Five MPs vying to replace Boris Johnson as Tory leader and Prime Minister engaged in a lacklustre but sometimes testy debate that ignored immigration, law and order, and free speech issues on Sunday.
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, former communities minister Kemi Badenoch, former trade minister Penny Mordaunt, and backbencher Tom Tugendhat clashed on issues including the economy and cost of living crisis, whether public sector workers should get a five per cent pay rise, and the net zero green agenda, but ignored issues that are traditionally of concern to the public but not the political and media class, such as immigration and crime.
Most failed to set out any firm policies on the issues under discussion — Sunak, for example, provided the content-free slogan “investment, innovation, education” as his “plan” — but they did not shy away from taking shots at each other on their records, or lack thereof.
Several proposed minor tax cuts — which would represent a sea-change from policy under Johnson and Sunak, who have increased the tax burden to its highest level in generations — to alleviate the cost of living crisis, Sunak strongly suggested that he would continue on his current trajectory and that doing otherwise would be left-wing.
“I’d love to stand here and say I’d cut this tax, that tax, and another tax, and it will be OK, but you know what, it won’t,” he said, insisting that “something for nothing economics isn’t conservative, it’s socialism” and emphasising his focus would be tackling inflation.
This is in line with the view of establishment figures like Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, who advised workers not to ask for pay rises and accept a “painful” fall in living standards to control inflation.
On proposals that public sector workers should get a five per cent pay rise with inflation running at ten per cent, candidates left workers with little to hope for, either fobbing the question off to independent pay review bodies or warning outright that the economy could not support “inflationary pay rises”.
Turning to internal and personal matters, all of them said they would not have Boris Johnson in their Cabinet if he wanted to serve, while Mordaunt bridled over a brief mention of her alleged support for trans people being allowed to self-identify their gender.
She called the discussion of her view that “trans men and men” and “trans women are women” an “unedifying” attempt to “paint me as an out of touch individual”, insisting “my constituents do not elect people who are out of touch” — although they have previously elected a number of Labour MPs.
The views expressed by Mordaunt her book last year, endorsed by Bill Gates and Tony Blair, certainly do not seem especially conservative, harping on the fact that Britain’s leaders too often hold a “long-term, male, patient, predictable, factual, planned, heterosexual, white, Christian, Western” worldview and claiming that the late Kenneth Clark’s legendary Civilisation series, beloved by many conservative history lovers, “explained how superior Oxford-educated British middle-aged white men were.”
The contenders managed to land some good blows on one another, with Sunak asking Truss if she regretted having been a Remainer or a Liberal Democrat more, for example, and being grilled in turn on whether he still wanted to get closer to an increasingly belligerent Communist China.
Sunak, who has been effectively endorsed by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times, paid lip service to the fact that China has been deemed a threat, but added that “when we can protect ourselves that shouldn’t stop us from engaging with countries around the world” — suggesting that he would indeed seek to increase links in some areas.
Sunak was also pressed on the parlous state of the British military, with Tugendhat — who mentioned his own service with the Army Reserve frequently during the debate — noting that 10,000 troops were being made unemployed when he suggested he had boosted Ministry of Defence pay considerably.
Candidates also landed some blows on themselves, as when Mordaunt called her own campaign video “legendary” and said “[t]here’s a couple of things we need to win the next general election, one of them is me as Prime Minister,” making her come off somewhat conceited.
Kemi Badenoch, by her own admission a “wild card” in the leadership contest and a favourite among Conservative activists for her anti-woke statements, also struck a somewhat dubious posture on Brexit, saying she was “tired of us being Brexiteers and Remainers” and that it was “time to move on”, insisting there was “not unfinished business, we have left the EU” despite persistent issues with the bloc around issues including Gibraltar, fishing, and its continued power over Northern Ireland.
As previously mentioned, issues of great concern to voters such as record-high legal immigration and an out of control illegal immigration crisis in the English Channel were not mentioned, with crime, sentencing, and so on also ignored.
Free speech did not get a mention either, despite the fact the Johnson administration has been driving forward censorship with things like the Online Harms Bill, and a clampdown on so-called “hate speech” is one of the proposals in Mordaunt’s aforementioned book.
Net zero, an obsession of the political and media class, did get a section, however, with all the candidates saying they backed it — although Badenoch said it could not “bankrupt the country” and that she would change it if need be.
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