NOTE 1A
NOTES 1 AND 2
NOTE 3
NOTE 4
NOTE 5
NOTE 6
NOTE 7
NOTES 8, 9, 10 AND 11
NOTES 12, 13 AND 14
NOTES 15, 16,17,18,19 AND 20
NOTES 21,22 AND 23
NOTES 24, 25 AND 26
NOTE 27
NOTE 28
NOTES 29 AND 30
NOTE 31
NOTES 32 AND 33
Maandelijks archief: november 2022
Notes 1A t/m 33/Rishi Sunak
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Note 1A/Rishi Sunak
1A
UK GOVERNMENT
RISHI SUNAK’S FIRST SPEECH AS PRIME
MINISTER: 25 OCTOBER 2022
Rishi Sunak gave his first speech as Prime Minister in Downing Street.
Good morning,
I have just been to Buckingham Palace and accepted His Majesty The King’s invitation to form a government in his name.
It is only right to explain why I am standing here as your new Prime Minister.
Right now our country is facing a profound economic crisis.
The aftermath of Covid still lingers.
Putin’s war in Ukraine has destabilised energy markets and supply chains the world over.
I want to pay tribute to my predecessor Liz Truss, she was not wrong to want to improve growth in this country, it is a noble aim.
And I admired her restlessness to create change.
But some mistakes were made.
Not borne of ill will or bad intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. But mistakes nonetheless.
And I have been elected as leader of my party, and your Prime Minister, in part, to fix them.
And that work begins immediately.
I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda.
This will mean difficult decisions to come.
But you saw me during Covid, doing everything I could, to protect people and businesses, with schemes like furlough.
There are always limits, more so now than ever, but I promise you this
I will bring that same compassion to the challenges we face today.
The government I lead will not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves.
I will unite our country, not with words, but with action.
I will work day in and day out to deliver for you.
This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.
Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.
I will always be grateful to Boris Johnson for his incredible achievements as Prime Minister, and I treasure his warmth and generosity of spirit.
And I know he would agree that the mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual, it is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us.
And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto.
I will deliver on its promise.
A stronger NHS.
Better schools.
Safer streets.
Control of our borders.
Protecting our environment.
Supporting our armed forces.
Levelling up and building an economy that embraces the opportunities of Brexit, where businesses invest, innovate, and create jobs.
I understand how difficult this moment is.
After the billions of pounds it cost us to combat Covid, after all the dislocation that caused in the midst of a terrible war that must be seen successfully to its conclusions I fully appreciate how hard things are.
And I understand too that I have work to do to restore trust after all that has happened.
All I can say is that I am not daunted. I know the high office I have accepted and I hope to live up to its demands.
But when the opportunity to serve comes along, you cannot question the moment, only your willingness.
So I stand here before you ready to lead our country into the future.
To put your needs above politics.
To reach out and build a government that represents the very best traditions of my party.
Together we can achieve incredible things.
We will create a future worthy of the sacrifices so many have made and fill tomorrow, and everyday thereafter with hope.
Thank you.
Published 25 October 2022
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[1]
RISHI SUNAK TO BECOME THE NEXT UK PRIME MINISTER
AFTER MONTHS OF TURBULENCE
- Sunak to become prime minister after winning party race
- Sunak becomes first UK leader of colour
- He will be appointed by King Charles on Tuesday
- Warns UK faces a profound economic challenge
LONDON, Oct 24 (Reuters) – Rishi Sunak will become Britain’s first prime minister of colour on Tuesday after he won the race to lead the Conservative Party, tasked with steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer.
One of the wealthiest politicians in Westminster, Sunak, 42, will become the country’s youngest leader in modern times – and its third in less than two months – as he takes over during one of the most turbulent eras in British political history.
He replaces Liz Truss, who only lasted 44 days before she said she would resign, needing to restore stability to a country reeling from years of political and economic turmoil and seeking to lead a party that has fractured along ideological lines.
He told his lawmakers in parliament on Monday that they faced an “existential crisis” and must “unite or die”. He told the country it faced a “profound economic challenge”.
“We now need stability and unity, and I will make it my utmost priority to bring our party and our country together,” he said.
The multi-millionaire former hedge fund boss will be expected to make deep spending cuts to try to rebuild Britain’s fiscal reputation, just as the country slides into one of the toughest downturns in decades, hit by the surging cost of energy and food.
A recent mini budget by Truss, which triggered her downfall, pushed up borrowing costs and mortgage rates, and sent investors fleeing. British government bonds rallied aggressively in the run-up to Sunak’s victory, and extended their gains on Monday.
Sunak, who will be appointed prime minister by King Charles on Tuesday, will also have to work hard to hold Britain’s dominant political party together after some accused him of treachery earlier this year when he resigned from the cabinet of former leader Boris Johnson, triggering his downfall too.
Other Conservatives say he is too rich to understand the day-to-day economic pressures building in Britain, and worry whether he could ever win an election for a party that has been in power for 12 years.
“I think this decision sinks us as a party for the next election,” one Conservative lawmaker told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
PERMA-CRISIS
Britain has been locked in a state of perma-crisis ever since it voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, unleashing a battle at Westminster over the future of the country that remains unresolved to this day.
Johnson, the face of the Brexit vote, led his party to a landslide victory in 2019, only to be driven out of office less than three years later after a series of scandals. His successor Truss lasted just over six weeks before she too was forced out.
Historian and political biographer Anthony Seldon told Reuters that Sunak had the most difficult economic and political inheritance of any British leader since World War Two, and would be constrained by the mistakes made by his predecessor Truss.
“There is no leeway on him being anything other than extraordinarily conservative and cautious,” he said.
He added that Sunak had shown composure when he became finance minister just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Britain.
Amid the turmoil, polls show that Britons want an election. The Conservatives do not have to hold one until January 2025.
Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, said the Conservatives had “crowned Rishi Sunak as prime minister without him saying a single word about how he would run the country and without anyone having the chance to vote.”
Labour has held record leads in opinion polls of more than 25 points ever since Truss’s budget sent shockwaves through financial markets.
Economists and investors welcomed Sunak’s appointment, but questioned whether he can tackle the country’s finances while holding the party’s warring factions together.
Many Conservative lawmakers appeared relieved that the party had at least selected a new leader quickly.
Penny Mordaunt, who lost out to Sunak, said his election was an “historic one and shows, once again, the diversity and talent of our party,” she said. “Rishi has my full support.”
Veteran lawmaker Crispin Blunt told Reuters after Sunak met lawmakers in a room in parliament: “The party will remain united, not least because we don’t have a choice. In there, he showed a capacity to marshal the whole party.”
INDIAN ORIGIN
The first real test of unity will come on Oct. 31, when finance minister Jeremy Hunt – the fourth person in the role in four months – is due to present a budget to plug a black hole in the public finances that is expected to have ballooned to up to 40 billion pounds.
The task will be helped by a recovery in the bond market, with the 30-year gilt , which suffered unprecedented losses after the mini-budget on Sept. 23, now recovered to levels close to those seen early on that day.
Sunak’s appointment is another first for Britain – he will become the country’s first prime minister of Indian origin.
His family migrated to Britain in the 1960s, a period when many people from Britain’s former colonies moved to the country to help it rebuild after World War Two.
Sunak attended Oxford University and Stanford University where he met his wife Akshata Murthy, whose father is Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy, founder of outsourcing giant Infosys Ltd. Among the many messages of support, he received “warmest congratulations” from Indian leader Narendra Modi.
END OF THE REUTERS ARTICLE
BBC
NEW UK PRIME MINISTER: WHAT COMES NEXT FOR
RISHI SUNAK?
24 OCTOBER 2022
Rishi Sunak will establish a series of firsts when he becomes prime minister – including becoming the first British Asian person to hold the office, and being the first prime minister appointed by King Charles III. But much of the process of the next few days will follow choreography set by decades of tradition.
So what happens now and what can he expect when he does formally become prime minister?
A final word… or two
Liz Truss will hold her final Cabinet meeting at 09:00 BST on Tuesday. As Rishi Sunak is not currently in the Cabinet, he will not be present.
Like many a departing prime minister, she will then deliver a final speech outside 10 Downing Street at about 10:15.
Ms Truss will then be driven to Buckingham Palace to offer her resignation to the King.
This means Ms Truss will miss out on her chance of a goodbye in the House of Commons, as she announced her departure after last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, but is being replaced before this week’s takes place at noon on Wednesday.
In the past that has provided an opportunity for a standing ovation or a tearful farewell from supporters. Last month it gave Boris Johnson the chance to tell the Commons “Hasta la vista, baby”.
Kissing hands
Once Ms Truss has departed the scene – and the UK is temporarily without a prime minister – Mr Sunak, as leader of the largest party in the Commons, will be invited to Buckingham Palace by the King.
The King will ask Mr Sunak if he believes he can form a new government, before the politician is appointed through a tradition called “kissing hands”.
In his autobiography, Tony Blair – who was operating on only one hour’s sleep following his election victory – admitted to being a bit confused when a royal official told him: “You don’t actually kiss the Queen’s hands in the ceremony of kissing hands. You brush them gently with your lips.”
Having been formally appointed as prime minister, the new leader will head to 10 Downing Street – his new workplace and (usually) his new home – although in the past, Tony Blair swapped with the living quarters above No 11 to accommodate his family more comfortably.
Here, at about 11:35, Mr Sunak will make his first prime ministerial speech with the aim of explaining what he wants to do in government.
Margaret Thatcher promised to bring “harmony… where there is discord”, Gordon Brown vowed to “try his utmost”, Theresa May spoke of tackling “burning injustices” in society, while Boris Johnson warned that “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters” would “lose their shirts”.
The plans are for the speech to be outside No 10 – but becoming prime minister in October means there is a persistent risk of rain, so Mr Sunak’s team might be anxiously checking the weather.
The new prime minister will then enter through the famous black door to be greeted by Downing Street staff, who traditionally line up to applaud their new boss. Usually it is all smiles, but not always.
When he arrived, Mr Blair noticed one of the secretaries was in tears. Lord Robin Butler – the most senior civil servant at the time – recalls that Mr Blair asked if she was OK. “Well, Mr Blair, you are welcome,” she replied “but I did so like that nice Mr Major [Mr Blair’s predecessor].”
Who’s up, who’s down and who’s out?
There is not much time for anxious introspection as a prime minister must immediately begin appointing senior ministers, some of whom can prove to be surprisingly elusive, just at the moment the party leader wants to sound them out about accepting a promotion.
Dealing with angry or even eager colleagues is to be expected for a prime minister on their first day. Mr Sunak has yet to set out how he plans to bring together a party riven into factions that have driven out two prime ministers in three months.
Civil servants – government workers who are not politically appointed so do not change with a new prime minister – will have been monitoring the candidates’ various policy pronouncements throughout the leadership campaign and preparing advice.
Mr Sunak has not publicly updated his policy platform since the summer, when he last ran for leader. Since then the economic picture has changed.
Government borrowing costs have increased following weeks of market turmoil set off by Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget.
On his first day in the job, Mr Sunak will be presented with briefs from civil servants setting out how his policy plans can be put into action.
“It is a very big pile of paper,” says Lord Robin Butler, who led the civil service under Ms Thatcher, John Major and Mr Blair.
“You want them [the new prime minister] to feel that everything has been thought of.”
Those nuclear codes
At some point during his first few days, the prime minister will have to do something that will put everything else into perspective.
He will sit down and write letters to the four commanders of the UK Trident submarines with instructions about whether he should retaliate in the event the UK suffers a nuclear attack. The letters are stored in a safe on board the submarines, and only opened if contact with the UK is lost.
James Callaghan – prime minister from 1976-1979 – is the only former leader to reveal what he would have done in the event of a nuclear attack.
“If we had got to that point where it was, I felt, necessary to do it – then I would have done it,” he told a BBC documentary in 1988. “I’ve had terrible doubts of course about this. And I say to you that if I had lived after having pressed that button, I would never, never have forgiven myself.”
In 2013, political historian Lord Peter Hennessy told BBC Radio Four: “This is the moment they know what being prime minister is all about – no other job can prepare you for this.”
Phone a friend
The first days of the prime minister’s term are normally filled with phone calls from foreign dignitaries.
President Biden is looking forward to speaking with Mr Sunak in the coming days, the White House Press Secretary said. But they added that it was “protocol for the president to wait until after an incoming British prime minister has met with the monarch and been invited to form a new government to offer his congratulations”.
The congratulations have already started rolling in, though.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted “Special Diwali wishes” to Mr Sunak and “the ‘living bridge’ of UK Indians, as we transform our historic ties into a modern partnership”.
