When Queen Marie Antoinette of France was told the peasants were starving and had no bread, she allegedly said: “Let them eat cake.” Now critics are claiming the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said something just as silly. Asked what he had to sacrifice as a child, Sunak, a multimillionaire richer than King Charles, said his parents didn’t let him have Sky TV.
His opponents seized on his comments, pointing out how little he had to sacrifice. The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davie recalled: “I lost my father when I was four, and my mother was widowed with three boys under ten.” He had to care for his mother until she died when he was 15. All they could afford was a small colour TV.
The pro-Labour Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Nowak said: “Millions of kids are going into school hungry. Try telling them that missing out on Sky is a sacrifice. Every time the PM opens his mouth he shows how out of touch he is.”
‘Have you ever gone without something?’
Rishi Sunak exposed himself to criticism and ridicule when he was interviewed by ITV.News.
In the interview, aired on June 12, the ITV News UK editor Paul Brand asked him: “When you are wealthier than the king, what do you do day to day to make sure you’re still in touch with the kind of struggles ordinary people face? Have you ever gone without something?”
Sunak replied: “Yeah, I mean my family immigrated here with very little and that’s how I was raised. I was raised with the values of hard work.”
His father, a doctor, and his mother, who owned a chemist’s shop, were born in East Africa.
Sunak, born in Southampton in 1980, attended Winchester College, one of the most expensive schools in England.
Brand asked him, “What did you go without as a child?”
Sunak replied, “Oh, we went without lots of things, right? Coz my parents wanted to put everything into our education, and that was a priority.”
Brand pressed on: “So what sort of things had to be sacrificed?”
“Lots of things,” Sunak replied, laughing.
“Give me an example,” said Brand.
‘Sky TV. That was something we never had, growing up’
“All sorts of things like lots of people. There’ll be all sorts of things that I would have wanted as a kid that I couldn’t have right. Famously, Sky TV. That was something that we never had growing up actually,” said Sunak, laughing again.
A voiceover then cut in and commented, “In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, he knows many are going without far more but denies that is the fault of the conservative party.”
Sunak is then shown on camera again, claiming progress in education. “English schoolchildren right now are among the best readers in the Western world,” he said.
Brand then commented on his immigrant background and speculated about the reason he wanted to curb immigration.
Brand said: “Your grandparents were immigrants. Your wife is an immigrant. You were an immigrant for a while in the US yourself. So you know that immigration can be good for a country. The only reason you want to bring it down is because you are scared of Nigel Farage, isn’t it?
Sunak replied: “No, I have been saying I want to bring immigration down since I had this job because it’s too high, because immigration that is too high puts pressure on public services.”
The Tories are worried because the anti-immigration Reform Party led by Nigel Farage has won over some of their supporters.
However, in the interview, Sunak asserted that either he or Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer would win the election.
The 30-minute interview can be partly seen on YouTube.
The post What did Rishi Sunak sacrifice as a child? Sky TV, he says appeared first on The Independent News.