Riding the Elephant

To all friends and followers of this blog, Seasons Greetings and All Best Wishes for 2023, with this fun painting of an imaginary aircraft by Ram Kumar Shyam, a Gond tribal artist from Patangarh village in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh

First non-white PM as old colony’s offspring produce new UK leaders

Britain hopes Sunak is the strong ethical and efficient leader it needs

“Let’s see what an intelligent, young, multi cultural, economics-fluent leader can do for us,” said Nick, one of my sons who is in his 40s, when it was clear that Rishi Sunak, 42, would become Britain’s third prime minister this year, the youngest for decades, and the first non-white occupant of 10 Downing Street. Of Indian descent with a Punjabi family that emigrated first to Kenya and then the UK, Sunak is also the first Hindu prime minister – and the first to have worked for Goldman Sachs and have an MBA.

The news that he had won was officially announced at 2pm London time yesterday – 6.30pm in India where it added to the celebrations as coloured lights were lit and firecrackers noisily let off across the country to mark the big annual festival of Diwali.

As happened when Kamala Harris became America’s vice president, Sunak’s rise is seen as proof of India’s growing importance internationally. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, tweeted “Warmest congratulations @RishiSunak!” and looked forward to strengthening India- UK relations.

Sunak became party leader last night and this morning he had a formal meeting with King Charles, who invited him to form a government as prime minister. He returned to 10 Downing Street, one door away from No 11 where he lived as Chancellor of the Exchequer for just over two years till he resigned in July, to begin appointing his cabinet.

He has a massive list of urgent issues to tackle and has pledged that “there will be integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level of the government I lead”. Standing in Downing Street after meeting King Charles, he warned of “difficult decisions to come” and said “I will unite our country note with words but with action”.

Financial and economic problems include a fiscal gap of some £40bn, an approaching recession, and a cost of living crisis with inflation around 10%, the highest for 40 years. That stems from Brexit and the Ukraine war’s rising energy costs, escalated by the right-wing economic agenda of Liz Truss, the outgoing prime minister. The national health service is failing to cope with demand and the public sector is facing shortages and a spate of wage-related strikes led by railway workers that could escalate into a confrontation between the government and trade unions.

Foreign policy issues include Ukraine where Johnson and Truss (as foreign secretary) led one of the toughest responses to the Russian invasion, plus  confrontations with China. Unresolved Brexit problems include legislation challenging trade barriers that threaten stability in Northern Ireland, and there is also the looming question of Scotland’s independence.

All recent prime ministers have failed the “do for us” test mentioned at the top of this article. Both Boris Johnson and David Cameron in different ways failed because they believed too much in their (Eton-educated) leadership gifts, while Theresa May could not handle the cut and thrust of politics and diplomacy. Truss, who defeated Sunak for the prime minister’s job last month, thought she could buck the markets and public opinion with right wing tax and borrowing dreams that Sunak had correctly warned would cause economic chaos.

Those prime minister’s had spent years in politics before entering 10 Downing Street, whereas Sunak only began in 2015 when he became a member of parliament – though he was quickly spotted as a future prime minister by Cameron and others. He is therefore bringing a fresh approach, but he has much to learn about how to get the government machine to deliver on policies, and he also needs to learn how to project himself and his family.

As prime minister, he has to overcome the negative publicity burden of the wealth and privileges that he has enjoyed for years. He and his fashion designer wife Akshata are worth some £730m, thanks mostly to the wealth of her father, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s three leading IT companies.

If he was more adept at politics, Sunak would in 2015, or soon after, have cancelled the US green card that he obtained when he worked at Goldman Sachs and as a hedge fund analyst. He would also have cancelled his wife’s UK non-domicile status as an Indian citizen that saved her paying taxes totalling as much as £20m.

Personal embarrassments

Both the green card and tax became personal embarrassments earlier this year, as did a £3,500 suit he wore at a leadership meeting and his £500 Prada shoes on a construction site. He talked on television about how many types of bread his family enjoyed when many voters could not even afford one loaf, and he was building a large swimming pool in the garden of his elegant north Yorkshire country house when the plight of the poor was spreading across the country.

