The Tory government has made yet another re-shuffle of ministers but their unpopularity will continue until they are finally kicked out of office.
The Conservative Party has lagged behind the Labour Party in Opinion Polls for nearly two years now. The latest YouGov poll from 9 November showed 23% intending to vote Conservative at the next election compared to 47% for Labour – and this is no better than it was a year ago. Against this background and despite several ‘resets’, ‘big ideas’ and so on, the government is rightly despised across the country and this latest desperate attempt to salvage something at the next election is doomed to fail. It is like ‘shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic.’
The choice of ministerial replacements also lays bare the continuing splits within the Conservative Party. These replacements will not make those splits go away. In fact, they will probably get sharper as recriminations fly about the falling support for the Conservative Party after their success in the 2019 election.
The sacking of Suella Braverman
The first change was the sacking of Suella Braverman from her position as Home Secretary. She has been the vocal exponent of some of the most disgusting ideas ever put forward by a UK government minister. The fact that she became a minister in the first place shows how the Conservative Party has allowed the development of a right wing that is demagogic, xenophobic and racist. She epitomises a nasty English nationalism.
It looks like Rishi Sunak started planning Braverman’s removal at least a week ago because talks with David Cameron seem to have started back then. In the past fortnight, she has come out with some of her worst provocations. On 4 November, she tweeted about homeless people having to sleep rough and complained about them having tents. She said ‘we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.’ In a single tweet she manages to attack homeless people and ‘people from abroad’. She even suggested that homeless charities should be fined if they provided tents to the homeless. Sunak didn’t sack her at the time but there was an enormous backlash in the general public and even amongst Conservative Party voters.
Braverman’s next hand grenade came in the form of an article in the Times newspaper last week. She accused the Metropolitan police in London of not being even-handed when it came to marches and demonstrations. In her article, she claimed the pro-Palestine marches were not “merely a cry for help for Gaza”, but an “assertion of primacy by certain groups – particularly Islamists – of the kind we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”.
Braverman’s words embolden far right thugs
The right-wing media had previously created a false narrative about the Palestinian support marches being a threat to the Armistice events on Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 November (and Sunak did nothing to challenge this narrative). Braverman amplified those ideas in her article and this all led directly to the encouragement of a 1,000 or so far right extremists to descend on London. They came tanked up, looking for a fight, and some were heard chanting at the police ‘You’re not English any more’. These thugs claimed they were coming to ‘defend the Cenotaph’. How ironic that people who make Nazi salutes claim they had come to defend the memory of those who died fighting the Nazis. Nearly one hundred of these people were arrested. In contrast there were over 300,000 marching in support of those Palestinians under siege in Gaza and their march was overwhelmingly peaceful. Braverman continues to call these genuine peaceful acts of solidarity ‘hate marches’.
Let’s remember that Rishi Sunak said that Braverman had his ‘full confidence’ following the publishing of her Times article, even though it was later reported that his office did not sign off on the article. His sacking of Braverman is not based on any principled objections to her extreme right wing-ideas. Rather it is based on his attempts to survive in a party that is riven with divisions.
Braverman has been sacked but the right wing has not gone away. Almost immediately there has been a call for a vote of no confidence in Rishi Sunak from Dame Andrea Jenkyns. Like Braverman, Jenkyns is part of the (UK taxpayer-funded) European Research Group (ERG) which includes amongst its membership luminaries like Jacob Rees Mogg and Michael Gove. She opens her letter with the words ‘Enough is enough. If it wasn’t bad enough that we have a party leader that the party members rejected, the polls demonstrate that the public reject him, and I am in full agreement. It is time for Rishi Sunak to go.’ The letter has been criticised for its poor grammar and punctuation. Incredibly, she was Minister for Skills when Liz Truss was the Prime Minister briefly in Autumn 2022.
Just one day after being sacked, Braverman has come back with a stinging attack on Sunak in an open letter. The letter doubles down on her recent right-wing views on pro-Palestine marches and on immigration. The tone of her letter indicates who she thinks should be in charge when she writes that ‘Despite you having been rejected by a majority of party members during the summer leadership contest and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister, I agreed to support you because of the firm assurances you gave me on key policy priorities.’ This is just the start of more vicious infighting to come.
So-called ‘Rwanda plan’ slapped down by the Supreme Court
Braverman is notorious for an interview she gave in 2022 when she said ‘I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda.’ at which point she simulates a plane take off with her arm and smiles. ‘That’s my dream – it’s an obsession.’ Her ‘dream’ was all but ended by the Supreme Court decision today to confirm that the plan to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda to be processed was unlawful.
