The Intelligence: Rishi Sunak's report card

This episode reviews the performance of Rishi Sunak as the UK's Prime Minister, particularly in the context of the impending general election.

1. Rishi Sunak's administration has been characterized by inconsistency, reacting to poor polling with frequent policy shifts.
2. The Conservative Party's campaign for the upcoming election has been shaky, with mixed responses to their proposed policies and pledges.
3. Labour appears unified and disciplined in contrast to the Conservatives, potentially benefiting from their rivals' disarray.
4. Sunak's policy responses to crises, like the Windsor Framework with the EU, showcase his administration's occasional successes amid broader challenges.
5. The episode underscores a broader theme of political volatility in the UK, with frequent leadership changes and unstable governance.

1: Introduction

The hosts introduce the political climate in the UK with the dissolution of parliament and the announcement of a general election. Jason Palmer: "Today Britain's parliament is being dissolved to make way for a general election on the 4th of July."

2: Sunak's Leadership

Discussion on Sunak's leadership style and the internal and public challenges he faces. Matthew Holehouse: "His personal ratings are now among some of the lowest that some pollsters have ever recorded."

3: Conservative Strategies

Analysis of the Conservative Party's campaign strategies and their reception. Matthew Holehouse: "So far, the early polling suggests that actually it's not working and people's minds are made up on the conservative party."

4: Labour's Position

Insight into Labour's campaign strategy, highlighting their readiness and discipline. Ora Ogunbi: "It's fair to say they're having their own internal ructions about the sort of selection or deselection, rather, of candidates on the left."

5: Conclusion

The hosts conclude with thoughts on the potential outcomes of the election and its implications. Ora Ogunbi: "You can follow the fortunes of the Conservatives and the other parties in the run up to this election with our online poll tracker and a wealth of other coverage."

1. Stay informed about political developments and their implications for your community.
2. Engage in discussions and debates to better understand different political viewpoints.
3. Exercise your right to vote, making an informed decision based on comprehensive information.
4. Encourage open dialogues about political accountability and transparency in leadership.
5. Monitor policy changes and their impacts, staying proactive in community and national issues.

Ahead of a general election in July, we reflect on 14 years of Conservative rule. It’s not a great record, but will the prime minister be able to spin it on the campaign trail? Latin America is still being torn apart by some of the world’s worst gang violence. Why aren’t countermeasures working (10:26)? And how climate change is making our days ever so slightly longer (20:03).

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Matthew Holehouse

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Jason Palmer
The Economist hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Ora Ogunbi. Every weekday, well, for me, just until the end of this week, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Latin America remains the world's most violent region.

The gangs are only growing more powerful. Yet for most countries, heavy handed tactics like mass incarceration are unlikely to help in the long run. We look at the alternatives and did. You know that climate change can actually slow the earth's rotation? Only by a tiny bit, though.

Ora Ogunbi
But as our environmental editor explains, it complicates things for those who rely on incredibly precise timekeeping.

But first, today Britain's parliament is being dissolved to make way for a general election on the 4 July. It marks the official end of Rishi Sunak's government and the official start of the race for number ten Downing street. But already the last eight days have seen some vintage electioneering from the conservative party. This election will take place at a time when the world is more dangerous than it has been since the end of the cold war. Putin's Russia is waging a brutal war in Ukraine.

It all kicked off when Rishi Sunak announced the election in the pouring rain, barely audible over the sound of protesters, loudspeakers blasting. Things can only get better. Once a Labour party anthem and his sodden speech was deemed by his opponent to be a massive blunder. We are going to keep putting bold actions on the table that I think are going to transform this country for the better. You saw that just over the last few days.

A few days later, the Tories announced a plan to bring back national service. Details for that have been thin on. The ground that we can foster a culture of service in our country, to make our society more cohesive, so that we can strengthen our country. And on Tuesday, the Tories unveiled another a tax promise for pensioners. So we're going to raise the threshold, make sure that pensioners get a tax cut and they will never pay tax on the state pension as well as a triple lot going up, right?

So those of you there will inevitably be more pledges in the coming weeks. But after 14 years in power, might the Conservatives lackluster record prove just too much to overcome? Rishi Sunak came to office in October 2022, following the crisis brought on by his predecessor, Liz Truss, fifth conservative prime minister since 2010. Matthew Hull House is our british political correspondent. Over that one and a half years, he has really failed to reverse the polling nadir, which he inherited.

