Sunak

 1.  Rishi Sunak "kisses hands" with King Charles (a first for both) this morning and Sunak becomes Prime Minister. I think he doesn't actually kiss.

2.  It speaks well for the UK that we have a prime minister of South Asian heritage.  I think one of his parents was a Kenyan Asian.  As far as I can remember the only party to welcome the Kenyan Asians was the Liberals.  Both the Conservative and Labour parties tried to wriggle out of any commitment to take them in.  He owes us.

 3.   It also speaks well of the UK that we have a practising Hindu for a prime Minister, and it's rather nice that it happened on their feast of Diwali (Light). He'll still appoint the Bishops of the Church of England, though.  It's interesting that we've never yet had a Roman Catholic PM. (Tony Blair "converted" after he'd resigned as PM.)

4.  He's very personable, the sort of chap Tory selection committee members would rather like for a son-in law when they're selecting a parliamentary candidate.

5. He is not, however,  a man of principle.  His predecessor as Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid walked out rather than submit to Prime Minster Johnson's demand that he sack his own advisors and use Downing Street's.  It would have been nice if the entire top echelons of the Tory party had united against Johnson's concentration of power in No 10, but Sunak had no such scruples.

6. Nor is he very moral .  He openly boasted to the Tories of Tunbridge Wells (where better?) that he had diverted  funds meant for depressed areas to affluent towns such as their.  There's no getting away from this: you can watch the video if you google "Sunak Boasting." One of the beneficiaries of this immoral if not illegal diversion was his own constituency, Richmond, one of the poshest bits of Yorkshire.

7. Some of the newspapers are making a great fuss about his being "unelected."  This does not worry me.  As argued in the previous post, we are a parliamentary democracy and it is up to MPs to decide who can command a majority.  A plebiscite among Tory party members with Johnson on the ballot could have led to an even greater disaster.

8.  Nor am I all that sympathetic to calls for a general election, which are pretty predictable and make the opposition parties sound robotic if not pathetic.  I believe in fixed term parliaments. One of the most effective parliaments was that before 2019.  It failed to find  a solution that would produce a Brexit beneficial to the UK, because there is no such thing, as we are painfully finding out.

9.  Most of the debate and comment from Conservatives over the weekend has centred around finding a leader who could unite the party.  That was the theme of Sunak's first speech to the party.  What should have been the primary objective, finding someone with policies good for the country, was secondary to keeping their hands on power.

10.  Sunak is seen as a "safe pair of hands" but his decisions as Chancellor were pretty feeble. He pandered to the comfortable with his silly "eat out to help out" scheme,  chose to increase the tax on a "good", (employment,) rather than a "bad" (river pollution perhaps) to pay for the care system, and took a hard hearted swipe at the poor by discontinuing the £20 uplift to universal credit.

11.  He also voted (and I presume campaigned) for Brexit, so is clearly susceptible to fraudulent promises and fantasy economics, if not quite to the extent that M/s Truss is.

12. Most seriously his promise to be "responsible" about the public finances means that we are to be locked into yet another round  of the discredited Cameron/Osborne austerity of the 2010-15 government.   There is no slack, in the NHS nor anywhere else, there are no non-damaging savings, our public services are threadbare.  They need increased  expenditure, and cannot sustain cuts.  However, the market turmoil following  the Truss recklessness means that the Tories have another fake excuse to disguise further cuts as necessary and responsible.

 This is not true.  

As distinguished economist Chris Grey writes:

 That reaction [of the markets] was to the fact that Truss and Kwarteng’s plan was based on the total nonsense that reducing taxes would deliver growth and make government debt sustainable. It doesn’t mean that borrowing to fund public spending in ways that would plausibly promote growth would meet the same fate. Such spending would include infrastructure projects, environmentally sustainable and energy-saving projects, and significantly enhanced education spending. (My emphasis)