Rishi Sunak

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Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

The enmity continued to bubble over, with allies of the spin doctor briefing that Javid’s nickname was ‘Chino’ – an acronym for ‘chancellor in name only’.2 In late January, there were more media briefings designed to undermine Javid, with claims that Cummings was ‘writing the budget’ himself.3 So the prime minister’s ultimatum during the reshuffle was the final straw for Javid and he tendered his resignation. His tenure as chancellor had been the shortest since 1970 – just 204 days. Within hours Johnson had replaced him with Rishi Sunak, who had been Javid’s second-in-command as the chief secretary to the Treasury. Smart, confident and only 39 years old, Sunak was a Brexiteer through and through who didn’t mind that his advisers would be run from Downing Street. Although he came across as being capable, he cannot have been prepared for the extraordinary decisions he would have to make as chancellor as the virus gathered pace over the next month.

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One was the wife of an ally of Vladimir Putin. It was that sort of party. David Ross, the Carphone Warehouse founder who had arranged Johnson’s holiday in the Caribbean a few weeks earlier, auctioned a grouse-shooting party on his country estate. Donors could also dubiously buy access to the new chancellor Rishi Sunak by sharing a box with him at Lord’s for an England versus Australia one-day cricket match. The secretary of state for justice, Robert Buckland QC, was offering, somewhat unappealingly, lunch served in a prison. Whether that was the correct use of Her Majesty’s prison service was an interesting point.

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It is an extraordinary fact that each day that passed that week before lockdown, the health service’s burden was increasing by a third. The complacency that had allowed Johnson to sail through February believing coronavirus to be a medically ‘irrational panic’ was rapidly dissipating. His government was panicking and nothing showed this more clearly than the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s big gesture on the afternoon of Tuesday 17 March. Sunak was the new Clark Kent in town, but he was not acting as the caped defender of libertarianism and free trade that Johnson had spoken about in Greenwich six weeks earlier. He was turning on the money tap with the biggest ever state intervention seen in peacetime.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Their landlords – local authorities and housing associations, as opposed to private individuals – generally stuck to the government’s guidance not to evict people. The extent to which successive governments: At the time, I reported on this for the i Paper. You can read more here: ‘When it comes to housing during coronavirus, Rishi Sunak’s claim that “we are all in this together” isn’t true’, 16 April 2020, inews.co.uk/opinion/housing-coronavirus-renting-rishi-sunak-418924 The Chancellor’s support package: Vicky Spratt, ‘Coronavirus help for renters: The assistance available if you are renting in the UK’, i Paper, 27 March 2020, inews.co.uk/opinion/coronavirus-rent-help-government-uk-home-pay-assistance-how-claim-explained-412072 you can buy a flat in Dorrington Court: www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/71201970#/ or rent one privately: www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/70771572#/ Macintosh’s work, her vision: Pre-war, most council housing was for those on middle incomes.

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If a supplier goes out of business, they cannot pay their debts and people lose their jobs. If a landlord starts to worry about their financial future, they decide to have a crack at charging their tenants more and, if the tenants can’t pay, move to evict them. On 11 March 2020, a new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, talked the nation through his first budget less than a month into the job. Building affordable housing – which housing experts agreed was urgently needed – barely got a mention. Just one week later, the coronavirus crisis had become so serious that the government had started giving daily wartime-style televised press conferences.

Routes to Rejoin by Stay European

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, lockdown, Rishi Sunak

The finance sector is publicly unpopular, to say the least, but it provides an estimated 11 percent of UK tax revenue and over a million jobs, according to the Office for National Statistics. The government made reassuring noises about negotiating a finance sector deal (known as ‘financial equivalence’) later in 2021, only for chancellor Rishi Sunak to admit at the start of July that the government has given up on equivalence, and make statements about deregulation that make it even less likely. Having previously relied on the City of London as a financial centre, the EU appears to be quietly trying to build up its own hubs, to lessen its reliance on infrastructure it can no longer regulate.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

The financial system is, as always, supported with every state resource available, and corporations have been given access to a near-endless pool of liquidity. Meanwhile mortgage holders were quickly provided with a three-month break on their mortgage payments. Under pressure from the trade union movement, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a furlough scheme covering 80 per cent of employees’ wages, up to £2,500 per month, to encourage employers to keep staff on as the crisis worsened. In a tacit admission that the current welfare system barely provides claimants with enough to survive, Sunak injected it with an extra £7 billion, equivalent to an extra £20 per week for the unemployed.

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

If Putin invades Gotland [Sweden’s largest island] it will be enough for him to turn off the payments system. No other country would even think about taking these sorts of risks, they would demand some sort of analogue system.’ Whether as a direct result of Kontantupproret’s efforts or real fears about imminent invasions, legislation to preserve cash has been put in place in Sweden.1 Rishi Sunak, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced similar plans in March 2020.2 The Swedish measures have been pushed through for two key reasons: first, to ensure that everyone, including the digitally disadvantaged, is able to pay and be paid; second, to ensure that payments can still be made if there were to be a major disruption to the system.

