London: Rishi Sunak marked his 100th day in office as the first non-white British Prime Minister on Thursday with a slick new video for social media pledging to deliver change, amidst multiple challenges, including spiralling inflation.
The UK’s first Indian-origin Prime Minister took charge at 10 Downing Street a day after Diwali last year on October 25 in the wake of intense political turmoil following the unceremonious exit of his predecessors – party-gate scandal-hit Boris Johnson and the country’s shortest-serving Prime Minister Liz Truss.
Since then, Sunak has laid out his top priorities with a particular focus on cutting soaring inflation to tackle the crippling cost of living crisis in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“Others may talk about change. I will deliver it,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
The accompanying video captures a montage of his historic selection for the top job as the “youngest in modern history”, aged 42, and also the first non-white politician at No. 10 Downing Street. It goes on to reiterate his new year commitments of five key priorities: to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut National Health Service (NHS) waiting lists and stop the illegal migration via small boats crossing the English Channel.
Among the scenes of his meetings with key world leaders, there is shot of him shaking hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, last November where the two leaders greenlit the UK-India Young Professionals Scheme – a reciprocal scheme offering 3,000 18-30-year-old degree-educated youth visas every year to live and work in either country for two years.
“I know first-hand the incredible value of the deep cultural and historic ties we have with India. I am pleased that even more of India’s brightest young people will now have the opportunity to experience all that life in the UK has to offer – and vice-versa – making our economies and societies richer,” he said at the time.
Sunak, who is married to Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s daughter Akshata Murty, has also committed to working towards a free trade agreement (FTA) with India but reiterated that his government would not compromise “quality over speed” after the Diwali deadline set for the deal was missed due to the political turmoil in the UK.
On the domestic front, Sunak faces multiple challenges and pressures, including having to recently sack Conservative Party chair Nadhim Zahawi as a minister without portfolio in his Cabinet after an investigation found he had breached the ministerial code over his tax affairs.
He faced intense Opposition pressure over the issue and continues to be challenged over his decision to keep his deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, in the post while he is being investigated over multiple bullying allegations by civil servants.
“Integrity is really important to me,” he said recently, pledging to “take whatever steps are necessary to restore the integrity back into politics”.
“The things that happened before I was prime minister, I can’t do anything about. What I think you can hold me to account for is how I deal with the things that arise on my watch,” he added.
Besides, his government is facing some of the biggest strikes in British history as nurses, teachers, transport workers and civil servants take industrial action demanding better pay and working conditions.
The spectre of Brexit, which also marked its third anniversary this week after Britain formally left the European Union (EU) on January 31, 2020, continues to loom large over his leadership as he works on signing off on a new deal over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The unresolved issue of goods traded between the UK region and EU member-state Ireland has continued to cause great discontent on all sides.
All this comes against the backdrop of the governing Conservative Party trailing 20 or more points behind Opposition Labour in opinion polls. A poor show for the Tories in the upcoming May local elections could spur calls for yet another change of party leader ahead of general elections expected next year.
LONDON — Public sector workers on strike, the cost-of-living climbing, and a government on the ropes.
“It’s hard to miss the parallels” between the infamous ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 and Britain in 2023, says Robert Saunders, historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary, University of London.
Admittedly, the comparison only goes so far. In the 1970s it was a Labour government facing down staunchly socialist trade unions in a wave of strikes affecting everything from food deliveries to grave-digging, while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives sat in opposition and awaited their chance.
But a mass walkout fixed for Wednesday could yet mark a staging post in the downward trajectory of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, just as it did for Callaghan’s Labour.
Britain is braced for widespread strike action tomorrow, as an estimated 100,000 civil servants from government departments, ports, airports and driving test centers walk out alongside hundreds of thousands of teachers across England and Wales, train drivers from 14 national operators and staff at 150 U.K. universities.
It follows rolling action by train and postal workers, ambulance drivers, paramedics, and nurses in recent months. In a further headache for Sunak, firefighters on Monday night voted to walk out for the first time in two decades.
While each sector has its own reasons for taking action, many of those on strike are united by the common cause of stagnant pay, with inflation still stubbornly high. And that makes it harder for Sunak to pin the blame on the usual suspects within the trade union movement.
Mr Reasonable
Industrial action has in the past been wielded as a political weapon by the Conservative Party, which could count on a significant number of ordinary voters being infuriated by the withdrawal of public services.
