Topic: A new prime minister and Economic Crisis (Read 148 times)

One thing for sure this man has his fundamentals clear. When we go through his storyline we find that he has the capability to truly understand the current economic crisis and take necessary steps to fight it. He is technically a MBA in polticians dress. So yes if anyone can help UK in current financial crisis, it is this man.

Well, I can say that it would take time to get back on track. Let's give him some time to fix things, and we should not be judgemental for anything. So wait and watch; as far as my opinion Mr. Sunak does have the ability to make the government progressive.

Yes. I'm not a fan of the Conservatives (as is perhaps evident ), but Sunak has always seemed quite competent, whereas Truss has always seemed way out of her depth.

The distinction needs to be made between Conservative MPs (who wanted Sunak instead of Truss) and the wider Conservative party membership (who wanted Truss and not Sunak). The politicians aren't being racist, but they are being somewhat foolish in leaving the final decision up to their wider membership. The only reason Sunak won the next time around is because he's the only one who gathered enough backing from MPs, so the membership weren't given a choice. I believe the Conservative MPs deserve some credit here for the way they learned from their mistake and tweaked the rules this time around. Even so, it was a close run thing... if Johnson had managed to get 100 MPs backing him, then the membership would have chosen him to return as PM... leading to perhaps even greater chaos than we've seen already.

I'm not suggesting that a high percentage of the population is innately racist, more that many years of politicians and their friends in the media blaming foreigners for the woes of the country has dramatically increased antipathy towards immigrants across the population, such that a high percentage of people now vote for racist/xenophobic reasons. Perhaps I should have been clearer on this. And perhaps instead of nincompoops it might be kinder to reframe it as people whose opinions are easily manipulated. It would be interesting to see, in some alternative universe, what would have happened with the Brexit vote if the preceding years had been filled not with foreigner-bashing, but with the media lauding the invaluable contribution that immigrants make to the economy, and particularly as doctors and nurses within the beloved NHS. Unfortunately we will never know.

Well, but whether it is one thing or another, we are in the same: about 17 and a half million voted leave.

I have said in other threads that in my opinion the Brexit was a mistake.

But that there are 17 and a half million racists and nincompoops in the UK seems to me too high a figure, and, although I'm sure you don't mean 100%, you do mean a high percentage.

If that were true, it would certainly change my opinion of the average UK citizen, as I think that in any civilized society the percentage of racists is clearly below 10%.

Racism and xenophobia would never end in this world regardless of how world powers seems to work very hard to eradicate it. I was very sure that Rishi Sunak was more qualified for the post of the Prime Minister than Liz Russ but because he has an Indian lineage he was not given the job.

This is exactly the same situation in my country where tribalism and nepotism is promoted more than meritocracy. It is quite unfortunate that it is the ordinary British citizens that would suffer from the consequences of the mistakes of the political class. Liz Russ would constantly receive thousands of pounds as former Prime Minister's benefits while the people would have to battle with inflation and other economic challenges that her careless mistake triggered.

No, that's not what I said. Plenty of Conservative voters voted remain. Equally plenty of Labour voters voted leave. I'm talking here about leave voters (regardless of Con/Lab orientation) being racist and having difficulty grasping simple concepts. I'd argue that were Labour to elect a non-white leader, then many of the Labour voters who voted leave would be outraged (albeit more so if Labour were running the country).

As a separate point (and it is a separate point) I'd certainly argue that the small number of Conservative party members (overwhelmingly old, rich, white and rural) who voted in the leadership election are proportionally more racist than everyone else, but I wouldn't argue that they are stupid, or indeed that they voted leave.

Interesting on the one hand, and on the other hand it seems to me like the Alice in Wonderland story but in reverse.

You mean the 14 million or so people who voted Conservative in 2019 are racists and moreover so dumb that they didn't know that with brexit they were not going to get rid of Indians and Pakistanis?

You missed the one about them being poor and voting Conservative because they want to feel part of an elite or something.

The Conservative party runs the country. If the PM resigns, the Conservatives just pick a new leader from their own ranks, who then becomes the next PM. They don't have to go to the electorate.


It's complicated. He's much more competent, so less likely to make calamitous blunders where he'd have to resign. The big question is whether his party just implodes.



I'm British, so can offer an opinion from that perspective (but of course it's just my opinion, and others would no doubt disagree). Apologies for the wall of text, but hopefully you might find some of it illuminating.

If we want to understand the current situation, then we need some background. 2010 is probably the best place to start...

