depart<\/a> after they were denied a vote by the maneuvering of MPs, and Nadine Dorries \u2014 Johnson\u2019s former culture secretary \u2014 is on the record for saying that Sunak lacks legitimacy because he does not have a mandate of any kind.<\/p>\nMoreover, if Sunak tries to implement another round of austerity, he\u2019s likely to face opposition from his own backbenchers. Winning dozens of former Labour seats in the 2019 election has made a layer of new Tory MPs vulnerable to the political fallout from their traditional attacks on the poor and the vulnerable. Johnson had political sense enough to realize this and therefore promised to \u201clevel up\u201d areas of the country that had suffered under the decade of Tory rule.<\/p>\n
It’s important to note that while Sunak was chancellor, he sought and managed to frustrate these ambitions to address the UK\u2019s regional inequality. What remains of the agenda is likely to get scaled back even further when his new program for government is unveiled on Friday. These MPs, organized under the Northern Research Group, were a source of instability during Truss\u2019s brief reign because she refused to guarantee an uprating of social security payments in line with inflation. By implementing more cuts, it\u2019s difficult to see how Sunak can escape causing more turmoil.<\/p>\n
Sunak was once lauded thanks to his overseeing the job guarantee scheme and loans and grants to businesses that kept millions of people afloat during the acute phase of the COVID crisis. But this political capital was swiftly thrown away when he announced a rise in National Insurance in September 2021, got a police fine for attending a gathering during COVID restrictions, and lost face after it was announced his billionaire wife was a beneficiary of a tax-avoidance scheme.<\/p>\n
He has a reputation for being smooth and relatively charismatic, but he is politically flat footed and his rise to the top quite sudden. If a master of bullshit and skulduggery like Johnson could not bring the Tory party to heel, the chances of Sunak doing so must range from slim to nonexistent.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since November last year, the UK\u2019s ruling Conservative Party has been gripped by rebellion, chaos, and a collapse in popular support. Be it revelations that Boris Johnson partied in Downing Street while the nation groaned under the weight of COVID restrictions or Liz Truss\u2019s tax cuts for the rich during a sharp rise in inflation, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8583,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8583"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":853353,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853352\/revisions\/853353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}