Rishi Sunak will need all the help he can get from cabinet – he faces toughest situation any PM has had for decades | Beth Rigby

Published

2 years ago

October 26, 2022

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If he cherished the moment or savoured the win after losing out in the Tory leadership contest in the summer, Rishi Sunak kept it from view.

From his audience with the King straight to Downing Street, the new prime minister went straight to the lectern and made his inaugural address to the nation.

There were no staffers or MP supporters applauding their man. His wife did not stand outside No 10 and look on.

Sunak’s first full day in the top job – live updates

From the choreography of the moment to the words he spoke, much about Mr Sunak’s launch day was an attempt to show the public his premiership was a break from the past – which is exactly how he wanted it.

Because this is a prime minister who resigned from Boris Johnson’s government after concluding that the business of government was not being conducted “properly, competently or seriously”.

He is a prime minister who warned Liz Truss that her “fantasy economics” would damage the economy. In the end, he had little time for either politician politically or policy-wise, and he used his first speech to try to and put clear blue water between him and them.

When it came to Ms Truss, Mr Sunak was crystal clear – telling the public what she chose not to in her short final speech outside No 10.

“Some mistakes were made,” he told the public as he acknowledged he has been made leader “to fix them”.

And he also took a swipe at the policies – those unfunded tax cuts – she tried to implement as prime minister and which he detested, making it clear that his approach was different to hers: “The government I lead will not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.”

When it came to Mr Johnson, Mr Sunak on the one hand praised his “warmth and generosity of spirit” – but on the other, he indirectly criticised the manner in which he ran his administration.

“This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned. And I will earn yours,” he said.

And finally, Mr Sunak made a pledge to the public that he’d turn the page on Conservative Party introspection and infighting and “put your needs above politics”.

“I understand too that I have work to do to restore trust after all that has happened.”

But this was a speech that also hinted at what was to come – with possible spending cuts and tax rises to help tackle the “profound economic crisis” the country is facing.

This a former chancellor-turned-PM who wants to right the wrongs of his predecessor and put “economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda”, while sticking very clearly to the promises made in the 2019 manifesto as he sought to claim a mandate for his appointment, rather than public election, on the back of Mr Johnson’s general election win.

There would be “difficult decisions” ahead. His new fiscal plan is expected next week, in which he will have to try to reassure the markets that debt is under control, and outline some of those agonising choices over possible tax rises and spending cuts.

Perhaps that’s why faced with this level of economic pain, Mr Sunak didn’t choose to make significant cabinet changes.

Big beast moves (and more bruised egos) are a risk he was not minded to take right now.

The Change PM became Mr Continuity Cabinet as he kept Jeremy Hunt as chancellor and James Cleverly as foreign secretary.

He even brought Suella Braverman back as home secretary, despite her having to resign from that role just six days ago for a security breach (sending official documents via her personal email) which broke the ministerial code.

Overall, about a third of his cabinet were still in post. He did, however, try to build a unity cabinet in a way that his two predecessors did not – bringing in Ms Braverman and Kemi Badenoch from the right of the party, and keeping Liz Truss’s deputy and key ally Therese Coffey in this top team.

There were jobs too for arch-Johnsonites, be that James Cleverly at the Foreign Office or Chris Heaton at the Northern Ireland office.

He also brought back experience and brought in his own people – be that putting Michael Gove back into the department of levelling up, or his key ally Oliver Dowden into the powerful Duchy of Lancaster role to run the Cabinet Office.

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Grant Shapps was put into the Department of Business while Dominic Raab was reappointed deputy prime minister and made justice secretary.

“Unity, experience and competence” is how one No 10 insider explained the reshuffle to me last night. “We do need a bit of experience around the cabinet table with the economy and the international situation.”

He will need all the help he can get from this team in the coming days.

For this is a new prime minister who is about to be tested in the toughest set of political and economic circumstances than any leader has faced in decades.

The lingering question has to be whether he is up to the extreme challenges of being prime minister.