Matthew Holehouse
His personal ratings are now among some of the lowest that some pollsters have ever recorded. And he really caught his party badly off guard by calling a snap election, and they've made quite a faltering start to this campaign. Matthew, I know that 14 years is quite a lot of time to summarize, but how would you characterize the Tories time in office? One way of looking at it is a succession of leaders who had really grand ambitions to remake the country, all of which were brought low, often by their own failings. So let's start with David Cameron.

He led a coalition for one term before forming a majority government. It was relatively stable. They got some big public service and constitutional reforms through and also the program of austerity. But it all ended in tears, really, with the Brexit referendum. That led to Therese May, who also wanted to be a transformational prime minister, but really became quickly lost in the quagmire of Brexit and her eventual forcing from office.

Then followed Boris Johnson, who on a landslide majority thought he had remade the political landscape for a decade, saw through Covid, responded to the war in Ukraine, but he himself was forced out over scandals and a really sort of chronic mismanagement of his government. Then there was Liz Truss. She wanted to revive the economy with an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, but she triggered the crisis in the bond markets, which meant she broke the record for the shortest time of any prime minister in office. Then you have Rishi Sunak. So really it's a story of continual inconsistency in policy making, some moments of true political crisis, and really underpinned by pretty weak growth and deteriorating public services.

Ora Ogunbi
And now looking a bit more closely at Rishi Sunak. What's his government achieved? Rishi Sunak really set out to mop up the inheritance that he got, much of which was a legacy of COVID So he promised to bring down record high NHS weighting lists, to bring down inflation, which was then in double digits, and also to bring down the flow of irregular crossings in small boats across the English Channel, and also to really tackle some of the reputation for sleaze administration in his government. And his biggest achievements, you might say, was probably the Windsor framework. This was a new deal with the EU over Northern Ireland, which succeeded in effectively normalizing relationships with Brussels and also improve the relationship with the US.

Matthew Holehouse
He's also, in the Economist's view, had some pretty sensible budget measures, such as the full expensing regime for capital investment. However, this really persistent poor polling led him to effectively change direction quite often as he sought to change the game. So one would be putting a huge amount of political capital into this idea that you would deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. There was a phase where they went through quite sort of populist or conspiratorial rhetoric, a big shift from the more technocratic tone. All of which has meant that his short administration has also been marked by some pretty big inconsistencies.

Ora Ogunbi
And is that why he's so unpopular? I suspect the main reason why he's unpopular is that a. He's catching the tailwind of now 14 years in government, which is difficult for any leader when they're faced with what polls suggest is a big demand for change of any form. The other is that, like leaders around the world, he's contended with very high inflation, which has been coupled with years of poor wage growth in the UK, which means that many people simply feel miserable when they go shopping. He has also, I think, failed to convince people that he really is filling the clouds of his office.

Matthew Holehouse
That's partly because, as we said, this change in approach so often, you know, first there is a technocrat, then the slightly unconvincing, swaggering populist now tacking to a national security thing. He's not been able to project a really sort of consistent story of what this administration is about. Okay, so he's fighting this election from a position of weakness. But has the first week of campaigning brought any good news for the Tories? It's fair to say that he caught his party off guard by calling a snap election.

Many were expecting to have the summer, really, to think about what they wanted to do if they lost. It's meant that the campaign wasn't really fully ready. Lots of MP's have announced they're going to quit. Some are just refusing to campaign, others are sort of criticising the campaign. So that's been a big contrast with the Labour machine, which insisted it's been ready from the start and is pretty unified about really throwing themselves behind their leader's strategy.

The Tory strategy, it seems, has been that given that they face a pretty huge polling deficit, around 20 points, they need to change the conversation, get people to rethink the conservative party and, you know, attract lots of attention. Just change this story that they're heading for an inevitable defeat. So they're pushing out lots of things that are designed to really get people talking. So what has that been? Well, what was a pledge to bring back a form of national.

This is the military service that people used to do in the UK up to the 1960s and seems to be quite popular, particularly amongst older, more conservative people. They have promised tax cuts for state pensioners. There is an announcement that bad university courses will be scrapped and an expansion of apprenticeships, really stirring a conversation there about whether going to university is a good thing. So lots of things that are really designed to get people talking about the conservatives and looking at them afresh. So far, the early polling suggests that actually it's not working and people's minds are made up on the conservative party.

But several weeks to go. The big question really is, can they squeeze the vote of people who say they're going to vote for reform, this sort of insurgent radical party to the right, and also animate some of the voters who are currently saying they decided who they hope to squeeze back into the conservative fold? Well, a shambolic Tory campaign sounds like pretty good news for Labour, then. So I was with the Labour campaign on the road, first in Lansing on the south coast and then in Stevenage, is very well engineered. It's pretty slick.

