Rishi Sunak is spot on – state handouts and more borrowing won’t fix the country’s finances

AFTER £400billion of Covid borrowing and with a tax rise looming it comes as a mighty relief to discover Rishi Sunak is still a Conservative.

Indeed his impressive conference speech was reassuring about the need to fix the finances ravaged by the pandemic.

We just hope Boris Johnson — a man more laid back about big spending — took it all in. Because the Chancellor’s argument, also made by The Sun countless times, was irrefutable.

That simply borrowing more is the road to ruin, saddling future generations with our debt to pay back at the cost of their living standards.

That jobs and better pay, not state handouts, are the routes out of poverty.

That taxes should be CUT. That Brexit gives us the freedom to design and build a nimbler economy for the future.

Britain, Mr Sunak rightly said, will not “trust a party that isn’t serious with their money”. That is a warning to his own party as much as Labour.

The Tories had to spend big to save lives and jobs when Covid struck. Fair enough. But if they now jettison their reputation for sound finances and lower taxes, they are in trouble.

Which is why Labour’s huge spending vows last week were so ill-judged.

The nation knows the credit card is maxed out. Mr Sunak is desperate to pay it down. Labour wants another credit card.

We all know where that ends.

Eco psychos

ANYONE who, in making some political point, deliberately delays paramedics as they race to save lives deserves years behind bars.

Aside from being a punishment richly deserved, it would give “Insulate Britain” time to reflect on how they lost their minds.

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How they became so consumed by their zeal to lag Britain’s lofts that they chose to block an ambulance on an emergency mission.

The assorted vicars and left-wing OAPs could ask themselves how they became ready to sacrifice other people’s lives . . . and what gave them that right.

They might even wonder what possessed them to stoke up a nation’s rage and harm their own eco cause.

Yesterday they ignored the pleas of a stranded paramedic and the tears of a desperate woman needing to accompany her 81-year-old mum to hospital.

They are psychopaths. What else can explain such selfish callousness?

We knew that if the police and courts failed, and the Government did little more than wring its hands, the public would take matters into theirs.

Yesterday they did, with commendable restraint. We do not see that lasting.

Nothing seems to puncture this group’s bubble of insufferable self-righteous arrogance. So, since the Government’s injunctions are feeble, much harsher laws and punishment must follow.

And cops should follow the public’s lead: Drag the morons off in an instant.

Lock them up as long as the law allows.