Jeremy Hunt's Pre-Election Give Aways

At first glance Jeremy Hunt's second and, in all likelihood, last Autumn statement is unexpectedly good news. A cut to National Insurance, giving back £450/year to those on average salaries. This is due to come into force in January. Pensioners can look forward to a big hike in the state pension, with it increasing by 8.5% April. Social security up to match inflation. Local housing allowance was also put up, alcohol frozen, and the minimum wage cranked up to £11.44/hour, translating into a pay rise of £1,800/year for the lowest paid full time workers. Where has this Conservative Party been? Isn't Hunt trying to outflank a Labour Party who have said nothing and promised nothing on any of these issues?

Not in the slightest. These are measures designed to dazzle and bedazzle. The Tories know full well that their press allies are going to be effusive with praise. I can almost see The Sun's front page now, leading with the pension and wage increases superimposed onto a frozen bottle of booze. And this is exactly what any Tory chancellor would do. In an election year, it's the done thing for hitherto tight-pursed, penny-pinching occupants of Number 11 to shower the electorate with a generous helping of goodies. And the more mean spirited they usually are, the greater their largesse is talked up. Indeed, the fact the NI decrease is coming in imminently instead of waiting for the start of the new financial year suggests that election is coming sooner rather than later.

But this is smoke and mirrors stuff, and does not depart from Rishi Sunak's political strategy to manage expectations by dampening down belief in the capacity of the state to do anything. In Hunt's statement, this intent manifests in two ways. With £27bn more than expected to play with, rather than plugging gaps in eroding public services the Tories elected to give it away. The second is his announcement that state spending should never exceed economic growth, virtually guaranteeing even more cuts if the economy heads south. And his expectation that the public sector should strive to be more productive, with bureaucracy - that old Tory favourite - singled out as the barrier to efficiency. Never mind they're dropping to bits because the Tories have starved them of funds for nearly 14 years.

And consider who benefits from thse measures. Increasing benefits after holding them down so long still leaves this country the meanest in Western Europe where supporting the poorest are concerned. The big increase in the minimum wage is not before time, but only partially addresses the real terms erosion of wages that has characterised the sunset years of this Tory government. The state pension reaffirms their fidelity to the triple lock, hoping a generous bung to the pensioner base will turn them out at the next election and deliver them from a deserved drubbing. And that National Insurance cut? This applies to the 27 million workers who pay 12% on their salaries between £12,571 and £50,270. Higher paid employees pay two per cent on monies over the £50k mark. What that means is the higher the salary, the bigger the cut. Someone on an average salary will keep £450/year, but those at the top and beyond can look forward to pocketing a £750 saving. A subsidy for the wealthiest paid for by crumbling public services. Still, that's nothing compared to the billions handed to business. They will permanently enjoy a tax cut of 25p for every pound they invest in their firms.

The "good news" around benefits is tempered by a renewed assault on disabled people. As trailed last month, the Tories have now decided the flexible working that usually irks them offers a new excuse to tighten the screws. Their so-called back to work plan comes with more conditionalities, a more brutalising range of sanctions, and a new campaign of demonisation. As Hunt puts it, "Anyone choosing to coast on the hard work of taxpayers will lose their benefits." Red meat, they hope, for the crueller sections of the Tory base who might be Reform UK-curious.

In all, this is a short term budget designed to get the Tories over the electoral finishing line. There's nothing to address the anaemic growth forecast by the OBR. And no, reducing business taxes won't magically cut it. The headline grabbers are designed to bamboozle and hoodwink. But for most people, particularly working age people, they can see how even with higher benefits and/or NI cuts that they're worse off than before the pandemic. The prices have gone up and they keep going up, and the extra money can't stretch far enough. And that's why the Tory fates are sealed. They could have made other choices, but they didn't. Therefore, come the Spring it is their turn to suffer as the British electorate turns out and chooses to bury them. Possibly permanently.

The Human League - One Man In My Heart

While tonight's post is cooking, here's a ditty from the middle of the 90s to tide you over.

