PM Rishi Sunak would build a Bangalore to Bedfordshire

Niall McCrae

What links the contest to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, town planning, and the Dutch farmers’ protest? Answer: Rishi Sunak. 

Despite the looming economic crisis and the failures of fiscal management at Number 11, the boyish face of Sunak is remarkably free of the mud splattered over rivals. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak presided over the biggest splurge in state debt since the Second World War. He’s the MPs’ favourite, but what would a Sunak premiership really mean for Britain?

Sunak glides across the political stage, wearing any conflict of interest with his business connections lightly. His wife Akshata owns the major company Infosys, which provides IT services, business consultancy and outsourcing. Infosys invests heavily in lobbying governments, using teams of lawyers to find loopholes in immigration rules. 

Rishi and Akshata met as students at Stanford University, marrying in 2009. She is the daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Narayan Murthy, known as ‘the Steve Jobs of India’ co-founded Infosys in 2014, and Akshata is a director of his investment firm Catamaran Ventures. Sunak described his father-in-law as ‘incredibly supportive’, if somewhat ‘intimidating’. 

Born and bred in Britain, his father a GP and mother a chemist, Sunak is nonetheless ensconced in the Indian aristocracy. With its incomparable size, booming population and rapacious enterprise, Sunak’s land of descent has opportunities that are harder to come by in the relatively small and parochial UK. But Sunak would like to change that. 

British Indians have contributed immensely to the national economy, and their appointments and achievements disprove the simplistic charges of racism against white Britons. Half of the Tory leadership candidates: were of Indian background, most having held Cabinet positions. Sunak and Sajid Javid come from the banking world, and they inevitably have horizons beyond the English Channel. Sunak wants unimpeded growth and technological development, though not necessarily for the ordinary people’s benefit. 

Infosys is a ‘technology partner’ of the World Economic Forum, which described the company as a ‘global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting’. A key product is Finacle, a digital banking platform. Sunak is an enthusiast of central bank digital coupons (CBDC), collaborating with the Bank of England to float the idea of ‘Britcoin’. Such currency would give unprecedented power to the state and global banks. Infosys president Mohit Joshi, in an article for the WEF in August 2020, promoted CBDC as the future for all spending (he also warned that ‘paper money can transmit the virus’). 

Social credit system here we come. The state, as a proxy for the ‘rules-based international order’ could use a digital currency as carrot and stick, rewarding compliance such as vaccination and punishing dissidents by surcharges or barring travel or other purchases. It’s already happening in China. 

Would Sunak conserve anything? His penchant for immigration would be a serious threat to our culture and countryside. Back in 2007 the Department for Communities & Local Government announced a competition to design ten ‘eco-towns’. These would be a modernised version of the new towns built in the post-war decades. The Town & Country Planning Association report A New Future for New Towns (2021) NFNT_Reworked.qxd (tcpa.org.uk)  argued: – 

‘The choice between poorly located and poor-quality homes and the opportunities that development at scale can offer in realising a zero-carbon and sustainable future remains the crucial housing delivery issue of the 2020s. This is no longer a question of our technical ability to finance, design and deliver such places: it simply a question of the political will to achieve them.’

By 2012 merely four eco-towns had been planned, with nothing built. However, as Prime Minister, Sunak could revive this scheme, overridling local planning controls and rural conservation. A blank slate is more attractive to politicians and planners than established communities steeped in heritage. The weaker the social bonds the less resistance to change. In an eco-town, by contrast, everything is transient and everyone is dependent on whatever industry it was built around.

Sunak would exploit the contrived climate change crisis to bring in the bulldozers. Eco-towns are sold as ‘green’, although this noble aim is hardly in keeping with paving over vast acreage of countryside and generating a large increase in traffic.  ‘Zero-carbon’ jobs will be created in technology, following the WEF doctrine of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. Importantly, these towns would not be populated by local shire folk, but by immigrants classed as ‘skilled’ (newspeak for cheap and compliant).

Consider what is now happening in the Netherlands, under the leadership of WEF golden boy Mark Rutte. Holland has a unique combination of a high-density population and the most productive agricultural and horticultural industry in the world. An arbitrary nitrogen threshold is being used to wreck farmers’ livelihood. The real reason is suggested by a document of Flevoland province, which has bought farmland in the Noordoostpolder, where the government intends to build an asylum centre.  PVV leader Geert Wilders exclaimed: – 

‘Here’s the proof. It just says it all. The farmer has to go because they want to build a registration centre for asylum seekers on his land. They are completely destroying the Netherlands. Our farmers out, the fortune seekers in. No wonder people are furious.’ 

Sunak was a soft Brexiteer whose stance was less about the principle of sovereignty than political opportunism. He is closely linked with Remain campaigners in the European Movement and Best for Britain. Although no fan of Brussels, he is an arch-globalist who sees borders as an unnecessary obstruction. The bustling tech-driven city of Bangalore is a model that Sunak believes we should follow, and he would build it somewhere like Bedfordshire.

On the demise of Boris Johnson, BBC comedian Nish Kumar tweeted: – 

‘Balancing out the fact that I can’t stand Javid or Sunak with the fact that I love to see a rich white man brought down by Asians’. 

Such racism is permissible on Twitter, where anyone who isn’t white is categorically a victim of discrimination. But Kumar could more accurately have observed a white man brought down by rich Asians – particularly in the case of Sunak, a Goldman Sachs alumnus sitting on a dynastic fortune.  

There is some inevitability about Sunak taking on the baton of Global Britain. Opposing MPs argue that ‘there is nothing Conservative about the Big Tax and Big Spend agenda’ of Sunak, but the stars are aligning. Sunak’s special advisor would surely be Dominic Cummings, who wants to strip out all the inefficiencies of traditional government; creating a technocratic dystopia in our once green and pleasant land.

There may be trouble ahead.