The party secretary of the Conservative Party, Nadhim Zahawi, was dismissed on Sunday because he had not played open cards that he has paid a penalty tax of several million pounds. He did not disclose it when Rishi Sunak appointed him party secretary. He also did not disclose that he was under investigation by the tax authority when he himself became the head of the tax authority as finance minister in the summer of 2022. NO LONGER TRUSTED: The party secretary of the Conservative Party, Nadhim Zahawi, is fired because of a tax case. Photo: Alastair Grant / AP Sunak has been hard pressed to dismiss Zahawi since the tax case broke in the British media just over a week ago. Sunak is the prime minister who promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability at all levels” when he took office. Sunak would wait to decide Zahawi’s fate until the government’s ethics adviser had reviewed the tax case. His conclusion was clear on Sunday morning. Thus, Zahawi’s time as party secretary and government member was over. Unpopular after a short time as prime minister Until this week, Rishi Sunak has served 100 days as prime minister. He took over the job from the least popular British Prime Minister of all time, Liz Truss, who held the job for less than two months. Sunak is certainly more popular than his predecessor, but a YouGov poll earlier this month shows he has little to cheer about. CRISIS: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak answers in Parliament’s Question Time. Photo: JESSICA TAYLOR / AFP Three out of five Britons have a bad impression of the Prime Minister. One in three Britons think he is doing a very bad job. And his popularity has only gone down since he took office. He doesn’t have an easy job either. Five crises make the job of prime minister particularly challenging right now: Economy Britain is the only G7 country that has less to contend with than one before the pandemic. The world’s sixth largest economy has thus not been able to rise economically in the same way as the countries it compares with. DIFFICULT: The British do not have much to be happy about in the economy. Inflation is over 10 percent. Photo: MAJA SMIEJKOWSKA / Reuters Inflation is over ten percent, the national debt is increasing and both private individuals and companies are struggling to make ends meet. Sunak recently promised to halve inflation, grow the economy and reduce the national debt when he set out his visions for this year. Three of his five promises to the population were therefore about the economy. Healthcare The fourth promise was to cut waiting lists in the healthcare system. Seven million Britons are waiting for treatment. People die because the ambulances cannot deliver patients from them to hospitals that are full of patients ready for discharge. The critics believe that the Conservative Party has reduced the national healthcare system NHS during almost 13 years in the government offices. 13 years that began in 2010 with a strict savings policy after the financial crisis. In addition, there is a great shortage of labour. Over 130,000 positions are vacant in the healthcare system and in the care sector the figure is even higher. A British patient tells news that he was placed in a corridor and forgotten. Strike wave Hardly a day goes by without a strike in Great Britain. Nurses and ambulance staff have already gone on strike, and have announced more strikes in the coming weeks. Now teachers in England are also signing up. The colleagues in Scotland have been on strike for a long time already. Railways, post office, border guards… The list is long and seems to be getting longer. Many of those strikes have great sympathy among the population, surveys show. Wages lag behind. Several occupational groups have had a real drop in wages over many years, while the work tasks only become tougher and tougher when there is a lack of people in vacant positions. WANT MORE: Ambulance workers are among the occupational groups that have gone on strike. Photo: HENRY NICHOLLS / Reuters The government is criticized for not resolving these conflicts. For not being able to prevent ever new strikes. But Rishi Sunak and co. is afraid that too high a wage increase will lead to even higher inflation. The UK government is proposing to ban strikes that paralyze essential social functions. Immigration The fifth of Rishi Sunak’s promises for the year was to stop small boat traffic with migrants across the English Channel. A main argument for Britons who wanted out of the EU was to gain control over the borders. But the number of migrants coming to England by sea has never been higher. MANY: The British rescue service has picked up migrants off the coast. Photo: BEN STANSALL / AFP It is both expensive and problematic for the government, which does not want asylum seekers to enter the country with the help of people smugglers. A temporary solution has been to send the asylum seekers to hotels. Recently, The Guardian has told how minor unaccompanied asylum seekers are kidnapped from these hotels, apparently without any problems. “Tory Sleaze” Sleaze in the Conservative Party has got its own term, so widespread has it been. Rishi Sunak is not getting away, despite the promise he made when he stood on the doorstep of Downing Street last October. The tax case of Nadhim Zahawi has now been resolved. But there has also been considerable attention to another questionable matter recently. Which involves former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. LOAN NEEDED: Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also been in the spotlight. Photo: TOBY MELVILLE / Reuters When he was prime minister and had to hire a new chairman of the BBC, he also had financial problems privately. He needed a loan. It happened that he knew someone called Richard Sharp, who in turn knew a guy who would be happy to give Johnson a loan equivalent to many millions of kroner. Richard Sharp organized a meeting between the two, before pulling out of the money talks. A short time later he was given the job of chairman of the BBC by Boris Johnson. The opposition criticizes The case increases people’s impression that it is the boys’ club that controls politics and the top echelon of British society. This is how the opposition party Labour’s education policy spokeswoman put it on Sunday after the dismissal of Zahawi: – The reason why such things continue to happen is that we have a government whose only principle is to put the party first and the country second. The Conservative Party leads in its own interests, with a prime minister who tries to lead his own politicians rather than lead in the interests of the country. Sunak himself believes that he is now cleaning things up by firing a popular politician, and that it is in line with his promise of integrity and accountability, which is again for the good of the nation. But there is no doubt that there are still significant rocks in the sea for Rishi Sunak when he marks his 100th day as British Prime Minister on Thursday.
ttn-69
Sunak fires Zahawi – but struggles with several crises – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