Tories have consequently often used strikes as a stick with which to beat their Labour opponents, branding the left-wing party as beholden to its trade union donors.
But public sympathies have shifted this time round, and it’s no longer so simple to blame the union bogeymen.
Sunak has so far attempted to cast himself as Mr Reasonable, stressing that his “door is always open” to workers but warning that the right to strike must be “balanced” with the provision of services. To this end, he is pressing ahead with long-promised legislation to enforce minimum service standards in sectors hit by industrial action.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner | POOL photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Unions are enraged by the anti-strike legislation, yet Sunak’s soft-ish rhetoric is still in sharp relief to the famously bellicose Thatcher, who pledged during the 1979 strikes that “if someone is confronting our essential liberties … then, by God, I will confront them.”
Sunak’s careful approach is chosen at least in part because the political ground has shifted beneath him since the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020.
Public sympathy for frontline medical staff, consistently high in the U.K., has been further embedded by the extreme demands placed upon nurses and other hospital staff during the pandemic. And inflation is hitting workers across the economy — not just in the public sector — helping to create a broader reservoir of sympathy for strikers than has often been found in the past.
James Frayne, a former government adviser who co-founded polling consultancy Public First, observes: “Because of the cost-of-living crisis, what you [as prime minister] can’t do, as you might be able to do in the past, is just portray this as being an ideologically-driven strike.”
Starmer’s sleight of hand
At the same time, strikes are not the political headache for the opposition Labour Party they once were.
Thatcher was able to portray Callaghan as weak when he resisted the use of emergency powers against the unions. David Cameron was never happier than when inviting then-Labour leader Ed Miliband to disown his “union paymasters,” particularly during the last mass public sector strike in 2011.
Crucially, trade union votes had played a key role in Miliband’s election as party leader — something the Tories would never let him forget. But when Sunak attempts to reprise Cameron’s refrains against Miliband, few seem convinced.
QMUL’s Saunders argues that the Conservatives are trying to rerun “a 1980s-style campaign” depicting Labour MPs as being in the pocket of the unions. But “I just don’t think this resonates with the public,” he added.
Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, has actively sought to weaken the left’s influence in the party, attracting criticism from senior trade unionists. Most eye-catchingly, Starmer sacked one of his own shadow ministers, Sam Tarry, after he defied an order last summer that the Labour front bench should not appear on picket lines.
Starmer has been “given cover,” as one shadow minister put it, by Sunak’s decision to push ahead with the minimum-service legislation. It means Labour MPs can please trade unionists by fighting the new restrictions in parliament — without having to actually stand on the picket line.
So far it seems to be working. Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group representing millions of U.K. trade unionists, told POLITICO: “Frankly, I’m less concerned about Labour frontbenchers standing up on picket lines for selfies than I am about the stuff that really matters to our union” — namely the government’s intention to “further restrict the right to strike.”
The TUC is planning a day of action against the new legislation on Wednesday, coinciding with the latest wave of strikes.
Sticking to their guns
For now, Sunak’s approach appears to be hitting the right notes with his famously restless pack of Conservative MPs.
Sunak has made tackling inflation the raison d’etre of his government, and his backbenchers are reasonably content to rally behind that banner.
As one Tory MP for an economically-deprived marginal seat put it: “We have to hold our nerve. There’s a strong sense of the corner (just about) being turned on inflation rising, so we need to be as tough as possible … We can’t now enable wage increases that feed inflation.”
Another agreed: “Rishi should hold his ground. My guess is that eventually people will get fed up with the strikers — especially rail workers.”
Furthermore, Public First’s Frayne says his polling has picked up the first signs of an erosion of support for strikes since they kicked off last summer, particularly among working-class voters.
“We’re at the point now where people are feeling like ‘well, I haven’t had a pay rise, and I’m not going to get a pay rise, and can we all just accept that it’s tough for everybody and we’ve got to get on with it,’” he said.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent.
‘Everything is broken’
But the broader concern for Sunak’s Conservatives is that, regardless of whatever individual pay deals are eventually hammered out, the wave of strikes could tap into a deeper sense of malaise in the U.K.
Inflation remains high, and the government’s independent forecaster predicted in December that the U.K. will fall into a recession lasting more than a year.
