The worst part for me is that I get where both of them are coming from, and both of them are going full on hard-right because they clearly know that's what their member base wants. The Tory party of today is the UKIP party of yesterday, pretending not to be as hardline.
Sunak clearly knows this and is happy to enrich them (and himself) to avoid being thrown under the bus for not being British enough. He knows he has to take this sort of line, along with Priti Patel because he knows full well that if the shoe were on the other foot, he wouldn't have a leg to stand on - he is not welcome by the lunatic fringe of his own party but because he enriches them, he is tolerated.
Truss on the other hand is well on the way to earning her moniker of 'mad as a box of frogs' by saying things that sound good to the lunatic fringe as 'tossing a bone to the poor and undeserving' to give them a veneer of humanity left, but never stand up in practice. For example, the cut to NI that notionally 'helps' the poorest - except it doesn't because the people in that bracket don't pay NI in the first place because they're not over the threshold to do so. That's like saying 'I'm going to cut income tax for those earning under £12k a year' while forgetting that most people (everyone?) has a personal tax allowance of the first £12,500 or so - you can't cut something you're not actually taking in the first place. But it sounds good to the rich folks that won't care either way and they can pat themselves on the back for voting for someone who will 'do something' about all those poor starving people who should just work harder, you know, like the Tory voters do. We're on the threshold of our own version of the American Dream where you can work your way out of poverty if only you worked hard enough, or retrained or whatever. I think on some level much of the NHS should take the government's advice and do just that, leaving the profession for better paid ones. (They won't because too many of them *care* but you take my point.)
Or, Truss's "we're going to get rid of all EU derived laws by the end of 2023" which is clearly designed to appease the "sovereignty" crowd but this is so unworkable it's utterly farcical. It will immediately make our entire tech sector much, MUCH less competitive with the EU because that cuts the data adequacy agreement that permits data to flow in and out of the EU to the UK because we haven't thrown out our equivalent of the GDPR yet. When we do (and that one counts), you suddenly need a whole lot more fuss to move data in and out of the EU, which means Facebook for example will complain bitterly because it won't be able to move its UK people data to its datacentre in Dublin. See also Google with the same problem. And also Amazon. And anyone else who has datacentres and traffic between, say, Ireland and Great Britain which is... all the big tech firms, and of whom might just throw the UK under the bus to keep access to the rest of Europe.
And let's not forget about all the worker protections that have come in that will all be stripped back.
One of these two will deliver a pound-shop America, the other a tin-pot dictatorship. Or somehow, some even worse mashup of the two. The problem is I have no idea what I can do about any of this.
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