Thursday 4 August 2022

Sunak's career is over

Hard as it may be to imagine, I think Liz Truss is probably going to outdo Johnson in incompetence, incoherence and stupidity. On Tuesday she told a hustings that if they voted for her, she would introduce regional pay boards to set the pay of civil servants outside London. It would apparently save the taxpayer £8.8 billion a year. The policy is one from the right wing ‘think tank’ The Taxpayers Alliance (TPA) which you can see HERE. 

The press release setting out the policy was embargoed before Sunday 31 July.

It was in other words, hot off the press and immediately seized on by Truss and her team without giving it a moment's thought. She ‘announced’ it on Tuesday night, Rees-Mogg and others were in front of TV cameras defending it bright and early on Wednesday morning as commentators began pointing out that the entire wage bill for Whitehall civil servants was £9 billion in total so the savings had to be made over the whole public sector. 

JRM said it would only apply to new employees although in that case it’s hard to see where the £8.8 billion was coming from. It would also create a two-tier pay structure with people doing the same job being paid different amounts. 

The TPA press release says: "On average, public sector employees receive higher pay than the private sector in every region of the UK, with this disparity potentially costing £20 billion a year. The campaign group is proposing a reform to national pay bargaining to introduce region-based public sector pay."

This is not altogether surprising since the public sector employs a lot of highly qualified professional people and not very many waiters or delivery drivers on the minimum wage.  To get the full £8.8 billion meant teachers, policemen, doctors and nurses in the provinces would see a wage cut. 

There was uproar, including from a lot of Tory MPs, especially in red wall seats. 

By lunchtime, the policy had been ditched.

Truss said her policy had been 'misinterpreted' and to avoid worrying people she was being ‘clear’ that having regional pay boards was not her policy. It had lasted less than 16 hours. I don’t remember even the famously chaotic Johnson adopting and dropping a major policy that quickly. But don’t expect the gaffe to reduce her lead.  

If anything the Tory members like this kind of off-the-wall thinking and disruption. They exist in their own strange nether world and don't seem to worry what the rest of the country thinks.

Check this out:

Over half of Conservative members think kicking Johnson out was a mistake. And Sunak is widely seen as one of the key ministers to withdraw support very early on. Johnson supporters hate him for it.

But even more than that, I posted the other day that I thought Sunak would lose because he’s not white and sure enough, somebody re-tweeted what is claimed to be some messages exchanged on a Conservative forum:

I don't know how widespread this is and maybe it's confined to a tiny number but perhaps not.

Let's face it, the Tory party membership has seen a considerable shift to the right when many UKIP members switched (or returned) in large numbers in 2019. For UKIP, leaving the EU and controlling our borders was all about stopping foreigners coming here. They were never going to make the Tories more tolerant of immigrants and now both Sunak and Truss are having to make their pitches to a lot of swivel-eyed xenophobic nut jobs.

There was always a strand of thinking inside the Conservative party that was openly racist and effectively merging with UKIP has done nothing to dilute it. It has in fact made it far worse. Sunak was handicapped from the start.

In an effort to counteract this, Sunak himself is cultivating an ever-more authoritarian tone by talking about 'lefty lawyers' and suggesting Britain needs to "move away from the ECHR definition of asylum" with the implication being the UK's withdrawal from the ECHR.

And he's also calling for those who "speak or write about the UK in an abusively disparaging manner" being 'deradicalised' - I suppose he means in the way they used to 're-educate' people in the Soviet Union or how China deals with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

It's amazing how the children of immigrants like Sunak, Patel and Braverman are happy to come here, be educated and then move into politics to create conditions not dissimilar to the countries their own parents fled from, where the population have fewer rights and less protection from authoritarian regimes.  Why do they do it?

Sunak's brief but spectacular parliamentary career is almost certainly over. He was elected as an MP in 2015, became a junior minister in 2018, Chief Secretary to The Treasury under Johnson in 2019 and Chancellor when Javid stepped down later in the same year.

Three years later he has shot himself in the foot.

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