Bigwigs in the UK Conservative Party are fond of saying that their members compose ‘the most sophisticated electorate in the world’. It is certainly one of the peculiar quirks of British democracy that prime ministers can be elected solely by the 150,000 Tory party members.
Unlike in 2019, when Boris Johnson was always a heavy favourite to win the support of the party faithful, this time there is no clear favourite.
Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak has more support across the general public, and among Conservative MPs, while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss currently has a narrow lead among Conservative party members.
After a slow start to her campaign, Truss picked up support as other candidates from the right of the party were eliminated, following a concerted campaign in the right-wing media by her allies to undermine rival Penny Mordaunt.
Pundits and party insiders expect a bitter and personal campaign, full of dirty tricks.
Sunak has accused Truss of ‘fairytale economics’ after she promised tax cuts and pointed to her past as a member of the pro-European Liberal Democrat party.
Truss, meanwhile, has taken potshots at Sunak’s privileged upbringing and called him a socialist for increasing taxes to cut the budget deficit created by COVID-19 spending.
Sunak’s leadership prospects were almost derailed by revelations that his wife had claimed non-domiciled tax status to avoid paying UK tax while he was chancellor, and we can expect Truss’s team to weaponise that in the coming weeks.
The 2016 referendum continues to be a vital dividing line in UK politics, and particularly the Conservative party.
Sunak campaigned for Brexit, while Truss was a quiet Remainer, though it is she who has won the backing of the hard-core Eurosceptics in the European Research Group of Conservative lawmakers.
However, after three years of Johnson, the question is what either of the two candidates would mean for EU-UK relations, left battered and bruised first by the process of the UK’s withdrawal from the bloc and then by a series of rows over the implementation of the new EU-UK trade deal and the Northern Ireland protocol.
In terms of hard policy, neither Truss nor Sunak appear likely to align the UK any closer to Brussels.
Truss has had an eye on a Tory leadership contest for most of this year and analysts say that this partly explains why she was the architect of the bill to override the protocol that is currently making its way through the UK parliament. The protocol bill is popular with Brexiteers and appears almost certain to be passed into law in the autumn.
Besides, as prime minister, Truss would need the repay the favour and keep her backers, the ERB and the Tory right, happy.
Since 2016, Truss was quickly converted to enthusiastically backing Brexit and, as international trade secretary between 2019 and 2021, was responsible for negotiating the roll-over of the EU’s third country trade deals into UK law.
Having done most of the work on the UK’s trade pacts with Australia and New Zealand, deals with the United States and Pacific Rim states are likely to be a priority for her. Johnson’s ‘Global Britain’ agenda, which never saw policy substance to match the rhetoric, could be reborne under a Truss premiership.
However, it is Sunak whose initial policy promises appear more likely to pull the UK further away from the EU.
He has committed to reforming all EU laws that impose unnecessary bureaucracy and hamper businesses that are still in place, by the time of the next general election. In practice, a bonfire of regulation is unlikely.
For one thing, defining what is unnecessary – the REACH regulations on chemicals impose bureaucratic burdens but are vital to human health, for example – is a difficult task and each case would mean taking on trade unions, business leaders or both.
That goes some way towards explaining why mass deregulation is a promise that three successive Conservative prime ministers have made and then quietly dropped.
A promise that is more likely to be kept is Sunak’s pledge to scrap regulations on financial services, most of which were adopted by the EU in the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis. The aim is to trigger financial sector growth similar to that seen in the 1980s following the deregulation ‘big bang’ of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
This would pitch the UK more along the lines of the ‘North Sea Singapore’ that many Brexiteers have always longed for.
Meanwhile, his promise to rip up the UK’s adherence to the EU’s data protection regime, the GDPR, in favour of a light touch regime, would put the ‘adequacy agreement’ allowing a continuous flow of data between the UK and the EU at risk of being cancelled.
Relations between Brussels and London have been characterised by mistrust, often the consequence of Johnson’s capacity to unpick or simply renege on agreements.
His successor will not bring the UK closer to the EU in policy terms – only a change of government can do that – but the tone, trust and good faith will probably be stronger with the new management.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
Source: euractiv.com
