Rishi Sunak will leave the economy in a hole – Labour will have to think big to dig it out
Nearly 30% of all Britain’s postwar prime ministers will have been in office in the past six years, all from the same party. But the cause of this chronic political instability is not just Tory psychodrama: it’s an economic model that has failed to deliver rising living standards.
David Cameron’s political career was consumed by a referendum result in which resentment over stagnating incomes played a key role: as one detailed academic study found, “Dissatisfaction over austerity measures was significant enough to give the leave campaign its majority.” When Theresa May’s premiership was fatally wounded by the snap election of 2017, voters’ rage at years of financial struggle – and a belief that Labour was best placed to do something about it – proved pivotal. While Boris Johnson was felled by deceit over illicit partying, public anger at an escalating cost of living crisis – and the Tories’ failure to address it – was crucial in suppressing Tory polling, leading his MPs to conclude he was no longer an electoral asset and could therefore be discarded. As for Liz Truss: well, no further explanation is necessary.
Even before the surge in inflation and Truss’s move to crash the British economy with a series of lethal rightwing policies, wages were set to be lower in 2026 than back in 2008. There was once talk of the financial crash and the subsequent Tory austerity triggering a lost decade in people’s living standards, but the reality we now face is a lost generation. Too often, political reporting reduces British politics to soap opera, to personality-driven machinations: to do so strips away the much more profound drivers of political turmoil.
What, then, does the ascent of Rishi Sunak mean for all this? That he has been widely painted as a relative Tory moderate is a political travesty: Sunak is easily to the right of Johnson on economic policy. The anonymous briefing of one senior Sunak ally underlined why so many Tory MPs were uneasy with Johnson, and it wasn’t because of his addiction to deceit: “There is no evidence that during his time as prime minister he grasped the need for restraint in spending or had any understanding of how the public finances worked.” Johnson, they believed, was opposed to a renewed bout of austerity and lacked a true-blue ideological commitment to rolling back the frontiers of the state. Sunak, on the other hand, will gleefully wield the scalpel, from real-terms pay cuts for the key workers who were hypocritically applauded by Tory ministers in the pandemic, to the core services that a healthy society depends on to function. Sunak must believe that he will escape the same fate as his four predecessors – three of whom were more experienced than him – even as he is likely to oversee a more dramatic plunge in living standards than any of them.
Sunak is likely to be the fifth and final Tory prime minister of this era whose career will end in humiliating failure, in his case an electoral rout at the hands of the Labour party will probably be his final chapter. As far as many of Keir Starmer’s cheerleaders are concerned, this will mark the end of Britain’s Age of Chaos. The post-2016 turmoil, they believe, was driven by the Tories’ infantile ideological zeal: now