It looks as if he has learned from those mistakes. But he has critics among MPs and a larger proportion in the party membership, not least because he arguably triggered the mass cabinet resignations that led to Johnson’s downfall in July when he quit as chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister).

His right-wing credentials are also not as firm as some on the right would like, prompting a slanted Daily Telegraph headline last night that described him rather unfairly as “A man riddled with contradictions trying to shed his ‘slippery’ image”

The article said that “not everyone knows what he truly stands for” on issues such as Brexit, which he supported, and the free market which he moved away from with state intervention and increased corporation tax as a result of the covid pandemic.

On policy, Sunak is strong on the economy and financial markets because of his professional background and his experience as chancellor under Johnson. He will continue with the abandonment of Truss’s policies that was started by Jeremy Hunt, who became chancellor a week ago and is expected to stay in the job. Sunak believes in low taxes and has said he would reduce the bottom rate of income tax from 20% to 16%, but only when prudent without fuelling inflation, perhaps in seven years’ time.

But he has absolutely no experience appeared on foreign policy, international relations or national security, nor on vast swathes of domestic policy ranging from the national health service and home care, to the police, and transport.

When he appeared in public debates during his contest with Truss however, he appeared as a fast-learning and efficient policy manager who was prepared to devise positive answers to problems without resorting to Truss-style popular tax cuts.

The hope now must be that he has not had to make too many promises to would-be cabinet ministers in order to obtain their support for his candidature – he eventually received nominations from 185 MPs. That success prompted his main rival Boris Johnson to withdraw two days ago followed by Penny Mordaunt, currently leader of the commons, who gave up just before the 2pm deadline yesterday.

A united cabinet

He has to balance different needs as he try have a united cabinet that has talent in the top jobs as well as representing different wings of the party and rewarding friends and allies who supported his bid to become PM.

On climate change, Sunak is likely to follow the trend set by Johnson and a pledge to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, a target Truss might have weakened. He has said he would make the UK energy independent by 2045 with increased power from offshore wind, rooftop solar and nuclear sources and improved home insulation – a key detail many politicians forget. It remains to be seen if he lifts the blockage put by Truss on King Charles, a devoted climate change activist, attending the Cop27 summit in Egypt next month.

He could face problems with the Conservative Party’s right wing on strikes and law and order. Suella Braverman who has been a strident home secretary and backed Sunak, would want an uncompromising tough line if she kept her job. Labour unrest however will not be solved with new laws that could escalate unrest and exacerbate economic problems.

There could also be a clash over a pending India-UK trade deal where Braverman opposed easing access to the UK for Indian students and key workers. Sunak is likely to back easier access because he has said he wants to make it easier for British students to travel and for companies to work together “because it’s not just a one-way relationship, it’s a two-way relationship, and that’s the type of change I want to bring”.

Sunak’s most pressing problem is to unite the party which is riven by personal rivalries and policy differences. That will not be easy, but it is essential if it is to have any chance iof winning the next general election due in 2024. There will be calls from opposition parties for an immediate general election, but Sunak can probably ignore them if he can hold the party together to tackle what he described in his 84-second victory statement last night as “a profound economic challenge”.

Daughter of economic migrants opposes advantages her parents enjoyed

Immigration and other snags develop as Truss government in crisis

LONDON Oct 13: Cutting a somewhat insignificant looking figure on a late night television show when prime minister Boris Johnson was about to resign three months ago, Suella Braverman announced to a bemused television panel that she would stand in the contest to succeed him. She was the first candidate publicly to state her intentions, but neither Robert Peston, the ITV interviewer, nor subsequent media reports seemed to take the then little-known attorney general very seriously.

Born to Kenyan Indian and Mauritian parents who moved to Britain in the 1960s, Braverman has however has proved to be ambitious and ruthlessly controversial and outspoken.

That has led to her playing a seemingly leading role in slowing progress on the current India-UK free trade deal (FTA) negotiations by opposing the sort of economic migration that her parents enjoyed.