Politicians are to an extent judged on events that happen around them, regardless of how well or badly they perform. Labour (left of centre) were in office at the time of the global financial crisis, and when the next election came around in 2010, the Conservatives (right of centre) ran an election campaign blaming Labour for the crash. The campaign was effective, and the Conservatives won and took control of the country. They then began a process of austerity, drastically cutting public funding across the board. I'd contend that this approach was largely ideologically driven rather than through necessity. The crash gave them an excuse to cut services and reduce the size of the state, to do what they'd always wanted to do but had previously shied away from due to its unpopularity. Now they could claim that they were simply being economically responsible, financially prudent, and that there was no other option.

The inevitable consequence of Conservative rule is that money gets taken from ordinary people and given to the rich, and inequality increases. The effect was exacerbated this time around due to the unprecedented levels of austerity, and many people, even those in full-time employment, began to struggle to survive. Food banks proliferated. The Conservatives and their friends who control the media then just relied on their tried and tested divide and conquer strategy. If you're poor and struggling, it's not your fault, and it's not the government's fault, it's [insert sub-group of the powerless] who are to blame. They decided to blame European immigrants.... the Poles and Romanians are taking your jobs, they're exploiting EU freedom of movement to use our health service for free and then go back home without paying anything, they're the reason you're poor, the reason that services are suddenly so over-stretched, that it takes you weeks to get a doctor's appointment, that you can't afford to buy a house, that you are suffering. We want to help you, we want to stop them coming here, but we can't because Europe won't let us. It's Europe's fault.

As a consequence of this media offensive, support for the small, obscure, anti-immigration, anti-EU, UKIP (UK Independence) party began to rise dramatically. UKIP threatened to suck up right-wing votes, which would hurt the Conservatives in an election, and potentially let Labour back into power. So the Conservatives needed to appeal to the xenophobic tendencies that they'd helped to promote. And the threat wasn't entirely external, there had always been a section of the Conservative party that were hard-right zealots intent on leaving Europe in order to be able to remove EU-imposed protections on workers' rights, sick and redundancy pay, environmental standards, etc. So the Conservatives, as well as heading off the threat of UKIP, also needed to heal the developing rift within their own ranks.

The eventual result was that the Conservatives promised the public an in/out referendum on the EU question, and due to giving this promise they successfully held off the threat of UKIP, won the next election, and retained power. Next came the EU vote. On one side of the debate, the perfectly clear economic argument of remaining a part of your largest market. On the other side, xenophobic hysteria. The prime minister (David Cameron), knowing that he himself, most of his own party, and almost the entirety of the opposition Labour party, wanted to remain a part of the EU, assumed that the referendum result would be fairly clear-cut in favour of remain. This was a catastrophic miscalculation, as leave won the vote (52% to 48%), and the UK was suddenly committed to leaving the EU. The prime minister duly resigned, abdicating all responsibility for what he'd done, and leaving someone else to sort out the mess.

This is a large part of why we have had so many prime ministers in such a short space of time. The Conservatives have to be seen to support the referendum result. A largely pro-remain party has to become pro-leave, and deal with the aftermath. The supposedly pro-business party has to throw up barriers to trade. They also have to solve unsolveable questions, such as: where should the border between the EU and the UK be? The Republic of Ireland remains part of the EU, but we can't have a hard border between Northern and Southern Ireland for obvious historical reasons, and we can't have a border in the Irish Sea, because that would split Northern Ireland off from the rest of the UK, and would be seen as surrendering the territory to Europe. Basic, simple questions, that the people who voted leave either couldn't comprehend or just disregarded because it wasn't as important as getting rid of the foreigners.

These issues have for the last few years been threatening to tear the Conservative party apart. Many of the Conservatives are pro-EU membership, but must be seen to be pro-leave. Meanwhile the pro-leave faction are steadily gaining control of the party. It's civil war in all but name. And then came Covid, and a new global economic downturn. The world has to fight to recover, but the UK has to recover from both this and Brexit.

Our populist, foreigner-bashin' Trump-lite prime minister, Boris Johnson, was forced to resign after a series of scandals. The Conservatives command a sizeable majority in parliament, and for so long as they can muster enough votes from amongst their own ranks to keep the government functioning, they don't need to call an election until the end of 2024.