The Supreme Court decision could not have been more decisive against the Rwanda plan. One of Braverman’s ‘solutions’ was for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. But this ruling showed that it would still not be lawful because it broke other international conventions that the UK is signed up to, like the UN convention on torture, as well as various UK laws including one introduced by the Tories back in 1993. It has been revealed that officials in the Foreign Office advised against considering Rwanda as a destination option because it was not safe. But it was added onto the list of countries when Priti Patel and Boris Johnson showed interest in it.
The government has continued to plough time and money into the Rwanda plan even though it was clearly illegal and unworkable. They will continue to keep this pot boiling because the main purpose of it is to inject racist anti-asylum seeker views into political discussion.
The return of David Cameron, Mister Austerity
Sunak moved James Cleverly into the Home Office position leaving a vacancy for the post of Foreign Secretary. And, as if by magic, out from the political wilderness comes former Prime Minister, David Cameron to fill that position. Oh, and because he is not an elected MP, Sunak makes him a life peer so he can sit in the House of Lords and become part of the government. Just like that! One ex public schoolboy doing a favour for another. This is the true nature of so-called ‘democracy’ in the UK. A system based on privilege and patronage.
The number of Conservative Party MPs in the House of Commons is currently 350. It says something that Sunak is so dismissive of that ‘talent pool’ that he went outside and brought back Cameron. David Cameron, together with George Osborne, was the architect of the austerity measures of the previous decade, the appalling effects of which continue to this day. Whilst the top earners increased their wealth after the financial crash of 2007-08, working class people saw real wages and the social wage (health, education etc) drastically reduced by austerity. And despite claims from Boris Johnson, when he was Prime Minister, that austerity was over it definitely isn’t. It is still making life miserable for many working people.
A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last month showed that 3.8 million people (including one million children) experienced destitution in 2022. This means that the number doubled in just five years. Sabine Goodwin, of the Independent Food Aid Network, has pointed out that since May, one million people have switched off their fridge or freezer to save money. Four out of five people on Universal Credit have at some point gone without food or not replaced worn out clothes. And 2.8 million people have gone into debt to pay for food. It is quite clear that no ‘big bold’ policies will come from this latest re-shuffle to make any change to the dire conditions facing millions of people. Having politicians who are so-called ‘statesmanlike’ does not put food on the table. It does not pay the rent or the exorbitant energy bills.
Cameron and the Greensill scandal
There is a tendency in business for senior managers to recruit people in their own image. Sunak’s choice of Cameron conforms to this tradition. They are both rich and know how to work the system to benefit themselves and their friends. Whilst away from government, David Cameron was paid millions of pounds by Greensill Capital to lobby civil servants and ministers to help them gain access to the government’s Coronavirus loan support scheme. Greensill Capital didn’t get any of those funds in the end but when they went bust, in 2021, they had other liabilities that a parliamentary committee estimated would cost the taxpayer £5 billion.
As well as the headline-grabbing changes at the senior ministerial level, there have been changes at junior ministerial level. Five junior ministers resigned including Nick Gibb, who has been an MP for 25 years. Many of these MPs would not have been confident about getting back in at the next election anyway. Another junior minister, Rachel MacLean, has been removed from her job as Housing Minister. Her successor will be the 16th Housing Minister since 2010. Sunak can fill these posts with MPs loyal to himself. Even though they only stay an MP until the next election they will have experience on their CV to help them get cushy jobs in business afterwards.
Sunak says his ‘new team’ will come forward with big bold policies. In reality he is just trying to hold on for another year, keep the right wing of his party at bay if possible, and continue to enrich himself and his class at our expense. The Tories know they are on the way out but they want to take as much as they can before that happens.
We call for
- A general election now – kick the Tories out
- A fight to commit Labour to socialist policies, in opposition to the Starmer leadership
- Co-ordinated action by the trades unions to defend workers from all attacks
- A campaign of resistance to the anti-trade union laws – including non-compliance
- Active campaigns against racist demonising of asylum seekers
- An immediate ceasefire in Gaza
- Abolish the House of Lords
Capitalism offers nothing to working people. Only a socialist society, based on need and not on profit, can deliver decent living standards.
The featured image shows Rishi Sunak flanked by the new Home Secretary, James Cleverly and the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman in a video on the Channel 4 News Youtube channel.