END OF BBC ARTICLE
WIKIPEDIA
RISHI SUNAK
BBC
RISHI SUNAK: A QUICK GUIDE TO THE UK’S NEW
PRIME MINISTER
25 OCTOBER 2022
He won after running for the second time this year
He lost to Liz Truss in September, but she resigned six weeks later. In the latest leadership contest, Mr Sunak racked up the support of his fellow MPs early, and fast. He crossed the 100 nominations he needed long before the deadline – including from MPs that had previously backed Truss or Boris Johnson.
He ‘predicted’ financial problems under Truss
He clashed with the former PM during the previous leadership race, claiming her plan to borrow money during an inflation crisis was a “fairytale” that would plunge the economy into chaos.
He is the son of immigrants
His parents came to the UK from east Africa and are both of Indian origin. Mr Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980, where his father was a GP and his mother ran a pharmacy. He went to the boarding school Winchester College, then studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, and business at Stanford in America. He is now the first British Asian prime minister.
He’s only been an MP for seven years
Mr Sunak was first elected as an MP in 2015 – for Richmond in north Yorkshire – but rose quickly, and was made finance minister – or chancellor – in February 2020 under Boris Johnson.
He was in charge of Covid support cash
As Mr Johnson’s chancellor, Mr Sunak was behind the financial aid during lockdowns – including furlough payments and the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme for restaurants.
He’s thought to be one of the richest MPs
His wife is Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire Narayana Murthy. Mr Sunak himself has worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs and at two hedge funds. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates the couple’s fortune to be worth about £730m. They have two daughters.
He faced controversy over his wife’s tax arrangements
Over the summer, it emerged Akshata Murthy paid no UK tax on big earnings abroad – which is legal. Mr Sunak defended his wife saying, “to smear my wife to get at me is awful” – but eventually she agreed to start paying extra taxes. We also found out he temporarily had a US green card, allowing him to live permanently in America while he was the UK’s chancellor.
He campaigned for Brexit and deregulation
“Free ports” are one of his long-time favourite ideas: areas near ports or airports where goods can be imported and exported without paying taxes, to encourage trade.
He really wanted to be… a Jedi
In 2016, he told a group of schoolchildren that he originally wanted to be a Jedi Knight when he grew up. His favourite Star Wars film is The Empire Strikes Back.
[2]
WIKIPEDIA
RISHI SUNAK/EARLY POLITICAL CAREER
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
RISHI SUNAK
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[3]
BBC
LIZ TRUSS: A QUICK GUIDE TO THE UK’S SHORTEST-SERVING PM
20 OCTOBER
Liz Truss has resigned as the UK’s prime minister after six weeks. Here’s what you need to know about her if you don’t regularly follow politics.
She was the shortest-serving UK prime minister
Liz Truss replaced Boris Johnson as leader and became PM on 6 September then resigned 45 days later. The previous record was set at 119 days by George Canning who died in office in 1827.
Her ‘mini-budget’ caused huge economic problems
With her support, finance minster Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled £45bn of tax cuts in her third week. But it was widely blamed for reducing the value of the pound and panicked financial markets. Almost all of it has now been reversed – and Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor.
Some of her own MPs started openly criticising her
Dozens of Tories called on her to step down and her Home Secretary Suella Braverman resigned. She had to hire former rivals Grant Shapps and Jeremy Hunt to plug the gaps in her top team.
She went back on what she promised to do
She had pledged to cut taxes and boost the economy but in her resignation speech outside Downing Street, she said: “I recognise that I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.”
She won a leadership campaign to become PM, not a general election
Only Conservative MPs and party members got to vote to make her leader. After two months of voting she beat the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the final round with 80,000 votes.
We’ll find out next week who will replace her
There will be a much shorter leadership contest that is expected to be over by Friday. She will stay on as leader until her replacement is announced.
We don’t know what she is going to do next
She’s still the MP for South West Norfolk. Before politics she worked for Shell and Cable & Wireless. She is married and has two daughters.
END OF BBC ARTICLE
BBC
LIZ TRUSS: THE TEENAGE LIB DEM WHO
LASTED JUST 45 DAYS AS PM
20 OCTOBER 2022
Liz Truss has resigned as prime minister after a chaotic 45 days in Downing Street. But where did she come from and what makes her tick?
A Remain supporter who became the darling of the Brexit-backing Conservative right wing.
A former Liberal Democrat activist, who marched against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but claimed to be the keeper of the Thatcherite flame. It is fair to say that Mary Elizabeth Truss has been on a political journey.
She was not a household name, like her predecessor Boris Johnson, when she became PM. But she leaves having made history; serving the shortest tenure of any UK prime minister.
During the leadership election this summer, her promise to return to fundamental Conservative values – cutting taxes and shrinking the state – proved to be exactly what party members, who got the final say over who took over from Mr Johnson, wanted to hear.
And, crucially, as foreign secretary she had remained loyal to Mr Johnson until the bitter end, as other ministers deserted him. It won her favour with Johnson loyalists.
Grassroots Tory supporters of Liz Truss saw in her the steadfast, tenacious and determined qualities they admired in Margaret Thatcher – an image Ms Truss herself has tried to cultivate.
But despite her shifting political positions and allegiances over the years, these words also come up frequently when friends and family are asked to describe her character – along with “ambitious”.
Liz Truss: The basics
Age: 47
Place of birth: Oxford
Home: London and Norfolk
Education: Roundhay School in Leeds, Oxford University
Family: Married to accountant Hugh O’Leary with two teenage daughters
Parliamentary constituency: South West Norfolk
“She’s a very opinionated person in terms of what she wants,” said her brother Francis in 2017, when recalling his older sister’s teenage dalliance with vegetarianism.
“When you go to a restaurant, you might be 14 but she was precocious about what she wants, what she didn’t want.”
When the family played Cluedo or Monopoly, “she was someone who had to win,” added Francis in a BBC Radio 4 profile of Truss.
“She would create some special system to work out how she could win.”
Maurizio Giuliano, a university contemporary who first met her at a Liberal Democrat event, says she stood out from the other students.
“I remember her being very well-dressed compared to other 18 to 19-year-olds. She also had the demeanour of a real adult compared to what we were at that age.
“She was forceful and opinionated and she had very strong views.”
Serious political debate was the order of the day in the Truss household, according to Francis, the youngest of her three younger brothers.
“You didn’t sit around talking about the latest Megadrive game at the dinner table, it was much more issues, political campaigns etc,” he told Radio 4’s Profile programme.
It must have felt inevitable that she would get involved in politics in some capacity when she grew up, but no-one in her family would have predicted the path she eventually took.
Born in Oxford in 1975, Ms Truss has described her father, a mathematics professor, and her mother, a nurse, as “left-wing”.
As a young girl, her mother took her on marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organisation vehemently opposed to the Thatcher government’s decision to allow US nuclear warheads to be installed at RAF Greenham Common, west of London.
Though she is now proudly a Conservative from Leeds, back then she was a Scottish liberal.
The family moved to Paisley, just west of Glasgow, when Ms Truss was four-years-old.
In a BBC interview, she recalled shouting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – oot, oot, oot,” in a Scottish accent, as she took part in marches.
The Truss family later decamped to Leeds, where she attended Roundhay, a state secondary school. She has described seeing “children who failed and were let down by low expectations” during her time there.
Some of Ms Truss’s contemporaries at Roundhay have disputed her account of the school, including Guardian journalist Martin Pengelly, who wrote: “Perhaps she is selectively deploying her upbringing, and casually traducing the school and teachers who nurtured her, for simple political gain.”
One Roundhay school mate, who did not want to be named, told the BBC: “It was a really good school, really supportive teachers. Quite a lot of us have gone on to good universities and good careers.”
Although not part of her friendship group, he has clear memories of the young Truss.
“She was quite studious, serious,” he says, with a “heavy social conscience” and part of a group that were into environmentalism.
“I remember a school trip to Sellafield and her asking difficult questions and giving them a grilling. I remember that quite distinctly.”
At Oxford University, Ms Truss read philosophy, politics and economics. Friends recall a well-liked, if frenetic student.
“I remember her determination which was very impressive for me,” says Jamshid Derakhshan, who was studying for a postgrad degree in mathematics when Truss was an undergraduate.
“She was very quick with everything. Going around the college quickly, being everywhere.”
As to what sort of prime minister his old friend will make, Dr Derakhshan says: “My feeling is she’s not going to be stuck with one particular idea, she’s very flexible in her mind and what will be best for the time.”
Ms Truss was involved in many campaigns and causes at Oxford but devoted much of her time to politics, becoming president of the university’s Liberal Democrats.
At the party’s 1994 conference, she spoke in favour of abolishing the monarchy, telling delegates in Brighton: “We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people are born to rule.”
She also campaigned for the decriminalisation of cannabis.
“Liz had a very strong radical liberal streak to her,” said fellow Lib Dem student Alan Renwick in 2017.
“We were setting up the Freshers Fair stall, Liz was there with a pile of posters, saying ‘Free the Weed’ and she just wanted the whole stall to be covered with these posters.
“I was scurrying around after Liz trying to take these down and put up a variety of messages, rather than just this one message all over the stall.”
Her conversion to conservatism, towards the end of her time at Oxford is said to have shocked her left-leaning parents, but for Mark Littlewood, a fellow Oxford Lib Dem, it was a natural progression.
“She’s been a market liberal all of her adult life,” according to Mr Littlewood, who is now director general of the libertarian, free market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.
“Her political career reflects her ideology – she has always been highly sceptical of big government and privileged institutions who think they know best,” Mr Littlewood said.
She clearly changed parties, but that “was a judgement about what’s the best and most likely vehicle for her to succeed in politics and get what she wants to get done,” Mr Littlewood said.
Nevertheless, what she has described as her “dubious past” came back to haunt her as she tried to convince Tory members she was truly one of them.
At a leadership hustings in Eastbourne, some in the audience jeered, as she told them: “We all make mistakes, we all had teenage misadventures, and that was mine.
“Some people have sex, drugs and rock and roll, I was in the Liberal Democrats. I’m sorry.”
She had become a Conservative because she had met like-minded people who shared her commitment to “personal freedom, the ability to shape your own life and shape your own destiny,” she explained.
After graduating from Oxford she worked as an accountant for Shell, and Cable & Wireless, and married fellow accountant Hugh O’Leary in 2000. The couple have two children.
Ms Truss stood as the Tory candidate for Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, in the 2001 general election, but lost. She suffered another defeat in Calder Valley, also in West Yorkshire, in 2005.
But, her political ambitions undimmed, she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich, south-east London, in 2006, and from 2008 also worked for the right-of-centre Reform think tank.
Conservative leader David Cameron put Ms Truss on his “A-list” of priority candidates for the 2010 election and she was selected to stand for the safe seat of South West Norfolk.
But she quickly faced a battle against de-selection by the constituency Tory association, after it was revealed she had had an affair with Tory MP Mark Field some years earlier.
The effort to oust her failed and Ms Truss went on to win the seat by more than 13,000 votes.
She co-authored a book, Britannia Unchained, with four other Conservative MPs elected in 2010, which recommended stripping back state regulation to boost the UK’s position in the world, marking her out as a prominent advocate of free market policies on the Tory benches.
During a BBC leadership debate, she was challenged about a comment in Britannia Unchained, describing British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”. She insisted she had not written it.
In 2012, just over two years after becoming an MP, she entered government as an education minister and in 2014 was promoted to environment secretary.
At the 2014 Conservative conference, she made a speech in which she said, in an impassioned voice: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.”
The speech was little noticed at the time, but it has taken on a life of its own on social media, attracting much mockery and becoming widely shared.
Two years later came arguably the biggest political event in a generation – the EU referendum.
Ms Truss campaigned for Remain, writing in the Sun newspaper that Brexit would be “a triple tragedy – more rules, more forms and more delays when selling to the EU”.
However, after her side lost, she changed her mind, arguing that Brexit provided an opportunity to “shake up the way things work”.
Under Theresa May’s premiership, she became the first female Lord Chancellor and justice secretary, but she had several high-profile clashes with the judiciary.
Her initial failure to defend judges after they were branded “enemies of the people” by the Daily Mail, when they ruled Parliament had to be given a vote on triggering Brexit, upset the legal establishment.
She later issued a statement supporting the judges, but she was criticised by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd as “completely and absolutely wrong” for not speaking out sooner.
After 11 months as justice secretary, she was demoted to chief secretary to the Treasury.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Ms Truss was moved to international trade secretary – a job which meant meeting global political and business leaders to promote UK PLC.