After Johnson resigned, there was a Conservative leadership contest, which would give us our new prime minister. This contest had two parts. Firstly, Conservative MPs selected their favourite candidates from their own ranks, and through voting whittled this down to a final two (Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss). Sunak was the overwhelming favourite amongst MPs, but the leadership contest has a second part... once it's down to the final two, then members of the Conservative party (not MPs, rather that small section of the general public who are members of the wider party) vote to determine who wins from the final two. There was absolutely no chance that those racist bigots would vote for the one with brown skin, regardless of the fact that Sunak was by far the more qualified of the two... so they elected Truss, who became the new PM despite the MPs of her own party not wanting her, and her not being elected by the general population. We ended up with an imbecile in charge, with inevitable consequences, a disastrous unfunded mini-budget, market chaos, recrimination and finally resignation and another leadership contest to elect yet another new PM. Similar rules to last time, first the MPs pick their top choices - not the final two this time, just anyone who gets over 100 Conservative MPs supporting them - and then the party membership vote for their favourite. And the result was that Sunak was the only one to get the 100 nominations, which meant the MPs didn't need to go to the membership for the second round (if they had, it would surely once again have been a resounding win for 'anyone but the brown-skinned guy').

The result is that Sunak is our new PM. He has the backing of most of the Conservative MPs, but there is a sizeable minority who blame him for the downfall of Boris Johnson, and who might vote with the opposition and so limit what he can achieve in parliament - they could conceivably make the government entirely powerless if they so wished. And because Sunak has brown skin and is (gasp!) a Hindu, many Conservative voters are outraged (we voted for Brexit! we voted to get these people out!*). The Labour party and other opposition parties are saying we need a general election, because we now have yet another PM who has no mandate. Sunak doesn't want an election, because Truss destroyed support for the Conservatives, and they will undoubtedly lose badly and relinquish power to a resurgent Labour party. It's up to the Conservatives really, if they can hold themselves together, they have no need to call an election until Dec 2024. The issue is whether they can hold themselves together and vote together as a functioning government. Now that Sunak has taken over, we are for the first time starting to see some Conservative voters wanting an election just to get rid of the brown-skinned guy, some Conservative MPs wanting an election to get rid of the guy who helped bring down Boris Johnson, and some Conservative MPs who, more strategically, can see that their party is in a complete mess, and would rather give up power for a few years, let Labour in to take control and make the painful decisions to get the country running again, and then try to get back in at the next election by blaming Labour for the pain of fixing everything.





*The fact that xenophobes and racists are largely the same, and that the xenophobes who wanted us to leave the EU did so in large part to get rid of people from India and Pakistan, despite India and Pakistan not being a part of Europe, says a lot about the intellectual wattage of the electorate and the wisdom of holding a plebiscite on anything important.

I would be interested to know what the british think about all of these recent developments. Even if I had no opinion on #brexit it was still interesting to see what brits had to say about it. Them not being as polarized or partisan as americans trend towards being.

Japan has suffered by far the worst spate of resigning prime ministers. The UK would have to drastically up their resigning game to begin to compare. I wonder if recent history is becoming the best primer education on economics and politics modern people have had in the past 50 years. Its so strange to see people forget so many basic fundamentals, only to relearn things in current events over the last 2 years. A definite case could be made for public literarcy on politics, current events and economics skyrocketing more over the last 2 years than they have in the past 40 years combined.

Liz Truss seemed like the UK's version of italy's Giorgia Meloni.

I'm not certain what the UK's process is in the event of a resignation. But it does seem on the surface that a kind of subtle shift is occurring. I wonder if anyone notices. While there have been many independence movements over the last decade or so. Arab spring. Catalan independence. Etc. Circumstances seem to be intensifying.

On Friday, amid ongoing political unrest and new economic cautions for the UK, the pound dropped as low as $1.11 and government borrowing costs increased. Although Mr. Sunak had previously issued a warning about this before this summer's Tory leadership election.
Government borrowing prices decreased on Monday. Bonds with 30-year repayment terms now have an interest rate, or yield, of 3.8%. After the mini-budget and a following promise by Mr. Kwarteng to announce additional tax cuts, the rate had reached 5.17% on September 28.
On October 31, Mr. Hunt, who is supporting Mr. Sunak, is expected to lay out the government's economic strategy for taxes and expenditures.
The administration would have to make "decisions of eye-watering difficulty," he has warned.
Guy Hands, a banker and ardent Conservative supporter, however, claimed on Monday that the Conservative Party was unfit to govern the nation and ran the risk of having to request a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

What should we expect from the new Prime Minister? or is he likely to resign as his predessesor?