Rishi Sunak, Britain’s richest MP with a personal fortune of £730million, has been crowned Prime Minister with the backing of just 202 Tory MPs. Resisting calls for a general election, Sunak plans a fresh wave of deep cuts to public sector jobs and services to reassure financial markets. He has, however, no democratic mandate for his programme and comes to office at a time of escalating pay strikes. Jonny Jones looks at how mass walkouts by workers and other actions could break the Sunak government.
Image via Flickr
If you think British politics has the incredulous tenor of a US sitcom right now, you’re not alone. There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza quits his job and, regretting his decision, turns up for work hoping that that his boss will let him stay on. He doesn’t, and George is quickly let go. The last week has seen this in reverse for the Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who on Thursday 30 October resigned after a few days of pretending she was still in charge, despite having been effectively sacked last week. As the former Tory minister Michael Gove joked shortly before the resignation, he used to be her boss, but that role was now “a job-share between Jeremy Hunt and the bond markets”. Now the former chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has been anointed prime minister by Tory MPs despite having been beaten in a vote of party members by Truss just two months ago.
As funny as all this may seem, behind it stands a grim reality. The British government has fallen, with its prime minister and chancellor offered up as sacrifices, to the whims of the financial markets. It is true that Truss and Kwarteng had no electoral mandate for their project of supply-side reforms, in particular massive tax cuts for the rich funded by borrowing. They have failed on their own terms, ejected by the very markets which they hold to be sacrosanct. Yet what was put in their place is effectively a junta at the behest of markets, based around the Tory establishment, with Jeremy Hunt as its strong and stable figurehead as Chancellor. Hunt has spoken of the need to make decisions of “eye-watering difficulty”, including tens of billions of pounds of spending cuts. Hunt is the establishment figure par excellence to inaugurate a new age of austerity after the damage he did to the NHS as health secretary last time around.
Sunak was crowned PM after a truncated leadership election in which rivals Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson, his former boss who left office less than two months ago, failed to garner enough support from colleagues. The 1922 Committee had imposed high barriers to entry, 100 MP nominations, in an attempt to weed out fringe candidates who could slip through the MP’s selection process and get elected by the party’s increasingly right-wing membership base.
From a leader who won a general election opportunistically promising to “level up” across the country, to one who won a ballot of Tory members promising handouts to the wealthiest, to one given the nod by colleagues as the only candidate who can keep the financial markets happy – this is the sorry state of official democracy in Britain. Not only does Sunak have no mandate, he is the richest MP in parliament, with a personal wealth of almost three quarters of a billion pounds. He is likely to face a tough time selling the austerity snake oil to people struggling to heat their homes.
However, Sunak is an eager proponent of cutting spending. When he resigned as chancellor in July, he talked of the need to “make sacrifices and take difficult decisions” – a universally recognised euphemism for cuts to public services and benefits. He is in place just a week before the promised budget on 31 October, which is being assembled in dialogue with Hunt’s new economic advisory council, all four members of which are executives and fund managers. One was an architect of former chancellor George Osborne’s austerity programme, another an advisor to his successor, Phillip Hammond, while the remaining two are former members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. It seems highly unlikely that this budget is going to be significantly altered, or that the Tories will dispense with the financial markets’ favoured chancellor at this moment.
The Tory leadership election was less about economic policy and more about finding someone who can keep the markets happy and minimise the damage any future election poses to the party. Sunak, a former employee of Goldman Sachs and partner at various hedge funds, is certainly a good shout for the former. On the latter, Sunak is likely to continue to lean into the authoritarianism and anti-migrant racism that has characterised recent Tory governments to shore up support.
Yet the party is so internally riven by factionalism and rivalry that Sunak, enacting what will be an unpopular austerity budget in the context of a cost-of-living crisis, economic recession, and a rising tide of popular struggles by workers, will find the way forward difficult to navigate. Hunt himself has recognised the challenges of imposing austerity in the current climate, with the Telegraph reporting on Monday that he is being forced to balance out spending cuts with up to £20 billion in tax rises concentrated on higher earners. Yet such a programme could fall afoul of Tory MPs eager to advocate for the “low tax, high growth economy” promised by both Truss and Sunak.