Though quickly eliminated from the leadership contest that eventually produced Liz Truss as a crisis-prone prime minister, Braverman’s strengthened her post-Brexit popularity with the anti-immigration and anti-woke right wing of the party during the campaign. That led to her being made home secretary, one of the four top posts in the cabinet at the age of 42, even though she lacked the experience of most predecessors.

Along with Priti Patel, who she followed as home secretary, Braverman is far to the right of other top politicians of South Asian descent, notably Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javed.

Denying opportunity

Her stance horrifies many others from the subcontinent because she is denying would-be new immigrants the success that she is able to enjoy as a result of the opportunities given to her parents when they were economic migrants. She has said she is proud of what her parents achieved – her mother became an NHS nurse and local councillor in north London, and her father worked for a housing association.

Along with Patel, Braverman’s motives are widely thought to stem as much from political ambition as ideology, Both pander to the Conservative Party 80,000 largely right-wing members who elect the leader. They want to show they are “whiter than the whitest of Cheltenham colonels,” I was told, controversially but maybe aptly, by a friend of Indian origin.

Last week during the Conservative Party’s chaotic party conference, Braverman horrified government insiders with a Spectator magazine interview where she opposed the inclusion of more open immigration in , for Indian students, key workers and others in the trade agreement that Truss and Narendra Modi had been aiming to sign by Diwali. That festival is celebrated at the end of next week and the target now has slipped to later in the year, unless some sort of interim deal is concocted.

Braverman also infuriated British universities with complaints about students’ extended families and said she wanted to drive down immigration, even though Truss’s economic growth needs immigrants to help fill over one million job vacancies.

Other cabinet ministers cashed in on the conference’s free-for-all and rebelled against Truss, who had been weakened a few days earlier by a disastrous mini-Budget and a financial crisis, but Braverman was perhaps the most disruptive. She has gone quiet publicly since then and last weekend joined a chorus of party leaders appealing for unity behind Truss.

In the Spectator interview she said she had “concerns about having an open borders migration policy with India” because she didn’t “think that’s what people voted for with Brexit”.

In the context of the trade agreement, she said there could be flexibility for students and entrepreneurs, though she had reservations. “Look at migration in this country – the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants. We even reached an agreement with the Indian government last year to encourage and facilitate better co-operation in this regard.”

The remark about India not abiding by the agreement to take back over-stayers is in line with Home Office grumbles over several years. It brought a predictable response from the Indian government that said it was was committed to facilitating the returnees and awaited “demonstrable progress” from the UK.

Braverman talked about immigration in other interviews and has complained about the number of dependents who accompanies students. – “family members who can piggyback onto their student visa.”

Lord (Joe) Johnson, who was universities minister in his elder brother Boris Johnson’s government, said her ideas on foreign students “bode ill for her period as Home Secretary if this is going to be her approach to, frankly, one of the most promising export industries that the UK has”. Without international students, the government could “kiss goodbye” to its ambition for Britain to become “a science superpower”.

Deal “in peril”

The reverberations from the interview continued and led to a story in the UK’s Times newspaper on October 12 headlined “Indian trade deal in peril after Suella Braverman migrant comments”. This quoted anonymous sources from India saying the “relationship has taken a step back” while a British source alleged Indian officials were “apoplectic”.

In parallel, India’s Economic Times ran a headline that the deal was “stuck over access to skilled workers”. It said India had hardened its position demanding easier immigration into the UK amid the concerns raised by Braverman. A Delhi trade department spokesman was quoted saying India would not “sacrifice quality for speed”.

There are many other issues as yet unresvolved in the trade negotiations where subjects range from access in India for Scottish whisky and British cars. A stumbling block is the UK wanting effective protection such as international arbitration for UK investments and freedom to store business data overseas, both of which India resists.

But apoplectic or not, relations between the countries seem as cordial as ever, at least at top levels.
India’s has a new high commissioner (ambassador), Vikram Doraiswami in London who arrived three weeks ago and has been extremely active with a country-wide tour.

Those he has met include King Charles, at a reception in Scotland, Liz Truss in a Downing Street reception (on Oct 11), plus with regional leaders and Keir Starmer who heads the Labour Party.

