Now is the time for Boris to govern like a Conservative – for his sake and for Britain’s
That rumble you hear? It is the incoming economic tsunami. As we pout and quarrel on the beach, a 30ft tidal wave is rushing towards us.
This week’s elections will be the last for a while to be contested under the old dispensation. Candidates argued about bus routes and bins, curries and cakes. But it is already clear that the chief issue in politics henceforth will be our immiseration. Most of us will be poorer – that is inescapable. What remains to be determined is who gets the blame, and how long it takes to recover.
Boris Johnson is not going anywhere. Yes, there were painful losses for the Tories, as well as signs of tactical voting by their opponents. But, compared with the mid-term kickings directed at previous Conservative administrations, this one does not look irrecoverable.
The Tories’ worst results were in southern seats, which they can reasonably expect to hold in a general election. Across the marginal red-brick towns of the Midlands and the North, people who never voted “for the Conservatives” turned out again to vote “for Boris”.
At the same time, the immediate threat to Johnson’s position – the decision by the Met retrospectively to apply a new interpretation of the lockdown rules – was nullified by Keir Starmer’s hilarious hoist-petarderie.
For the avoidance of doubt, I think the decision to investigate Starmer is preposterous. Durham Police, like the Met, changed tack in response to political pressure. Such things should not happen in Britain. We are not a banana republic where partisan investigations are launched against politicians.
Having a curry with people who had already gathered legally is not, in my book, a breach of the rules. Or, if it is, it is a tiny and technical infraction, one that no other group of co-workers would have been investigated for – let alone years after the event.
Starmer might reasonably complain at the double standard, had he himself not demanded that the PM resign the moment a police investigation was launched. To watch Labour frontbenchers now scrambling to argue that, no, an investigation is only an investigation, and we should all wait for the result, is a piece of irony so funny – so beautiful, indeed – that it could be mounted on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.
Before long, though, we will look back wistfully on the days when we could afford to argue about parties. It now seems possible that inflation will hit 10 per cent – a medieval tithe, only this time applied to savings. At the same time, growth has stalled and seems set to go into reverse. We face the worst possible combination – stagflation.
Who will we blame? I’m afraid our anger might overwhelm our interest in cause and effect. On Thursday, most voters, upset by the rising cost of living (“they just don’t get it”) voted for candidates who will hike their council tax. In Ulster, nationalist and Alliance candidates who raged against high prices demanded the retention of the Northern Ireland Protocol that is pushing them up.
Not that I want to pick on Northern Ireland. Everyone is at it. Politicians who called for longer and stricter lockdowns are now screeching about the cost of living. They plainly think that the rest of us won’t put the two things together and, depressingly, they may be right. You’d think people would make the connection intuitively. If you decided to stop working for the better part of two years, and to maintain your income solely through borrowing, you’d end up worse off. Almost everyone understands that on a personal level. But we struggle to extend the logic to the nation.
During the lockdowns, the Government paid people not to produce things, and funded the difference by printing money. A decline in the production of real-world goods and services, combined with an increase in the number of pounds and pence in circulation, would mean inflation even without the Ukrainian conflict. Yet commentators and MPs who opposed every loosening of restrictions (including Starmer) now talk about the cost of living crisis as if it were some wanton act of ministerial sadism.
Around the world, incumbent governments are pleading with their electorates not to hold them responsible for the pandemic or the Ukrainian war. In most cases, they have a point. Then again, as the former leader of Canada’s Tory opposition, Andrew Scheer, puts it: “Trudeau defenders say Canadian inflation can’t be his fault since other countries have inflation, too. That’s like me arguing: ‘Not my fault I’m putting on weight since some of my neighbours are, too.’ Countries that also printed money also have inflation.”
Britain has been putting on a great deal of weight, so to speak. Even before the pandemic, we were becoming portly; now, we can barely haul ourselves off the sofa. Public spending last year was 52 per cent of GDP, and there seems to be no plan to return state spending to the 35 per cent of the late Thatcher years, or even the pre-pandemic level of 40 per cent. The expansion of the state means fewer people paying into the system and more drawing from it. It sacrifices future growth to present revenue. Yet, again and again, we hear ministers boasting of higher expenditure as if it were itself a measure of success.
This is most obvious when it comes to the NHS, where cheques have been written more or less unconditionally. The UK now spends 12.8 per cent of its GDP on healthcare, a higher proportion than any other country in Europe. Yet the debate is still conducted almost wholly in terms of money. Ministers have a little room for manoeuvre. Sajid Javid, for example, is trying to get GPs to see patients for a minimum number of hours each week in return for their salaries. But there is no appetite for the levels of privatesector involvement that makes Europe’s healthcare systems better than ours at keeping people alive.
What is true of the NHS is true across the board. A few useful reforms – privatising Channel 4, cutting the cost of childcare, ending the obligation to get an annual MOT – are blasted away by the firehose of public spending. Faced with a problem like rising energy bills, the first instinct is not to scrap fuel levies but subsidise consumers – tackling a problem caused by state intervention with more state intervention.
Even sensible policies can seem grudging and accidental. The mooted privatisation of the Passport Office should be approached as an opportunity for the institution, not a punishment for poor performance. Ditto the BBC. The windfall tax on energy companies should be rejected, not because the companies promise to invest their surpluses, but because retrospectively changing the tax regime is expropriation.
To be fair, one or two more ambitious reforms are now being discussed, notably a welcome plan to extend the right to buy. But a government with an 80-seat majority and perhaps 100 weeks left needs to be far more radical. It should let homes be built – ideally in the beautiful and compact form championed by Roger Scruton.
It should make employment laws flexible, and let overseas workers take jobs here (albeit without the right to settle or to claim benefits). It should scrap every tariff. It should give genuine fiscal and regulatory autonomy to freeports. Most urgently, it should deregulate financial services so that the City can benefit from Brexit.
Eleven months have passed since three Conservative MPs – Iain Duncan Smith, George Freeman and Theresa Villiers – presented a detailed plan on deregulation, including in the City, to Downing Street. Their report was warmly welcomed by the PM, but the majority of their 100-odd proposals remain untouched.
This comes down to force of will. We have an immobilist civil service – this week, the outgoing Australian high commissioner revealed that resentful Remainers had almost derailed the trade deal – and public opinion is always suspicious of change. But the only way for a government to be re-elected at a time like this is to be visibly pulling every lever to stimulate growth.
Johnson’s detractors assert that he is not interested in governing, that his high verbal intelligence masks low analytical intelligence, that he is better at winning power than using it – something that, Simon Kuper claims in his new book, was true even of his presidency of the Oxford Union.
Yet the PM has an extraordinary capacity to rise to the occasion – even if, as Churchill said of the United States, he tries everything else first. He lost the first half of his premiership to Covid, but he still has an 80-seat majority. It is time to govern like a Conservative – for Britain’s sake as well as his own.
The only way for a government to be re-elected at a time like this is to be visibly pulling every lever to stimulate growth
Before long we will look back wistfully on the days when we could afford to argue about parties