On Tory Briefcases

With the return of Dave to frontline politics and James Cleverly displacing the vengeful but weak Suella Braverman, there has been a sense among Westminster watchers that something has changed. The policy agenda hasn't. The new Home Secretary is apparently keen on making sure the Rwanda deal happens and the deportations begin as soon as possible. In time for May, perhaps? What we're seeing the return of is not "sensible politics", which have never really existed, but an attempted restoration of the pre-Brexit vibe economy.

What do we mean? Cast your mind back to how politics was performed before the referendum spoiled their game. On the one side there was Dave, George Osborne, and Nick Clegg. Opposing them was Ed Miliband and then, as now, an unremarkable clone army of inauthentic witterers and empty suits. There were some political differences between the two sides. Labour experimented with some social democratic-sounding policies and occasionally (very occasionally) uttered the word 'inequality'. All this while promising not to cut too far or too fast. There's a rousing slogan if there ever was one. And on the other? Some of the most appallingly destructive and cruel policies this country has ever seen. An unnecessary restructure that severely weakened the NHS but made it easier for Tory donors to get their slice of state money. The collapse of child and adult social care. Cuts to schools. The evisceration of the civil service and public services generally. And the return of social security cruelties not seen since the workhouse. Punitive sanctions that left people destitute. The grim farce of the bedroom tax, and the indignity of the work capability assessment. This is before we even mention the couple of hundred thousand excess deaths that occurred before the pandemic thanks to their programme of cuts.

Yet, to look at Dave, Osborne, and Clegg, their horrific legacy was delivered with an observance of the rules of the constitutional game. They were courteous in public, paid lip service to the rule of law, pretended their policies were driven by evidence and not ideology (and certainly not interests). They gave off a vibe of being at ease in office, of having a plan for dealing with the problems they defined and definitely exacerbated, and all three were accomplished performers in the media. Not that it mattered much. They too were beneficiaries of the real blue wall - the barrier collectively erected by the right wing press against criticism and democratic pressures. Marrying this to always being seen in a suit and never in casual clothing, and how comfortable they were in front of TV camera,s they gave off vibes of competence. They had their long-term economic plan, even though it didn't exist. They knew what they were doing, when the indices for GDP and living standards showed they did not. Their accomplishment was seeding a structure of feeling that appealed to just enough people to win the Tories their second term and a slim majority.

This is what briefcase Toryism is. For instance, if like Dave and Osborne Boris Johnson had nodded to constitutional niceties, never contrived to outrage, and wasn't stupid enough to unnecessarily break his own laws and shield favoured lackeys from accountability, he'd still be in office. To be seen playing by the rules of the game protects a politician from media commentators and other politicians who affect to uphold these conventions. This is what separates Rishi Sunak from Johnson and Liz Truss. His expensive suits and shoes, the efforts gone to for personal branding, the niche he carved out in the Tory leadership contest he lost - of lecturing the other candidates on fiscal probity - marked him out as the "serious" choice. Which is one reason why the membership rejected him. When the wheels fell off Truss's premiership, it was the sensible people who steadied government and then secured the top job for the right man. It's true Sunak has proven just as useless as his predecessor, but his own approach to governing the country is an unshowy affair of not doing much. Except for outsourcing the unpopular populism to noted right wingers.

Therefore, it doesn't matter what Sunak's particular politics are. It doesn't even count that he was a Brexiteer. He has the smooth, business-like habitus of a Cameroon. His very appearance and manner of speaking recalls the memory of the Coalition government, and the vibe he wants to give off is underscored by bringing Dave back into government. Briefcase Toryism is their version of sensible centrism, and ticks exactly the same boxes. Both pride themselves on what you might call heady pragmatism. A hard worship of accomplished fact, which are selected for and refined by media and political framing. In as much as they differ, it's on the specifics of managing the class relations and contradictions of British capitalism. And, true to this tradition, Keir Starmer has yet to offer a programme for fixing its problems. He too is content to emit the right vibes, and this is undoubtedly a preview of what to expect more of when he's in office.