Ultimately, the trade agreements prospects could rest on whether Truss has enough prime ministerial authority to over-rule her home secretary in the interests of a deal that would be good for the British economy.

Usually a prime minister would be able to do that but these are not usual times, Truss’s future is in doubt, and it might just be easier to let issues slide for now.

Braverman will not however have won the admirers and supporters she desires among the party leadership with her outbursts in the past week and could maybe have even reduced her chances of stepping into No 10 Downing Street if Truss loses the job that she now holds precariously.

Record ethnic mix likely in Truss’s top Cabinet jobs

Truss faces massive crises that will test her abrasive character

Rishi Sunak has been beaten – more narrowly than many had expected – by Liz Truss to become leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and the country’s fourth prime minister in six years.

Truss’s 81,326 votes against Sunak’s 60,399 showed a majority of approximately 21,000, which is less of a landslide than recent media commentary has suggested. It means that she has less authority over MPs, who originally backed Sunak, and less support among party members than she would have wished in order to enforce her radical right wing policies.

The fact that only about 11,000 voters need to have switched sides to make Sunak the winner reflects the result of five televised “hustings” where he clearly won over the audiences with his willingness and ability to give clear cut answers. Truss kept her replies vague and did not develop her ideas.

It is fair to conclude that if more party members had known more about Sunak when they voted over the past month, the result might have been different.

Ethnic mix in Cabinet

Britain will not – for now at least – have an Indian-origin prime minister, but it looks likely that there will be an historic broad-based mix of ethnic backgrounds at the top of Truss’s cabinet.

If media forecasts are correct, the three leading Cabinet posts will go to Kwarsi Kwarteng, whose parents come from Ghana, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Cleverly with a British father and Sierra Leone mother as Foreign Secretary, and Suella Braverman with Kenyan Indian and Mauritian parents, as Home Secretary. They have all held less senior cabinet posts in the past. In Johnson’s government the Chancellor and Home Secretary posts were taken by Indian-origin Sunak and Priti Patel.

Also probably included in Truss’s Cabinet will be Nadhim Zahawi, the current (temporary) Iraqi-origin Chancellor, who may go back to his old role as Heath Secretary. There might also be a job for Pakistan-origin Sajid Javed, one-time Chancellor and later Health Secretary, who triggered Boris Johnson’s exit as prime minister when he resigned in July, quickly followed by Sunak.

This reflects the growing social mix of British society. It far exceeds the 15% of the UK population who come from a minority ethnic background, while in parliament there are currently 65 MPs from those backgrounds, just 10% of the total (an increase of 25% over the 2017 general election).

There will always be suggestions that Sunak lost because of his Indian origins, and there may be something in that because Conservative Party traditionalist members are almost certainly less likely to want a non-white person as prime minister than the general electorate.

The main reason however is that Truss’s unwavering true blue tax-cutting rhetoric, and developing right-wing image as an experienced politician, appealed in the tortuous month-long election campaign to more grass roots party members.

Sunak appeared as a super-efficient well-groomed policy manager. He knew exactly how to run the country during an economic crisis and had an answer to every contingency, something Truss carefully avoided. He shunned quick popular tax cuts.

It all seemed rather unreal because, while Britain faced news of escalating crises with rocketing energy prices and inflation, plus a drought and the prospect of water shortages, the two contestants fought over their primary differences – Truss’s tax cuts that in reality will worsen inflation and scarcely help the poorest and most destitute, while Sunak condemned that as lunacy and proposed interventionist policies that Truss will now be forced to adopt.

Johnson’s jaunts

Meanwhile the government became sterile and Johnson enjoyed his final weeks in power. In addition to visiting Ukraine, where he is a popular hero, his jaunts included flying in a jet fighter, joining a dawn police raid, and announcing distant nuclear power plans. He even suggested people should buy a new £20 efficient kitchen kettle to save £10 a year on their electricity bills. That was his solution for families facing rocketing energy bills that have just risen from an average of around £2,000 a year to over £3,400 and are then forecast to nearly double to more than £6,000 in six months’ time.

