Rishi Sunak told us to judge him on his unambitious five pledges... the public’s answer loud and clear - analysis by Olivia Utley
Rishi Sunak told us to judge him on his unambitious five pledges... the public’s answer loud and clear
PA
When Rishi Sunak laid out his five pledges in a speech to journalists in January, we – his audience – were unimpressed. From where we were sitting it looked like something of a cop out. Why? Because conventional wisdom at the time was that all five promises were embarrassingly unambitious.
The thinking went that even if Sunak spent the whole year finger-painting instead of running the country his goals would be achieved anyway thanks to a changing geopolitical outlook and the effects of lockdown starting to wear off.
The first pledge – halving inflation – we predicted would be met automatically once the initial shock of the war in Ukraine began to wear off and high gas prices, which fuel inflation, began to tumble. Given that inflation is both the biggest enemy of economic growth and feeds dramatically into debt, we assumed that the natural result of meeting the first pledge would be meeting the second two, growing the economy and reducing national debt.
As for NHS waiting lists, the fourth priority, logic dictated that they were artificially high as a result of the stay-at-home messaging during the pandemic and would shrink precipitously over time without any Government intervention. The only real challenge Sunak seemed to have set himself was pledge five: stopping the boats.
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It is astonishing then that 12 months on, the Prime Minister has comprehensively failed to fulfil all but one of his promises.
As pledged, inflation has halved this year, from a high of 10.7 per cent at the start of the year to 5 per cent by October 2023. Though whether that was down to anything Sunak did is up for debate: inflation has fallen drastically in most Western economies since the start of the year without the help of the British Prime Minister.
And that’s the end of the good news for Sunak.
Despite Jeremy Hunt’s “Get Back To Work” Spring Budget, the economy has stubbornly failed to grow. For most of the year, growth has hovered around the zero mark – meaning we are permanently teetering on the edge of a recession. And figures out today show that if anything, things are getting worse: in October, the economy actually contracted by 0.3 per cent after economists had predicted a rise.
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The Prime Minister has so far failed to fulfil all but one of his promises
PAPaul Dales, the chief UK economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, now says that we might be experiencing the “mildest of mild recessions”.
Hunt has tried to put a positive spin on the numbers, saying that the measures announced in the Autumn Statement mean the economy is “in a good place to start growing again”. But it would take more than a bit of spin to persuade the voting public that putting the country into a mild recession is synonymous with “growing the economy”.
And there’s bad news in the national debt quarter too. The projection from the OBR is for the primary balance (the deficit excluding interest payments) to swell to 10 per cent of GDP by 2070, while interest payments will reach 13 per cent of GDP – nearly three times the annual Education Budget. Far from falling, economists now suggest that debt is “sky-rocketing” and the OBR has said bluntly that the current trajectory is “unsustainable”.
Meanwhile, NHS waiting lists reached an all-time high of an eye-watering 7.7 million last month and don’t look set to shrink any time soon. Demand for treatment is now back to where it was before the pandemic, plus people who avoided using the NHS during the lockdown years are now turning up at their doctors’ door in a far worse state than they’d have been if they’d been seen promptly when their symptoms first appeared.
To compound the problem, NHS nurses and doctors have been striking on and off all year, and doctors at least look set to continue pretty much indefinitely.
As for stopping the boats, the general feeling across the country is that Sunak has failed on this pledge too. Though that may be a little unfair – the data shows that there’s actually been a 30 per cent drop in crossings this year compared to last – it is hardly surprising. Sunak himself chose to make the Rwanda policy the central tenet of his pledge to stop the boats, and from the scenes we saw in Westminster yesterday, that looks set to be bogged down in Parliament for many, many months to come.
At the start of the year, the Prime Minister asked us to judge him purely on how he delivered on his five key pledges. Fast forward to December and Sunak’s popularity is lower than it’s ever been. One way or another, it seems that the public is indeed judging – loudly and clearly.