It’s all about him. That much was clear from Rishi Sunak’s conference speech last week and the interview he gave the BBC soon afterwards. “I want to change our country,” he told his interviewer, before adding: “I want to change the way we do politics.”
There was the occasional reference to the government, other members of the cabinet and the Conservative party, but mostly we found out what his plans were going to be after almost a year in No 10.
Sunak said he was going to put his stamp on the country, now that he had concluded that his party, much of his government and his cabinet were being swayed by a “false consensus”. It would be a long and lonely journey. He understood that.
He suggested his dictatorial drive and superior knowledge about how to transform the education system, the health system and the way we commission transport projects would be the only antidote to those misguided consensus-builders when the next election arrives.
He likened himself to Margaret Thatcher and, in so doing, echoed the fundamental mistake she made in her attempts to reform public services. Sunak has fallen into the trap of believing that numbers win the argument – a view which pervades the top of the financial services industry and seems to have infected the prime minister from his time in the City.
For example, when examining how to improve post-16 educational standards in the state sector, Sunak says he appreciates the work teachers do, but his answer to recruitment shortages and a terrible teacher retention record is to offer tax-free bonuses.
It is a gesture that displays a lack of understanding about what drives teachers to educate the next generation and why they, too often, remain in the job for no more than a couple of years before quitting. With no consultation with teachers’ unions or reference to the experts used in previous education reviews, the move ranks as another top-down declaration of intent.
For instance, the bonus scheme lasts five years. What then for financially motivated maths and physics teachers? Will they carry on without access to another bonus? City workers don’t – or at least not without the prospect of more rewards should they meet certain targets.
Only last year, further education teaching staff were on strike, and not just about pay. Technicians at UK universities were among those taking part in higher education strikes last month and, like striking lecturers, complaining about the conditions they had to work under as much as a lack of money.
Public sector reform is not about laying waste to what is now in place. It is about building teams and a consensus about the most sensible way to reach agreed goals.
The health system is plagued by a spaghetti of computer systems that means nurses need four screens to fill in simple updates to patient records. Hospital wards are clogged with staff prevented from giving care by the sheer volume of admin the computer systems demand.
Twenty years ago, the high street banks were in the same situation, but through painstaking work, which demanded collaboration across sprawling organisations, they developed single interfaces.
Sunak’s government, should the British people give it one more chance, is not going to achieve anything like that.
Like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss before him, Sunak is signed up to the idea of “magic bullet” reform that ignores sensible analysis in the belief that public services can be transformed quickly and painlessly.
The need for collaboration and teamwork to achieve lasting results appears to be secondary to announcing a policy that fits Sunak’s need to define himself in the eyes of the public. We are told he has sweated over spreadsheets late into the night to provide data that his civil servants have struggled to compile in time for meetings the following day.
HS2 is another example. The latest briefing from No 10 tells us Sunak didn’t like the high-speed line when he was chancellor. The costs were always too high. Yet he made no visible effort to bring it back on track. Never mind that the scheme was the result of a monumental effort by many in his party, who built cross-party agreement about its direction, and then herded complex, probably never-to-be-repeated, legislation through parliament.
Sunak had a chance to review HS2, but chose to end the line at Birmingham, suggesting anyone who disagreed with him and his spreadsheets was operating in the shadow of a false consensus.
Such high-handedness repeats the mistakes of the past, by both Labour and the Conservatives, when leaders have thrown the steering one way and then another, only to find they have gone nowhere.