Everything's locked down. It's very, very disciplined. They're determined, really, not to have this big poll lead nibbled away at through their own gaffes. So it's fair to say they're having their own internal ructions about the sort of selection or deselection, rather, of candidates on the left. They're bowing, really, to continual pressure to rule out tax rises in order so that the Tories don't have an attack line, that this is going to be a tax raising Labour government, which is really going to leave them with some pretty little wiggle room in office and.

Ora Ogunbi
Coming back to the Conservatives. Is there anything that Sunak can do to turn it around? Well, it's fair to say that going into the campaign, the Conservatives really required the comeback of the century to stay in office. Now, I think what they can hope to do is reanimate some of the anxieties about the Labour party and remind people of why they may have been voting Conservative previously, to defend a corps of seats which will provide them with a base to come back from after the election. But going much further than that is looking incredibly challenging based on the polling so far.

Matthew Holehouse
And of course, the difficult start to the campaign having sprung it on the conservative party means that Rishi Sunik has effectively made that job a little bit harder as well. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.

Ora Ogunbi
You can follow the fortunes of the Conservatives and the other parties in the run up to this election with our online poll tracker and a wealth of other coverage. Go to economist.com for more.

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Emiliano
I don't know anybody who goes into this system is going to come out the younger you are. You're fucking pretty. So fascinating. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's. I don't know.

It's definitely a different universe. Emiliano is a foreigner who was imprisoned in ecuador a few years ago. That's not his real name. Ana Lankas is our Brazil correspondent. He says he saw several massacres while inside prison.

I literally was listening to Iraq war level gunfire and grenades for 4 hours. I was actually trapped outside in the fucking yard and I couldn't get back into my block. You can hear the music behind our conversation because we were having lunch in a busy cafe when we spoke and he told me he had a video of some of these massacres. If you want to see, I have some videos, but the slaughtering, I don't know. You're eating it.

Do you want to see something or not see something? Yes. No. Okay. So, for example, Emiliano showed me piles of bodies.

Ana Lankas
He says there were 40 people there, and he alleges that the cops didn't do anything about it. Um. You're already dead. They piled them up. Yeah, here we go.

The images were truly terrible. Just hanging. Some of the skulls were still inside the heads other ones which just looked like a fucking sock, you know, they do this to show you that, you know, we're in fucking charge. Three of the guys who are on the video were in my fucking block. Just a few years ago.

As recently as 2019, Ecuador was one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America. The homicide rate was about the same as the US. It was under seven per 100,000. But by 2023, it had become the deadliest country in mainland Latin America. It had almost 45 homicides per hundred thousand last year.

Duran, which is a city next to the important port of Guayaquil in Ecuador, had a jaw dropping murder rate of 148 per hundred thousand last year. That made it the world's most violent city. So what's behind the change? Why did it go from peaceful tourist destination to quite dangerous sounding place? In Ecuador's case, it has a lot to do with cocaine, which is smuggled from Colombia to Europe via ecuadorian ports, especially Guayaquil.

So what's happening in Latin America is that homicides have gone down in some of the region's biggest countries, like Brazil and Colombia. But they've increased dramatically in smaller, previously peaceful countries, like Costa Rica, Uruguay, and much of the Caribbean. And that's because in the past few years, the production of cocaine has exploded. In the past ten years, it's doubled. And demand is changing, mostly from the us market, which is saturated, to the european market, which is booming.

So that's kind of shifting the geography of the drug market. And at the same time, there's been a massive increase in the number of gangs as gangs are fighting over control of these markets. There's been great fragmentation, and all of this has spurred crackdowns in many countries across the region. And we've spoken in the past, in particular about crackdowns in El Salvador, where some notable fraction of the entire population is now locked up. That's right.

In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the president, came to power in 2019. It looks like he initially brokered a deal, a kind of truce with the gangs, but something seems to have happened, and that truth seems to have broken down. In March 2022, the gangs, in a single weekend, killed 87 people. So they went on like a murder spree. And El Salvador's president changed strategy.

So he called a state of emergency, and he's rounded up almost 80,000 people and thrown them in jail. That's more than 1% of the population. And since then, the homicide rate has fallen from 53 per 100,000 in 2018 when he was elected, to 2.4 last year, which is like Canada, levels of homicide. What Bukele is doing is often called manodura, or iron fist policies. And in the region, what that usually means is that you call states of emergency.