More than half (59 percent) of people back strike action by nurses, according to new research by Public First, while for teachers the figure is 43 percent, postal workers 41 percent and rail workers 36 percent | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
Strikes by ambulance workers only drew more attention to an ongoing crisis in the National Health Service, with patients suffering heart attacks and strokes already facing waits of more than 90 minutes at the end of 2022.
Moving around the country has been made difficult not only by strikes, but by multiple failures by rail providers on key routes.
One long-serving Conservative MP said they feared a sense of fatalism was setting in among the public — “the idea that everything is broken and there’s no point asking this government to fix it.”
A former Cabinet minister said the most pressing issue in their constituency is the state of public services, and strike action signaled political danger for the government. They cautioned that the public are not blaming striking workers, but ministers, for the disruption.
Those at the top of government are aware of the risk of such a narrative taking hold, with the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, taking aim at “declinism about Britain” in a keynote speech Friday.
Whether the government can do much to change the story, however, is less clear.
Saunders harks back to Callaghan’s example, noting that public sector workers were initially willing to give the Labour government the benefit of the doubt, but that by 1979 the mood had fatally hardened.
This is because strikes are not only about falling living standards, he argues. “It’s also driven by a loss of faith in government that things are going to get better.”
With an election looming next year, Rishi Sunak is running out of time to turn the public mood around.
Annabelle Dickson and Graham Lanktree contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
London: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Sunday sacked one of his Cabinet ministers and Conservative Party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, after he was found to have been in serious breach of the Ministerial Code.
Zahawi, who was a minister without portfolio as the chief of the governing Tory party, had faced fierce pressure in recent days to quit over questions about his finances after it emerged that he had agreed a penalty settlement with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) department.
Sunak had ordered an independent investigation into the Iraqi-born former Chancellor’s tax affairs amid growing Opposition demands for him to sack Zahawi.
His independent ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, submitted his assessment on whether the HMRC settlement amounted to a breach of the ministerial code.
“When I became Prime Minister last year, I pledged that the government I lead would have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level,” writes Sunak in his letter to Zahawi, released by Downing Street.
“Following the completion of the independent adviser’s investigation the findings of which he has shared with us both it is clear that there has been a serious breach of the Ministerial Code. As a result, I have informed you of my decision to remove you from your position in His Majesty’s government,” he said.
He added that Zahawi should be “extremely proud” of his “wide-ranging achievements in government over the last five years”, particularly crediting his “successful oversight of the COVID-19 vaccine procurement and deployment programme”.
In the correspondence to Sunak, also released by Downing Street, Magnus said his overall judgement was that “Mr Zahawi’s conduct as a minister has fallen below the high standards that, as Prime Minister, you rightly expect from those who serve in your government”.
Earlier this week, Zahawi said he welcomed the investigation and looked forward to “explaining the facts of this issue” to Magnus the UK Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests.
“In order to ensure the independence of this process, you will understand that it would be inappropriate to discuss this issue any further, as I continue my duties as chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party,” Zahawi said at the time.
The minister has insisted he “acted properly throughout” and any tax error was due to being “careless” and not deliberate.
The Opposition parties and even some members of the Conservative Party had called for Zahawi to step down as Tory chairman amid too many unanswered questions.
In his report, dated 29 January, Magnus notes: “Given the nature of the investigation by HMRC, which started prior to his appointment as secretary of state for education on 15 September 2021, I consider that by failing to declare HMRC’s ongoing investigation before July 2022 despite the ministerial declaration of interests form including specific prompts on tax affairs and HMRC investigations and disputes Mr Zahawi failed to meet the requirement to declare any interests which might be thought to give rise to a conflict.”
He adds: “I also conclude that, in the appointments process for the governments formed in September 2022 and October 2022, Mr Zahawi failed to disclose relevant information in this case the nature of the investigation and its outcome in a penalty at the time of his appointment, including to cabinet office officials who support that process.
“Without knowledge of that information, the Cabinet Office was not in a position to inform the appointing Prime Minister.”
Rishi Sunak has fired Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi over a “serious breach” of U.K. government ethics rules relating to his tax affairs.
Zahawi has been hit by weeks of damaging headlines over an investigation into his personal taxes carried out by HM Revenue and Customs.
The party chairman and Cabinet Office minister was hit by a penalty from the tax authority while serving as a senior minister, with media reports putting the total charge at £4.8 million. An independent probe, ordered by Sunak and published Sunday morning, concluded Zahawi had not been sufficiently transparent about his private dealings with the tax authority when accepting a succession of senior ministerial roles.
