Wells, the reality is somewhat more prosaic.

There is nothing secret about Rishi Sunak’s revision of the rules for assessing public investment, and nor is there anything in them which favours rich areas over poor ones. On the contrary, the new rules revolve around two things of which you might think Labour and others on the left would approve: prioritising public benefits which cannot easily be monetised and promoting the government’s target for net zero by 2050.

The rules surrounding the allocation of public funds for investment are contained

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