Rishi Sunak Won’t Save Britain

Opinion

October 27th, 5:25am

Kimi Chaddah

Kimi Chaddah -

In March, Rishi Sunak was photographed filling up a car at a supermarket gas station. The purpose, of course, was self-promotion: Mr. Sunak was keen to advertise his role, as finance minister, in cutting the price of fuel. But the puff misfired. The car, a modest red Kia Rio, wasn’t his (it belonged to a supermarket employee). Inside the garage, Mr. Sunak further embarrassed himself by showing he had no idea how to make a contactless payment. As a dramatization of Mr. Sunak’s detachment from ordinary life, it couldn’t be bettered. That detachment will now be put to the test. After securing the backing of his party, Mr. Sunak is set to be Britain’s prime minister. On the surface, he has a lot going for him: Liz Truss’s disastrous 44-day premiership proved his warnings about economic “fairy tales” to be remarkably prescient; he commands the support of a majority of the faction-ridden Conservative parliamentary party; and his ascent — on the back of his grasp of economics — has calmed the financial markets. Yet for all Mr. Sunak’s appearance of calm and competence, he remains deeply out of touch with the country he will soon run. That country, economically stagnant, regionally unbalanced, socially strafed, is in dire need of compassionate leadership. In Mr. Sunak, by conviction a devotee of small-state Thatcherism and with no visible concern for the lives of the majority, Britain is unlikely to get it. Supporters of Mr. Sunak point to the success of the furlough policy in March 2020, in which the government covered up to 80 percent of employees’ wages during the pandemic. Yet his eagerness to end the policy — and its glaring holes, such as the exclusion of three million self-employed workers — undercut the apparent generosity. Within two months, Mr. Sunak outlined plans for its gradual withdrawal and, later in the year, delayed extending the policy to the point that many workers had already lost their jobs. He was keen to ax a small pandemic-cushioning increase in the country’s welfare payment, amounting to the largest overnight cut to the welfare state in British history, and chafed throughout at the scale of state support. In private, he complained that there was no “magic money tree.” He approached the cost-of-living crisis with the same miserly air. In March, Mr. Sunak promised to provide billions of pounds of financial support to families throughout the crisis and bring benefits in line with inflation. But these measures, seemingly substantial, were in practice piecemeal. Mr. Sunak was widely criticized — including within his own party — for not doing enough to protect the country’s poorest; it was estimated that in the absence of greater support, 1.3 million people would fall into absolute poverty. His scant plans for the worse off were deemed in The Times of London to be “insufficient, inefficient and unconservative.” The criticism was a fitting capstone for his tenure, defined by a selective and shallow concern for others. It’s a bad time for the country to be in dispassionate hands. Inflation stands at over 10 percent. Living standards have eroded, with Britons set to see the biggest drop in disposable income since records began. For the first time, demand for food banks is said to be outstripping supply. Energy blackouts could be coming in January. In April, after a further increase in bills, the number of people in fuel poverty could reach 10.7 million. Ambulance delays are now a palpable “threat to life.” The economy is anemic, set to have the highest inflation and lowest growth rates of the Group of 7 nations next year. These ills are results of deep, systemic problems, to be sure. But Mr. Sunak is complicit in them all. At no point did he show any meaningful interest in addressing, challenging or rectifying these issues. His attitude toward regional inequality, among the worst of any comparable developed country’s, is instructive: In office, he boasted about rigging Treasury formulas to shift resources from “deprived urban areas” into wealthier constituencies, regardless of need. His pledge to fix the economy, burdened by a 40 billion pound black hole in the public finances and facing parlous global economic conditions, rings hollow. After 12 years in power, the Conservative Party is almost out of ideas. One that endures — to balance the books by cutting social spending, shifting the burden onto the backs of ordinary people rather than the wealthy — is something that Mr. Sunak is likely to willingly advocate. After all, he is wedded to Thatcherite notions of a small state, individualism and constrained public spending. This propensity is no secret. During the leadership election in the summer won by Ms. Truss, Mr. Sunak wrote in The Telegraph, “I am a Thatcherite, I am running as a Thatcherite, and I will govern as a Thatcherite.” It’s impossible, of course, to know exactly what Mr. Sunak plans. (It doesn’t help that he didn’t appear in front of the media during this month’s contest until after he had won it.) But from his history as a minister and the summer’s leadership election, it’s fair to assume that in the name of fiscal rectitude, he will rein in public spending and cut social protections. Who knows whether such an approach, delivered competently and with an air of seriousness, will resurrect the Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes. But at the outset of his tenure, one thing seems guaranteed: Mr. Sunak, conservative savior, won’t save the country. The New York Times

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3953831/kimi-chaddah/rishi-sunak-won%E2%80%99t-save-britain