In a letter to Zahawi confirming his sacking, Sunak said he had vowed to put “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level” of his administration, and that the investigation by the government’s ethics watchdog Laurie Magnus had found “a serious breach of the Ministerial Code.”
“As a result, I have informed you of my decision to remove you from your position in His Majesty’s Government,” Sunak said.
No.10 also published Magnus’ letter to Sunak, setting out the findings of his short investigation. The ethics chief said that while Zahawi had “provided his full and open cooperation” with his own inquiry, he had shown “insufficient regard” for the ministerial code, and in particular, its requirement to be “honest, open and an exemplary leader.”
Zahawi had, Magnus concluded, failed to declare the HMRC investigation when he became Boris Johnson’s chancellor in July last year; failed to update his declaration of ministerial interests when he settled with HMRC last September; and failed to disclose the nature of the HMRC probe and penalty when Sunak was forming his own government in October 2022, “including to Cabinet Office officials who support that process.”
“Without knowledge of that information, the Cabinet Office was not in a position to inform the appointing Prime Minister,” Magnus concluded.
Zahawi hits out at press
In his reply to the prime minister, Zahawi — who served as U.K. vaccines minister as Johnson’s government vied to get COVID-19 under control — said it had been, “after being blessed with my loving family, the privilege of my life to serve in successive governments and make what I believe to have been a tangible difference to the country I love.”
Zahawi’s own letter made no mention whatsoever of his tax affairs and instead attacked the media, saying he is “concerned” about “the conduct from some of the fourth estate in recent weeks.”
“In a week when a Member of Parliament was physically assaulted, I fail to see how one headline on this issue ‘The Noose Tightens’ reflects legitimate scrutiny of public officials,” he said, referring to the front page of the Independent newspaper, whose reporting helped bring the tax investigation to light.
The sacking was seized on by the opposition Labour Party, with Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson arguing that Sunak had taken too long to act, and is a prime minister “trying to manage his MPs, rather than govern in the national interest.”
“It’s vital that we now get answers to what Rishi Sunak knew and when did he know it,” she added. “We need to see all the papers, not just have the prime minister’s role in this brushed under the carpet.”
This developing story is being updated.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
London: British Prime Minster Rishi Sunak is seen as more trustworthy, more economically competent and more likely to win votes than his former boss, Boris Johnson, in a new survey of voting intentions that was released on Saturday.
The Savanta ComRes survey for The Independent’ newspaper found that Johnson’s perceived popularity as the Conservative Party leader who won a big mandate in the 2019 general election does not necessarily translate among British voters ahead of the next polls expected in 2024.
The survey finds that 63 percent are opposed to Johnson, 58, trying to lead the country again with only 24 percent in favour of the idea.
At the same time, around 41 percent of voters believe Sunak, 42, can “improve” the reputation of the Tory party, with only 19 percent saying the same of Johnson.
“The former Prime Minister’s backers believe he has electoral magic’ but the results show that Mr Sunak is deemed more trustworthy, more economically competent and more likely to win their vote,” the survey findings in the newspaper reveal.
“Mr Johnson’s allies are keen for the former PM to return from the wilderness, replace Rishi Sunak and lead the Tory party into the general election expected in 2024. But 63 percent are opposed to Mr Johnson trying to lead the country again with only 24 percent in favour of the idea,” it notes.
A clear majority of voters (58 per cent) believe Johnson should have to resign his Uxbridge and Ruislip seat as a Tory MP in London if he is found to have lied over Partygate at the parliamentary inquiry, set to begin by next month.
Although both Johnson and Sunak were fined in the scandal for attending a birthday party at No.10 Downing Street in violation of COVID curbs, around 39 percent of the British public blame the former prime minister for Partygate, while only 9 percent blame Sunak.
Only 14 percent of voters think Johnson can be trusted to tell the truth, while 39 percent believe the same of Indian-origin Sunak.
On the economy, only 19 percent trust Johnson to manage the nation’s finances versus 44 percent for the current Tory leader.
Chris Hopkins, director of Savanta, said the survey numbers showed that discussions by some Tories about bringing back Johnson “should come with serious health warnings”.
“Boris Johnson, and to some extent Liz Truss, are responsible for the Conservatives dire polling numbers,” he warned.
The Savanta ComRes survey comprised of 2,064 adults was carried out between January 13 and January 15 in the UK.