However, a long hibernation awaits Tory briefcaseism. With defeat inevitable and a period of right wing ascendency in the party likely, where do the so-called "good" Tories go? Do they snipe from the sidelines to fill the copy of their dwindling press? Cross the floor? Leave the Commons for profitable opportunities outside? Bed down and snooze until better times come? Whatever is the case, now the briefcase tendency has a firm grip on the leadership they are the ones who will cop the blame for the coming disaster. At least their outfits will come in handy for the post-politics job interviews.

A Tour of Stoke-on-Trent

I was there for 27-and-a-bit years, and I'll always have an abiding affection for the place. This video does a good job of providing an outsider's point of view without being condescending or doing crap town gloating. Help unbreak Stoke by visiting!

Also good to see Drop City Books getting a plug. Some more news about that coming up ...

How Damaged is Keir Starmer?

That was a bit bruising. 56 Labour MPs rebelled against Keir Starmer's command to abstain, and joined 69 other MPs supporting the SNP's amendment calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. After briefing suggested 18 front benchers would resign/be sacked for defying the whip, in the end only 10 had the courage to do so. Perhaps most surprising among their number was Jess Phillips. It might have more to do with "constituency reasons" (41,000 - or 35% of her constituents are Muslims) than a principled stand, but a vote against is a vote against. And besides, she showed more dignity and courage than those MPs who spoke in the Commons in favour of a ceasefire, then abstained. Or abstained, and then tweeted as if they had voted for the amendment. Or had previously supported a ceasefire and then decided career came before conscience. Nevertheless, not great for the Labour leadership. But how damaging is this for Starmer's leadership?

In one respect, Freddie Hayward's assessment of the immediate damage seems spot on. No one, not even the left MPs portrayed the vote as a rebellion against Starmer. The vituperative and hurt language of Suella Braverman's sacking statement was absent, and it was Israel's genocidal assault on the people of Gaza that was the focus of Labour rebels' speeches. Not the mental gymnastics of Labour's tacit support. Everyone was very careful to not challenge the leadership's politics. Second, while there was a breadth in the vote against (alongside Phillips, Liam Byrne and Stella Creasy are hardly "usual suspects" and they supported the amendment) a lot of those outside the left MPs are broadly supportive of Starmerism and the transformation of the Labour Party. Ergo Starmer slept easily in his bed last night, safe in the knowledge the vote presents no challenge whatsoever to his tenure.

On top of this, there was more good news for Starmer on Thursday. Polling suggests 64% of Muslims still plan on voting Labour, with Gaza being fourth on their overall list of priorities. It was beaten out by bread and butter issues - the cost of living, NHS, and the economy. This is still down a quarter on the support attracted in 2019, but with Labour riding high in the polls there are plenty in Labour - and certainly in the whip's office - who believe they can afford to lose these voters. And in their cynicism they have a point. Even a large rebellion of Muslim communities against Labour is unlikely to cost them the election.

In a paper for an online conference back in 2020, I argued the risk Starmer's winding back from the politics of the preceding years was a demobilisation and disintegration of the electoral coalition Labour put together at the two general elections. Jeremy Corbyn's enduring achievement was not the worst vote since 1935, but the sedimentation of a new, solid bedrock of support Labour could build on to win big in the future. Starmer's gallop to the right risked quarrying out the new base and erecting a substitute coalition on quicksand. Because it was a different time and neither Partygate nor Liz Truss had happened, the concern was this would cost support in the marginals Labour could ill-afford if the election was as polarised as its two predecessors. Politics has moved on, but the insight has not. Starmer is driving loyal voters away and will continue to do so, but the appearance of a pronounced anti-Tory sentiment, which Labour is benefiting from, means the danger to Labour has changed. Starmer will enter Number 10, perhaps as early as next May, with little fanfare, a deficit of enthusiasm apart from a tiny sliver of people, and a low to no amount of leeway with the public where "tough decisions" are concerned.

