It has been a week of misfires for the two people who have put themselves forward to be the UK’s next Prime Minister.

Last week, Liz Truss put forward the notion of regional payscales. The idea that a public sector employee is paid more in one location than in another, depending on the cost of living there.

This is fine. It’s not a new idea, and has been floated by various chancellors for fifteen or twenty years. The reason it has always hit the buffers is because there is a huge standard of living disparity here already. There is London, and there is “everywhere else”. Indeed, for the last twelve years, there has been a policy called “levelling up”, although any practical achievements are negligible.

By penalising public sector salaries based on location, it would have exacerbated the gap rather than have improved it. That’s why other governments have dropped the idea. And Truss’s team themselves were quick to drop it. But not quick enough. They only dropped it a day after it had been announced as policy.

Truss herself claimed that the policy had been “misrepresented”. That by “public sector” she didn’t mean what everyone else thought it meant. While the policy was just plain dumb, this was a deliberate lie, an attempt to conceal the truth. The policy, of course, was an attempt to save money, and the only way Truss’s numbers could have worked was if they applied to all public sector workers. Not just civil servants, but doctors, nurses, teachers…. everyone. And the policy was represented perfectly accurately by the media; it was just a stupid policy in the first place.

On the other side of the fence, we have Rishi Sunak, who wants to charge £10 for missed GP visits. Another worn old policy that has been floated previously, and which has always been shot down before it got off the ground.

You fine someone. There are two questions.

• What happens when someone does pay the fine?
• What happens when they don’t?

You take the first case. You walk into the doctor’s with hard currency? What’s the first thing they’ll do? They’ll refuse it, because doctor’s surgeries here are not equipped to handle any cash. You walk in with a £20 note? You want change? Tough shit. Where are they going to get change from?

Of course, you can change surgeries so that they can accept cash, but this is something that will actually cost money, not save it. Not just to cope with payments, but the IT cost to convert every patient into an account.

Or what if someone refuses to pay? What you going to do? Refuse to treat them in future? But if you do that, you’ve abandoned one of the cornerstones of our health system. That everybody is entitled to treatment.

That’s fine, but the public need to be absolutely aware that you’ve just abandoned universal healthcare.

What a pair of fucking wasters! And you realise who has set these people up in the first place, don’t you? Tory MPs. The same shower who trusted Boris Johnson to lead the country.

I want better.