If Rishi Sunak wins the UK general election in July, he will make it so it always snows on Christmas Day and that British summers are never wet and miserable. While these policies are marginally less achievable than the ones the prime minister has offered thus far, they are not far off.
Sunak has pledged to abolish a host of university courses, affecting one in eight students, and to move them on to apprenticeship schemes. Given that most “low-value” courses cross-subsidise courses with much higher returns, how he will do this without causing universities to collapse is unclear. So, too, is how he will arrange this seamless transfer from one mode of study to another, while keeping his promises to pensioners to give them a tax cut every year by exempting them from the fiscal drag that the working-age population experiences.
But policy pledges that are detached from reality are not unique to the Conservative side. Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s policy proposals, his commitment to clean power by 2030 aside, are on paper achievable. But they are accompanied by increasingly categorical statements about what Labour will not do on tax that make it hard to see how they are any more likely than guaranteeing a white Christmas. A handful of tax rises on the rich are being pressed into service right across the public realm.
The UK’s election campaign is part of a wider British disease: of politics detached from policy, of arguments about politics divorced from questions about whether you can even implement the proposals at the end of the day. Most of Sunak’s time as prime minister has been spent finding increasingly desperate ways to deport at least someone to Rwanda under the terms of the government’s relocation scheme. Thus far, all the government has managed is to pay a failed asylum seeker from elsewhere in Africa three grand to make a new life in Rwanda. This is an achievement of sorts, in that it manages to be even less of a plausible deterrent than being one of the vanishingly small number of people who come to the UK seeking a better life who might ever be sent to Rwanda.
Part of the problem is how politics is covered. Starmer’s evasions on fiscal policy are treated as a natural, even savvy, outgrowth of long-standing voter anxieties about the party’s love of raising taxes and increasing spending. Sunak’s scattershot mix of policies designed to appeal to the nostalgic elderly are, again, treated not as a man saying things he visibly does not believe and could not implement even if he did, but a sensible attempt to save as many Tory MPs as possible by making promises he can’t keep.
One reason why the two major parties get away with it is that neither is well-placed to attack the other. It is easy to get lucid, believable and fair comment on the shortcomings of Conservative plans from Labour politicians, and of Labour schemes from Tory ones. But given that neither party is putting forward spending plans that look achievable over the course of the parliament, it is unsurprising that their attacks on one another are not landing. The UK’s electoral system, which punishes new entrants, also makes it much harder for the parties to be punished when they both take a holiday from reality at the same time.
Sunak bears a larger share of the blame, because he could, as prime minister, have stuck to the same terrain he occupied as chancellor. At the Treasury, Sunak correctly raised taxes to keep the Tory party’s pledges, wrongfooting Labour and meeting the mood of the times. But now, he prefers to instead occupy a world where his sums need not add up and his promises need not make sense. The Labour opposition, just like the coming Conservative one, has less freedom to level with the public and occupy sensible positions if the government is already on a flight of fancy.
Part of why Sunak is such a different prime minister than he was a chancellor is because of his personal politics. But another part is that the Conservative party did not like his Budgets and punished him dearly for trying to make them stick to reality. In the past, political journalism has always had a preoccupation with the horse race and the who’s-up, who’s-down, while a party’s fringes have always wanted to pull its leaders away from the ground that wins it elections.
Remember, too, that Sunak has been unable to achieve some seemingly achievable policy challenges. Although it is early days, it is hard to see how any political party in the general election will manage a better argument as to why Sunak should not be re-elected than the one that came from the man himself. He described his failed attempt to ban future generations from buying cigarettes as evidence of “the type of prime minister I am”, and he was right. Rishi Sunak is the type of prime minister who, when he wants to do something, when it is backed by large majorities in both his own party and the Labour opposition . . . still can’t reliably deliver.
In this case, his attempt to bring about a “smoke-free generation” — the flagship not only of his attempt to rebrand himself as a “change candidate” last autumn but also one of his signature achievements in his speech calling the election — came unstuck because he couldn’t manage the simple trick of not expediting the legal change ahead of an election he didn’t need to hold.
Whether you agree with Sunak’s phased smoking ban or not, the difficult truth for the prime minister is that passing his ban into law was a public policy challenge with the difficulty turned all the way down to “casual”. Yet he could not manage it. Nor is it an isolated example. One of Sunak’s earliest initiatives was a push to teach all children in England a form of maths until 18. If, as looks likely, he leaves office in five weeks’ time, the country will be less equipped to teach maths to 18 than when he took office — because there are fewer maths teachers. There is no prospect that Sunak, a limited prime minister with few achievements to his name, is going to be able to keep the promises he is now making, any more than he could make the snow fall on Christmas Day and the sun shine in June and July.
What has changed is that British politicians face greater limits on what they can do than in the past. Like all countries in the rich world, we have an ageing population and, with it, higher healthcare costs, that have to be met, whether by the state, the private sector or a combination of the two. Like every country in the world, the UK has to urgently decarbonise and navigate a return of great-power conflict. Even before you get on to other things voters deem essential, such as good schools and functioning transport links, politicians lack the ability to engage in grand visions of the kind that predecessors lionised by Sunak and Starmer, such as Nigel Lawson and Harold Wilson, were able to embark on. On top of that, the UK has chosen to exile itself from its nearest free-trade zone by leaving the EU, a policy with costs of its own.
Admitting that the UK is in a difficult spot and needs to make radical changes to how it operates that can’t cleanly be placed on the right or the left of the political spectrum is uncomfortable for most politicians. Small wonder they prefer to make impossible promises and stay detached from reality.
Stephen Bush is an associate editor and columnist at the Financial Times. He writes a daily newsletter, Inside Politics
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