The Tories are exceedingly unlikely to benefit from any difficulties the new government would encounter. And so an historic opportunity opens up for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. But because of the arrogance Labour has repeatedly shown its Muslim support, there's an opening there to for the left. It's not hard to suppose independent left challenges from the likes of Aspire in Bethnal Green and Bow, or other left independents in places like Walsall South could scoop up enough disaffected Muslims and others outraged by Starmer's knee bending to US interests to unseat Labour. And it might cost seats in some of the marginals along the lines identified previously. Kim Leadbeater better be hoping the good people of Batley and Spen find the Tories more objectionable than the say-one-thing-vote-the-other-way trick she pulled on Wednesday, for instance. I am and remain sceptical of left wing challenges to Labour under First Past the Post, but a handful of seats could be tipped. And this becomes a problem because there's a chance independent left wingers in the Commons could become the nucleus of a new alternative to Labour, especially with the Tories out of the picture and mass opposition to Starmer being to the left of his government. A situation that could float Lib Dem and Green boats might finally furnish the left with a sea worthy vessel as well. If this comes to pass, all three of them will have Starmer to thank for his carelessness.

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Suella Braverman's Feeble Revenge

Suella Braverman's letter to the Prime Minister is funny. The petulant, almost childish tone, the unrestrained spitefulness and lying, and the delusions of grandeur. Braverman would never do well at stand up, but she at least raised a few titters from me.

Where to begin with her three page epistle? We learn that Braverman extracted a price from Rishi Sunak when he signed her up for the second crack at Home Secretary. Their alleged agreement committed him to reducing immigration, introducing legislation that would box out the provisions of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights, stick with the Northern Ireland Protocol as was and keep the Retained EU Law bill, and formally institutionalise transphobia through the issuing of statutory guidance to schools. By my reckoning, that's three issues that weren't in the 2019 manifesto and, indeed, the last one breaks it. The Tories were previously committed to LGBTQ inclusive education.

The rest of Braverman's letter is a long complaint about how these unilaterally declared policies went nowhere. "I wrote you letters", she whinges, "but you never answered them!". She moans about how robust legislation wasn't in place that would put the disgusting Rwanda scheme on a firm footing, and how Sunak wasn't interested in pursuing this further/ He was seemingly content to leave it to the fates or good fortune. Instead, the government were thwarted in the courts. This should have been taken as a warning, but nothing more has been done to save the scheme ahead of the Supreme Court's imminent decision on Wednesday. As such, Braverman concludes that her former boss has "no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people". Ouch.

She then has a go over the Palestinian solidarity marches, showing no contrition for her role in Saturday's white riot. Braverman says she's "become hoarse in urging you to ban the hate marches [sic]" on grounds that they, not she, threaten "community cohesion". Again, she complains about his weakness and refusal to use his office to do things. I.e. Turn the country into an outright authoritarian hellhole in which Braverman has free rein to prosecute and persecute any groups she wishes to.

I can't really blame Braverman for not understanding why she was appointed, seeing as the Very Smart People paid to comment on politics don't either. Her purpose was to say racist things, be outrageous, wind up the public, and ram home new wedges the Tories might profit from. In search of some post-Brexit condiment to make the Conservative dish more appetising before the next election, Braverman was the woman to administer it. Would you like some xenophobic, anti-immigrant sauce on your chips sir? But the actual implementation of the policy didn't matter. Sunak was unconcerned about delays to the Rwanda plan because he only believed in it as a means of creating new opportunities for friction and grandstanding. He doesn't want to be known as leading the most authoritarian and racist government of recent times, especially with the glamorous thrum of Silicon Valley in his near future. And, to be fair to Sunak, he learned the importance of appearing to do something while doing nothing from Boris Johnson.

