ANALYSIS Challenges for the new British Prime Minister

analysis

TRYING TO SQUARE CIRCLES

THE NEW BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, RISHI SUNAK FACES MULTIPLE CHALLENGES FROM DAY ONE

BY TAMÁS MAGYARICS

The first ever Prime Minister of color in the United Kingdom has assumed responsibilities of almost historic proportions in various senses. In place of the generally upbeat first speech in front of 10 Downing Street was everything but. Rishi Sunak warned of ’difficult’ decisions to deal with the ’profound economic crisis facing Britain’. And that is only one of the outstanding issues that are waiting for the new resident of one of the most famous addresses in the world in the ’in-box’. The unresolved questions between the EU and the UK, the perennial Scottish attempts at gaining independence, the future of Northern Ireland, the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war and its far-reaching security and energy implications are a few among the weightier problems.

Divided Tories

Rishi Sunak is not only the Prime Minister of the UK, but he is also the leader of the Conservative Party, which – for all intents and purposes – is undergoing in one of its worst identity crises in its century-long history. The Labour Party is ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls by some 35 points, and it will be a tall order for Mr Sunak and his party to close the gap between now and 2024 when the next parliamentary elections are to be held – provided, the government does not collapse meanwhile. It is true that the Conservative Party has a comfortable parliamentary majority with 357 seats out of a total of 650; however, as the fall of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in the past few months demonstrated, the Tories are deeply divided in a number of issues from the economic policies to taxation and social services. The Conservatives have been able to manage the recent changes in the leadership, but it seems more likely than not that they cannot afford another leadership failure. In case of another one in the near future, the pressure would be too strong to call an early election; in fact, even now Rishi Sunak is confronted with claims that he does not possess a democratic legitimacy. Boris Johnson won the general elections straight in 2019 with a popular mandate; Liz Truss gained the premiership after an internal voting by some 160,000 Conservative Party members, while Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister with the support of 178 Tory MPs – hardly a popular mandate. According to opinion polls, some twothirds of the British voters favor early elections. Nevertheless, in general, all opinion polls should be taken with a grain of salt. As for the British ones, they were wrong in a number of elections and the Brexit referendum alike in the recent past.

Out of touch with society?

While the election of Liz Truss met with distrust in the business community, Rishi Sunak seems to be a safe pair of hands. After graduation, his first work place was the investment bank Goldman Sachs, then he was working for two large hedge funds before entering politics. He has had a meteoric rise: was elected an MP in 2015 and five years later, he got the unofficial No. 2 position in the government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was the one who opened the gates of the resignations of the 50 or so members of the government earlier this year in response to the antics of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He was defeated in the ensuing leadership contest in August, but the ’unforced errors’ of Liz Truss and her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng forced the Prime Minister first to fire Mr Kwarteng, then a few days later she had to resign. Rishi Sunak was lying low during the 44-day long Truss premiership, and he became an obvious choice as the early return of Boris Johnson into power was a no-starter politically – despite the fact, that ’BoJo’ is still the most popular Conservative politician in the country. Mr Sunak has an image problem: he and his wife are among the richest couples in the U.K., Rishi Sunak himself was having a U.S. green card for some time, and his wife, Akshata Murthy was a ’non-domicile’, that is, she was paying taxes outside of the United Kingdom. Rishi Sunak’s detractors and political opponents (there is quite an overlap) are doing their best to depict the new Prime Minister as a person out of touch with the problems of the large majority of the British people, which incorporate, among others, high energy prices, high cost-of-living, some seven million people on the waiting lists of the NHS, and so on.

Unresolved squares to be circled on both sides

Prime Minister Sunak has promised to correct some of the mistakes that his predecessor committed. First and foremost, Liz Truss wished to follow Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal economic policies with low taxes, deregulation and the like (’Trussonomics’). However, times have changed – and Liz Truss is not Margaret Thatcher – and her proposed mini-budget would have had GBP tens of billions of unfounded programs as the idea of recharging the economy by slashing personal income taxes was an economic ’fairy tale’ as Rishi Sunak pointed out in one of the debates between Liz Truss and him in August. Rishi Sunak has not committed another mistake done by his predecessor either. Liz Truss picked the cabinet members only from among the ’hard-core’ conservatives and Brexiteers (Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, among others), while Rishi Sunak has appointed cabinet members who represent the various factions within the party (for instance, Jeremy Hunt or Dominic Raab while retaining a number of cabinet members too, including Ben Wallace, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, and so on). However, it remains a ’million-dollar question’ whether the rather unruly Conservative Party can be united, and if yes, how the traditional Tory voters and the Brexiteer working-class ones in the previously Labour constituencies in the Midlands and the industrial centers can be persuaded to vote for the Conservative Party when the parliamentary elections come, most likely late 2024. If Rishi Sunak is not able to square this circle, then the Conservative Party is bound to suffer a defeat of the proportions of 1997. True, the Tory wipeout at that time needed a Tony Blair and an invigorated Labour Party, which had been out of power for 18 years. The Labour will have been out of power for 14 years by 2024, but Keir Starmer is not a Tony Blair, and the party has had to pay a stiff price for taking a sharp left turn after 2010 in contrast to the party in the 1990s when Tony Blair steered it back to the center. Despite the obvious weaknesses of the Tories and the opinion polls, the Labour does not seem to be able to offer an attractive alternative now. The Labour Party also has its own unresolved squares to be circled. Whichever party is able to do the trick will have better chances at the next parliamentary election.