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. ______________________________________________________________________ 1 In January 2020, the Obligation for Certain Credit Institutions to Provide Cash Services law came into effect in Sweden. It requires certain local credit institutions and branches of foreign credit institutions to provide cash services to consumers and firms. 2 Delivering his first budget in March 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that the UK government was to bring forward legislation to protect access to cash and ensure that the UK’s cash infrastructure was sustainable in the long term. Budget 2020, Section 1.53. 3 An eWallet is an electronic version of the physical one. It can contain your bank cards and hold cash balances.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Uncle Sam is already on the line for over $3 trillion in stimulus, deferrals, and guarantees.12 By the end of May around forty-five million jobs were being supported by governments in the euro area alone. When British shops reopened, a cartoon in the Daily Telegraph showed a consumer, loaded down with goods, announcing, “Just charge it to Rishi Sunak,” Britain’s finance minister. The left wants more. Corbynistas and Sandersistas are having a merry time attaching all their favorite policies onto Covid-19 like so many baubles on a Christmas tree—radical redistribution here, universal basic income there. “The Corona crisis is not without its advantages,” says Ulrike Herrmann, a German anticapitalist.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

‘Immigrants bolster patriotism and national trust in American government institutions,’ the researchers concluded.14 This is borne out in countless examples, including the Irish-born French immigrant Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism in the French Resistance, many of the UK’s leaders – Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Home Secretary Priti Patel and London Mayor Sadiq Khan are all first- or second-generation immigrants – and social reformers such as Thomas Paine, the British-born American immigrant whose pamphlets helped inspire the patriots to declare American independence in 1776. Today, just one in seven of us is a migrant, and of these only 20 per cent crossed an international border.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

Goodman, “The Nordic Way to Economic Rescue,” The New York Times , March 28, 2020, nytimes.com/2020/03/28/business/nordic-way-economic-rescue-virus.html ; Richard Partington, “UK Government to Pay 80% of Wages for Those Not Working in Coronavirus Crisis,” The Guardian , March 20, 2020, theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/20/government-pay-wages-jobs-coronavirus-rishi-sunak ; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Jobs Aren’t Being Destroyed This Fast Elsewhere. Why Is That?,” The New York Times , March 30, 2020, nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus-economy-saez-zucman.html . 53. Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker , pp. 79–99. 54. Ibid., pp. 115–39. 55. Ibid., pp. 25–28, 210–12. 56.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

Other governments announced similar measures. Inside Greensill, senior managers knew that this shift, this opportunity was what Lex wanted them to focus on. He told staff, confidently, that the Bank of England and HM Treasury were ready to provide funding. IN THE UK that hectic and fear-filled spring, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS). The loans were intended to support small and medium-sized businesses that were struggling to make ends meet as the economic effects of the pandemic hit home. He then announced a similar plan for large businesses (CLBILS).

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Mnuchin, who had a deep understanding of short-term funding markets and the implications of any freeze, didn’t need to be convinced. Whatever you need, he told Powell. Central banks in other democracies were undertaking coordinated actions to shore up confidence. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney had appeared alongside Rishi Sunak, the UK chancellor, that Wednesday after both men unveiled a one-two punch of interest-rate cuts and stimulus spending. “There is no reason for this shock to turn into the experience of 2008—a virtual lost decade in a number of economies—if we handle this well,” said Carney, who was set to leave office at the end of the week.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

See Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire, Yale University Press, 2016. 2 Two titles that explore this fascinating history: Ron Ramdin, Reimagining Britain: 500 Years of Black and Asian History, Pluto Press, 1999; Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857, Permanent Black, 2004. 3 Esther Addley, ‘A one-way passage from India: Hackney Museum explores fate of colonial ayahs’, Guardian, 1/03/2020, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/01/one-way-passage-from-india-hackney-museum-colonial-ayahs-london. 4 Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, Abacus, 2013, p. 340. 5 Alice Phillipson, ‘White Britons a minority in Leicester, Luton and Slough’, Telegraph, 10/01/2013, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9792392/White-Britons-a-minority-in-Leicester-Luton-and-Slough.html; Rishi Sunak and Saratha Rajeswaran, A Portrait of Modern Britain, Policy Exchange, 6/05/2014, https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/a-portrait-of-modern-britain.pdf. 6 https://archive.bma.org.uk/news/2018/september/a-passage-from-india. 7 Habib Imtiaz, ‘Indians in Shakespeare’s England as “the first-fruits of India”: Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription’, Journal of Narrative Theory 2006, 36:1, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-1163615621/indians-in-shakespeare-s-england-as-the-first-fruits. 8 Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 131, 138, 145, 219. 9 Onyeka Nubia, ‘Who was the Ipswich Man?’

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

In the nineteenth century, German immigrants to the US were viewed as an alien threat by established settlers of English heritage; now a president who is the grandson of German immigrants poses as the defender of ‘real Americans’ like him. While some people still think that non-white Britons such as Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan are not truly British, most Britons no longer equate Britishness with being white.15 The notion of a single unchanging national community is a myth. Diverse nations Nor have nations ever been as uniform as nationalists think, and they are becoming ever more diverse for many reasons other than immigration.