Rishi Sunak Isn’t a Good Enough Technocrat

On a leisurely recent afternoon on the cobbled market street in Castle Cary, a small town in the British countryside of South Somerset, there were no no customers at the local cafe and a solitary old man walking toward the town pub. But beneath the quiet surface and slow pace in the quaint town there were rumblings of a political rebellion.

In the by elections last month in Somerton and Frome, the parliamentary constituency that Castle Cary is a part of, people voted tactically against the conservative candidate and chose Sarah Dyke, a liberal democrat who overturned the Conservative majority of nearly 20,000 votes. The defeat of the conservative candidate here, and in other constituencies and local councils once considered the party’s heartland over the last year, tells the story of a larger mood in the country heavily tilted against the incumbent prime minister.

The blue wall of Tory dominance is crumbling and pundits have pronounced the party is in “deep electoral trouble.’’ At the helm of the affairs is 43-year-old technocrat Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Even though on the doorstep he seems to be trusted as the man of finance, it looks increasingly difficult for him to rescue the party at the ballot.

John Curtice, a British political scientist who is currently the Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, analysed the results of the three recent by elections in Somerton and Frome, Selby and Ainsty and Uxbridge for the BBC and wrote it was Rishi Sunak who had “the biggest headache’’ ahead of the general elections.

“The coalition of Leave supporters that delivered Boris Johnson his majority in 2019 has collapsed—nearly half are no longer supporting the party, while Brexit itself has lost its allure for some voters,’’ Curtice wrote. “The Tory leader needs to find a new tune for his party. But with living standards falling, the economy faltering, and public services struggling, enticing voters back into the Tory fold still looks far from easy.’’

Sunak secured the keys to 10 Downing Street last year in the middle of a crisis in the Tory party and on the back of his reputation as a safe pair of hands as chancellor of the Exchequer amid the chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic. A former Goldman Sachs employee and hedge fund manager, he was applauded for his prescient warning against Liz Truss’s unfunded tax cuts. He took office as the first brown prime minister of the United Kingdom and marched into public meetings with the exuberance and optimism of a head boy that he once was.

Tie slipped in between the shirt, sleeves rolled up, Sunak reiterated his five pledges in every press briefing and media appearance. He said he would halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut National Health Service waiting lists and stop the boats ferrying irregular migrants. He said that the British people should hold him accountable if he fails to deliver and that he would have succeeded only when people feel a discernible change, an improvement in their living standards. If results of by elections and the sentiment in Castle Cary is anything to go by, the prime minister has a long distance to cover.

Margaret Bond stood at the cash register at the local coffee shop called The Place and said this time of the year her cafe started to receive more people but over the last two years the cost of living crisis has kept them away. “When we came back after the lockdown, after COVID, we were very busy, but we found that since the energy prices and everything went up, we’ve noticed a slump in our customers,’’ Bond told me late last month. “I think a lot of the shops are finding it hard.’’

A few steps away Victoria sat on a chair in the picturesque market place as her younger colleague Abby Stevens rolled up unsold Moroccan carpets. “Everything is terrible,’’ Stevens said, complaining about high food, gas and electricity prices. “People are lining up outside food banks. We have lost faith in the government.’’ Food prices rose to the highest levels in nearly five decades in March and April, by more than 19 percent. According to a YouGov poll one of five people in the U.K. either skipped a meal or ate less in recent months.

Victoria, however, lived in neighbouring Sherborne and said she was disappointed with Brexit and plans to deport asylum seekers to third nations like Rwanda. “I have always tried to support them [the conservative party] and see where it goes, but I don’t like how this is making us seem, bigoted and cruel,’’ she said. Victoria promptly added that many residents of the town backed Sunak’s illegal migration law or plan to stop the boats and asked me to speak to pensioners.

I approached two senior citizens sitting on a bench outside a pub called The White Hart and requested to speak to them but without even asking who I was and what I was writing about they snapped “NO.’’ At another pub a short distance away as I moved towards a group of three more with a notebook in my hand one of them shouted “NO.’’

It was hard to predict the reasons behind their outright refusal and whether their attitude to a journalist of colour was indicative of larger attitudes to immigrants. But for every person who declined to comment there were those like Dean Murphy who wanted to share how the conservatives had failed the nation. He sat on a bar stool with a mug of lager. A carpenter by profession Murphy said he was most disappointed by Boris Johnson’s “partygate” scandal. “He was partying himself, wasn’t he?’’ Murphy said. “I had someone in the hospital at the time.’’ Murphy, however, had kind words for Sunak. “He’s very sensible, good with finances. He’s trying to help the country.’’ 