The chutzpah of the lies though. Not just the usual rubbish about the Palestinian solidarity movement, or claiming her policies are the people's priorities, or that they were in the manifesto. But the funniest and most desperately grasping line was this: "It is generally agreed that my support was a pivotal factor in winning the leadership contest and thus enabling you to become Prime Minister". Pah, she wishes. Of the 60-strong right wing group Braverman is loosely affiliated with, only 20 of them could be bothered to dial in or turn up for their "emergency meeting" after her overdue sacking. Interestingly, they have today launched yet another research group. The splintering cadres of post-war Trotskyism has nothing on these guys. The truth is the briefcase tendency stepped in after the Liz Truss disaster and agreed among themselves that Sunak was their man because the membership could not be trusted to make the right decision. The then just-resigned Braverman didn't have enough backbench supporters to make a blind bit of difference. Besides, she was hardly going to support Penny Mordaunt - the only other viable candidate.

And there, one has to hope, ends Braverman's career as a minister of state. Someone utterly without principle, driven by self-aggrandisement, petty-mindedness, and an authoritarian disrespect for the law and the lives of others. She's the sort of candidate UKIP would have rejected 10 years ago for being "too extreme". And yet here we are, a fascist-adjacent politician who slithered her way up the Tory pole and made the kind of speeches that might have given Nick Griffin pause. May a long period of irrelevance on the back benches beckon, followed by a richly deserved humiliation in the next Conservative leadership contest.

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The Return of Dave

Who saw that coming? No sooner were the lobby hacks getting over the expected demise of Suella Braverman than Rishi Sunak pulls off the unexpected: David Cameron enters into Downing Street and, following a hasty ennoblement, is appointed Foreign Secretary. I don't want to call it a master stroke, but in the game of politics no one saw it coming. We've gone from a day where Labour would have made hay over Braverman's departure to one where the headlines were occupied by Dave's return to frontline politics. Sunak has short circuited the "weak, weak, weak taunts and his appearance of buckling under political pressure. Which is just as well because the fates are not kind to Prime Ministers who hand active, mobilised social movements a ministerial scalp.

Getting rid of Braverman immediately posed the question: who now? As rightly forecasted, the honour of being her replacement and the sixth Home Secretary since 2016 (seven if you count Braverman twice) fell to James Cleverly. At the Foreign Office, he's burnished his reputation as a dependable pair of hands. Someone not given to grand standing and has loyally discharged Britain's traditional interests without any qualms. For Sunak, he's the natural counter to Braverman who, hired to say the unsayable, inevitably went off piste and threatened to bury the Tory ski resort under a political avalanche. With a reputation for seriousness, and as someone who has spoken sensitively and positively about his mixed race background, it is hoped Cleverly can repair the government's fraught relationship with the police and start undoing the damage left by his predecessor.

As many have pointed out, bringing Dave back into the fold after a barely-reported scandal and, more recently, "working closely" with a UK-China investment firm shows up a paucity of talent on the Tory benches. An observation that won't find any quarrel round these parts. But within the terms of briefcase Toryism, Dave works on three counts. He is experienced, is well known among the foreign policy establishments of the States That Matter (though not always positively - see his frequent and not terribly successful efforts at handbagging the EU), and is a known quantity. He's not about to go rogue and sign Britain up to recognising Palestine. And his administration's extensive love-in with China won't do any harm given how much Sunak is pivoting to East Asia. Second, Dave had the special sauce where a layer of Tory and Tory-curious support was concerned. His slippery PR patter and teflon countenance served him well in office until the Brexit gamble destroyed his career. Might some be attracted back to the party now Sunak has disposed of Braverman's services? And thirdly, most outrageously, at a time of fraught politics and a mass movement against British foreign policy, making Dave a peer give the Foreign Office an extra layer of insulation from democratic accountability. Even Lindsay Hoyle expressed his annoyance. Dave will be taking questions in the Lords while a bag carrier becomes his meat shield in the Commons.

