Political Theater Instead of Pragmatism
Whether it’s the promised tax cuts or the farce surrounding refugee plans, the politics of the Tory government serve only to placate the right-wing faction and harm the opposition.
When Rishi Sunak moved into Downing Street as the British Prime Minister just over a year ago, he promised a fresh start. After the unprecedented farce of the Johnson years, a policy of reason was supposed to return to Westminster. One year later, none of that has materialized.
Scandal after scandal ensues, and even the dismissal of his far-right-leaning Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, did not bring calm to the party. On the contrary, Sunak further provoked the right-wing faction by appointing the perceived moderate David Cameron as Foreign Secretary. What suffers as a result is any coherent policy that could put the economically beleaguered country on a more solid footing post-Brexit.
Budget: A somewhat inelegant political ploy
The budget announced with great enthusiasm yesterday is just the latest example. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced a slew of tax cuts, the financing of which is supposed to happen in the future through harsh cuts to social benefits and public facilities. It is a somewhat inelegant political ploy, laid out for the opposition Labour Party, which currently leads Sunak’s conservative Tories by around 20 percentage points in the polls.
With this tax cut package, Labour leader Keir Starmer is likely to inherit a public budget in 2024, in the event of an election victory, that could hardly be more depleted. The only potential way out would be if he announces during the election campaign that he plans to raise taxes again – something Starmer can hardly do if he wants to win the elections.
Thus, the new budget is nothing more than a cynical maneuver by the Tories, making it even more challenging for Labour’s leader to solve any of the current problems facing Britain in the event of an election victory, such as the urgently needed overhaul of the dilapidated healthcare system.
The British experience with the ruling Tories since the time of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the sad spectacle of a once-conservative party whose flirtation with right-wing populism led it to abandon the attempt to govern – that is, to solve problems for the benefit of the country. Instead, they now only perform political pirouettes to stay in power.
Noise as a strategy in the fight against Labour
Sunak’s tangled refugee policy is another example of this purely performative politics. The idea of flying refugees to Rwanda to leave them to the goodwill of the rulers in Kigali was nothing more than a cynical attempt to portray the rule of law as an opponent, distracting from the government’s own inability to develop sustainable refugee policy.
Even Johnson, who invented the “Rwanda Policy,” knew full well that it would fail not only in British courts but also in all international refugee conventions. Not to mention that each refugee flown to Rwanda in this way would cost the taxpayer around €180,000, and Rwanda repeatedly stated its capacity to accommodate only a few thousand people at most.
However, the noise surrounding it, according to the calculation, is well-suited to portraying the social democratic opposition as failures in dealing with migrants should they dare to oppose it. The fact that, in this way, the principle of the rule of law is increasingly undermined seems to concern almost no one in the Tories anymore, including Sunak.
Tory Party Out of Control
The British Prime Minister may be a pragmatist at heart, but he evidently cannot control the dynamics of the Conservative Party, which has spiraled out of control since the days of Johnson, as evidenced by his recent handling of the British Supreme Court.
After the court delivered a damning rejection of the “Rwanda Policy” last week, stating that Rwanda is not a safe country for refugees, the Deputy Chief Whip of the Tories suggested ignoring the ruling and proceeding to fly asylum seekers there anyway. It was an open call for breaking the law, an act for which he would have been promptly dismissed in any normal democracy.
Not in today’s Britain, though. Instead, Sunak followed his advice and announced the next day that an emergency law would be presented to declare Rwanda a safe country. This move will only prolong the debacle of the “Rwanda Policy” because any hastily made emergency law is likely to fail in the courts or even earlier in the House of Lords.
Sunak in the Tradition of Johnson
The entire situation, much like the budget presented yesterday, is nothing more than a political farce. Its sole purpose is to keep the right-wing faction in the party quiet for a while and, at the same time, prolong the debate to the detriment of the Labour Party.
Instead of a fresh start as a pragmatist, Sunak has, in the tradition of Johnson, cultivated a new version of political shadowboxing. To the detriment of the country, which no longer has a pragmatically acting government but a continuously spinning political theater.