Sunak’s defeat compares with the voting among Conservative MPs in July where he led Truss with 137 votes to her 113. Those figures probably reflected Truss’s lack of popularity among MPs, many of whom will have welcomed Sunak’s role in triggering the 50 or so Cabinet resignations that led to Boris Johnson’s downfall.

The grass roots party members knew him less well and only gradually realised his potential. Nearly half of them wish Johnson was still prime minister according to opinion polls, so will have resented Sunak’s role. At the start of the campaign, his position was undermined by heavy criticism from Truss’s supporters for being ‘disloyal’ to Johnson – he replied that policy and other differences became too great for him to remain in the cabinet.

Then there was the issue of his immense family wealth totalling some £730m, mainly stemming from his wife Akshata, daughter of Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s three leading IT companies. Akshata, who was little known before the campaign started had retained non-domicile status and used it to escape some £20m UK tax. During the campaign however she emerged as a visible and enthusiastic supporter.

Sunak also had a much weaker political and policy team around him than Truss, who managed to garner traditional Conservative support, though that seemed less evident in the more prosperous south of the country than in the north. She quite quickly gained personal confidence, keeping the debate focussed on her popular tax cuts and rejecting interventionist policies that she is now likely to announce.

Truss’s family story

She traded heavily on her apparently poor northern childhood roots in order to distinguish herself both from Sunak’s childhood in Hampshire, a well off country in the south, and from his immense wealth. In fact, they both come from professional middle class families and Truss was born not in the north but in Oxford. Her father was a mathematics professor at Leeds university and her mother was a nurse and teacher, while Sunak’s East African Indian father was a doctor and mother a pharmacist.

Truss , age 47, now faces a series of crises that need immediate attention. They will test her reputation for abrasiveness and whether she is uncharacteristically willing to consult and be flexible.

Reports suggest that no-one who knew her when she was young expected her to get this far, though there is a general view that she is always determined to win and succeed. A quick YouGov opinion poll today however showed only 14% of people thought she would make a better leader than Johnson.

On the economy, there is double-digit inflation and a cost of living crisis with public finances heavily stretched, rising debt and a prospect of a long recession. That worsened this morning with gas prices rising sharply after Russia banned supplies to Europe. Early action to freeze energy prides is espected.

Foreign policy issues include Ukraine where Johnson – backed by Truss as foreign secretary – led the toughest response to the Russian invasion, and the West’s simmering confrontation with China. Unresolved problems stemming from Brexit are led by a confrontation with the European Union over trade barriers that threatens stability in Northern Ireland, and there is the question of Scotland’s independence that would cripple the United Kingdom. On all of these issues, Truss has till now struck confrontational stances that would not ease solutions.

The National Health Service is in a crisis. Hospitals are barely able to cope with a post-Covid demand, but the subject that scarcely figured in the leadership election debates is serious labour unrest that looks like leading to the worst rash of trade union strikes since the 1970s. The railways are being hit with a series of crippling one-day stoppages that have also hit bus services and the country’s largest port. Other groups threatening action include teachers, lawyers, ambulance drivers, refuse collectors, and telecommunication and airport workers.

Trade union strikes

Both Truss and Sunak have aired confrontational policies to restrict public service workers’ freedom to strike. If Truss stays on that track, without introducing attempts at labour conciliation that have been absent under Johnson, she could face an early showdown with the unions this winter. Co-ordinated action is due to be debated at the annual Trades Union Congress next week.

Meanwhile, Johnson still harbours hopes of returning as prime minister. There are even reports that MPs who support him are thinking of triggering a new leadership crisis before the end of the year.

“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy, and to tackle energy crises,” Truss told party members after her election was announced today. The policies will begin to emerge tomorrow when she enters Downing Street and begins to appoint Cabinet ministers. That will happen after she has visited the Queen at Balmoral in Scotland where she will be invited to form a new government.

Sunak of course must be regretting today that it is Truss who will receive that invitation but, given the scale of the immediate crises, he can console himself with the thought that the prime minister’s post might be up for grabs again in two year’s time.

This is a slightly extended version of an article commissioned by TheWire.in https://thewire.in/world/liz-truss-rishi-sunak-new-prime-minister-uk-analysis