Sunak has won the day by keeping the fall out of Braverman from the main headlines, but is it going to make any difference to Tory prospects? No. Dave destroyed his cache with liberal-inclined Tory voters by delivering a Leave vote in the referendum, and then leaving others to clean up his mess. Nor are right wingers going to look at his return with favour. The never not ridiculous Andrea Jenkyns was hardly full of praise in her no confidence letter. And you can't imagine the Tory base being full of unalloyed enthusiasm, given it was he who "forced" many of them to support UKIP in 2015. He was woke before wokery was a glimmer in the Tory culture warrior's eye.

On the other hand, he reminds plenty of people of how made life worse. The cruelties he oversaw in social security, particularly the humiliations of the work capability assessment and the bedroom tax, the saddling of young people with unsustainable levels of debt, the flatlining of living standards - is it any wonder Dave accelerated the turning of an entire generation against the Tories?

Sunak seems to have realised this as the day wore on. Without any women occupying the four chief offices of state and no obvious right winger front and centre, he has belatedly resurrected the miserable career of Esther McVey. Dubbed the "Minister of Common sense" by The Sun, she will now work as a minister-without-portfolio with responsibility for fronting up the government in the media. In other words, someone else who will say the right wing things Sunak is too cowardly to repeat, but doesn't have any power to wreck stuff. Though being white means McVey does not have the same leeway Braverman had in her pronouncements.

In the social media branding accompanying the reshuffle, the Tories said Sunak was "strengthening his team". What this really means is briefcaseism dominates the cabinet more than hitherto. But it's the politics that matters. It doesn't matter who's selling it, be it Dave and his salesman slick, Cleverly and his new found seriousness, or McVey and the inevitable "I'm working class me" routine, no one is biting. Thankfully, the agony might soon be over. Dan Hodges alighted on the number of ministers stepping down voluntarily and how this points to a May election. I hope this is correct. The wipeout of the Tories, so thoroughly and richly deserved, cannot come soon enough.

The Afterlife of Liberal Zionism

In the latest edition of Politics Theory Other, Alex talks to Amjad Iraqi about Israel's ongoing massacres in Gaza, the Netanyahu government's war aims, the scant interest Western governments have shown in making a two-state solution workable, and the ethereal life led by liberal Zionism.

Politics Theory Other · Israel's war on the Palestinians w/ Amjad Iraqi

After Braverman's Bovver Boys

In politics, chains of causation are often fuzzy. They are subject to countervailing tendencies and the pressures of concurrent actions, movements, and affects. The relationship between Suella Braverman's repeated smears against Palestinian solidarity marches and the white riot of far right thugs by the Cenotaph was not one of them. Her comments, embellished and amplified by fash-adjacent commentators like Douglas Murray and Matthew Goodwin conjured up a mob who, without anyone to kick off against, attacked the police. Braverman got the ugly scenes on Remembrance Day that she wanted, except it was supposed to be the other people who were to go on a violent rampage. Not upstanding citizens who, in their patriotic fervour, screamed "where's your fucking poppy?" at the plod.

In the end, the figures speak for themselves. 92 arrests from the thousand or so fascists at the memorial, while the Met reported "no issues" on the Palestinian solidarity march. This was supplemented by some confrontations with a 150-strong group toward evening, but that's it. From a demonstration of between 700,000 and a million people. The biggest since Iraq, eclipsing the so-called People's Vote marches of several years ago. And whereas the Iraq demo was a mass, if sullen affair by all accounts today's marches in London, Glasgow, and Cardiff were more politically clued up and angry. The rarity of stupid and antisemitic signs, broadcast by social media's placard police as "proof" the whole demo was a racist endeavour, demonstrates the increased level of self-understanding as consciously anti-imperialist and solidaristic rather than simply being a "war is bad" mobilisation. No wonder it will continue to give the establishment the heebeegeebees.

But the immediate consequence is not only pressure on the government and opposition (after all, these are as much demonstrations against Labour Party policy as they are the Tories' backing of Israeli genocide), but a real falling out among the political establishment too. As last week wore on, more and more Tories and their allies were showing concern about the Home Secretary. When even Keir Starmer delivered a damaging broadside against Braverman and, by extension, Sunak too, he was speaking for plenty on the government benches who think the Pennywise clown show at the Home Office has gone on long enough. And yet where are the signs of her demise? In Sunak's statement put out this evening, he said there were bad people on both sides. Nothing, as you would expect, on Braverman's responsibility for the scenes in front of the Cenotaph.