Sunak’s popularity has plummeted since becoming prime minister. But if he delivers on his promises he might still give the Tories a fighting chance. In January when Sunak said he intended to halve inflation the latest readings were from November and inflation was at 10.7 percent. Last month it fell to 6.8 percent. That should be good news for him and his party but instead experts have pointed out he made a pledge that falls in the domain of the Bank of England which has raised interest rates more than a dozen times to reduce spending and contain rise in prices. Moreover, some believe that setting the goal to halve inflation may have inadvertently created conditions to prevent a steeper fall.

For his part Sunak tried to get leading supermarkets to impose voluntary caps on basic food commodities to rein in what has come to be known as Greedflation or profit inflation by companies to “rebuild margins’’ eventually for the interests of shareholders and CEOs, but so far nothing has come of it. Furthermore, economists are worried that core inflation—the change in prices of goods and services, except for those from the food and energy sectors—has persisted at 6.9 percent.

“To be completely clear, in the U.K. the Bank of England is in charge of setting the interest rates, and they operate separately and independently of the government,’’ Heidi Karjalainen from the Institute of Fiscal Studies told Foreign Policy. The Bank hopes that by raising interest rates, they will dampen demand for goods and services in the economy, “and thus ease price increase pressures.’’

But increasing interest rates have resulted in high mortgages and are expected to slow down the economy over the long term, negatively impacting Sunak’s second priority. “The U.K. is still experiencing moderate positive growth so we are not seeing that happening yet, but the effects of monetary policy can take a long time to feed through fully.’’

The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacted most economies in the world but while fluctuations in food and energy prices can be attributed to such global factors, inflation in the U.K. has been more persistent due to other longer-term policy decisions economists believe.

Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, said the U.K.’s short-term economic difficulties are not primarily Sunak’s responsibility: “He is closely associated with two of the major drivers of the U.K.’s long-term structural economic weakness: Brexit and austerity.’’ Sunak supported fiscal austerity in David Cameron’s time as prime minister, which cut productivity and hurt social services, and was a staunch backer of Brexit which reduced trade with the EU and caused major labor shortages further impacting businesses.

His third priority, reducing debt, is connected to how well he does with the second. Debt has risen above 100 percent of the GDP for the first time in six decades and cannot be reduced substantially if the economy does not grow at a faster pace and provides the state with sufficient revenue. The deadline for this target is unclear.

Sunak has announced a long-term plan to reform the National Health Service and cut down the waiting lists but training thousands of medical staff will take years. The number of patients waiting for treatment in England rose from 7.47 million in May to 7.57 million in June, even as the prime minister claimed progress.

“We have virtually eliminated 18-month waits and are taking action to bring down waits of over a year,’’ he said. In another interview he added that under his plan the NHS will undergo the “largest expansion in training and workforce” in its history, and reduce “reliance on foreign-trained health-care professionals.” But he admitted it could take “five, 10, 15 years,’’ a wait perhaps too long for millions in queue for essential health check ups.

Sunak and his home secretary have spent the most time in advertising his fifth priority, stopping the boats and deporting irregular asylum seekers. This is a part of the culture war that they hope will bring the Tories back to power. They have pushed through the illegal immigration bill in both houses which calls for deportation of irregular immigrants to Rwanda or another third safe country and until then keeping them in cheaper accommodations than hotels, such as military bases and barges.

Sunak believes this policy is working, too, and has said that in the five months since he launched the scheme crossings are down by 20 percent. It is true that figures for this year are below what they were the same time last year but the number of crossings in June was the highest for any June on record and the fact that people are still crossing the channel on boats defeats the governments narrative of how this law is meant to act as a deterrent. Six people died and dozens were rescued as a migrant boat crossing the English Channel capsized earlier this month.

Experts say “Stop the Boats,” again, is simply a catchy phrase to appease British people who are suspicious of irregular migrants and not a coherent policy to deal with the problem of millions being forced to flee their war-torn, poverty ridden nations. There are other reasons it is not working. For instance, the decision to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has been challenged in the court and the first barge where 500 adult male asylum seekers were to be kept has been found unsafe to host people.

As inflation goes down and the economic outlook for Britain improves, even if marginally, it is possible that some people might feel better off, said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe and senior fellow at the Institute for Government. “Even if people do feel a bit better off, or at least that things have stopped getting worse, there is a risk for Sunak that the loss of confidence in Conservatives’ ability to manage the economy persists, as it did the last time the Conservatives went down to a big electoral defeat in 1997,’’ she wrote to Foreign Policy in an email.

Sunak still has yet to fulfill his original reputation as an effective manager of the economy and doing so may be his only chance of gaining reelection. But there is no guarantee that will prove true or, after years of his party’s economic mismanagement, that it is even possible.