In 2021, aged 46, she moved to one of the most senior jobs in government, taking over from Dominic Raab as foreign secretary.
In this role she has sought to solve the knotty problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, by scrapping parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal – a move the EU fiercely criticised.
She secured the release of two British-Iranian nationals who had both been arrested and detained in Iran.
And when Russia invaded Ukraine in February she took a hard line, insisting all of Vladimir Putin’s forces should be driven from the country.
But she faced criticism for backing people from the UK who wanted to fight in Ukraine.
Her decision to pose for photographs in a tank while visiting British troops in Estonia, was seen as an attempt to emulate Margaret Thatcher, who had famously been pictured aboard a Challenger tank in 1986. It also fuelled speculation that she was on leadership manoeuvres.
Claims she was deliberately trying to channel Thatcher grew even louder when she posed for a photograph in a white pussy bow collar of the kind favoured by the Iron Lady.
But she has always dismissed such criticism, telling GB News: “It is quite frustrating that female politicians always get compared to Margaret Thatcher while male politicians don’t get compared to Ted Heath.”
Ms Truss’s campaign for the party leadership was not free of controversy.
Pressed on how she would tackle the cost-of-living crisis, she said she would focus her efforts on “lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts”.
She has been forced to scrap a plan to link public sector pay to regional living costs by a backlash from senior Tories who said it would mean lower pay for millions of workers outside London.
And she called Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon an “attention seeker”, adding it was best to “ignore her”.
She also got into a spat with French President Emmanuel Macron, who accused her of “playing to the gallery” at a leadership hustings. Asked if Mr Macron was a “friend or foe”, she had said the jury was still out.
But it was domestic issues, or rather one domestic issue, that dominated the sometimes fractious leadership contest with Rishi Sunak.
Ms Truss’s response to the cost-of-living crisis was always likely to define her premiership. And ultimately her time in Downing Street began to rapidly unravel following her disastrous “mini-budget”.
Liz Truss now becomes the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
END OF BBC ARTICLE
WIKIPEDIA
LIZ TRUSS
WIKIPEDIA
KWASI KWARTENG
”On September 23, Truss looked on as Kwasi Kwarteng—her chancellor of the Exchequer, political soulmate, and personal friend—put forward a “mini budget” that would cut taxes on top earners, remove a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and cancel a planned corporate-tax hike. ”
….
….
”The left-wing opposition hated it—tax cuts for millionaires as Middle Britain struggled with high energy bills, rampant inflation, and rising mortgage costs—but so did the financial markets.”
THE ATLANTIC
THE PRIME MINISTER WHO DID EVERYTHING WRONG
18 OCTOBER 2022
In March 1841, William Henry Harrison became the ninth president of the United States. He gave the longest inaugural speech in history—one hour and 45 minutes—developed a cold, and then, after a mere 32 days in charge, succumbed to a mixture of pneumonia and 19th-century medicine.
According to a persistent, if apocryphal, rumor, Harrison caught that fatal chill at his inauguration. Here in Britain, Liz Truss’s prime ministership was dealt a similarly mortal blow by her own government’s first set-piece event—the launch of an economic plan designed to turn Britain into a low-tax libertarian paradise. Just six weeks into her tenure, her ambitions have shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible. They are deceased. They have ceased to be. Truss ran for prime minister on a promise to unleash growth. Instead, she unleashed market turmoil, a fall in the pound, and a precipitous drop in her party’s poll numbers. Even now, she says she wants to lead her party into the next election, as if she had not just immolated her credibility; her longstanding ideological commitment to Britannia Unchained has proved entirely resistant to facts and changing circumstances.
On September 23, Truss looked on as Kwasi Kwarteng—her chancellor of the Exchequer, political soulmate, and personal friend—put forward a “mini budget” that would cut taxes on top earners, remove a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and cancel a planned corporate-tax hike. This was the “biggest package in generations,” he said. Dust off the Laffer curve, silence the “doomsters” worried about where the money would come from, and luxuriate in what even a sympathetic commentator described as a “Reaganite show of fiscal incontinence and Thatcherite derring-do.”
The left-wing opposition hated it—tax cuts for millionaires as Middle Britain struggled with high energy bills, rampant inflation, and rising mortgage costs—but so did the financial markets. Government bonds fell sharply, which left pension funds struggling to stay solvent. Five days later, the Bank of England was forced to step in and stabilize the British economy. A right-wing chancellor had implemented right-wing economic dogma, and the free market swooned—in horror.
At the start of the month, as Truss’s Conservative Party gathered for its annual conference, pressure from her own colleagues led the prime minister to junk her most toxic policy, the tax cut for the rich. She papered over the humiliation with a tone-deaf speech attacking anyone who criticized her as part of the “anti-growth coalition.” These people, she claimed, “prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions … From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers. It’s always more taxes, more regulation, and more meddling.”
But even this gratuitous dollop of culture-war blather couldn’t restore calm to the markets or the restive ruling party. Everyone could see that Truss and Kwarteng’s authority was shot to pieces. The Economist pointed out that, once the official mourning period for Elizabeth II was taken into account, Truss “had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.” A tabloid newspaper promptly set up a livestream of a decaying vegetable, to see which lasted longer. The lettuce now looks sad and wilted. So does the prime minister.
Desperate to remain in power, Truss fired Kwarteng on Friday—even though she had signed off on his disastrous proposals. Yesterday, Kwarteng’s replacement, Jeremy Hunt, went on television and unloaded clip after clip into Truss’s cherished economic policies. In three days (his time in the job) and five and a half minutes (the length of his televised statement), Hunt unwound the entire basis of Truss’s leadership so comprehensively that the past month might as well have never happened. It was a bloodbath: “The most important objective for our country right now is stability,” he said, reversing almost all the tax cuts announced in the mini budget. (The subsidy for domestic energy bills was also drastically reduced in scope: This distinctly big-state policy, forced on the government by high wholesale gas prices, was—and still is—extremely costly, and a more cautious leader might have restrained their other plans as a result. Not Liz Truss, though, who had pledged to “hit the ground running.”)
The speed and savagery of Truss’s collapse has been astonishing—particularly because her predecessor, Boris Johnson, won a general election with an impressive majority of 80 seats just three years ago. Back then, the Conservatives looked like an all-conquering horde, even after a decade in power and the protracted agony of the Brexit negotiations.
So what’s gone wrong? Everything. Since taking office, she has made a series of bad calls. She appointed a cabinet of fellow hard-liners, rather than drawing on the breadth of her party. She fired the most senior civil servant at the treasury, because he was too fond of fiscal orthodoxy. She dismissed the strategist who masterminded the 2019 election victory. Her chief of staff has spent his entire tenure embroiled in scandal after it was revealed he was being paid by his old lobbying firm, rather than taking a government salary. She didn’t prepare the country for the top-rate tax cut. Apparently, she was sure that the right-wing media’s adoration would be enough to convince the rest of Britain that millionaires were the group that most needed a break right now.
Even worse, all the way through, Truss has been barely visible, as if her actions speak for themselves. Which, sadly, they have. In the past few days, the Conservatives’ deteriorating polls have indicated that they would not simply lose the next election; they would no longer be the second largest party in Parliament. Unless their fortunes undergo a complete reversal, the Conservatives—who have dominated the postwar period and consider themselves the “natural party of government” in Britain—would suffer a wipeout on the scale of the Canadian center-right in 1993.
Under these circumstances, possible successors have begun to present themselves. Hunt, the new chancellor, has unsuccessfully run twice for the leadership and would love another chance. Penny Mordaunt, whom Truss defeated over the summer, denied yesterday that the prime minister was hiding “under a desk” instead of facing the House of Commons. In doing so, Mordaunt accidentally-on-purpose repeated the accusation. (The headlines and push alerts wrote themselves.) Rishi Sunak, another defeated rival, is also circling—ready to point out that his unheeded warnings about Truss’s economic policies have proved to be prescient. Boris Johnson’s allies are even suggesting that Britain take him back, Berlusconi-style, for another try.
Earlier this year, I wrote that Truss was walking into an economic hurricane. For some reason, she decided the best response to this was to toss fistfuls of cash into the air in the form of unfunded tax cuts. She has failed because she won the leadership by telling her party’s most ardent activists what they wanted to hear. She has failed because she is a born-again Brexiteer, and had already swallowed the lie that reality can be bent to ideology. She has failed because, in a prime-ministerial system, leaders can be expected to implement even their most irresponsible promises—so the link between action and consequence is brutally obvious.
Liz Truss has been cosplaying as Margaret Thatcher without noticing that the Britain of 2022 looks nothing like the Britain of 1979, in either its demographics or its economic problems. Her time as prime minister is a parable of being careful what you wish for: True Trussonomics—Brexit-loving, libertarian, trickle-down—has certainly been tried. Unfortunately, it went about as well as William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address.
END OF THE ARTICLE
”Embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss sacked her Treasury chief and reversed course on a major part of her tax-cutting economic plan Friday as she struggled to hang on to her job after weeks of turmoil on financial markets. But the market response was muted and the political reaction to what many saw as panicked moves left Truss’ credibility in tatters after only six weeks in office.”
APNEWS
UK’S TRUSS DROPS TAX CUTS, AXES TREASURY CHIEF AMID TURMOIL
14 OCTOBER 2022
LONDON (AP) — Embattled British Prime Minister Liz Truss sacked her Treasury chief and reversed course on a major part of her tax-cutting economic plan Friday as she struggled to hang on to her job after weeks of turmoil on financial markets. But the market response was muted and the political reaction to what many saw as panicked moves left Truss’ credibility in tatters after only six weeks in office.
At a hastily arranged news conference, Truss said she was acting to “reassure the markets of our fiscal discipline” by ditching her pledge to scrap a planned increase in corporation tax. Earlier, she fired her close friend Kwasi Kwarteng as head of the Treasury and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt, a long-time lawmaker who has served three previous stints as a Cabinet minister.
Truss is trying to restore confidence and rebuild her credibility with international investors and members of her own party after the “mini-budget” she and Kwarteng unveiled three weeks ago sparked political and economic turmoil.
The government’s Sept. 23 announcement that it planned to cut taxes by 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) without detailing how it would pay for them or offering independent analysis about the impact on public finances raised concerns that government borrowing could rise to unsustainable levels.
That sent the pound plunging to a record low against the dollar and forced the Bank of England to step in to prevent a wider economic crisis.
Truss has now canceled about 20 billion pounds of the originally planned tax cuts.
But her brief, downbeat news conference is unlikely to have reassured Truss’ Conservative Party that she is in control.
“I think she’s just confirmed that she’s not the right person for the job,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “I don’t think it communicated the kind of confidence the country needs right now.”
Despite backtracking on a major part of her program, Truss clung to the idea that her policies were what the country needs to spur economic growth. She also avoided repeated questions about why she should remain in office when she and Kwarteng were equally responsible for the government’s economic plan and the fallout it triggered.
“I am absolutely determined to see through what I have promised,” Truss said.
The initial response from investors suggested Truss’ moves may not be enough to calm financial markets.
Yields on 10-year government bonds rose immediately after her news conference, indicating investors are still concerned about government debt. The pound fell 1.2% against the U.S. dollar.
The next big test for Truss will come Monday when trading resumes on financial markets. The Bank of England on Friday ended its emergency intervention to stabilize long-term bond prices and protect pensions funds.
“Whether or not she remains prime minister, her whole agenda now, her ability to pursue her political project, if you like, is really out of her hands,” said Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank.
Her fate is now in the hands of the markets.”
Truss is also facing pressure from across the political spectrum.
The opposition Liberal Democrats called for an emergency weekend session of the House of Commons for Hunt to provide more detail on the government’s economic plan. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon called for an early general election. And the BBC reported that a group of senior Conservative lawmakers are planning to call for Truss’ resignation next week.
Truss’ future is in doubt less than six weeks after she took office promising to re-energize the British economy and put the nation on a path to “long-term success.”
A small-state, low-tax Conservative who patterns herself after 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Truss argued that cutting taxes, reducing red tape and courting investment would spur economic growth and generate more revenue to pay for public services.
But the Sept. 23 tax cut plan only provided half of the equation. Without an independent analysis of her full economic program, the added growth it will produce and the additional tax revenue likely to be created, she was asking investors and voters to trust that the sums would in the end add up.
Truss said Friday that Hunt would unveil the full economic plan on Oct. 31, along with analysis from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility.
