As Johnson draws happy face, Britons confront a run of bad news
LONDON >> Britons are lining up for gas, staring at empty grocery shelves, paying higher taxes and worrying about spiraling prices as a grim winter approaches.
But to visit the Conservative Party conference in Manchester this past week was to enter a kind of happy valley, where Cabinet ministers danced, sang karaoke and drained flutes of Champagne — Pol Roger, Winston Churchill’s favorite brand, naturally.
No one captured the bonhomie better than Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who told a whooping crowd of party faithful, “You all represent the most jiving, hip, happening and generally funkapolitan party in the world.”
The cognitive dissonance extended beyond the Mardi Gras atmosphere. In his upbeat keynote speech, Johnson characterized the multiple ills afflicting Britain as a “function of growth and economic revival” — challenging but necessary post-Brexit adjustments on the way to a more prosperous future.
It was at least his third explanation for the food and fuel shortages, which continued in some areas after three weeks. Initially, he denied there was a crisis. Then he said the shortages were not about Brexit — contradicting analysts, union leaders, food producers and business owners — but were hitting every Western country as they emerged from the pandemic. And finally, he cited the stresses as evidence that Brexit was doing its job in shaking up the economy.
“It is the ultimate in post hoc rationalization — the idea that this is a well-thought-out plan, that we intended to do this all along,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a London think tank.
Few politicians have either the indomitable cheer or the ideological flexibility of Johnson, so it was hardly surprising that he tried to put the best face on Britain’s run of bad news. He remains utterly in command of the Conservative Party, which has an 80-seat majority in the Parliament, and comfortably ahead of the opposition Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, in opinion polls.
Yet political analysts and economists said there were risks in the Panglossian tone he struck in Manchester. With inflation projected to continue at a relatively high level, and the government admitting that shortages could continue until Christmas, voters could quickly sour on Johnson. Then next year come tax rises, after he broke his promise not to increase them last month.
In hindsight, some said, the conference might be seen as a high-water mark for the prime minister.
“A few days of disruption to fuel supplies makes the government look foolish,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London. “Much larger fuel bills are a much bigger deal.”
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said Johnson could come to resemble James Callaghan, a Labour prime minister who was toppled in 1979 after a winter of fuel shortages and runaway inflation, when he did not appear sufficiently alarmed about the pileup of problems.
When Johnson bounded into the auditorium at the conference recently, stopping to kiss his wife, Carrie, he looked anything but alarmed. Between jokes and jibes at the opposition, he presented a blueprint for a post-Brexit economy that he said would deliver high wages for skilled British workers, rather than lower-cost immigrants from the European Union, and put the onus on businesses to foot the bill.
Companies and previous governments “reached for the same old lever of uncontrolled immigration to keep wages low,” Johnson said. “The answer is to control immigration, to allow people of talent to come to this country, but not to use immigration as an excuse for failure to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment, the facilities, the machinery they need to do their jobs.”
That model is worlds away from Singaporeon-Thames, the catchphrase once used by the intellectual authors of Brexit to describe an open, lightly regulated, business-friendly hub that they said Britain would become once it cast off the labor laws and other shackles of Brussels. No one is talking about removing labor laws now (indeed, Johnson soon may move to raise Britain’s minimum wage).
Contradictions between protectionists and free marketeers have run through the Brexit movement from the start.
“I describe it as Little England versus Global Britain,” Portes said, noting that Johnson, because of his lack of fixed convictions, was wellsuited to hold this coalition together.
Since Johnson’s landslide election victory in 2019, however, the gravity in the Conservative Party has shifted decisively toward protectionism and anti-immigration policies. That was the message that helped the Tories lure disenchanted, working-class, former Labour voters in the industrial Midlands and north of England. Many of these voters want the jobs that would come with the revival of British heavy industry, not better opportunities for hedge fund managers in London.