At just 42 years old, he is the youngest serving prime minister in over 200 years and has clocked up just seven years in parliament and three years in cabinet.

He is relatively untested and has, say his critics, displayed a shocking lack of political nous for someone with ambitions for the highest office.

They point to revelations in April that Mr Sunak’s multimillionaire wife Akshata Murty was claiming non-domicile status – a scheme that allows people to avoid tax on foreign earnings – when her husband was chancellor as politically naive (Ms Murty has since changed her tax status).

There was also his admission that he’d held a US green card for two years – which means he had to pay US tax on worldwide income and pledge the US as his forever home – while serving as chancellor, with perhaps ambitions to run as PM.

Whether he was advised badly, or he didn’t see the red flags himself, these were scandals that could have been avoided, which in turn question his judgement.

That political judgement was questioned again within hours of him becoming prime minister, as he reappointed Ms Braverman as home secretary.

It was all too easy for the Labour Party, who derided the new prime minister for pledging professionalism while putting – to quote shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper – someone “so careless and slapdash into that job”.

Meanwhile, his decision to leave his challenger Penny Mordaunt in the relatively junior cabinet role of Leader of the Commons – friends told me she wanted foreign secretary – may have been seen by her backers as a rather peevish thing to do, although one of her supporters told me Ms Mordaunt was happy with the job.

But for all the politics of this moment, it is the policies that will matter for Mr Sunak in the coming days as he tries to set out an economic plan that will reassure the markets, his party and the public, that he is up to the job and can handle the task in hand.

He told the British public on the steps of Downing Street that he “understood how difficult this moment is”.

This no doubt a message to himself too.

UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.

UK

Wes Streeting ‘crossed the line’ by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Published

3 hours ago

November 15, 2024

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Wes Streeting 'crossed the line' by opposing assisted dying in public, says Labour peer Harriet Harman

Wes Streeting “crossed the line” by opposing assisted dying in public and the argument shouldn’t “come down to resources”, a Labour peer has said.

Speaking on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Harriet Harman criticised the health secretary for revealing how he is going to vote on the matter when it comes before parliament later this month.

MPs are being given a free vote, meaning they can side with their conscience and not party lines, so the government is supposed to be staying neutral.

But Mr Streeting has made clear he will vote against legalising assisted dying, citing concerns end-of-life care is not good enough for people to make an informed choice, and that some could feel pressured into the decision to save the NHS money.

He has also ordered a review into the potential costs of changing the law, warning it could come at the expense of other NHS services if implemented.

Baroness Harman said Mr Streeting has “crossed the line in two ways”.

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“He should not have said how he was going to vote, because that breaches neutrality and sends a signal,” she said.

“And secondly… he’s said the problem is that it will cost money to bring in an assisted dying measure, and therefore he will have to cut other services.

“But paradoxically, he also said it would be a slippery slope because people will be forced to bring about their own death in order to save the NHS money. Well, it can’t be doing both things.

“It can’t be both costing the NHS money and saving the NHS money.”

Baroness Harman said the argument “should not come down to resources” as it is a “huge moral issue” affecting “only a tiny number of people”.

She added that people should not mistake Mr Streeting for being “a kind of proxy for Keir Starmer”.

“The government is genuinely neutral and all of those backbenchers, they can vote whichever way they want,” she added.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously expressed support for assisted dying, but it is not clear how he intends to vote on the issue or if he will make his decision public ahead of time.

The cabinet has varying views on the topic, with the likes of Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood siding with Mr Streeting in her opposition but Energy Secretary Ed Miliband being for it.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is being championed by Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater, who wants to give people with six months left to live the choice to end their lives.

Under her proposals, two independent doctors must confirm a patient is eligible for assisted dying and a High Court judge must give their approval.

The bill will also include punishments of up to 14 years in prison for those who break the law, including coercing someone into ending their own life.

MPs will debate and vote on the legislation on 29 November, in what will be the first Commons vote on assisted dying since 2015, when the proposal was defeated.