James Athey, investment director at the fund manager abrdn, described Truss’ move as a “U-turn on its decision not to U-turn on its profligate tax-cutting policies.″ And, Britain still faces myriad problems, he said.
“Inflation is at multi-decade highs, government borrowing is huge, as is the current account deficit. The housing market is likely to suffer a hammer blow from the jump in mortgage rates and the war in Ukraine rumbles on,” he said.
“We may well be through the worst of the volatility, but I fear that the U.K. is nowhere near out of the woods.”
Conservative lawmakers are agonizing over whether to try to oust their second leader this year. Truss was elected last month to replace Boris Johnson, who was forced out in July.
The weeks of financial turmoil has helped the opposition Labour Party take a commanding lead in opinion polls. A national election does not have to be held until 2024, but many Conservatives fear the party is running out of time to close the gap.
Fractious Conservative lawmakers are scrambling to find a unity candidate who could replace Truss, with speculation centering on Hunt and two of the rivals who lost to Truss in the summer leadership contest: Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.
INDEPENDENT
IMF URGES KWARTENG AND TRUSS TO
RETHINK TAX CUTS IN RARE INTERVENTION
28 SEPTEMBER 2022
The International Monetary Fund has hit out at Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts for the rich, warning that “large and untargeted fiscal packages” would probably deepen inequality in Britain.
In a rare intervention, the IMF took aim at the British government after the UK chancellor’s mini-Budget on Friday caused sterling and bonds to plummet and gilt yields to soar, reflecting the cost of borrowing.
The market turmoil started after investors were spooked by Mr Kwarteng’s plan to offer tax cuts to the richest while increasing state expenditure dramatically.
“We are closely monitoring recent economic developments in the UK and are engaged with the authorities,” an IMF spokesperson said.
“Given elevated inflation pressures in many countries, including the UK, we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture, as it is important that fiscal policy does not work at cross purposes to monetary policy,” they added.
The global lender predicted that the UK’s new measures would “likely increase inequality” rather than achieving the government’s aim of creating a prosperous Britain.
It urged the British chancellor to change tack when he gives a statement on 23 November, a promise he made earlier this week in a bid to calm the markets.
“The 23 November budget will present an early opportunity for the UK government to consider ways to provide support that is more targeted and reevaluate the tax measures, especially those that benefit high-income earners,” the IMF said.
Commentators noted that the IMF’s wording closely resembled warnings it typically gives to emerging economies in the throes of a current account crisis. It comes after Larry Summers, a former US treasury secretary, accused Britain of “behaving a bit like an emerging market turning itself into a submerging market”.
Labour said the IMF’s statement showed the dangers of Ms Truss’s and Mr Kwarteng’s economic policies.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said: “This statement from the IMF shows the seriousness of the situation.
“Families will be concerned about what market movements in recent days mean for them.
“The government must urgently lay out how it will fix the problems it created through its reckless decisions to waste money in an untargeted cut in the top rate of tax.
“Waiting until November is not an option. The government must urgently review the plans made in their fiscal statement last week.
“First the Bank of England had to step in to reassure markets. Now, this statement from the IMF should set alarm bells ringing in government and make it clear that they need to act now.”
In response to the IMF’s rebuke, a UK Treasury spokesperson said: “We have acted at speed to protect households and businesses through this winter and the next, following the unprecedented energy price rise caused by [Vladimir] Putin’s illegal actions in Ukraine.”
They insisted ministers were “focused on growing the economy to raise living standards for everyone”, and promised that the chancellor would set out measures in November to ensure that debt falls as a share of GPD “in the medium term”.
Mr Kwarteng continues to deny that he has committed “economic vandalism” as his opponents have alleged. Instead, he told investors on Tuesday that he would boost growth through deregulation.
“We are confident in our long-term strategy to drive economic growth through tax cuts and supply-side reform,” he said.
It is not just opposition parties that have condemned the new government’s actions. Many backbench Tory MPs are said to be deeply concerned about the sliding of the pound, which has brought Labour its biggest lead over the Conservatives for two decades.
Mel Stride, a Sunak ally who chairs the Commons Treasury Committee, said his party’s strategy put it “in jeopardy”.
Meanwhile, Sir Charlie Bean, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, told Sky News that the Bank should hike interest rates immediately to reassure the markets.
“The thing about credulity is when you lose it, it can be quite difficult to get it back,” he said. “It takes time.”
THE GUARDIAN
THE LAST DAYS OF TRUSS WERE AN UTTER SHAMBLES.
THEN THE REAL CHAOS BEGAN
The departure of Britain’s shortest serving prime minister and a possible comeback by her predecessor has created further divisions and infighting in the chaotic Conservative party
The plunging pound had not done it. The wholesale dumping of a budget did not do it. A complete collapse in party discipline that led to MPs cursing colleagues and others sobbing did not do it. Even the resignation of Liz Truss, making her Britain’s shortest serving prime minister by some distance, was not enough.
Yet as allies of Boris Johnson immediately let it be known that he was planning to stand for party leader again, just minutes after Truss had retreated into Downing Street at the end of her humiliating resignation speech, a Tory MP with long-lasting doubts about the party’s direction said they were now finally contemplating their future within it.
“If Boris wins, all bets are off,” they said. “Defections, people resigning the whip. It’s all on the table now. I’m starting to realise that I have so little in common with a large number of colleagues.”
In the crisis-ridden psychodrama that British politics has become, perhaps the prospect of Johnson’s return should have been the obvious next step after Truss’s devastating demise.
But several MPs said that it would simply lead to splits and the collapse of the government and the Conservative party – and could even be the one thing that could precipitate a general election that would be, in all likelihood, devastating for the Tories.
According to one cabinet member, the lobbying campaign for Johnson was “very quick and very aggressive”. Senior figures were contacted with the view of having as many public supporters as possible early on in the race, to convince waverers that it was now plausible to think the unthinkable and bring back a leader ditched just months earlier for being incapable of avoiding scandal and crises.
Every tactic was used to get an early bump in support that would create a sense of momentum. “Possibles” were told that Johnson was prepared to bring back key figures into a cabinet such as old foes Michael Gove and leadership rival Rishi Sunak.
Things would be different, with new staff and a new culture in No 10. The campaign was also from the ground up. Johnson already had a built-in advantage among members because of the drive that had been spearheaded by Tory donor Peter Cruddas since Johnson’s removal in the summer.
Cruddas had mounted a campaign to have Johnson reinstated or allowed to run again – and with it developed a network of passionate members fighting for the former prime minister.
Some MPs have reported that has led to lobbying at a local level for them to “back Boris”. Reports have also emerged that deselection is being dangled should they fail to comply.
The early shock and awe attempt was an essential element of making the Johnson saga once again the central question to the future of the Conservative party and the country.
By Friday morning, it was serving its purpose. Yet such has been the dizzying ebb and flow of the race to replace Truss that by the time Johnson was boarding a flight home from the Dominican Republic – with the boos from some passengers an early reminder of the divisions he will bring with him – there were concerns among his supporters that the momentum was ebbing.
By Friday afternoon, he was stuck on the halfway line, with about 50 MP backers. Allies were telling him it was the wrong time to attempt a comeback. Sources familiar with the Commons privileges committee into whether he misled MPs over Partygate were saying the investigation could well “finish him off”.
By the time his delayed flight hit the Gatwick tarmac shortly after 10am on Saturday morning, Johnson was fighting to keep alive the dream of a swift and jaw-dropping return.
Key now was the support of the right of the party, who had struggled to find a candidate, with Suella Braverman, whose shock departure from the cabinet earlier in the week is now a mere footnote in Britain’s political chaos, unable to secure enough supporters. The backing of former home secretary Priti Patel on Saturday morning was enough to keep his supporters going.
But with Johnson scrambling, Sunak – planning his campaign from his rural North Yorkshire constituency – was already sure he had the support of the 100 MPs needed to enter the race.
The third figure in the running, Penny Mordaunt, was also struggling. Her backers knew, however, that her fate was tied up with Johnson’s – she had the capacity to keep him out of the race with enough supporters. Yet should Johnson drop out, she could inherit the anti-Sunak mantle that had helped deliver victory for Truss just weeks earlier. And all the while, the Tory melodrama continued to drive the fate of the country.
With the breathless speed with which the race to find a new Tory leader has unfolded, it can be easy to forget that halfway through the week, Britain lost its latest prime minister in record time. The fall of Truss came so fast that even 24 hours before her robotic resignation statement on Thursday, many MPs and insiders had been working on the basis that they had a couple of weeks left to ensure that the succession could be sorted out. While Truss and her team had been dreading prime minister’s questions, she managed to get through without an implosion. It was not a good outing – she had undermined chancellor Jeremy Hunt by committing to protect the pensions triple lock and bizarrely quoted Peter Mandelson by saying she was “a fighter, not a quitter” (Mandelson twice had to resign from the government). However, given how low expectations had fallen, the session had not caused a terminal problem.
As late as Wednesday afternoon, you could still find MPs who thought Truss was finished, but could even last as long as May’s local elections. Others were talking about Christmas, while the hawkish were aiming to get the medium-term fiscal plan out of the way on 31 October.
Ministers were shocked by the resignation of Braverman, with one cabinet source instantly pointing to it as “the beginning of the end”. The appointment of Grant Shapps in her place, a man who had been logging sentiment against the prime minister days earlier, was a symbol that Truss was no longer in charge of cabinet appointments, let alone the government. Yet still there were some saying she could be kept in place until a more convenient time.
It was, in the end, the botched handling of a Labour vote on fracking that pushed many MPs over the edge. Labour officials could scarcely believe their luck when a message emerged from the Tory deputy whip Craig Whittaker that their motion was being treated as a confidence vote in the government.
Throughout the day, Tory MPs facing huge local pressure over fracking began making it clear they would happily lose the party whip rather than back the government on the issue.
The peak of the chaos is hard to fathom, but it was probably witnessed in the House of Commons voting lobbies at about 7pm on Wednesday. As the fracking debate came to an end and climate minister Graham Stuart said that the vote was no longer being regarded as a confidence motion, chief whip Wendy Morton was seen leaving. Moments later, with MPs confused over what on earth they were meant to be doing, there were confrontations and reports of skirmishes. When one MP asked Morton how they were meant to vote, several witnesses said she replied: “I don’t know. I’m no longer the chief whip.”
An MP who saw the exchange said: “It was total chaos.” A former cabinet minister watching the scene said: “They can’t liaise with ministers – they can’t run things. This has to end. The party is being humiliated but, more importantly, so is the country.”
Back in the lobbies, some Tory MPs were brought to tears, being consoled by Labour MPs. Stuart was informed his closing speech had “finished off” the chief whip. Meanwhile, Whittaker, who had the task of getting MPs into line, was heard making the outburst: “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck any more.” The phrase was reported around the world as a sign of the apparent state of the British government.
As the pressure increased, other MPs said Truss was seen racing after Morton, losing her security detail in the process. It culminated in a 45-minute meeting in the Tory whips’ office. Eventually, the two whips had unresigned, with a 1.30am briefing from Downing Street that MPs would be disciplined for failing to back the government in the vote. As one veteran from the Brexit wars era noted: “They’re making Theresa May look like Winston fucking Churchill.”
In the middle of it all, there was also a hidden war going on among Downing Street officials, seemingly without Truss being able to control it. A blame game was taking place over a briefing against Sajid Javid the previous weekend, with a quote from a Downing Street source dismissing the idea that Javid had been offered the job as chancellor, adding that the prime minister thought he was “shit”.
On Sunday, Truss had repeatedly tried to contact Javid to apologise for the briefing. When the pair finally spoke, Javid is said to have insisted that the perpetrator was fired. Truss said that she could not do that. However, on Wednesday, as prime minister’s questions began and Javid was scheduled to ask a hostile question about the briefing and destabilise Truss yet further, it was announced that senior aide Jason Stein had been suspended over the issue and was being investigated.
This announcement was made, said insiders, without Truss’s knowledge, by another Downing Street aide. Discipline had not only been lost within the party. It had disintegrated in the rooms surrounding Truss’s Downing Street office. Stein was reinstated later in the week.
While a botched party management might seem an obscure reason to ditch a prime minister, to many wavering MPs it was a sign that Truss’s status as the least powerful figure in her own government had made the whole enterprise of governing unsustainable.
Many had previously disregarded the idea of sending a letter of no confidence to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee. In theory, Truss was protected from a confidence vote in her leadership for a year. But now, many decided Brady needed the ammunition of letters in his inbox.
This mayhem all unfolded after Hunt had already held a televised address on Monday effectively killing off the mini-budget that had triggered Britain’s economic turmoil – and with it, he finished off Truss’s leadership pitch and any reason she had to continue.
