Explainer: A scoresheet on Rishi’s five pledges
With Parliament’s summer recess approaching, it is usually a good time to draw some conclusions on the current political situation. For the prime minister, it doesn’t look good.
Rishi Sunak started the year outlining his five pledges for 2023: halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce the national debt, cut NHS waiting lists and stop the boats. On all of them, he’s faring badly.
During his visit to Washington earlier this month, the prime minister said he would take personal responsibility if inflation is not halved by the end of the year. “Of course it’s on me personally. I’m the prime minister. I’m the person who set out those five pledges”, he said.
Yet inflation was still at 8.7 per cent in May. Food prices are set to go down over the course of the year, but food inflation will still be around 9 per cent in December, according to the Institute of Grocery Distribution. If cutting inflation was considered by some an easy bet in January, when Sunak made the pledge, it now doesn’t look so easy.
On growing the economy, Sunak is not doing much better. The GDP figures for May, published yesterday, showed the economy shrank by 0.1 per cent. The ONS director for economic statistics, Darren Morgan, said that “across the last three months as a whole the economy showed no growth”.
What about the national debt? It increased in May to the highest in more than 60 years, reaching 100 per cent of GDP.
The other pledge of fixing some of the problems plaguing the national health system has been high on the list of many governments – but on the success list of very few. Despite launching a long-term NHS plan a couple of weeks ago, Sunak doesn’t seem able to control the situation with junior doctors striking again this week.
Specifically, waiting lists, the subject of Sunak’s fourth pledge, have reached a record high. Figures released yesterday showed they reached their highest ever level for England, with 7.47 million people waiting to start routine hospital treatment at the end of May.
And finally, on the commitment of stopping the boats – which in less sensationalist language means lowering the number of people reaching the UK to claim asylum through the Channel – Rishi Sunak is getting ambivalent results too.
Small boat crossings seem to be down from last year. According to Home Office Statistics, there were 3,793 crossings from January to March 2023 compared to 4,548 from January to March 2022. But with around 1,340 people making the crossing in the last few days, the gap is likely to shrink.
Talking about the asylum system in terms of numbers is also not always helpful, as the root causes of what drives people to leave don’t disappear and in spite of numbers going up or down, people still leave and find new ways of doing so.
The Rwanda scheme has just lost in the courts, while the Illegal Migration Bill gets turned apart in the Lords, with peers doing all they can to introduce more protections for children, women and potential victims of slave trade in the legislation.
Sunak’s appeal to the electorate – and to his party – was that he was a grown-up who could get stuff done. But if he can’t stand up to this image, not much is left of his political character.