The British prime minister managed to calm financial markets with a tough fiscal program based on high taxes as the first move after taking office.
Rishi Sunak may be about to discover that his political opponents are harder to placate than investors. The British prime minister managed to calm the financial markets with a tough fiscal program based on high taxes as the first move after taking office. Sunak and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt are now developing plans for the second phase, according to government officials.
Hunt is working on a range of measures to boost UK economic growth and get people back to work, officials said. But the government is not expected to announce many of these measures until the 2023 budget in the spring.
The long wait for optimistic news will leave Sunak’s government vulnerable to attacks on its MPs and the opposition Labor Party as it leads the country into a winter of breathlessness, recession and rising energy prices. Some conservative lawmakers want more aggressive growth policies, while others care about preserving rural lifestyles for their wealthy. Many of them are worried about what Sunak can do to reduce the Labor party’s 21-point lead in the new opinion polls. The first attack had already begun.
Former cabinet minister Simon Clarke, who served in the short-lived government of Liz Truss, has tabled an amendment to the Leveling Bill that would strengthen the UK’s ban on wind farms. In a sign of the seriousness of the rebellion, Truss and his predecessor Boris Johnson signed the amendment, in their first major protest against the new prime minister.
Young lawmakers are determined to put pressure on Sunak, the lawmaker said. The group may cause problems for the government on many other political issues in the near future. It can be expected that they will want to act on Brexit opportunities, infrastructure, childcare rates and measures to increase productivity
. “The central problem in the UK is terrible productivity even by G7 standards and weak investment spending,” economist Jim O’Neill, a former Conservative cabinet minister who later told Bloomberg TV, told Bloomberg TV in this week. , says Sunak’s austerity plan is a mistake. “We need a government that is willing to lend money to invest.”
But Sunak found himself in a pincer movement, with those who want to block things like new housing also showing their own disobedience earlier this week. The Prime Minister was forced to vote in the House of Commons on his housing agenda, following a rebellion by a group of MPs in back-to-the-book, rural seats who did not want more new housing to be built on their horses.
The setback undermines Sunak’s plan to improve living conditions outside England’s affluent southeast.
The government would have won the vote if it had decided to attack the rebels, as opposition Labor leaders would have supported the plan, a Labor official said, pointing out that Sunak had chosen to protect unity. party instead to advance his vision for. country.
media coverage
With no major political plan to support support, Sunak has confused some MPs by engaging in daily media battles.
The Prime Minister’s media team has decided to abandon the tradition of sending a messenger every morning to visit television and radio stations and send his message to the public. Sunak’s media team downplayed this, thinking that the daily circulation is not helpful and creates a lot of bad news.
It is a mistake, said Tory MPs and strategists, because it allows Labor to establish a mouthpiece to attack the government without opposition. It is inevitable that the government will reconsider the decision, predict that the defender. The lack of a leader and a range of challenges facing the party are demoralizing MPs and many Tories are expected to announce in the coming weeks that they will run at another election, a government official said. said. Parliament has until December. 5 inform party leaders of their objectives.
Former minister Chris Skidmore, 41, told the Telegraph on Saturday night that he was resigning because his seat would be removed and he did not want new constituencies. A day ago Dehenna Davison, the 29-year-old who won the seat of Bishop Auckland North for the Conservatives for the first time in 2019, said she would not run again. Backbench MPs William Wragg and Chloe Smith have announced their intention to leave Parliament. Downing Street is also concerned that Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab may not survive an investigation into abuse allegations. On Friday, Number 10 announced that a third complaint had been lodged against Raab. He denied all the allegations.
The government initially hoped that by using the official complaint as a gateway to the investigation, Raab would be neutral because no complaint had been made before. Officials did not expect so many complaints to follow, the official said. Their hope is that the investigation will conclude that Raab is not a bully but simply unpleasant to work with. Officials are also alarmed by the severe drought that ravages the country during the winter. Nurses, railroad and postal workers plan to return to work in the coming weeks. A government official said he feared the number of factories could reach the level of general employment.