Beginning to See the Light: After only 24-hours Cracks are Already Appearing  

 

‘Just for one moment, thought I’d found my way 

Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away’ 

 

In the end it was a non-event, Rishi Sunak was the clear winner with the parliamentary party. However, he is still viewed with scepticism by those who were trying to turn the coronation into a contest between him and Penny Mordaunt or Boris Johnson.  

 One MP admitted on Monday: ‘My head is with Rishi, my heart is with Penny and my soul is with Boris.’ 

Whilst he was given a rapturous reception when he addressed the 1922 Committee for the first time as leader, there were some in attendance who had worked desperately to install a rival in No 10. Others jumped on the bandwagon when it became clear he was going to win, likely wanting to curry favour with the new Downing Street operation. 

One minister who threw their weight behind Sunak said they did so reluctantly. ‘He’s only spoken to me two times – both were during leadership contests.’  

The question that lingers is, is this a lasting peace, or political expediency?  There are still open critics within the party; Nadine Dorries, a Johnson diehard, said Sunak had ‘no mandate‘ to govern and predicted it would be ‘impossible‘ to avoid calling a snap general election. 

Tory activists feel ignored, and several MPs are saying they have received requests from people cancelling their membership. 

 

‘He’s only spoken to me two times – both were during leadership contests.’  

 

Joseph Robertson, the director of the Orthodox Conservatives thinktank, said Sunak was ‘voted against by the membership‘ over the summer and lacked a ‘democratic mandate‘. 

There are a number of issues that could rile Tory backbenchers in the coming weeks. Where do spending cuts fall? Do benefits rise in-line with inflation? Do we restore aid to 0.7% of GDP or row back on the commitment to raise defence spending to 3% by the end of the decade?  

Poor old Rishi, not a day into his new job and his aspirations of a united party ready to support his plans look to be in tatters. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, less than 2-hours after resigning as the business secretary accused Richard Graham, a fellow Conservative MP of never accepting the result of Brexit. 

The spat was over the proposed retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill, which, Rees-Mogg told MPs, was aimed at ‘restoring parliamentary sovereignty‘ and helping remove rules and regulations that supposedly put business under pressure. 

Rees-Mogg said the bill was about Britain taking back control, not about the process of law-making. ‘We are restoring parliamentary sovereignty. This bill is first of all of fundamental constitutional importance because it is removing the supremacy of EU law.’ 

Graham had objected to the speed with which the bill proposes to get rid of 2,400 laws. Included within the proposal is a sunset clause, that allows for laws which have not been actively saved by a government minister to be automatically switched off on 31 December 2023. 

The shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, told the house the bill was ‘not conducive to good laws’, saying the sunset clause ‘puts a gun to parliament’s head‘. 

The bill has been criticised by legal experts, who have said it gives ministers unprecedented and ‘undemocratic‘ powers to make or ditch laws without any consultation. 

The bill means that rights and protections such as caps on your working hours, your rights if your employer is sold, the ban on selling cosmetics tested on animals, protections of environmentally sensitive sites and your rights to compensation if your flight is cancelled, could all vanish unless ministers decide to keep them. 

 

‘new rules cannot increase ‘burdens’: which means that they can’t be used to improve rights and protections but only to remove them’

 

In addition, the bill allows ministers to replace them with new rules, without the need to consult those affected and usually without any vote in parliament. If there is a vote it will be a yes/no vote, after one short debate, and under the threat that the rules will vanish completely if parliament says ‘no’. The only limit on ministers’ powers is that the new rules cannot increase ‘burdens’: which means that they can’t be used to improve rights and protections but only to remove them. 

If any EU law are retained, the bill creates uncertainty about what it continues to mean, by ordering the courts to stop interpreting it in the way in which EU law is normally interpreted. 

Another draconian piece of proposed legislation is the public order bill. Within this, anyone who has protested in the previous 5-years, or has encouraged other people to protest, can be forced to ‘submit to … being fitted with, or the installation of, any necessary apparatus’ to monitor their movements. In other words, if you attend or support any protest in which ‘serious disruption to two or more individuals or to an organisation’ occurs, you can be forced to wear an electronic tag. ‘Serious disruption‘ was redefined by the 2022 Police Act to include noise. 

