IIn the last decade, Nigel Farage has traumatized the Conservative party and changed it for the worse. His proposal that he could return to politics after his stint on reality TV will cause paroxysms of Tory despair. The prospect of the former Brexit party leader’s return only highlights that Rishi Sunak is fighting for his political life after his party’s civil war over immigration restarted. The prime minister’s appearance at the Covid investigation probably won’t help much. His flagship scheme to boost the restaurant industry after the first lockdown was known in Whitehall as “eat out to help the virus“.
The Tory divisions over the closure of the country have been shallower and less insidious than over immigration, which has replaced Europe as the party’s big division. But they run along similar lines, with each side having its own facts. Tory MPs are calm because they were elected as Brexiters who have proven incapable of exercising the control over immigration they sought. For some, Mr Sunak’s proposed law goes too far in limiting migrants’ rights to challenge deportation, while for others it does not go far enough. The return of Mr Farage in such circumstances conservatives agonize.
Another cause for Tory unrest is the widespread perception that 13 years of Conservative prime ministers have run the country into the ground. Patients in the UK are waiting longer for a doctor than people in Kenya. Crumbling concrete means schools and courts are closed before they fall. Unicef said this month that the UK, among 39 of the world’s richest nations, had the biggest jump in child poverty in the past decade. The extent to which Mr Sunak prioritized the economy over wider society’s needs as chancellor during the pandemic was at the heart of his evidence. When he campaigned to lead the Tory party, he joined the Spectator last year that scientists were given too much power and that he complained about the cost of lockdowns early in the pandemic. However, in response to questioning, Mr Sunak will only admit that he opposed the introduction of restrictions in September 2020, unabashedly saying that he spoke to the Spectator about the government’s communications strategy.
Britain’s travel direction had to be reassessed after the pandemic. Countries which handled the emergency situation well, had strong welfare states. However, the government prefers a more simplistic, Panglossian and selective view. In education, the international rankings for England’s secondary school pupils flattered to mislead and were based on rough statistics. But ministers opted for cheap political point-scoring – no doubt influenced by the fact that Mr. Sunak’s treasury accused of starved schools of the cash needed for children’s learning recovery. At the Covid inquiry he was forced to deny allegations that he had called parents who could not afford to buy food for their children “freeloaders”.
Mr Sunak oversaw rise inequalitypublic-sector austerity and regressive tax reforms. Today’s Conservative Party has a clear interest in distracting the public from its policy failures. Mr Sunak gambled that his party benefited in the short term by shifting attention from unpopular economic policies to cultural issues that stir public opinion, such as immigration. But in the long run, this strategy strengthened the hard right – both within and without his party – so much so that it left him facing the biggest test of his premiership.
