Rishi Sunak has started to move on from his D-Day blunder. He probably won’t recover from the electoral damage he caused himself, but he is now able to talk about other things. The question is what is it that he can talk about that will actually get the voters listening? This evening he gave an interview to the BBC’s Nick Robinson where – after making his apology for the way he ‘bunked off’, as Robinson put it – he had to answer questions on why people should believe the promises the Conservatives are making on tax, immigration, the NHS, and so on, when none of the things they’d promised so far had come to fruition.
Sunak did have to concede that in all those areas, things weren’t where he wanted them to be. He tried to be forthright about this, telling Robinson that he was ‘not going to shy away from what happened’ to cause the tax burden to be at record post-war levels, arguing that this was because of the pandemic and the energy crisis. He accepted that the NHS was under pressure, and didn’t really try to argue the point that waiting lists had been rising even before the pandemic.
But he did try to pin the blame for the waiting lists not falling on the strikes in the health service, while arguing that the Conservatives were introducing reforms such as the pharmacy first policy which would help. He had to accept, too, that the numbers of people coming here legally and illegally were too high. He couldn’t fully explain why he had called an election before there was a chance for a plane to take off to Rwanda, but resorted to arguing about the principle of the policy rather than its detail or its implementation: a classic trick of a politician who knows they are defending a dud. ‘We’ve got a plan, the airfield is on standby the plane are booked, migrants have been detained,’ he said. As it happens, a fair few of those who were detained have since had to be released, but he just didn’t mention that detail.
The most interesting exchanges were over the big question that neither the Tories nor Labour wants to answer in full. Will there be public spending cuts? Robinson put it to the Prime Minister that the Conservatives’ pledges so far meant cuts were inevitable. Sunak didn’t accept that. He said: ‘No that’s not what our plans show and indeed public spending will continue to grow, it will continue to be at record levels, it will continue to grow ahead of inflation, that’s what our plans have said…’ Pressed on this, Sunak turned to public sector productivity. ‘Productivity in the public sector has fallen considerably since Covid… and if we recover just to pre-Covid levels of productivity – nothing heroic – just as productive as we were before the pandemic hit, you mentioned a figure, that productivity gain is worth £20 billion, so yes, I’m not going to apologise for finding more efficiencies in the public sector which by the way they were performing at just a few years ago, so that we don’t have to raise people’s taxes and we don’t have to cut them.’ The public sector just didn’t work hard enough for us to be able to cut your taxes is the sort of claim that requires a lot of pitch-rolling, and also for there to be less of an understanding in the electorate that public services aren’t working very well at the moment in part because there has been a lack of capital investment and long-term reform in order to get them moving again.
Anyway, Labour has no better answer to this question. Shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall was doing a broadcast round earlier today and was asked about the accusation from the IFS’ Paul Johnson that there is a ‘conspiracy of silence’ between the two parties on whether they would fund their plans using spending cuts or tax rises. The work and pensions brief is unprotected, unlike the NHS, and so it is ripe for attack. Indeed, Sunak mentioned welfare reform in his interview, arguing that spending on benefits had been rising unsustainably. Kendall had a similar response, saying that while she respected Johnson, he never talked about reform, and her party’s plans to get people back into work would save money. The problem – as the Conservatives found when they came until power back in 2010 – is that you often have to spend money to save money on welfare (and the NHS, and many other areas). So where does that money come from? When Keir Starmer has his Panorama interview with Robinson, he won’t be any more forthcoming.
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