Effectively, this outlaws the right to protest.  

This bill is likely to come under additional scrutiny with the re-appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, who, you may recollect, was forced to stand down less than a week ago for breaching the ministerial code by sharing sensitive cabinet information on a personal phone with a fellow MP.

 

‘Effectively, this outlaws the right to protest’

 

Braverman is known for being tough on immigration, which throws up two immediate issues. Firstly, the OBR and possibly the Chancellor feel that relaxing foreign worker rules is necessary to stimulate economic growth, and secondly, could torpedo the chances of an India trade deal. 

‘That appointment is borderline breaking the spirit of his pledge to restore integrity,’ said one unhappy MP. ‘She should have been on the sidelines for a bit and then moved back in a lower position – not back within six days.’ 

I suspect the appointment is political expediency, trying to include the hard-right in government. As  one MP said, Braverman was ‘hardly one of the sensibles, but he had to make entreaties to that side of the party’. 

Sunak has inherited chaos that has been years in the making. Public services are collapsing at breath-taking speed. Headteachers warn that 90% of schools in England could run out of money next year. NHS dentistry is on the verge of total collapse. Untold numbers are now living in constant pain and, in some cases, extracting their own teeth. It’s hard to defend the suspicion that the NHS is being deliberately dismembered, its core services allowed to fail so that we cease to defend it against privatisation. 

Even allowing for runaway inflation and Trussonomics, wages are set to be lower in 2026 than in 2008. Previously, after the GFC and the subsequent Tory austerity there was talk of a lost decade in people’s living standards, but, in reality, it is a lost generation. 

 

‘Headteachers warn that 90% of schools in England could run out of money next year’

 

Many feel that Sunak is a Tory moderate; incorrect, he is considerably more right in terms of economic policy than Johnson.  As a senior Sunak ally said of Johnson: ‘There is no evidence that during his time as prime minister he grasped the need for restraint in spending or had any understanding of how the public finances worked.’  

What he really meant was that Johnson was opposed to a renewed bout of austerity and lacked a true-blue ideological commitment to shrinking the state. Sunak, on the other hand, means real-terms pay cuts for the key workers, the ones we applauded during the pandemic, to the lowest levels required for society to function. Sunak is likely to oversee a more dramatic plunge in living standards than any of his predecessors. 

In essence, Sunak is the last vestige of a party out-of-time, out-of-ideas, and out-of-step. 

In the space of a month we have gone from Truss, who summed-up her ideals in her resignation statement: ‘We set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.’

A vision that, as I wrote numerous times, was deluded: slash taxes, scrap regulations, incentivise the rich and by dint of a miracle, Britannia reawakens and we return to the magnificent dynamism of the 19th century. ‘The rest of the world should believe this because we believe it.’ 

 

‘Sunak is likely to oversee a more dramatic plunge in living standards than any of his predecessors’

 

Sunak was pro-Brexit, his world is ‘Silicon Valley-London-Mumbai not London-Paris-Berlin.’ More recently, he campaigned as a realist, putting solid public finances and market credibility first, just as Thatcher did.  

If he is truly a realist, he should put dogma to one-side and lower the barriers to doing business with our largest single market (the EU), not further increase them. 

In truth, that wont happen because he will be governing with a  divided party behind him. The ideologues of Brexit are still there, some are even in his cabinet.  

If British democracy worked like most other major western democracies, the country would now have either a general election or a ‘constructive vote of no confidence’, bringing other parties into power. But it doesn’t.

 

‘I started a landslide in my ego 

Look from the outside 

To the world I left behind’ 

 

I sense that Philip is not going to struggle for material any time soon; it’s difficult to see the time between Rishi’s coronation and the GE, whether it’s two months or two years, being anything other than the gift that keeps on giving.

I know that I’m not allowed near the playlist, but if feels that after just a couple of days we could be watching a video of Mr Sunak in slow motion walking out of No10 and looking skyward with Whitney Houston belting out ‘Didn’t we almost have it all’ as a soundtrack.