Later that day, some MPs thought Truss had decided to resign when Commons leader Mordaunt filled in for her at the dispatch box. In fact, Mordaunt would only ensure Truss had no way back by insisting the prime minister was “not under a desk”. When Truss did appear alongside Hunt later, she had a fixed, trance-like stare.
Part of the unfathomable absurdity that has unfolded since Truss’s resignation is the way in which the next prime minister will be decided. While there was no agreement on who should take over, the majority of Tory MPs had been in agreement since their party conference that any process to replace Truss must not be put to the members. In the atmosphere of crisis and with the markets watching, they needed someone who could command the support of most MPs.
Yet somehow, to the consternation of many MPs, a process emerged that would see the two final candidates put to a vote of members. The system appears to have developed as a compromise between those wanting a Johnson return and those opposed to it. Many MPs had pressured Brady to ensure that any candidate would need a high threshold of 100 MP backers to make it into the race. This was the “stop Boris” measure.
Meanwhile, MPs point to Conservative party chairman Jake Berry, one of the earliest Johnson backers from the 2016 leadership contest, as the person who pushed for a members’ vote – the former prime minister retains some star billing with the grassroots. The prospect that the contest could once again be decided by party members has led many MPs to conclude the rules now need changing. “The members’ vote doesn’t work,” one said. “It was brought in to include members, but it just lets a load of loons in.” Even if Sunak has a huge lead over Johnson after a final vote of MPs, members would still have the power to foist Johnson upon them.
With the race set up under these rules, Johnson’s team knew the key was somehow reaching the 100 MP threshold. They knew they had to move early and began pressing MPs immediately, including cabinet ministers who might be won over and bring some people with them. Johnson backers were making clear that they understood it would have to be a “very different sort of government”. Johnson himself is said to have been phoning colleagues from his Caribbean holiday – an irony not lost on incredulous MPs opposed to his return.
By Friday, MPs who just months earlier had set out detailed reasons for wanting Johnson out were among those demanding his return.
Stoke-on-Trent North MP Jonathan Gullis, a passionate Johnson backer who then joined the mass resignations three months ago, declared once again that he was supporting him. In his July resignation letter, he said the party had been “more focused on dealing with our reputational damage rather than delivering for the people of this country”.
Sleaford and North Hykeham MP Caroline Johnson also backed Johnson. She had previously resigned as vice chair of the Conservative party, citing the “cumulative effect” of Johnson’s “errors of judgment and domestic actions”.
One senior official from the Johnson years was among those to despair of the spectacle. “They’re clowns,” they said. “And can’t complain if the same shit happens again.”
Meanwhile, some MPs were heading in the other direction. One “red wall” MP who had backed Johnson said his re-emergence was madness, adding: “This should be all about good government and getting barnacles off the boat. We just booted him out because of the shit he caused. Do we seriously expect good governance from him?”
The absurdity of the situation, several Tory MPs warned, was that the return of Johnson is the one thing that could precipitate a general election – the least favoured option by Conservatives, given the party’s poll ratings. One said an election would be accompanied by “the end of the Conservative party”.
As amazing as it sounds, there were no active conversations between Labour and potential Tory defectors by the time Truss resigned. Yet this weekend, some Tories are considering their positions in the party for the first time, saying they could not tolerate life with Johnson as their leader once again. Some are still simply trying to digest exactly what is happening.
“I feel like I’ve been walking around for the last three months on crazy pills,” said one MP. “Lately, I’ve just been going up to people shouting: ‘Do something!’ Our standing isn’t holed below the waterline – it’s below the Mariana Trench. There are no metaphors left to describe what is going on.”
By Saturday morning, with the reality of the difficulties Johnson would face in office sinking in, some long-term backers were urging him not to stand. His former editor Charles Moore wrote that Johnson should “sit this one out”.
Another crucial moment will come on Monday, when the pro-Brexit European Research Group of MPs meets to discuss the leadership. Winning the support of the right is now essential for Johnson, but on its own it is unlikely to get him over the 100 MP threshold.
Meanwhile, Downing Street has become a ghostly building. It is still filled with staff, but the bad blood and the humiliation of Truss’s downfall is felt keenly by all who work there. This weekend, they are preparing their goodbyes and buying farewell gifts. They are preparing for one final prime minister’s questions, should Truss be required to complete that one last time on Wednesday. But one senior Downing Street figure described the atmosphere as “complete despair”.
Some of the staff are now contemplating the return of the man who they had been serving under just months earlier. Some could yet be called to give testimony against him in the privileges committee investigation.
The question they are now pondering is whether they will be giving evidence against their old boss, or their current one.
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Note 3/Rishi Sunak
Opgeslagen onder Divers
Note 4/Rishi Sunak
[4]
WIKIPEDIA
LIZ TRUSS
BBC
LIZ TRUSS: A QUICK GUIDE TO THE UK’S SHORTEST-SERVING PM
20 OCTOBER
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 3
BBC
LIZ TRUSS: THE TEENAGE LIB DEM WHO
LASTED JUST 45 DAYS AS PM
20 OCTOBER 2022
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 3
THE ATLANTIC
THE PRIME MINISTER WHO DID EVERYTHING WRONG
18 OCTOBER 2022
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 3
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Note 4/Rishi Sunak
Opgeslagen onder Divers
Note 5/Rishi Sunak
[5]
MINT
EXPLAINED: WHY RISHI SUNAK LOST THE UK MINISTERIAL
RACE AGAINST LIZ TRUSS
5 SEPTEMBER 2022
Touted as the favourite initially for the race to Downing Street, Rishi Sunak started losing his spark midway. Sunak had a huge advantage as he threw his hat early in the ring and was endorsed by four former chief whips, but within weeks, he started trailing behind the late-comer Liz Truss in the UK prime ministerial race.
Several surveys and polls conducted over the past six consistently showed Truss to be a much stronger contender than Sunak and remained the preferred choice among Tory members.
YouGov Conservative membership poll showed, Truss enjoyed a lead of 69% to Sunak’s 31% from 29 July- 2 August. And till 17 August, she stayed ahead of Sunak with 66% votes to his 34%.
“Those interested in polling and the recent past will note that we originally found Truss ahead of Sunak by 17 points (12 July) and that the gap then closed to seven points (17 July). YouGov had Truss ahead of Sunak by 24 points (13 July) with the gap then closing to 18 points (20 July) – on an unforced choice in both cases,” ConservativeHome survey showed as cited by ANI.
Why is Sunak lost the PM race against Truss?
Hours after Boris Johnson announced his resignation, Sunak threw his hat into the ring with a campaign video titled ‘Ready for Rishi’. Even though it gave him the initial advantage, the act was a thorough mark of trust deficit in his boss and mentor.
Moreover, even as he gained massive support from his party at first, he started losing them including Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi and then, finally, Mordaunt. Several other MPs too switched sides. Meanwhile, Liz became stronger with her moves as the race progressed.
Apart from that, even though Sunak became popularity shot up immediately after Johnson’s resignation, his image to be a backstabber was never forgotten.
His tax policies and performance in the Treasury was given as a reason by 8%, while 7% cited a lack of trust and 5% saw him as out of touch, as per YouGov poll.
“Despite long having been talked of as a likely future Prime Minister, Sunak struggled to shed the parallel with the man who helped bring down Thatcher but failed in his own tilt at the top job – before coining the famous political cliche: “He who wields the knife never wears the crown,” The Guardian editorial wrote about him.
Why did Rishi Sunak suddenly become unpopular?
Rishi Sunak’s image was permanently tainted when a video of his came into foray where he accepted that he took money from deprived urban areas. His comments, boasting of shifting money from “deprived urban areas” to fund projects in the Kent commuter belt sparked outrage, considering it cut across the UK government’s rhetoric about ‘levelling up’ Britain and spreading wealth beyond the south-east.
Things turned worse when reports claimed that his wife Akshata is wealthier than British Queen Elizabeth II with assets worth £430 million, according to Sunday Times Rich List. In fact, they were mentioned to be Westminster’s first billionaire couple, probably enjoying the largest fortune of any House of Commons family. Their finances came under scrutiny as Labour party called him to be more transparent regarding loans he took to fund his businesses.
The Guardian reported, Rishi was forced to explain details about how he managed his family’s fortune, which is said to total £730million. His fortune’s are derived from his marriage to Akshata Murthy, who owns a 0.93% stake worth £690m in Infosys.
Further, the Independent newspaper claimed that Akshata, who is still an Indian national, had non-domiciled status in the UK and non liable to pay taxes in UK. In fact, her domicile status of helps her to save her around £20 million in taxes on dividends from her shares in Infosys.
More trouble came when reports suggested that Sunaks had retained their US Green Cards even after returning to Britain
Critics have also used expensive clothes and houses to portray him as out of touch with the ordinary public.
What is next for Rishi Sunak?
Hours after he lost the race, Sunak showed his support to Liz Truss. “It’s right we now unite behind the new PM, Liz Truss, as she steers the country through difficult times,” Sunak said on Twitter.
The ex-chancellor said he would continue to work as an MP, representing his constituency Richmond, Yorkshire, saying it was “a great privilege” to represent the people there. He said he would love to continue to represent the people of Richmond “as long as they’ll have me”.
Sunak, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for the post of leader of the Conservative Party in the future. “We’ve just finished this campaign. I’d say… I need to recover from this one,” he said.
However, more than the fact that who won or who lost, the race this time has been inspirational. Seeing someone like them in both origin and colour of skin, inevitably fuels hope within the community that is always striving to fight for its rights and against racism.
WIKIPEDIA
RISHI SUNAK/JULY-SEPTEMBER 2022
ORIGINAL SOURCE
WIKIPEDIA
RISHI SUNAK
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Note 6/Rishi Sunak
[6]
THE GUARDIAN
PRITI PATEL WANTS TO RESTART CONTROVERSIAL SMALL
BOAT ”PUSHBACKS”
SEPTEMBER 2022
Sex abuse survivors, human slavery and torture victims are among at least 19 people who have been warned in recent days that they face being deported to Rwanda as the Home Office keeps faith with its “brutal” policy before a major legal challenge this week.
As signs mount that Priti Patel’s new plan for immigration is faltering, details have emerged of the next cohort of asylum seekers whom the home secretary wants to send on a deportation flight to Africa.
Information shared by charities indicates that six were trafficked or tortured, including one who was detained and beaten in a warehouse in the Libyan desert for eight weeks.
Not a single asylum seeker has been sent to Rwanda nearly five months after the Patel’s policy was announced. A judicial review of its lawfulness will be heard in the high court this week.
Another central element of the immigration plan – the setting up of new processing centres for asylum seekers – also appears to have stalled after the Ministry of Defence admitted to the Observer that, despite evaluating 100 different sites for the Home Office since January, it has yet to publicly identify a new one that might be used.
The only site named so far as “asylum accommodation” – in Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire – was abandoned after the Home Office failed to move any asylum seekers there and the MoD withdrew from the plan.
Meanwhile, attempts by Patel – who, reports suggest, may be axed as home secretary – to control the number of small boat crossings are also failing, with record numbers arriving. More than 25,000 have arrived so far this year. Another 3,733 people crossed the Channel during the week to 28 August – twice as many for all of 2019.
The Observer can reveal that the government is considering reintroducing its notorious refugee pushback policy for use against small boats crossing the Channel.
Five months ago, after the heavily criticised policy was officially withdrawn by ministers, documents released under freedom of information laws suggest the government is reconsidering the tactic that has been blamed for drownings in Greece.
Sophie McCann, advocacy officer at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said: “It is shameful that the government ever considered carrying out potentially lethal ‘pushbacks’ against people seeking safety.”
Clare Moseley of the charity Care4Calais, one of the groups bringing this week’s legal action against the Rwanda plans, said: “The government’s brutal Rwanda policy targets people who have escaped from the worst horrors in this world. Given the more humane and effective options available, is this really what our country wants to do?”
Despite the legal challenge, the government plans to deport 19 people to Rwanda in the coming days. Details of 13 of these have been shared by Care4Calais after screening interviews of the asylum seekers: they include six who are married and two who have children.
Of those who shared details of torture in their preliminary questionnaire, one said they had been sexually abused in Iran and another that they had been “detained and threatened with execution if he didn’t comply with smugglers’ instructions” on the way to the UK.
A Sudanese person crossing Libya was detained for a month, “humiliated and made to work for no money”, said the charity. Of another, the charity said: “Smugglers were violent towards him throughout the journey in Turkey; [he was] kept for a week in a small room without food or water.”