Is he going to sack her then? The problem Sunak has got is while she is useful because she says the things he won't, it's obvious her perpetual campaigning has made her a liability. If the Prime Minister sticks by her, he's open to the not-entirely-accurate barbs that he's too weak to giver her the heave ho. And should he submit to the pressure, like his predecessors in the leader-centric game of Westminster politics, that invites further erosion of his authority. He's in a justly deserved position of exquisite political pain. No wonder she's apparently pleading with Sunak behind the scenes to call an election on stopping the boats. Her brand of toxicity would be indispensable for such a lurch into the gutter.

Unfortunately for Braverman and Sunak, her future is more than a matter of internal Tory politics and electoral strategy. Her week's worth of far right-enabling antics, on the streets and in the Jewish Chronicle's sheets, open insubordination, and unprecedented public criticism of the police is accumulating nothing but opposition among elite layers and opinion formers. If Sunak clings onto her, sooner rather than later he could face the kind of revolt he helped initiate against Boris Johnson.

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Laundering Sunak's Reputation

It keeps coming up and I'm sick of seeing it. Suella Braverman says something outrageous ... and Rishi Sunak is criticised not for sacking her, but for being too weak to do so..

Yesterday's exchange at King's Speech questions are a case in point. Criticising the light agenda of the coming year's legislative programme (it's almost as if an election is due), Keir Starmer mocked Braverman for dubbing homelessness "a lifestyle choice". He then goaded the Prime Minister, suggesting her posturing was driven by her future leadership campaign, and this reflected poorly on the government. Summoning his internal headmaster, Starmer told Sunak off and said neither the government nor him were "serious". The look on Sunak's face did suggest the criticism had punched a bruise. Immediately afterward, Yvette Cooper and sundry others took to the Twittersphere (Xsphere?) and immediately jumped on the "too-weak-to-sack-her" train..

It's time, once and for all, that this idea went to landfill. Because it's wrong. That all cabinets and shadow cabinets, from council chamber to Commons have to strike a balance between the factions sitting on the benches behind them is a truism of politics. Woe betide those who disregard it. But suggesting Sunak can't sack Braverman because she might cause trouble is ridiculous when you consider how slight her support is. The 2022 leadership election had Braverman on between two and five per cent of members polled - behind Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, and Tom Tugendhat. Not to say Truss and Sunak. In the first ballot of MPs she got 32 votes, which fell to 27 in the second. And her popularity hasn't improved since. Sunak doesn't need her to shore up his position. Despite her ambitions and sense of aggrandisement, in parliamentary terms she's a minnow..

No. Sunak appointed Braverman within a week of her originally resigning as Home Secretary not because she is super competent and was what briefcase Toryism needed. It was to inflame, stoke up tensions, and say racist things. The Tories want a populist Brexit-style substitute to glue an electoral coalition together, and the dominant school of thought thinks going hard on reactionary tropes is the way to do it. Braverman is a megaphone for this politics. She does it so Sunak doesn't have to. He has a "reasonable" brand and a socially liberal vibe to protect, and he won't want the stain of overt racism spoiling his shiny suits as he circulates among Silicon Valley people after the next election. If you need more proof of his intentions, then why on earth did he appoint the thug Lee Anderson as deputy chair of his party if it was not to provide distance between himself and the strategy of engineering wedges?.

In other words, stop letting Sunak off the hook. Saying he's weak and has to suffer Braverman is giving him an alibi. Instead, the attacks on the homeless are his as much as they are the Home Secretary's. As is the Rwanda plan, the dangerously authoritarian rhetoric about Palestine solidarity, the gross abuse of trans people, and the thousand and one shitty things his government have done this last year. Responsibility rests with him, and it's a failure of the duty to oppose to launder his reputation in this way.