It leads to kind of indiscriminate mass incarcerations, and you sent the army onto the streets to keep order. In many cases, these states of emergency can have like an indefinite duration, as is the case in El Salvador, where the state of emergency has been renewed every month since it's been called. Obviously, there are issues with what Mister Bukele has been doing, but I can imagine that regional leaders might look to what he's done and see a possible policy for their own countries. Everybody's looking at Bukele, and they really admire him, because, firstly, Salvadorians are really happy. Bukele has some of the highest approval ratings in the world.

And second, obviously, it looks like it worked. So lots of leaders in the region have actually gone to El Salvador to try to learn about the Bucuele model. So last year, Ecuador got a new president, and he started talking about a crackdown on gangs. He said that he was going to move gang leaders to different maximum security prisons, and the gangs kind of rebelled. And so the new president, Daniel Loboa, called a state of emergency.

He actually called an internal armed conflict, and he declared 22 gangs terrorist organizations. And so since January, the army has been on the streets and in prisons. And on April 21, Ecuadorians backed tougher anti crime measures in a referendum. So now the army will permanently patrol streets and prisons if Congress approves the measures to change the constitution. And inmates have no more possibility of early release for good behavior.

So they're trying to implement a version of Manodura. But Ecuador is significantly more democratic than El Salvador. Unfortunately for Ecuador, though, and for most other countries in the region, the Bukele model is not likely to work. And why is that? That's because El Salvador's gangs were really poor and predatory and deeply unpopular.

And in much of the rest of the region's gangs are significantly richer, they're better armed, and they have way more transnational links. So, just to give you an idea of how crappy the kind of gangsters in El Salvador were, you had two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio de Cioccho. And many researchers I spoke to estimated that over 90% of their income came from extortion, which just takes money out of the economy. It doesn't create jobs or put any money in, like, for example, the drug market does. Murder soared as gangs fought over territory but the returns were really meager.

The average rank and file member in an El salvadorian gang earned only like $15 a week. And they were really big on child recruitment because children were cheaper and they got lower sentences. So these were really predatory, unpopular gangs. And remember that El Salvador is tiny, so it was much easier to round them up. That's not the picture in the rest of the region.

Jason Palmer
So what do the gangs in the rest of the region look like? So most gangs in the rest of the region, I wouldn't even call them gangs. They're transnational criminal organizations. Their revenue streams are much more diversified. So, for example, Colombia's most powerful criminal group, the Clan del Golfo, is thought to earn around $4.5 billion a year from drug exports, human smuggling, illegal mining, extortion, and a few other things.

Ana Lankas
And many gangs depend on prisons actually to recruit to their organizations and also as kind of economic units. They're also an important part of how gangs make their money. So it seems like a lot of the region is still looking for the right policy prescriptions, then if filling up the prisons isn't going to fix things, if the El Salvador model won't work because the gangs themselves are different, what's to be done? I mean, nobody really knows, right? Because this is a really complex issue, and gangs often adapt and they have different profiles in different countries.

But some approach have been tried. Mexico launched a war on drugs in the early two thousands, and it was a disaster because it led to the fragmentation of gangs and homicides tripled in a decade. Colombia did something much more methodical, with huge amounts of aid from the United States. It reformed its police and also professionalized its army and improved intelligence. And all of these things put a lot of pressure on the FARC, which was a paramilitary group that was involved in cocaine trafficking, to come to the negotiating table.

And they ended up negotiating a political solution that's also probably not going to work in the rest of the region because most gangs don't have political ends in the rest of the region. You've also had some approaches like focused deterrence, which is kind of this approach where you say, we're going to let you guys do things like deal drugs, as long as you don't carry guns around and kill lots of people on the street. So they tried that in Rio with great success for a few years, and they tried it in some parts of Mexico City, but everywhere is going to need slightly different solutions. And there is no silver bullet to this. So, okay, a single policy or a single set of policies will not work throughout the region.

Jason Palmer
That seems very clear. But what are the sort of general facets of the ultimate answer to this question, if not the policies themselves? I think as long as things like drugs are illegal, Manodura policies by themselves will not work. And just sticking more people in jail might make the problem worse. Rather than try to dismantle all groups governments to try to deter only the most violent individuals, they need to focus on hurting gangs profits, and most importantly, in the long term, they must reduce recruitment.

Ana Lankas
So it's time to move beyond manadura, which is an ineffective crowd pleaser, and think of how really to create better lives for the people who may otherwise be tempted to join gangs. Anna, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, Jason.

