Whatever It Takes

Conservative Party members have only two weeks left to decide who will be the UK’s new prime minister. Last month was the driest July since 1935. Torrential rain and flash-flooding haven’t relieved the drought. The grass is burnt to dust, jagged cracks have opened up in the ground. The earth is coming apart. The future has arrived, earlier and harsher than predicted.

When asked about climate change, both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak talk about switching off lights and recycling. The Sunak household is ‘obsessive’ about it, apparently. ‘I know it’s a pain and you need lots of bins, but it’s very good for the environment.’ Truss boasts of her thrift and thinks food waste is ‘a huge problem’. But she plans to axe the green levy on energy bills and is enthusiastic for developing new UK oil and gas supplies, including fracking. As chancellor, Sunak announced a windfall tax on hydrocarbon companies, but they’ll get up to 80 per cent of it back if they invest in UK oil and gas extraction. He would retain the ban on onshore wind turbines. Under the rubric of ‘energy security’, anything is justified.

There is a gulf between the multiple crises facing the UK and the candidates’ responses to them. Problems that can only be tackled by a complete transformation of our way of life are being treated as obstacles to get past so we can get back to normal.

Not that Truss and Sunak’s proposals are small-scale or faint-hearted. Sunak would put the country on ‘crisis-footing’; Truss promises an emergency budget and an orgy of deregulation. The number of rhetorical promises has been giddying, starting with the list of adversaries against whom they have vowed to do battle: China, migrants, Vladimir Putin, civil servants, people who don’t love Britain, naysayers, especially Muslims, civil servants, Nicola Sturgeon, unions and equalities legislation. Both candidates insist they have the measure of the struggle ahead. Sunak will do ‘whatever it takes’. Truss will ‘do whatever it takes to get the job done’.

‘Unleash’ is one of her favourite words, along with ‘deliver’ and ‘I’. Over the past few weeks she has promised to unleash Brexit, investment, British farmers, food, the rural economy, innovation and Britain. The great thing about unleashing or unchaining (Truss was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained) is that whatever needs to be unleashed is already here – optimistic and energetic but reassuringly conservative. She has declared war on ‘benefits’ and ‘handouts’ though she doesn’t like to say that much of the money is being handed out directly to energy companies and private landlords.

The self-image Sunak returns to in interviews is of a hard-working son who did the books at his mum’s pharmacy and worked in a local restaurant while he was growing up: ‘I’m standing here because of the sacrifice and love of my parents. They worked day and night, saved and sacrificed to provide a better future for their children.’ His story, from ‘modest’ beginnings to absurd wealth and political success, is supposed to make him a model Tory, an exemplar of what Britain makes possible.

It’s interesting, though, that a man whose personal fortune from investment banking and hedge funds is partially held in a blind trust, and whose wife’s 0.93 per cent share of her father’s tech company is valued at £700 million, thinks that having seven fillings because of all the Coke he drank as a child is a badge of ordinariness – almost as if bad teeth and too much sugar were part of a nasty stereotype of what it is to grow up poor.

‘I’m fighting for the things that I think are right for this country,’ Sunak says. ‘I’d rather lose on those terms, than win by promising false things that I can’t deliver.’ Truss, too, talks a lot about what’s ‘right’. ‘If you work hard and do the right thing,’ she says, ‘if you save your money, start your own business, or go into work every day – I’m on your side.’ In both cases, ‘right’ is strongly pragmatic, it’s what works now. According to Truss that’s cutting taxes and abolishing ‘handouts’. According to Sunak, it’s a focus on cutting inflation and avoiding ‘immoral’ debt.

It might seem odd that Sunak and Truss can make any claims about their moral credentials, given they were key players in a government that sought to defend the breaking of lobbying rules, was ‘intensely relaxed’ about accepting funding from Russian oligarchs, including significant donations made after the invasion of Ukraine, and was led by a habitual liar – a series of scandals that have led to a clear crisis in public trust in the government.

For the party members the candidates have to persuade, however, trust has less to do with acting responsibly, legally and disinterestedly than it does with loyalty. Sunak isn’t trusted by the membership because he ‘betrayed’ Johnson. Truss is popular in part because she was loyal to the end. When Kay Burley asked her if she’d appoint a new ethics adviser, she replied: ‘I’m someone who acts with integrity and I’m slightly worried about outsourcing ethics to someone else.’

Desperate to increase his appeal, Sunak has doubled down on his hard-right credentials. He enthusiastically supports the policy of sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda and will do ‘whatever it takes’ to make it work. He wants to see asylum redefined in a more ‘Australian’ way to reduce the numbers. He has proposed a military-led ‘small boats taskforce’ to stop refugees crossing the English Channel. He not only supports Prevent but would ‘refocus’ it on Islamic extremism, which he calls the UK’s ‘most significant terror threat’ (he has nothing to say about other forms of terror). Part of the point of emphasising his Hindu faith seems to be as a way of saying ‘It’s all right, I’m not Muslim.’

None of this has succeeded, any more than his latest attack on Truss, claiming that her plans leave ‘millions at risk of destitution’. The most recent Conservative Home poll puts her 32 points ahead of him. While Sunak seems to understand that in culture-war politics, stridency matters more than rationality, it is Truss and her team who really surpass themselves, constructing her as the nation’s champion, defending it against anyone (usually imaginary) who seeks to undermine Britain, its great mythic past and its glorious, already mythological future.

Annual consumer inflation has now reached 10.1 per cent, with food prices up 12.7 per cent since July 2021. Real pay has fallen by 3 per cent over the past year. In October, the average annual energy bill is forecast to rise to £3582, and to £4266 or more in January 2023. There are daily reports of parents going hungry to feed their children, trying to get by on food that requires no gas or electricity, cancelling hospital appointments because of the cost of travel. The Trussell Trust distributed an emergency food package every 13 seconds in April and May, a 50 per cent increase on pre-pandemic levels. One in four people will not be able to afford their gas and electricity bills when the energy price cap rises in October, according to Citizens Advice.

Public services are disintegrating, hollowed out by privatisation; approximately one in ten of the working population is in precarious work; the private rental market is out of control; the ‘benefits’ system is deliberately punitive. All this is a consequence of the ‘normal’ that Sunak wants to get back to, the future of ‘aspiration Britain’ that Truss seeks to unleash. A couple of months ago, a woman on the radio described in meticulous detail how she buys food for her family with a very small, fixed budget: the number of shops she has to go to, the comparisons, calculations, recalculations she has to make, the late night supermarket visits in search of better offers. Survival as a way of life. I wonder if this is the kind of saving and working hard and ‘doing the right thing’ that Sunak and Truss profess to admire so much.