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said the policy was having a profound deleterious impact on the mental health of asylum seekers.
“Every day, through our work, we are witnessing the impact the threat of removal to Rwanda is having, especially on people’s anxiety and mental health, with worrying reports of young people who have been self-harming,” said Solomon.
MoD documents dated 31 August 2022, released under freedom of information laws, reveal that pushbacks and the results of trials into the tactic could form part of “future policy regarding the live issues surrounding the passage of small boats across the Channel”.
However, the MoD is refusing to release its assessment of the trials that were conducted off the coast of Weymouth, in Dorset, during the summer of 2021, raising questions over the actual findings along with issues of transparency.
During a defence committee hearing in July, the armed forces minister James Heappey admitted that Patel and Boris Johnson were persuaded of the merits of the dangerous tactic by its use in Greece, where it has been linked to a number of deaths.
“The prime minister, the home secretary and advisers around government had seen the successful employment of pushback tactics elsewhere, principally in Greece,” said Heappey.
McCann added: “MSF teams working there [Greece] have seen and heard the terrible harm that ‘pushback’ tactics have caused, including injury, trauma and people being left adrift at sea.
“It is therefore deeply alarming that, while it claims to have dropped the policy, this government seems to be leaving the door open to revive it in future.”
Responding to queries before the judicial review into the Rwanda policy, Patel said: “We expected legal challenges to this innovative plan.
“Those behind these legal challenges have regrettably delayed the implementation of our partnership and have thus far only succeeded in giving succour to the people smuggling gangs over the summer, resulting in more people boarding flimsy craft and putting their lives at risk in the Channel.
“Rwanda remains a safe and secure country with a strong track record of supporting asylum seekers. The sooner we can deliver this new policy, the sooner we can break the business model of the evil people smugglers and prevent further loss of life in the Channel.”
END OF THE ARTICLE
”Pushback is a term[1] that refers to “a set of state measures by which refugees and migrants are forced back over a border – generally immediately after they crossed it – without consideration of their individual circumstances and without any possibility to apply for asylum”.[2] Pushbacks violate the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens in Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights and often violate the international law prohibition on non-refoulement.[2][1]”
WIKIPEDIA
PUSHBACK (MIGRATION)
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Note 7/Rishi Sunak
[7]
BBC
TORY LEADERSHIP: TRUSS AND SUNAK PROMISE
CRACKDOWN ON MIGRATION
24 JULY 2022
Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have vowed to toughen controls on migration into the UK as part of their bids to become next Tory leader and prime minister.
Mr Sunak said he would tighten the definition of who qualifies for asylum and introduce a cap on refugee numbers.
Ms Truss said she would extend the UK’s Rwanda asylum plan and increase the number of Border Force staff.
More than 14,000 migrants have crossed the Channel to the UK on small boats so far this year.
In an attempt to deter the crossings, in April the government announced it would send some asylum seekers deemed to have entered the UK illegally to Rwanda to claim refuge there.
However, no asylum seekers have been sent to the east-African country yet following a series of legal challenges.
The UK stands to lose the £120m it has paid to Rwanda if the plan is ruled unlawful by the courts at an upcoming hearing.
Both leadership hopefuls said they would explore similar deals with other countries.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told the Mail on Sunday the Rwanda policy was the right approach and that she was determined to “see it through to full implementation”.
Ms Truss also said that if she became Tory Party leader and prime minister, she would increase Border Force staffing from 9,000 to 10,800.
She has also promised a strengthened UK bill of rights, adding: “I’m determined to end the appalling people trafficking we’re seeing.”
Former chancellor Mr Sunak has also pledged to do “whatever it takes” to make the Rwanda scheme work and described the UK’s migration policy as “broken” and “chaotic”.
His plans would see the UK re-assessing aid, trade terms and visa options on the basis of a country’s willingness to co-operate with the return of failed asylum seekers and offenders.
He has also promised to give Parliament control over how many come to the UK by creating an annual cap on the number of refugees accepted each year, though this could be changed in the case of emergencies.
And he said he would introduce “enhanced powers” to detain, tag and monitor those entering the UK illegally.
He said: “Right now the system is chaotic, with law-abiding citizens seeing boats full of illegal immigrants coming from the safe country of France with our sailors and coastguards seemingly powerless to stop them.”
But shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper criticised the pair’s proposals, saying they were wasting taxpayers’ money on the Rwanda scheme.
She said: “The Conservatives have been in power for 12 years. It beggars belief that they claim to be the ones to sort things out when they have both failed for so long.”
Last month, 47 people were told they would be flown to Rwanda, with a flight booked for 14 June. But after a series of legal challenges the flight was cancelled.
Another flight has not yet been scheduled.
Earlier this week, a Commons select committee cast doubt on the effectiveness of the scheme, saying there was “no clear evidence” it would stop risky Channel crossings.
On Saturday, the two candidates clashed over their tax plans.
Ms Truss rejected Mr Sunak’s criticism that it would be wrong to raise government borrowing to fund tax cuts – a major policy difference between the candidates.
She is pledging around £30bn in immediate tax cuts, arguing they will boost growth, while Mr Sunak has said immediate cuts could fuel already-soaring inflation.
Conservative Party members are due to start receiving ballot papers this week and the winner will be announced on 5 September.
Mr Sunak, who quit as part of the government mutiny against Boris Johnson, topped the MPs’ ballots to qualify for the final run-off with Ms Truss. But polls currently suggest the foreign secretary is the favoured candidate of party members, who decide the leader.
It is thought a significant chunk of the 160,000 or so Tory members will vote in the coming weeks.
Hustings will take place throughout July and August, and the two candidates will square off in a live BBC TV debate on Monday, followed by another hosted by The Sun and TalkTV on Tuesday.
BBC
WHAT IS THE UK PLAN TO SEND ASYLUM SEEKERS TO RWANDA
AND HOW MANY COULD GO?
9 OCTOBER
UK government plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda are being challenged in court.
The government says the measures would reduce numbers crossing the English Channel, but critics question Rwanda’s human rights record.
What is the Rwanda asylum plan?
The five-year trial will see some asylum seekers who arrive in the UK sent to Rwanda on a one-way ticket, to claim asylum there.
They may be granted refugee status to stay in Rwanda. If not, they can apply to settle there on other grounds, or seek asylum in a “safe third country”.
The government says it will deter people arriving in the UK through “illegal, dangerous or unnecessary methods”, such as on small boats which cross the English Channel.
However, the numbers crossing have not fallen since the policy was announced on 14 April. More than 33,500 people have already used this route to come to the UK this year, the highest figure since records began.
What is an asylum seeker?
The UN Refugee Agency defines an asylum seeker as someone who has applied for shelter and protection in another country.
A refugee is a person who has fled conflict or persecution in their own country.
The legal rights of refugees are protected by international law. However, it is up to host countries to decide whether an asylum seeker is granted refugee status.
In the year to June 2022, the UK received 63,089 asylum applications, the highest number for nearly 20 years. Of these, almost 16,000 people and their dependants were granted a form of protection.
How many people could be sent to Rwanda?
The UK government said “anyone entering the UK illegally” after 1 January 2022 could be sent, with no limit on numbers.
Rwanda says it can process 1,000 asylum seekers during the trial period, but has capacity for more.
Under the deal, Rwanda can also ask the UK to take in some of its most vulnerable refugees.
However, no asylum seeker has actually been sent to the country. The first flight was scheduled to go in June, but was cancelled after legal challenges.
Is Rwanda safe for asylum seekers?
The question of its suitability is being considered by the courts.
The UK government insists Rwanda is a “secure country, with a track record of supporting asylum seekers”.
It says asylum seekers sent there would be “provided with suitable accommodation and support”.
But charities, campaign groups and lawyers representing asylum seekers say Rwanda is not a safe destination. They argue that the scheme breaks human rights laws.
They told the High Court that Rwanda is an “authoritarian state with extreme levels of surveillance”. They said it was a country which “tortures and murders those it considers to be its opponents”.
Whatever the outcome, it seems likely that the losing side would ask for the the case to be heard by the Court of Appeal.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman said it was her “dream” to have a Rwanda flight depart before Christmas.
How much will the plan cost?
Costs would include flights to Rwanda, food, accommodation, access to translators and legal advice. Removing people from the UK by charter flight cost more than £13,000 per person in 2020.
When the policy was announced, former Home Office Minister Tom Pursglove said there would be a £120m upfront payment to Rwanda, to be followed by further payments as it handled more cases.
He said the cost would be “similar to the amount of money we are spending on this currently”, and that “longer term, by getting this under control, it should help us to save money”.
The UK’s asylum system costs £1.5bn a year. More than £4.7m a day is spent on hotel accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers.
Critics say the daily cost is so high because of the time taken to decide on applications, and a ban on asylum seekers working while waiting for confirmation of their status.
OUR PLAN
CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO 2019
Extra funding for the NHS, with 50,000 more nurses and 50 million more GP surgery appointments a year.
20,000 more police and tougher sentencing for criminals.
An Australian-style points-based system to control immigration.
Millions more invested every week in science, schools, apprenticeships and infrastructure while controlling debt.
Reaching Net Zero by 2050 with investment in clean energy solutions and green infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and pollution.
We will not raise the rate of income tax, VAT or National Insurance.
We Will Put You First
Getting Brexit done. Investing in our public services and infrastructure. Supporting workers and families. Strengthening the Union. Unleashing Britain’s potential.
The Conservatives offer a future in which we get Brexit done, and then move on to focus on our priorities – which are also your priorities.
Because more important than any one commitment in this manifesto is the spirit in which we make them. Our job is to serve you, the people. To deliver on the instruction you gave us in 2016 – to get Brexit done. But then to move on to making the UK an even better country – to investing in the NHS, our schools, our people and our towns.
We will build a Britain in which everyone has the opportunity to make the most of their talents. We will ensure that work will always pay. We will create a fair society, in which everyone always contributes their fair share.
So that together, led by Boris Johnson, we can get Brexit done, and move on to unleash th
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
AUSTRALIA: 8 YEARS OF ABUSIVE OFFSHORE
ASYLUM PROCESSING
15 JULY 2021
(Sydney) – Other governments should reject Australia’s abusive and costly offshore processing of refugees and asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said today. July 19, 2021 is the eighth anniversary of the Australian government’s resumption of its offshore processing policy, which has harmed thousands of people.
Denmark has passed legislation allowing the transfer of asylum seekers to offshore locations, and the United Kingdom is considering such a policy.
“Australia’s abusive offshore processing policy has caused immeasurable suffering for thousands of vulnerable asylum seekers,” said Sophie McNeill, Australia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The cruelty of these camps, in which seven people have committed suicide and children have been terribly traumatized, should not be replicated elsewhere.”
Since July 19, 2013, the Australian government has forcibly transferred more than 3,000 asylum seekers who sought to reach Australia by boat to offshore processing camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Individuals and families with children spent years living in substandard conditions in these centers, where they suffered severe abuse, inhumane treatment, and medical neglect.
Under international law, immigration detention should not be used as punishment, but rather should be an exceptional measure of last resort to carry out a legitimate aim. Adult migrants should be detained for the shortest time necessary. Children should not be placed in immigration detention.
Offshore processing not only inflicts human suffering, but is also costly. It is estimated that offshore processing cost the Australian government A$8.3 billion (US$6.2 billion) between 2014 and 2020. The annual cost of detaining a single asylum seeker in Papua New Guinea or Nauru is A$3.4 million (US$2.5 million).
Refugees and asylum seekers who have been transferred to Australia for medical treatment remain in limbo, with no permanent visas and little support, under threat of being returned to Papua New Guinea or Nauru at any time. At least 169 refugees transferred under the repealed Medevac legislation remain in Australia. Some refugees and asylum seekers are being held in Australia under guard in hotels, in makeshift detention centers referred to as “alternative places of detention.”
Approximately 962 people have been resettled to the United States, under an Australia-US resettlement deal. More than 230 people remain in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
“Other countries should learn from these horrors, rather than repeating them,” McNeill said. “The Australian government should accept New Zealand’s repeated offers to take some of the refugees, and work toward ending offshore processing once and for all.”
For selected accounts, please see below.
Selected accounts:
Thanush Selvarasa, a 31-year-old Tamil asylum seeker from Sri Lanka. He spent eight years in detention, six and a half years offshore, and one and a half years in hotel detention in Australia:
Offshore processing centers destroyed our lives. We are the victims of this cruel policy. Many of our friends lost their lives because of this cruelty. I myself tried to kill myself twice. Human beings have the right to seek safety and protection. This kind of indefinite detention really causes pain. It’s like cutting your neck. It’s so painful, no one should do it again to people. We are the examples from Australia who are affected by this policy. Still, I only have a temporary visa and can’t live. I’m the same human being as anyone, why am I treated like this? I don’t know how to explain this feeling.