Ora Ogunbi
Of all the things that humans have manipulated, we've had to accept that space and time have been out of our hands, mostly. In 1967, atomic clocks introduced the first ever leap second. Yes, leap second, not year second. A perfect day should have 86,400 seconds. That's an even 24 hours for the earth to spin on its axis one time.

But as the world warms, the calculation to record that perfect day is changing. The story here is that climate change is melting the pulse. So melting the amount of ice in Greenland and Antarctica or reducing those ice caps. And a completely unexpected consequence of that is, weirdly, that earth is spinning more slowly than it might otherwise. Catherine Braik is the economist's environment editor.

Catherine Brahic
In a tiny, imperceptible way, nothing that anybody is ever going to notice. Our days are getting a tiny bit longer than they would otherwise be. Now, that might seem completely inconsequential, but actually, there's a big question about what this means in terms of adjusting our clocks. Catherine. Longer days.

Ora Ogunbi
I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, even if it's super tiny, but what's happening here? So, first off, it's important to understand that there are actually two different ways of defining the second. The most obvious one is the one that's defined by the amount of time that Earth takes to spin once on its axis. So that's the 24 hours. The catch with that definition, which was in use until the mid to late 20th century, Earth doesn't always take exactly the same amount of time to spin once on its axis, so the spin can slow down or speed up, depending on things like the currents in Earth's core, the shape of the planet, which actually changes, believe it or not, over long periods of time.

Catherine Brahic
And so this definition of the second, let's call it the solar second actually varies imperceptibly in length. And that isn't good enough in our uber precise world. And so, sometime in the 1960s, the time nerds of this world came up with a more consistent, more reliable second, which is defined by, as these things often are, the vibrations of cesium ions in atomic clocks that are held in various places around the world. Okay, I'm with you. Keep going.

So, from this, you can see that the 2 seconds, the solar second, and the atomic second won't always match up. One is super precise and is always the same. One can vary. And the way that, again, these time nerds have found of dealing with these inconsistencies is basically by every so often, adding leap second to a year. And in fact, the very first year when this happened, in 1972, there were two leap seconds that were added.

So 1 second was added to the last minute of June 30, and 1 second was added to the last minute of that year's last day, December 31. So far, all of the leap seconds, if you're following me, have been positive leap seconds. So it's always been adding a second. But for some time, physicists have known that at some Point, they're going to have to add a negative leap second. And that's because Earth spin has actually been accelerating since the end of the 20th century.

And so these 2 seconds are kind of catching up with each other. And, in fact, at the minute, they're very close to each other. So, in the past, the solar second was slower than the atomic second, but in the future, the solar second is actually going to be faster than the atomic second. And so, at some Point in the future, and physicists have known this for some time, they will have to add a negative leap second to a year. And in other words, the last minute of the last day in some future year will have 59 seconds instead of 60 seconds.

Ora Ogunbi
So the negative leap second was probably going to happen anyway. But what role has climate change played and how soon it comes? So, the negative leap second is not actually a result of climate change. The negative leap second is something that we now know is due to changes happening in Earth's core. It's changes in the currents that ripple through the molten mass at the core of planet Earth, and that is causing Earth to spin up.

Catherine Brahic
And that's basically what's been happening to Earth for several decades. What's happening with climate change is an opposite effect at the surface. You've got these two ice masses at both poles, and because of climate change, some of that ice is sliding into the oceans, melting into water that can be redistributed at the surface of planet Earth. That mass is pooling, in a sense at the equator. What you get then is basically a thickening of Earth's waste.

The simplest analogy here is if you picture a ballerina, she's spreading her arms out and her spin is slowing. You now have these two spins that are counteracting each other, one at the core, which is causing Earth to spin faster, which means we have a negative leap second in our future and one at the surface which is causing Earth to spin more slowly. The result of that is that its basically buying time for the time nerds to figure out how to do their negative leap second calculations. Sorry Catherine, the idea of a planet Earth with a little thick waistline is just quite funny to me. But tell me a bit more about why this matters.

There are many systems that require very precise timing to be coordinated across the planet, things like the stock market and power grids. And so every time there's a positive leap second, those systems have ways of integrating the positive leap second at the same time, but they have never had to integrate a negative leap second at the same time. And so it's just an added complication that needs to be dealt with. Fascinating. Katrine, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks ore always a pleasure.

Ora Ogunbi
That's all for this episode. By the way, our half price offer on a subscription to economist podcast plus where you'll find all of our weekly feature shows, is now open until the 5 June. If you haven't already, sign up now by clicking clicking the link in the show notes or searching online for Economist podcasts and ill see you back here tomorrow for my last episode of the intelligence.

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