So Rishi Sunak’s downfall turned out to be a positive for Liz Truss and that’s how she became the 15th prime minister of UK on 6th September. Two days later on 8th September, the Queen died, the whole country entered the period of mourning, Queen’s funeral procession continued for 10 days till 19th September.
During this period , UK’s politics was suspended but at the end of the week that’s after 19th September, Liz Truss the new Prime minister’s official downfall began.
We all know “Liz Truss” resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister whose tenure lasted for only 45 days ( she was the shortest serving Prime minister of UK) . Russian Foreign Minister quoted her as “catastrophically illiterate disgrace “, a disgrace of a leader who would be remembered for her catastrophic illiteracy.
This whole drama of ” come, sit and leave” started from the day of 16th July when Borris Johnson decides to resign and he resigned. Boris Johnson’s obsession of looking like a cool young teenager and active, his young talking style, his hair, marrying a young woman, a lot of times lying and getting caught, throwing booze parties etc etc.
So he’s like a person who wants to know everything and wants to do everything in life and these qualities are never appreciated in politics as politics is all about perception and as politician you have to be very careful how people perceive you. You cannot go around doing whatever you feel like.
Boris Johnson lacked political depth and not just political, in general he is not a critical thinker. If we look around the controversies around him, all sends a negative signal amount the public. “Chris Pitcher’s Affairs” , Boris Johnson was aware of the allegations against Chris Pincher and he still appointed him as deputy chief, later he was caught lying about it ans he apologized about it.
The second one is “Party Gate Scandal ” , he broke down the Lockdown rules and invited and a lot people on his birthday , he also went on q bring your own booze party during the first lockdown and the people who were invited in his party many of them were fined and there were also reports that during lockdown he was doing a lot of parties with his friends and colleagues.
The third one is regarding a controversy around one of his MP ” Owen Peterson” who was accused of taking bribe from a big companies, basically he was lobbying for big corporations in exchange of money. The house office commons committee had suspended him for 30 days but Boris johnson paused his suspension and it was very sure that he was trying hard to save him and later on Boris Johnson admitted and he even said he made a blunder.
And The Forth reason is he increased taxes in April which actually was not in Boris Johnson’s control, the main reason behind was Russia-Ukraine war, there has been a rise in oil prices all around the world.
When oil prices increase, naturally the cost of living increase , the cost of food will increase , common people are going to suffer and on top of it if any government increases taxes then obviously a mature public will not like it and the opposition takes it as an advantage to criticize. So although the decision was not in his control but being tye head of the head of the government, he will have to take the responsibility.
And the Last reason is , Borris Johnson became the Prime Minister and the leader of the Conservative Party in 2019 and there was only one reason for his success “Brexit”. The while brexit negotiation took more than two years, it was Borris Johnson who contributed towards spreading up the whole process, that was the only sole reason he got the majority backing but since then he didn’t do anything significant for Britain.
Now pulling out Britain from the European Union , he should have done more as there is no european union countries that will help Britain Economically, Uk is on its own.
Brexit issue also one of the reasons why UK today is desperate to secure a trade deal with India. So anyhow these are the main reasons that have collectively led to Borris Johnson’s political downfall. After him, the conservative party appointed Liz Truss as the next Prime Minister of UK. Although she had previously help various cabinet offices under Prime Minister’s ” David Cameron , Theresa May and Borris Johnson and most recently as foreign secretary before becoming th PM. She has been a member of parliament for southwest Norfolk since 2010.
Rishi Sunak and she completed in the Prime Minister race , Rishi Sunak was leading the race in the initial phase campaigning but late on he lost due to his crowing unpopularity within and outside the conservative parth and this all happened when Borris Johnson was facing a lot of scandals (mentioned earlier).
Apart from this even Rishi Sunak had some controversy regarding diverting money from one part of the country to another part of the country during his tenure as chancellor and then he is also the son-in-law of Indian Tech giant Infosys founder Narayan Murthy so naturally he has a wealthy status.
So typical british citizen would hand questioned about his loyalty and the fact is he has been pretty vocal about his religious inclination as he said ” I am British citizen but a proud Hindu”, for this reason he received some backlash and we understand that britain once ruled India for more than 200 years and today if an Indian goes on to become the head of tye UK parliament it is definitely going to upset a lot of people, that’s why there are many in the British parliament and then there are many pressure groups in UK that do not want a person from an Indian origin to be UK’s Prime Minister.
So Rishi Sunak’s downfall turned out to be a positive for Liz Truss and that’s how she became the 15th prime minister of UK on 6th September. Two days later on 8th september, the Queen died, the whole country entered the period of mourning, Queen’s funeral procession continued for 10 days till 19th september. During this period , UK’s politics was suspended but at the end of the week that’s after 19th september, Liz Truss the new Prime minister’s official downfall began
She had a bunch of policies that she badly wanted to implement, disclosing her policies she announced a stimulus package of 45 billion pound in tax cut which were to be funded by government borrowings.
A tax cut means a reduction made by the government in the amount of the tax that people pay but in the middle of the economic crises, no sensible government will will cut taxes, that’s why her government came up with the idea of Govt borrowings.
Now government borrowings means ” the money that the government borrows to spend on public services by taking more loans in exchange of government securities and treasury bills”.
The government borrows from the financial market that means private corporations then banks in tye name of small saving funds then provident fund’s, government also borrows from other countries in return they have to pay interest. Now if the government plans on cutting taxes then obviously rich will highly benefits from it because they fall in the maximum tax bracket that means if you cut taxes for the rich, they will also invest in the government bonds wherein they are going to earn interest eventually rich benefited from tye tax cut plan and today whatever the government borrows , it turns into public debt that means the public debt is going to increase.
Public debt is socialized among among public so future generations has to pay more, anyhow this tax plan was beneficial for rich class only, which created instability in the financial market of UK which further lead to the sharp fall in the value of british pound. Liz truss’s whole idea plan back fired and then the bank of England had to step in to protect the value of government bonds. She and her goverment was heavily criticized and few weeks after she had to scrap this plan.
Always during high inflation, the best thing a government does is to control money supply in the market and the central bank does it by increasing interest rates but liz truss wanted to cut tax and borrow more monkey that also means she wanted to spend more money which is possible by increasing money supply in the market “A good recipe to increase inflation and mortgage rates”.
And in fact even Rishi Sunak warned her but she was very adamant, making her the least popular Prime minister in UK’s history. 55% of the members of her party demanded Liz Truss to be removed. Eventually, on 20th October, she was forced to resign.
Rishi Sunak was automatically declared the next Prime minister of UK by ruling party after crossing the approval of 100 MPs Mark, now the world is eagerly waiting to see the decisions that will be made by Rishi Sunak to protect his country these crisis.
Auqib Hassan is a Graduate in Economics from the Aligrah Muslim University. Auqib can be reached at auqibhassan321@gmail.com