Sunak’s ‘five pledges’ to voters may be what finally drags him down

Most press statements from UK government departments arrive with the same graphic emblazoned across the top listing the administration’s five top “priorities”. It is part of a relentless messaging campaign with its roots in a landmark speech given by prime minister Rishi Sunk in early January to a room of business leaders in Stratford.

The five pledges he made in that speech, and which now festoon every official government communication, are to halve inflation; grow the economy; reduce [government] debt; cut health service waiting lists; and “stop the boats” of illegal immigrants landing on English beaches.

Sunak never committed himself to a specific deadline, but in the January speech and afterwards he suggested these were his “priorities for 2023″. This suggested he intended to achieve them or show substantial progress by the end of this year, giving him a solid platform to face voters heading into the general election expected in the second half of 2024.

“I ask you to judge us on the effort that we put in and the results that we achieve,” said Sunak, while many commentators earlier in the year said the five pledges were modest in ambition and should be achievable.

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Yet the risk with making such measurable promises is that it leaves a political leader exposed if they fail. Halfway through the year, Sunak now looks to be in difficulty on all five pledges.

The prime minister, a former banker, has repeatedly stressed that halving inflation is the most important of the five pledges. In January when he made his speech that looked eminently achievable. Inflation was then about 10 per cent but already falling, as the realisation was dawning that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attempts to strangle Europe’s energy supplies would fail. Inflation below 5 per cent by the end of the year seemed nailed on.

Economists are now not so sure after last week’s inflation figures for May showed inflation stuck at a lofty 8.7 per cent, well above the 8.2 per cent expected. More worryingly for Sunak, core inflation, stripping out volatile food and energy costs, was back on the rise. The Bank of England responded by hiking interest rates yet again and the talk in the City of London is now that a recession caused by stratospheric interest rates may be the only way to get inflation down.

That would doom Sunak’s second pledge, to grow the economy. Meanwhile, the latest economic figures show that UK government’s £2.5 trillion debt is at a 62-year high, which means he is also behind the curve on his third pledge. If high interest rates cause the economy to shrink, that will push debt even higher when measured as a proportion of it.

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The domino effect of stubbornly high UK inflation is capable of wrecking all three of Sunak’s economy-related pledges. The news is no better for him when it comes to his government’s stewardship of the UK’s cherished National Health Services (NHS). The number of people on waiting lists is now more than seven million, another all-time record.

The numbers of immigrants on small boats are down on last year, with a drop so far in 2023 of one-fifth. But overall migration numbers are far higher than they were before Brexit, undermining the promise of Leavers such as Sunak to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. The Labour Party now regularly accuses the government of losing control of migration.

Sunak’s hoped-for electoral platform may yet turn into the deadweight that drags him under.