Abbas Maghames, a 34-year-old Arab Iranian asylum seeker. He and his family spent six years in offshore detention on Nauru and he currently remains in immigration detention in a hotel in Darwin:
Please. We need to get out from detention. It’s been almost nine years I’ve been in limbo. Everyday I’m suffering. My mental health is getting so worse. This is not a correct solution. Australia doesn’t treat me like a human. It’s not right to treat anyone like this. Every night I have nightmares. We live with stress and depression every single day. We are so suffering. We are so tired.
Loghman Sawari, a 25-year-old Ahwazi refugee who left Iran and came to Australia a few days after the resumption of offshore processing on July 19, 2013. He has spent eight years in detention, six years in Papua New Guinea, and two years in detention in Australia:
It’s very hard when some country accepts you as a refugee, and you’re still locked up. … Before I came [to Australia under Medevac], I was in the ICU, in Papua New Guinea. And I was in the hospital for two to three months, suffering from mental health and physical. And then the minister [for Home Affairs] signed for me to come and get treatment. But since two years I have been in detention I did not receive treatment. … We’re looking for safety, and we’re looking for a safe place to resettle. We need some place to call it home.
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Notes 8,9,10 and 11/Rishi Sunak
[8]
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
AUSTRALIA: 8 YEARS OF ABUSIVE OFFSHORE
ASYLUM PROCESSING
15 JULY 2021
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 7
[9]
‘On September 23, Truss looked on as Kwasi Kwarteng—her chancellor of the Exchequer, political soulmate, and personal friend—put forward a “mini budget” that would cut taxes on top earners, remove a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and cancel a planned corporate-tax hike. ”
….
….
”The left-wing opposition hated it—tax cuts for millionaires as Middle Britain struggled with high energy bills, rampant inflation, and rising mortgage costs—but so did the financial markets.”
THE ATLANTIC
THE PRIME MINISTER WHO DID EVERYTHING WRONG
18 OCTOBER 2022
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 3
[10]
[10]
ALJAZEERA
TORY DISDAIN FOR THE POOR IS FUELLING UK’S
COST OF LIVING CRISIS
23 MAY 2022
The British working class is struggling because this country is being led by a party whose members have nothing but contempt for the poor.
Britain’s cost of living crisis is spiralling out of control. The rise in food and energy bills is swiftly outstripping the disposable income of thousands of families, forcing them to make impossible choices between heating their homes, buying groceries, or putting aside money for their work commute.
According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), more than 250,000 households across the country will fall into “destitution” as early as next year – taking the number of those living in extreme poverty to a whopping 1.2 million – if the government does not take immediate action to help struggling families.
It did not have to be this way. Think-tanks, activists, opposition politicians, and frankly everyone with any understanding of the myriad struggles facing Britain’s working-class communities have long been urging the Tory government to reverse its post-Brexit welfare cuts, increase universal credit, and make small, one-off cash payments to those in most need to stop poverty levels skyrocketing in one of the world’s leading economies.
Regrettably, the government chose to do the exact opposite. In October 2021, as the nation was still struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences, for example, it slashed universal credit payments by 20 British pounds ($25) a week, leaving countless vulnerable Britons unable to pay their bills and put food on their table.
And this April, as skyrocketing energy prices added more urgency to an already devastating crisis, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said it would be “silly” for the government to provide more help to struggling families now. Despite households across the country facing an average £700 ($879) increase in their gas and electricity bills immediately after April, with another 50 percent spike expected in October, Sunak – whose family is worth more than £700 million ($879 million) – said he won’t act before “knowing what the situation will be in autumn”.
These days, when criticised for not doing enough quickly enough to address the cost of living crisis, Sunak points to the so-called £200 ($251) energy bill “discount” he arranged for British households to receive on their bill in October. This, however, as many repeatedly pointed out, is not a “grant” but a “loan”, meaning people will be forced to pay it back to the state starting in 2023 – in other words, whatever respite the “discount” may provide now will be cancelled once the government demands it back a few months later.
Earlier this month, after the Office for National Statistics revealed that inflation reached 9 percent in the year to April – the highest one-year increase in more than 30 years – Sunak said, “Countries around the world are dealing with rising inflation … We cannot protect people completely from these global challenges”.
There is no denying that it is not only Britain that is facing a cost of living crisis today. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the conflict in Ukraine, several challenges came together to brew a perfect storm, increasing the economic vulnerability of the poorest communities across the globe.
Nevertheless, it is also dishonest to deny that our current government has a particular disinterest in helping the poorest and most vulnerable in society. And this is causing the British working class and the poor to suffer more during this time of global economic upheaval than their counterparts in other developed economies.
In Britain, fully employed nurses say they rely on food banks to feed their families.
In Britain, pensioners say they ride the bus all day, every day to remain warm because they can no longer afford to pay their energy bills.
In Britain, new mothers say they skip meals to be able to buy their babies’ formula.
And this is not a problem affecting only an unfortunate few. The Trussell Trust, an NGO that works to end the need for food banks in the UK, said food banks in their network distributed 2.1 million emergency food parcels from April 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022 – a 14 percent increase from the previous year. Eight-hundred-and-thirty-thousand of these parcels were provided for children. According to research by the Food Foundation, in this country “around one in seven adults live in homes where people have skipped meals, eaten smaller portions or gone hungry all day because they could not afford or access food.”
Despite all this, those in government act as if all this suffering was inevitable. Worse, they claim that the desperate situation many of us working-class Britons find ourselves in is our own fault – a consequence of our supposed inability to live our lives efficiently.
Recently, Conservative MP Lee Anderson argued in the House of Commons, without a hint of irony, that food banks are mostly “unnecessary” because the leading cause of food poverty is not actual poverty but a lack of cooking and budgetary skills.
While his tone-deaf comments attracted much condemnation from the public, opposition MPs, and campaigners, his Conservative colleagues rushed to support him, showing that they share his misguided beliefs about food poverty.
MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, for example, penned an entire op-ed for the Daily Express newspaper explaining why Anderson’s offensive comments on food banks were actually “completely spot on”. Meanwhile, MP Jacob Rees Mogg – who once claimed food banks are “rather uplifting” as they show what a “compassionate” country Britain is – said he would not have made Anderson’s comments, but only because he “cannot cook” himself.
Britain’s cost of living crisis is undoubtedly part of a larger pattern. Nevertheless, millions of working-class Britons are not struggling to heat their homes and feed their children in the world’s fifth-largest economy simply because of “global challenges”.
They are struggling because this country is being led through this crisis by a party whose members have nothing but contempt and disdain for the poor.
END OF THE ARTICLE
”Tens of thousands of families in the United Kingdom every year do not have enough food to live on and are turning to sources of non-state charitable aid. This new phenomenon of growing hunger for some of the least well-off people in the country, has emerged alongside a wide-ranging and draconian restructuring of the country’s welfare system since 2010. With reductions in welfare support year on year, the number of people, including families with children, going hungry is rising at an alarming rate and represents a troubling development in the world’s fifth largest economy.”
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCHNOTHING LEFT IN THE CUPBOARDSAUSTERITY, WELFARE CUTS AND THERIGHT TO FOOD IN THE UK2019
https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/20/nothing-left-cupboards/austerity-welfare-cuts-and-right-food-uk
SOCIALIST PARTYEND TORY WAR ON POOR6 DECEMBER 2017https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/26573/06-12-2017/end-tory-war-on-poor/
Just weeks after Chancellor Phillip Hammond boasted that Tory MPs had never had it so good, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published an explosive report showing the rest of us are suffering through the first sustained rise in child and pensioner poverty for 20 years.The report showed that 14 million people in the UK – over 20% of the population – are living below the poverty line, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.This figure includes four million children now living below the poverty line in households that cannot meet their basic needs. These children are less likely to do well at school and more likely to suffer from health problems compared to their richer counterparts, pushing them into a cycle of poverty that spans generations.Even for those in work, the report shows that insecure and poorly paid employment does not keep people out of poverty.Despite Tory lies, eight million people in poverty live in families where at least one person is in work. One in eight workers – 3.7 million people – are living pay cheque to pay cheque, spending most of their income on extortionate rents.The fight for an end to zero-hour contracts and for a real living wage is more crucial than ever. While workers make huge profits for the bosses, our families are falling into poverty.Theresa May’s desperate empty promise to tackle society’s “burning injustices” is now embarrassing even Tory advisers. Her entire ‘social mobility’ team has quit over the government’s lack of actionAs the Tories forge ahead with cuts to benefits alongside the disastrous Universal Credit programme, they are forcing millions more into poverty, debt and homelessness.This cruel government has limped on for long enough. Its political agenda of austerity and privatisation has contributed to the deaths of over 120,000 people.The Tories – aided in many cases by the Blairites – have committed what the researchers who produced that figure have called “economic murder.” They have forced children into poverty, the effects of which will follow these young people throughout their lives.The power to bring this government to its knees lies with workers. We must fight for coordinated strikes to bring down the Tories, and for democratic workers’ control of the economy. Socialist policies can reverse the shameful rise in poverty shown in this report.
END OF THE ARTICLE
[11]
[11]”Article 9The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to social security, including social insurance.”
”Article 111. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.”INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/b2esc.htm
THE INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS HAS BEEN SIGNED AND RATIFIED BY THE UNITED KINGDOM![SIGNED 1968, RATIFIED IN 1976]International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 16 Sep 196820 May 1976http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/research/ratification-greatbritain.html
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 8,9,10 and 11/Rishi Sunak
Opgeslagen onder Divers
Notes 12, 13 and 14/Rishi Sunak
[12]
ALJAZEERA
TORY DISDAIN FOR THE POOR IS FUELLING UK’S
COST OF LIVING CRISIS
23 MAY 2022
SEE FOR THE WHOLE TEXT, NOTE 10
POLITICSHOME
”CRUEL” TORY WELFARE CUTS TO BLAME FOR POOR FAMILIES
GOING HUNGRY, DAMNING REPORT SAYS
20 MAY 2019
The Government’s “cruel and harmful” welfare policies have left tens of thousands of poor families hungry, a damning new report has said.
Global charity, Human Rights Watch, said successive governments had “violated” the right to food, but took particular aim at the Tories.
It listed a string of welfare policies over the past decade, including the introduction of Universal Credit and the benefit cap, as being behind a surge in hunger in England.
In a new report, the charity said many of the families affected were headed by single mums.
The cuts, which it said were motivated by austerity, had amounted to a 44% reduction in support for children and families, it added.
Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch, Kartik Raj, said: “This rise in hunger has the UK government’s fingerprints all over it.”
He added: “Standing aside and relying on charities to pick up the pieces of its cruel and harmful policies is unacceptable.
“The UK Government needs to take urgent and concerted action to ensure that its poorest residents aren’t forced to go hungry.”
Human Rights Watch also accused the Government of having “largely ignored” mounting evidence of falling living standards among the poorest residents.
It pointed to the “skyrocketing” use of food banks and multiple reports from school officials that “many more” children are arriving at school hungry and unable to concentrate.
The charity conducted more than 120 interviews in three areas of high depravation in Hull, Cambridgeshire and Oxford, and looked at stats and government data to compile its report.
It heard from young single mothers who feared they would lose custody of their children if they openly asked for food aid or admitted they were going hungry.
The report said ministers had cushioned some of the hardest-hitting policies, including rolling back the two-child limit on welfare payments and measuring food insecurity.
But it urged the Government to go further by addressing the “significant structural problems” of its welfare policies.
It called for an end to delays for Universal Credit payments and for benefits to keep in line with inflation. It also urged ministers to develop an anti-hunger strategy with legal weight.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said: “We’re helping parents to move into work to give families the best opportunity to move out of poverty.
“And it’s working – employment is at a record high and children growing up in working households are five times less likely to be in relative poverty.
“We spend £95 billion a year on working-age benefits and we’re supporting over one million of the country’s most disadvantaged children through free school meals. Meanwhile we’ve confirmed that the benefit freeze will end next year.”
