Targets to halve inflation, shorten NHS waiting times and stop small boat arrivals ‘appear increasingly out of reach’
Early in the new year, seeking to reset and define his premiership, Rishi Sunak laid out five key “pledges” on which he asked voters to judge him come the next election.
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These featured a promise to halve inflation by the end of the year, grow the economy, see debt fall, shorten NHS waiting lists and pass new laws to stop small boats crossing the Channel.
It was “politics by bullet-pointed bromide – matter-of-factly mundane and ruthlessly pragmatic”, said Politics.co.uk. But, six months on and with the election potentially just over a year away, the recent “barrage of bad news” has “placed the logic behind Sunak’s oaths-focused strategy under significant strain”.
What did the papers say?
On inflation, the government’s highest priority and the most easily measurable of Sunak’s pledges, the prime minister and economists had been hopeful it was on course to halve this year from January’s 10.1%.
However, recent figures from the Office for National Statistics showing CPI inflation unchanged in May at 8.7% “have thrown this confidence into doubt”, said the i news site. As predicted, energy prices have fallen dramatically but food inflation has “remained stubbornly high, and core inflation – excluding food and energy prices – is rising at its highest rate since 1992”, said Conservative Home.
Cutting the national debt is “another promise that looked feasible in January, but has since taken on greater complexity in recent months due to high inflation”, said i news. In June UK net debt exceeded 100% of GDP for the first time since the early 1960s.
Meanwhile, the UK economy “has continued to defy expectations by narrowly avoiding entering a recession”. Indeed organisations such as the IMF and OECD have improved their forecasts for the year.
It is a far more dispiriting picture for NHS waiting lists, which hit a new record high of more than 7.3 million in March. The government also missed its self-imposed target of eliminating 18-month waits for appointments by April.
And while small boat arrivals are down slightly on last year, it was revealed last week that more than 1,100 people had arrived across the Channel in just a three-day period in June.
“It seems that every other week another of Sunak’s five pledges is pummelled,” said Reaction. Taken together it means that the prime minister’s goals – “once slighted as unambitious – appear increasingly out of reach”, said Politics.co.uk.
What next?
Much hinges on whether Sunak can meet his inflation target, which both the prime minister and his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, have made clear is their number one priority.
The problem for Sunak, said i news, is that “there appear to be very few levers at his disposal to try and bring inflation back down that are politically palatable”.
While the most achievable of his January pledges, it was also “the most remarkable”, said Conservative Home. “That’s for the simple reason that controlling inflation is not supposed to be the Government’s job.” Rather it is the Bank of England’s.
The Bank of England has now revised its inflation forecast for December this year up from 3.9% to 5%, making it touch-and-go whether the pledge to halve it will be met. Others are more optimistic, with Simon French, chief economist at Panmure Gordon, rating Sunak’s chances as “60-40 in his favour”.
On boosting GDP growth “Sunak may hope the situation will turn around as wider economic forces, like rampant inflation, abate”, said The Telegraph. Yet it is on the NHS and stopping small boats that Sunak’s, and by extension the Conservatives’, political fate lies.
Illegal migration “is the big one”, agreed Conservative Home, and the pledge that Sunak “is devoting the most personal bandwidth to”. Yet it is also “one of the most ambitious”, said i news. Even though the government has removed the deadline of the end of the year, it remains “a monumental challenge”.
Dire waiting times in the NHS is another of “the most pressing issues for UK voters right now”, said The Telegraph. Yet “one thing to highlight is that there was very little detail behind the prime minister’s pledge”, Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation charity, told The New Statesman.
“Unable to rely on his pledges for political relief”, Politics.co.uk suggested Sunak could now look to deploy the so-called “dead cat strategy”: a new policy or line of attack “so shocking that the media cannot help but pay attention”.
This could provide Sunak with “a short-term grace period as his team scrambles to update its communications strategy, crafted on the uncertain foundation of his New Year oath-swearing”.
