South Holland and the Deepings MP Sir John Hayes on the priorities for new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
In his latest Hayes in the House column, Sir John Hayes MP looks at the task awaiting Rishi Sunak...
In his timeless masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky said that “taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most”.
The new Prime Minister must now deliver the economic confidence spawning national pride promised in the 2019 election.
To do so, he must glance back in order to move forward.
Brexit was a repudiation of the age of globalisation so lauded by Tony Blair.
The liberal establishment subjected the British people to rigid assumptions about the power of unfettered free market economics, untrammelled globalisation and unabridged individualism, all propped up by an ever-expanding state. The financial crisis of 2007-08 should have heralded fundamental change.
Instead, the old model was sustained by quantitative easing – a deceptively elegant way of describing printing money and pumping it into the economy.
Today, as an increasingly autocratic China looks inward, and Russia pursues its war in Ukraine, even the most naively enthusiastic proponent of globalisation will surely admit that that particularly game is up.
The managed decline of Britain, to which the self-appointed liberal establishment acquiesced, diminished the life chances of Britons as their inheritance of Parliamentary democracy was exported to Brussels and too much British manufacturing exported to the sweatshops of far off third-world outposts.
Thanks to Blair’s ‘third way’, we began to grow less and care less.
Fundamentally, both the economy and communities were hollowed out.
Brexit was a vote for civic, industrial and democratic renewal.
Following which, the great realignment of 2019’s General Election saw the Conservatives became a truly ‘one nation’ party as working class Britons broke through Labour’s Red Wall by voting Tory, many for the first time.
Benjamin Disraeli, amongst Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers, would surely have seen in Brexit his creed of mutual obligation, civic duty and patriotism uniting, in purpose and service, Britons of all backgrounds.
Our new Prime Minister faces a daunting task: the sharp downturn in the global economy, with its effect on the cost of living, is the immediate challenge, requiring stable governance and certain leadership.
Such certainty necessitates bolstering national reliance, restoring order to our streets, taking back control of our borders, levelling up Britain’s left behind places and fighting back against ‘woke’ warriors bent on corrupting our past to dictate our future.
Disconnected ‘citizens of nowhere’ may try to distort our current circumstances as an excuse for more mass migration to prop up their failing system or slash essential public services already at breaking point, as they prefer their economic fantasies to cold reality.
Yet, the British people know there is far more to statecraft than bookkeeping.
In place of the short-termist bean-counting of Treasury officials, we desperately need a long-term vision based on investment in our people and communities.
Such vision is responsible for the rise of far-east economies like South Korea, they understand that you cannot build sustainable economic growth if you cut away at its foundations.
Civic society built on communal values gives life to the best of our instincts.
The pursuit of those more noble purposes must nourish the kind of fraternal economics that ensures social solidarity accompanies prosperity.
Our new Prime Minister must now embody those more noble purposes in pursuit of the common good.