THE ARTICLE ABOVE REFERS TO THIS HUMAN RIGHTS
WATCH REPORT
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
NOTHING LEFT IN THE CUPBOARDS
AUSTERITY, WELFARE CUTS AND THE
RIGHT TO FOOD IN THE UK
2019
SEE ALSO NOTE 10
[13]
WIKIPEDIA
MARGARET THATCHER
[14]
THE GUARDIAN
THATCHER PUSHED FOR BREAKUP OF WELFARE DESPITE
NHS PLEDGE
PM declared the health service was ‘safe with us’ but secretly pressed on with radical proposals, archives reveal
Margaret Thatcher secretly tried to press ahead with a politically toxic plan to dismantle the welfare state even after a “cabinet riot” and her famous declaration that the “NHS is safe with us”, newly released Treasury documents show.
The plan commissioned by Thatcher and her chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe included proposals to charge for state schooling, introduce compulsory private health insurance and a system of private medical facilities that “would, of course, mean the end of the National Health Service”.
Some of her cabinet ministers believed they had buried the plan, drawn up by a seconded Treasury official, Alan Bailey, from the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), at a special cabinet meeting on 9 September 1982.
Nigel Lawson in his memoirs said the paper of “long-term public spending options” had been buried after what he described as “the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration”. In her own memoirs, Thatcher claimed to have been “horrified” by the CPRS paper and insisted that she and her ministers had never seriously considered it.
The CPRS paper had been partially leaked and she was only able to quell the subsequent furore by famously pledging the “NHS is safe with us” at the October 1982 Tory party conference. Downing Street briefed that the toxic plan had been “shelved”.
Photograph: Handout
But Howe’s Treasury private office papers released by the National Archives on Friday confirm that not only had that special cabinet meeting taken place to discuss the plan but that two months later, far from being buried, Thatcher was still secretly trying to press ahead with it.
The Treasury papers show that once a clutch of tricky byelections were out of the way she was keen to keep pushing the plan and held a series of meetings in December to “to soften up the big three spenders” under her chairmanship “to resolve any immediate political anxieties”.
The papers also show after the 9 September cabinet showdown Howe rejected an approach from the Adam Smith Institute, the rightwing libertarian thinktank, to back their “slightly oddly-named Omega Project” despite it being personally endorsed by Thatcher’s own economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters.
The Omega Project papers said the plans were modelled on research by a rightwing US thinktank for the incoming Ronald Reagan administration. It also argued for many state services to be replaced by “more efficient alternatives from the private sector”.
Howe rejected the approach in a note on 29 September not because he objected to their proposals to dismantle the welfare state but because he feared its “ill-researched proposals, which will be portrayed as strongly resembling our own, might prove an embarrassment”. The then chancellor added: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung (round) our necks. Cf CPRS Report. I see v. (underlined twice) great harm.”
The Treasury papers show that “no real action” was taken on the CPRS “radical right manifesto” until November 1982. “The prime minister (we understand privately) did not want to stir this up before the cabinet discussions on the 1982 survey, nor risk any adverse publicity while the last two byelections were pending. The leaks of the CPRS report did not help,” a senior Treasury official, Peter Mountfield, told Howe in a confidential note entitled “Follow-up of cabinet discussion on long-term public expenditure”.
The prime minister has arranged a series of meetings with the main spending ministers to discuss the follow-up to the discussion in cabinet on 9 September. The ministers involved are Sir Keith Joseph (7 Dec, 11 am), Mr Fowler and Mr Nott (14 Dec, 9.30 and 15 Dec 5.30.). You and the chief secretary will be invited to each meeting.”
Joseph was education secretary, Norman Fowler was health secretary and John Nott was defence secretary. The CPRS paper proposed to cancel Trident and halt the growth in defence spending.
“The only paper formally before the meetings will be the original interdepartmental report on long-term trends in public expenditure … The CPRS paper on options is technically a non-paper, but will be in everyone’s minds (and no doubt in their briefing folders too),” Mountfield told Howe.
The chancellor was told the objective of the meetings was “designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work. Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the prime minister’s concern about the NHS, this may be difficult. But we want to make sure that the ministers concerned do not close off any options at this stage, and, if possible, put their personal weight behind the exercise.’’
These papers flatly contradict Thatcher’s claim that the CPRS proposals were never seriously considered by ministers. The Treasury files released on Friday do not record what happened at the meetings with the big three spenders.
But a Treasury official’s note on 28 October 1982 to the then chief secretary to the Treasury, Leon Brittan, gave an indication of the depth of internal opposition Howe and Thatcher faced. “DHSS (health and social security) officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to a further study of this idea. I imagine in the circumstances, and especially given the prime minister’s speech at Brighton it is difficult to press them.”
In his memoirs, Howe reflects that although the row had postponed the “fundamental debate” he had hoped to start, until after the 1983 general election, “nothing from the Treasury’s point of view is ever as quite as bad as it seems”.
He reported that the impact of what he called the “CPRS furore” had ensured ministers made no new spending pledges and had “set the pace for our forthcoming 1983 manifesto”.
END OF THE ARTICLE
THE GUARDIAN
THATCHER PUSHED FOR BREAKUP OF WELFARE DESPITE
NHS PLEDGE
PM declared the health service was ‘safe with us’ but secretly pressed on with radical proposals, archives reveal
Margaret Thatcher secretly tried to press ahead with a politically toxic plan to dismantle the welfare state even after a “cabinet riot” and her famous declaration that the “NHS is safe with us”, newly released Treasury documents show.
The plan commissioned by Thatcher and her chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe included proposals to charge for state schooling, introduce compulsory private health insurance and a system of private medical facilities that “would, of course, mean the end of the National Health Service”.
Some of her cabinet ministers believed they had buried the plan, drawn up by a seconded Treasury official, Alan Bailey, from the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), at a special cabinet meeting on 9 September 1982.
Nigel Lawson in his memoirs said the paper of “long-term public spending options” had been buried after what he described as “the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration”. In her own memoirs, Thatcher claimed to have been “horrified” by the CPRS paper and insisted that she and her ministers had never seriously considered it.
The CPRS paper had been partially leaked and she was only able to quell the subsequent furore by famously pledging the “NHS is safe with us” at the October 1982 Tory party conference. Downing Street briefed that the toxic plan had been “shelved”.
Photograph: Handout
But Howe’s Treasury private office papers released by the National Archives on Friday confirm that not only had that special cabinet meeting taken place to discuss the plan but that two months later, far from being buried, Thatcher was still secretly trying to press ahead with it.
The Treasury papers show that once a clutch of tricky byelections were out of the way she was keen to keep pushing the plan and held a series of meetings in December to “to soften up the big three spenders” under her chairmanship “to resolve any immediate political anxieties”.
The papers also show after the 9 September cabinet showdown Howe rejected an approach from the Adam Smith Institute, the rightwing libertarian thinktank, to back their “slightly oddly-named Omega Project” despite it being personally endorsed by Thatcher’s own economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters.
The Omega Project papers said the plans were modelled on research by a rightwing US thinktank for the incoming Ronald Reagan administration. It also argued for many state services to be replaced by “more efficient alternatives from the private sector”.
Howe rejected the approach in a note on 29 September not because he objected to their proposals to dismantle the welfare state but because he feared its “ill-researched proposals, which will be portrayed as strongly resembling our own, might prove an embarrassment”. The then chancellor added: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung (round) our necks. Cf CPRS Report. I see v. (underlined twice) great harm.”
The Treasury papers show that “no real action” was taken on the CPRS “radical right manifesto” until November 1982. “The prime minister (we understand privately) did not want to stir this up before the cabinet discussions on the 1982 survey, nor risk any adverse publicity while the last two byelections were pending. The leaks of the CPRS report did not help,” a senior Treasury official, Peter Mountfield, told Howe in a confidential note entitled “Follow-up of cabinet discussion on long-term public expenditure”.
The prime minister has arranged a series of meetings with the main spending ministers to discuss the follow-up to the discussion in cabinet on 9 September. The ministers involved are Sir Keith Joseph (7 Dec, 11 am), Mr Fowler and Mr Nott (14 Dec, 9.30 and 15 Dec 5.30.). You and the chief secretary will be invited to each meeting.”
Joseph was education secretary, Norman Fowler was health secretary and John Nott was defence secretary. The CPRS paper proposed to cancel Trident and halt the growth in defence spending.
“The only paper formally before the meetings will be the original interdepartmental report on long-term trends in public expenditure … The CPRS paper on options is technically a non-paper, but will be in everyone’s minds (and no doubt in their briefing folders too),” Mountfield told Howe.
The chancellor was told the objective of the meetings was “designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work. Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the prime minister’s concern about the NHS, this may be difficult. But we want to make sure that the ministers concerned do not close off any options at this stage, and, if possible, put their personal weight behind the exercise.’’
These papers flatly contradict Thatcher’s claim that the CPRS proposals were never seriously considered by ministers. The Treasury files released on Friday do not record what happened at the meetings with the big three spenders.
But a Treasury official’s note on 28 October 1982 to the then chief secretary to the Treasury, Leon Brittan, gave an indication of the depth of internal opposition Howe and Thatcher faced. “DHSS (health and social security) officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to a further study of this idea. I imagine in the circumstances, and especially given the prime minister’s speech at Brighton it is difficult to press them.”
In his memoirs, Howe reflects that although the row had postponed the “fundamental debate” he had hoped to start, until after the 1983 general election, “nothing from the Treasury’s point of view is ever as quite as bad as it seems”.
He reported that the impact of what he called the “CPRS furore” had ensured ministers made no new spending pledges and had “set the pace for our forthcoming 1983 manifesto”.
END OF THE ARTICLE
SUTHERLAND ECHO
REVEALED: HOW MARGARET THATCHER PLANNED
TO ABOLISH WELFARE AND THE NHS
25 NOVEMBER 2016
Margaret Thatcher secretly continued to pursue politically explosive plans to dismantle the welfare state even after ministers thought they had been killed off by a cabinet revolt, according to newly-released official files.
The proposals – drawn up by Whitehall’s think tank the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) – were among the most contentious and the most radical to be considered by MrsThatcher’s Conservative government during her 11 years in office.
They included scrapping free universal healthcare and requiring people to take out private insurance, charging for education, and ending the annual uprating of benefits in line with inflation, as well as sweeping defence cuts.
The CPRS paper baldly stated: “For the majority the change would represent the abolition of the NHS. This would be immensely controversial.”
When chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe, who commissioned the report, introduced the proposals at a specially convened meeting of the cabinet on September 9 1982 there was uproar.
Nigel Lawson, then the energy secretary, later recalled in his memoirs that it was “the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration”.
And when the so-called cabinet “wets”, who opposed Mrs Thatcher’s hardline economic policies, contrived to leak details of the report to The Economist it sparked a public outcry.
In an attempt to quell the political storm, Mr Thatcher felt compelled to use her speech to the annual Conservative Party conference in Brighton to declare the NHS is “safe with us”.
Mrs Thatcher later claimed to have been “horrified” by the CPRS plan which was deemed so contentious it was designated a “non-paper” in Whitehall.
But while the “wets” believed they had seen off the proposals for good, Treasury papers released by the National Archives at Kew, west London, show the prime minister and her chancellor continued to work behind the scenes to keep them alive.
On November 26 1982, P Mountford in the Treasury informed Sir Geoffrey that MrsThatcher had set up a series of meetings with the key ministers involved – health secretary Norman Fowler, education secretary Sir Keith Joseph and defence secretary John Nott.
“This series of meeting is designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work,” Mr Mountford wrote.
“Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the prime minister’s concern about the NHS, this may be difficult.
But we want to make sure that the ministers concerned a) do not close off any options at this stage, and b) if possible put their personal weight behind the exercise and encourage their officials to co-operate fully with the Treasury.”
Others however saw little prospect of success. GW Monger warned: “DHSS (Department of Health and Social Security) officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to further study of this idea.
“I imagine that in the circumstances, and especially given the prime minister’s speech at Brighton, it is difficult to press them.”
While Sir Geoffrey remained adamant that radical reform was needed if public spending was to be brought under control, he was alarmed when the free market Adam Smith Institute intended to set out its own plans for privatisation and deregulation.
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His political adviser Robin Harris said that while the portentously named “Omega Project” could be “politically useful” to the Conservatives in the run-up to a general election, there was a real danger it could “fall on its face”.
“The timescale proposed is very tight; one has legitimate doubts about the competence of some of those involved; and ill-researched proposals which will be portrayed as strongly resembling ours might prove an embarrassment,” he wrote.
Sir Geoffrey scrawled in the margin: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung round our neck. I see v great harm.”
END OF THE ARTICLE
Reacties uitgeschakeld voor Notes 12, 13 and 14/Rishi Sunak
Opgeslagen onder Divers