It’s easy – not to mention very satisfying – to make light of the desperate and fractious situation the Tories find themselves in. Truss was in office for just 44 days and in that time went through two chancellors, two home secretaries and brought the weight of the markets down on the Tories’ heads. A poll released on the day of Truss’s resignation put the Tories on 14 percent support, with Labour on 53 percent.
Stats for Lefties predicts that such a result in a general election would lead to an unprecedented Labour majority of 410, with the Tories reduced to just 13 seats – behind the SNP and Lib Dems. Such a catastrophic result is unlikely, but a 1997 style wipe-out seems a real possibility. The closest to this polling the Tories have experienced was in 2019 in the run up to the European elections, when the majority of their voters defected to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in protest; this time, there is no protest party.
Keir Starmer’s Labour party has been the main beneficiary of the collapse in Tory support. After spending the last two and a half years savaging the left and rehabilitating Labour as the second party of British capitalism and imperialism, he is well placed to become the default substitute for the Tories. Starmer has repeatedly made clear that Labour is now the party of “sound money”. Labour’s Jess Phillips was even starker on BBC’s Question Time, saying that because of Liz Truss, Labour won’t be able to do things it would like to, but they promise to be “fiscally responsible”.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that most people are looking to Labour as an alternative to the Tories. A poll released on Friday showed that 78 percent of people wanted a general election in the next six months. The vast majority of people in Britain want a quick general election. They want to kick out the Tories. They don’t want to be governed by the financial markets. Yet we know that Starmer will not veer from the overall trajectory demanded by the markets. Does this mean we should be indifferent to calls for a general election? This would be a big mistake. The question for the left is how it relates to this mood in society.
The Labour Party and prominent supporters, left and right, are calling for a general election now to get Starmer elected. The problem with leaving it at this is that it places the general election and Starmer’s election as the most important thing to fight for. While we may prefer the election of a Labour government, and it will likely boost the confidence of class-conscious workers, this cannot be the aim of the left. To prioritise the election of Starmer is to suggest that other action – strikes and protests – can be put aside so as not to spook the electorate.
The left needs to articulate the demands for democracy differently. In our campaigning groups and our unions, through protests and strikes, we can start to argue that we can bring down the Tories through action. The government do not want a quick election in which they will get smashed. So, the question becomes, can we contribute towards bringing forward the government’s demise? This is a test for activists organising through every campaign, like Don’t Pay, Enough is Enough, the People’s Assembly, Just Stop Oil, the renters unions, and crucially, in our unions, on picket lines and workplaces.
We need to argue for escalation and coordination of strikes, to cooperate in building mass mobilisations against the cost-of-living crisis and in support of workers’ rights across the country. UCU’s victory in its nationwide ballot on the very same day Sunak came into office is a welcome reminder that our side is on the advance. The entire university sector could be affected by industrial action this year, alongside the postal workers, rail workers and others already in dispute. All major health unions are balloting for strike action and if they win, could come out on the same day. The call to bring down the government and for an election is about making it clear that the fight against crisis and austerity is the democratic movement.
It’s also about the footing we argue for in the movement. We are against de-escalation, against waiting for Labour, and for keeping up the action. The best check on a hostile Labour government is to keep building and mobilising against the effects of the cost-of-living crisis. Whatever we achieve in doing so, it at least creates the possibility of winning activists around a fighting orientation – against the perspective of pessimism and passivity that had gripped large swathes of the left since 2019.
We need again to be awake to what Daniel Bensaïd, discussing Lenin’s political thought, described as “politics as strategy, of favourable moments and weak links… as time full of struggle, a time of crises and collapses.” In this time of crisis, let’s pull together to hasten the Tories’ collapse as a step towards building a confident and independent left.
Join the People’s Assembly protest on 5 November. Transport and further details here: https://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/