Just hours after the man-hugging and high-fives, Mr Sunak decided it would be a good idea to reappoint ‘Leaky Sue’ Braverman as Home Secretary. What an absolute pilchard.

So, ‘reuniting the party’ by throwing those on the rabid right a bone, was seemingly at the cost of any credibility for the new PM’s pledge of honesty and integrity. Both barrels through his own Prada loafer.

Want to really cosy up to Ubergruppenfuhrer Braverman’s bosses?

How about instant jail terms for those terrible crusties trying to save their children’s planet. In fact, why not go the whole hog and raise a massive middle digit to the whole tofu-munching, sandal-wearing, face-painted lot of them, and say you’re not even going to their grubby little COP27 pow wow.

Pardon? He didn’t do that did he?

He did, change feet and pop another cartridge in. Why man? What message does it send when you can’t even be bothered to go along and feign interest in tackling climate change?

How about letting Chas go after all? No, apparently, Therese Coffey’s presence will suffice – as she said on R4 this morning, in her previous stint at Defra she proudly switched to ‘recyclable cups’.

FMOB. Is that all we’ve got?

So what was Philip thinking?:

Now, to our new PM, Rishi Sunak. At the outset I will clarify that I have no issues with his wealth, good luck to him, after all if you weren’t born to it, you either earn it for yourself, or marry it.

Unfortunately, he will bring nothing new. He is trying to unite the party, some hope with that unruly mob putting individual interests first.

He talks about integrity, but then brings back a minister who resigned after breaching the ministerial code.

In-place of Truss’s free-market madness we have austerity 3. This will be the worst yet, there is no fat left to cut, only people left to ruin. These cuts will impact further up the “social scale”, and the supposed middle classes feel the heat, too.

Austerity doesn’t feed growth, it kills it.

To grow we have to spend, that means more taxes not less. However, in a modern society, tax needs to be fair, proportionate, and not only levied on those who aren’t sufficiently wealthy to be able to avoid it.

To start, energy companies are benefiting unnecessarily from the energy crisis, therefore they should pay windfall tax. Instead we have Shell, a UK-headquartered oil company, today declaring record global profits of nearly $30bn (£26bn) year-to-date, saying it had not paid the current levy and did not expect to throughout 2022, because its British corporate entity did not make any profits during the quarter in part because of heaving spending on drilling more oil in the North Sea.

From corporations we move to individuals. Some of the uber-rich are good at trumpeting the actual amount of tax they pay, but rather more reluctant to admit what this represents as a percentage.

I have written several times about President Biden’s proposed Billionaire Minimum Income Tax (BMIT) that would require the wealthiest Americans to pay at least 20% on all income. Currently, billionaires pay an average of only 8.2% of their income, according to the White House. 

Biden created this proposal to make the American tax code fairer and reduce the budget deficit by $360 billion in the next ten years.

Despite the name, the tax isn’t imposed only on billionaires. The tax will apply only to the top one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%) of American households worth over $100 million. Over half of the revenue will come from households worth more than $1 billion.

Growth creates prosperity and prosperity creates growth, it’s a virtuous circle. Prosperity, to be of value, needs to be widespread, for the many not the few, inclusive not exclusive.

Tory policies are anti-growth. Truss diagnosed the problem but had the wrong solution. Johnson isn’t the soft-Tory the new PMs team portray him as. In his own bizarre way he understood the bigger picture when he proposed “levelling-up”. His failing was lack of attention, and being in a party that didn’t, and doesn’t believe in “levelling-up”, they just want your votes.

Lyrically, we start with Joy Division’s “24-hours” as that was all the time it took for the veneer to come off Sunak. We end with U2, a band I never really liked, however the first album “Boy” wasn’t bad. “A Day Without Me” came from it, and the lyrics are appropriate. Sunak has an ego, he might be dull, I mean can you imagine a night out with him, but his life has been planned down to the smallest detail. Urgh! Enjoy!

@coldwarsteve

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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