We wanted honesty, Rishi Sunak, not t-shirt slogans

Yet another senior politician expresses buyer’s regret after his term in office is over. This time, it’s Rishi Sunak, the former PM. So, it’s pretty significant. He said that the ‘stop the boats’ message was “too stark”. He said he regrets ever saying it and conceded that it couldn’t be done anyway. 

He regrets ever saying it. Ever. 

That’s all very well, Rishi Sunak, but it was the phrase you attached your premiership to, that you felt would deliver you back into Number 10. The starkness of that message was all part of the point. And that can’t have been lost on you as you printed loads of the phrase to sit on the front of lecterns and stages and then repeated it ad infinitum and watched it darken the public discourse.  

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Theresa May, as she lurched towards a constituency of voters she felt wanted her to be more hardline, introduced the phrase and idea of ‘hostile environment’. It was a damaging, toxic way of thinking, and there is a clear line from there to ‘stop the boats’. Turns out she thought it too much too.

After office, she said she regretted it. (Incidentally, Boris Johnson doesn’t seem to have regrets. Though it’s not clear what he really believed in. And Liz Truss keeps saying it was all somebody else’s fault. Her internal dialogue and ability for self-reflection appear to be permanently switched off.) 

The key point is that two very recent former leaders of the country were pushing a message they didn’t really believe in. It was a stance they adopted to show they were tough and, presumably, advisers said it would play well. It’s bad for two reasons. One, it shows they, in a key moment, had little deep conviction beyond self-preservation and the ballot box.

You could argue that this is core to politicians’ DNA, that desire to be re-elected. But you’d like to think that there is SOME navigating code inside, some reason they want to make life better for the nation beyond just being in office.

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You can see why people lose faith in the political class. If the message that voters are insistently told to get behind is simply a grubby vote grab, and left on the ground with a sad shrug as the politician leaves the main stage, why should voters continue to believe other messaging? 

The other is the facile, reductive nature of it. Policy appears to be little more than an easily remembered
slogan, a national identity as a phrase for a t-shirt, where the lives and people impacted are never considered. Why not just lead with ‘Frankie says relax’? At least that had a positive outcome for a lot of people.  

The difficulty in politics is not just that politics is difficult. It’s also that the desire to render the difficult easy is what leads to the reduction of everything to a consumable phrase. We, the people, are not stupid. Neither are we infantile. If there is a complex problem that requires nuanced thinking, present it. Be straight and communicate clearly.

Labour are preparing for massive welfare cuts. Though this feels like a punishment, again, of the poorest, the government is, at least, attempting to get under the skin of the huge leap in the welfare bill and, hopefully, do something that stops people reaching a point where they need so much of the welfare in the first place. They are being open, even while the openness presents difficult realities. 

That said, some of the debate around the one million young people not in work or education is still weighted towards tarring them as lazy, rather than building a place of more sustainable, useful jobs and training. And the demonising of young people with mental health issues allows the tougher questions about proper mental health support and provision to be sidestepped. These need to be met with more honesty.  

For now, we’ll all be on alert for any three-word phrases. Keir says relax. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue.Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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