The social anthropologist, Kate Fox, wrote a popular book, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, on the awkwardness of the English, their social ‘dis-ease’ that creates embarrassing gaffes, which then result in profuse apologies.
Brexit afforded the spectacle of a nation tying itself up in knots over the decision to leave the European Union. The latest twist to the unending Brexit saga is the race for the Conservative Party leadership to succeed Boris Johnson who delivered Brexit. It began with many candidates. The race then narrowed down, after several rounds of voting by Conservative Party parliamentarians, to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. The ultimate choice would be made by around 160,000 Conservative Party members who are predominantly white, wealthy men from the south of the country. In India, there has been a great deal of interest because of Sunak’s Indian origin: he is the son-in-law of the founder of Infosys, N.R. Narayana Murthy.
The prolonged leadership contest revealed an abject lack of political imagination along with the parroting of inanities on tax cuts and blind faith in Thatcherite Conservatism. Thatcher’s ghost continues to haunt British politics over three decades after she stepped down from power and almost a decade since she died. Truss even did her best to dress and look like Thatcher. Most available economic indicators signal the damage done to British economy and society by Brexit. Yet, no candidate in the Conservative Party or, for that matter, in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party dare speak out against Brexit.
Although Sunak’s political star had been in ascendance, he is unlikely to win this time. First elected to Parliament in 2015, his elevation to the office of the chancellor of the exchequer in Johnson’s cabinet in 2020 at the age of 39 signalled a meteoric rise. As chancellor during the coronavirus pandemic, his furlough scheme, which meant the exchequer dipping into vast financial resources to disburse funds to people to tide over the sudden loss of income on account of the stalling of economic activity, was a success. His relative competence in comparison to his rival, Truss, and an overall conservative temperament meant that he successfully differentiated his own policies from Truss’s robotic repetitiveness on tax cuts. Sunak instead suggested that controlling inflation was his major priority. But Sunak is hopelessly hobbled in terms of political imagination. In the debates, he kept repeating that the national debt should not be put on the “country’s credit card” which would leave future repayment for later generations. In terms of public finance, this is absurd as it wrongfully equates individual household expenditure with collective public expenditure of governments.
Since the austerity measures introduced by David Cameron’s government in 2010 and the Brexit churn since 2016, British politics has been on a narrow path of reducing public expenditure and shrinking the State. From a broader historical standpoint, if there is anything that post-pandemic British society requires, it is a large and heavy dose of public spending and investment. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s richer cousins in the United States of America seem to be doing that with the Joe Biden administration’s heavy fiscal stimulus packages and investment in public infrastructure. In Britain, there seems to be a blind belief in the ability of tax cuts to stimulate economic activity that, according to Truss, can expand the national pie. This neglects how unequal the slices of that pie are already.
Even with Johnson’s successor in place, it will be unlikely for the Conservatives to stay on in power in the next general election, paving the way for a Labour government under Keir Starmer. Starmer’s competence is limited to his microscopic forensic skills from his years as a lawyer. It has created a kind of tunnel vision associated with the loss of peripheral field vision. Starmer lacks the expertise needed to steady the economy, create the right kind of jobs, and return the environment back to green. British politics is certain to miss the wood for the trees.
Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU
