It’s 2009, I’m working in London office where the atmosphere is awful, the firm is losing money, staff are being laid off, people are doing a lot of unpaid overtime just to keep their jobs, there is no hope for the future, people are not enjoying life. Just before noon on Tuesday, a senior manager approaches a junior member of the marketing dept in front of me, he says, “Hey there, you up to much after work?”, she replies, “No, I think I’m going to go home and chill,” all surprised he responds, “A young girl like you, why aren’t you out every night?” I bristle internally, quite apart from that fact it wasn’t any of his business, that firm definitely didn’t pay entry level staff enough money to go out several times a week.
He was one of many mediocre or dysfunctional bosses I’ve had in my career (I’ve had a few brilliant and inspirational ones too), they get you to do a load of difficult and time consuming tasks they’ve never done themselves, they’re always looking for short cuts, they have blithe assumptions that you’re being paid enough for a good lifestyle, they think morale is okay despite the fact that HR is dead and they do no appraisals, they think if you work hard you’ll get ahead, despite the fact no one’s been promoted for three years.
Rishi Sunak reminds me of all those bad bosses wrapped into one. He’s breezed through life, worked his family connections, hell he’s even worked for his father-in-law’s company. He seems to think solving Britain’s problems is a lot easier than it really is, and like many bad bosses he’s not willing to make the choices that would really move things forward.
When I smelt a rat – Sunak and his short cuts
While Sunak’s predecessors have monumental flaws, Sunak is particularly inclined to take really bad working practices from the corporate world and transfer them into the public affairs realm. One example from earlier this year is the NHS workforce plan. Everyone agrees there is a recruitment crisis in the NHS, however Sunak wants to solve this by taking dangerous short cuts – reducing the time it takes to get a doctor’s degree from seven years to four. Sunak is a million miles from the medical coal face, he has no notion that under qualified doctors will be under a lot of pressure and making mistakes because they’ve been advanced too quickly (it’s estimated that the cost of clinical negligence in the NHS amounts to £6.6Bn p.a. or 3.5% of the total budget, good luck reducing that with fast tracked staff). Everything is easy in Sunak’s world, it’s fine to take short cuts in time and money, especially where public services are involved.
It’s the Autumn Statement today, what sort of policies should we be pursuing? Here’s my take:
- Completely transform our relationship with our major trading partners, i.e. Europe, to unlock trade and investment – this means being in the Single Market and Customs Union
- Increase public sector spending, especially at Local Government level to improve services, amenities and infrastructure
- Address the fact that Britain is one of the most unequal countries in the industrial world with a more progressive tax and benefits environment
- Have policies that show genuine urgency in tackling climate change, the biodiversity crisis and worsening pollution
- Be sensible with public finances and recognise public sector debt is currently huge and that debt interest payments are a major problem. Any spending increases have to be balanced by more taxes, on corporations and high net worth individuals
The Chancellor’s statement didn’t include any of those things, it just defaulted to a tired and predictable tax cutting agenda (those unfunded tax cuts worked out so well last year didn’t they), giving tax breaks to companies for capital investment that are no longer interested in the UK anyway.
A 2% National Insurance cut will make a small difference to household budgets, but it doesn’t outweigh years of prices rising faster than wages, food, utilities, property cost inflation, income tax fiscal drag and rising council tax eating into pay packets hugely. Business investment has flatlined since the EU referendum, tinkering around with regulations and taxes won’t make a difference, the Conservatives said ‘Stuff business’ under Boris Johnson, they took the hint and invested in France, Germany, Italy and Spain instead.
The economy and society have deteriorated so badly post-Brexit and post-Pandemic the statement is full of remedial action, simply making things less terrible than they were before – raising the Local Housing Allowance, after a £5Bn fall in Housing Benefits expenditure.
Good bosses know what their role is – to make a handful of executive decisions, focus on them, execute them as effectively as possible.
At the moment British Prime Ministers have two executive decisions to make – how to have an effective relationship with our neighbours in the EU and how to deal with the climate crisis. Sunak is incapable of bringing meaningful change to the first, and is actively resistant to tackling the latter. Caving into fossil fuel interests means we’ve dispensed with the home insulation and solar PV installation policies of the coalition era, millions of people are exposed to electricity and gas price hikes that would not affect them, if we’d not started to ‘cut the green crap’ 10 years ago.
Long term decisions for a brighter future not taken by Sunak
Post War the long term annual GDP growth rate was 2.8% (1948 – 2013), outside of the post-lockdown bounce back we haven’t seen 2.8% in a long time, We won’t see it in Brexit Britain any time soon either. The executive decisions our recent Prime Ministers have made – leaving the EU, refusing to invest in clean technology, cancelling major infrastructure projects – consign us to a lengthy period of economic mediocrity. Sunak is a particularly bad Prime Minister, you’d have thought he would learn from the mistakes of his predecessors but he doubles down. You’d have thought that working for big city institutions would give him business and economic literacy but his policies aren’t smarter, he just pretends things are better than they actually are. You’d have thought that working in the corporate world so much he’d be focused on practical problem solving, but no he prefers pipe dreams like deporting refugees to Rwanda and lying about meat taxes, car sharing and foreign courts.
Always remember this – we’re now a few years down the track from the peak identity politics period that affected Britain 2014 – 2019 when UKIP/Brexit Party won a lot of votes and leaving the EU was a live issue. The Conservatives now have a choice, they’ve even invented a new buzzword ‘headroom’, to describe the leeway they have. They could reject that Faragist populism wholesale and address the problems that confront people every day – food inflation, high rents/mortgages, bus and train cuts, crumbling public buildings – but they actively choose not to. That’s why Rishi Sunak is such a bad boss and I can’t wait to vote him out next year.
returnoftheliberal 