Roving Periscope: Wearing a crown of thorns, PM Sunak discovers the perils of power
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: A week is a long time in politics and a month’s eternity. Just within a month of his honeymoon with power, Rishi Sunak’s two predecessors—Boris Johnson and Liz Truss—have joined hands against him to make the first Indian-origin British Prime Minister realize he wears a crown of thorns.
The media reported on Saturday that Sunak might discover soon that his political rivals are more difficult to appease than the investors and financial markets he is trying to woo with an austere fiscal program based on major tax rises as his first move after taking office.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt is trying to frame policies to boost the UK’s lackluster growth and bring people back into the labor market. But the government might announce most of those measures only after the Budget 2023.
This long wait would leave the Sunak government vulnerable to attacks from his own backbenchers and the opposition Labour party as he leads the country through a winter of strikes, inflation, recession, and soaring energy prices.
Their first assaults have already started.
While some Tory MPs are demanding more radical pro-growth policies, another faction is concerned about protecting the rural way of life for their affluent voters. Most of them are worried about what Sunak can do to reduce the opposition Labour party’s 21-point lead in the latest opinion polls.
Truss and her predecessor Johnson have also joined this bandwagon with their first noteworthy dissenting move against the new premier. The pro-growth lawmakers are determined to pressurize Sunak, a lawmaker said.
The anti-Sunak faction may cause problems for the government on a series of other policy issues and demand action on Brexit opportunities, infrastructure, childcare ratios, and measures to increase productivity.
“The UK’s core problem is dreadful productivity even by G7 standards and really weak investment spending,” the media quoted economist Jim O’Neill, a former Tory minister who subsequently left the party, as saying this week. He argued that Sunak’s austerity strategy was a mistake. “We need a government that’s prepared to borrow to invest.”
PM Sunak finds himself caught in a pincer movement between his Labour and Tory opponents. They forced him to pull a vote in the House of Commons on his house-building targets after a group of even Tory backbenchers protested against plans to build many new homes in rural areas.
Interestingly, Sunak would have gotten Labour support on this, but he protected Tory unity instead of pushing ahead with his vision for the country.
Fearing negative publicity, his communications team has even dropped the tradition of a minister briefing the media every morning.
This, the Tories say, could backfire as it allows Labour to have their way in the media and attack the government unopposed. It’s inevitable the government will U-Turn on this decision as well, a Tory leader predicted.
The Sunak government’s lack of direction and the scale of the challenges facing the party and the nation has demoralized many MPs who, by December 5, might announce to stand down at the next election, a government official said.
For instance, lawmaker Dehenna Davison, 29, who won the northern seat of Bishop Auckland for the Tories for the first time in 2019, said in a Facebook post on Friday that she won’t be running again. Backbenchers William Wragg and Chloe Smith had earlier announced their intention to quit Parliament as well.
Downing Street is also concerned that Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab may not survive an investigation into allegations of bullying. On Friday, PM Sunak’s office said they had submitted a third formal complaint against Raab, who has, however, denied all the allegations.
The British government is also alarmed about a wave of strikes being planned to bring the country to a halt over the winter. Nurses, rail, and postal staff are all planning strikes in the coming weeks, which could balloon into a general strike.
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