Rishi Sunak may soon discover that his political opponents are harder to calm than investors.
As a first step after taking office, the British Prime Minister succeeded in calming the financial markets with a frugal fiscal program based on massive tax increases. According to government officials, Sunak and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt are now developing a strategy for the second phase.
Hunt is working on a range of measures aimed at boosting sluggish growth in the UK and getting people back into the job market, officials said. But the government is unlikely to announce most of these measures before the spring 2023 budget.
The long wait for a more optimistic message will leave Sunak’s government vulnerable to attack from his own backbenchers and the opposition Labor Party as he leads the country through a winter of strikes, recession and soaring energy prices.
Some Tory lawmakers are calling for more radical pro-growth policies, while another faction is concerned about protecting the rural way of life for its affluent constituents. Most of them are concerned about what Sunak can do to reduce the opposition Labor Party’s 21-point lead in the latest opinion polls.
The first attacks have already begun.
Former Cabinet Secretary Simon Clarke, who served in Liz Truss’ short-lived government, has tabled an amendment to a Compensatory Bill that would facilitate the effective ban of onshore wind farms in the UK.
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In a sign of just how serious this rebellion could be, both Truss and her predecessor Boris Johnson signed the amendment in their first significant dissenting move against the new prime minister. Pro-growth lawmakers are determined to pressure Sunak, an MP said.
The group is likely to cause problems for the government on a range of other policy issues in the near future. They can be expected to demand action on Brexit opportunities, infrastructure, childcare quotas and productivity improvement measures.
“The UK’s core problem is horrible productivity even by G7 standards and really weak investment spending,” economist Jim O’Neill, a former Tory minister who later left the party, told Bloomberg TV this week, arguing Sunaks Savings strategy was a mistake. “We need a government that is willing to borrow to invest.”
But Sunak finds himself in a pincer movement, with those wanting to block things like the construction of new homes also staging their own rebellion earlier this week.
The Prime Minister was forced to vote on his housing targets in the House of Commons after a group of backbenchers rebelled largely in leafy, rural seats who do not want large numbers of new homes to be built in their constituencies.
This setback calls into question Sunak’s plans to improve living standards outside of prosperous south-east England.
The government would have won the vote if it had decided to confront the rebels because the main opposition party, Labor, had backed the proposal, a Labor official said, noting that Sunak had chosen to assign unity to the party protect rather than advance his visions for the country.
media round
With no major political plans to rally support, Sunak has stunned some MPs by also giving in in the daily media battle.
The Prime Minister’s communications team has decided to abandon the custom of sending a minister every morning to tour TV and radio studios and get its message out to the public. Sunak’s communications team has scaled this back as they believe the daily round is unhelpful and generates too many negative stories.
It’s a mistake, Tory MPs and strategists said, because it allows Labor to field their own spokespersons to attack the government freely. It is inevitable that the government will reverse the decision, a Tory predicted.
The disorientation and scale of challenges facing the party are sapping MPs’ morale, and dozens of Tories are likely to announce in the next few weeks that they will step down in the next election, a government official has said. MPs have until December 5 to notify party headquarters of their intentions.
Former Minister Chris Skidmore, 41, told the Telegraph late Saturday he was stepping down because his seat was due to be abolished and he didn’t want a new constituency. A day earlier, Dehenna Davison, the 29-year-old who won Bishop Auckland’s northern seat for the Tories for the first time in 2019, said she would not run again. Backbenchers William Wragg and Chloe Smith have also announced their intention to leave Parliament.
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Downing Street is also concerned that Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab may not survive an inquiry into the bullying allegations. On Friday, No. 10 announced that a third formal complaint had been filed against Raab. He denies all allegations.
The government had initially hoped that by using formal complaints as a threshold for an investigation, Raab would be isolated, as no complaints had initially been received. Senior government officials did not expect multiple complaints to be filed then, an official said. Her hope is that the investigation will conclude that Raab is not a bully, just uncomfortable working for him.
Government officials are also increasingly concerned about a wave of strikes that will shut down the country over the winter. Nursing, rail and postal workers are planning strikes in the coming weeks. A government official said they were concerned the industrial action would approach the scale of a general strike.
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