Johnson is dead. Long live Johnsonism?
| Author | Ball, Jonny |
The sun has well and truly set over Boris Johnson's premiership. In the wake of partygate and the Chris Pincher affair he at first seemed determined to limp on as a lame duck, drawing out his exit into as unedifying a spectacle as possible. But any successful elaboration of a specifically Johnsonian political project had already been precluded by contradictions on his own benches, and by his total dependency on recalcitrant members of parliament and the cabinet, all jostling to extract competing policy concessions from the weakened, post-partygate 'big dog' in exchange for fealty. Johnsonism's vaguely coherent beginnings were flattened under the weight of the 'red meat' thrown to right-wing backbenchers--ad hoc half-measures and symbolic dead cats, lurching violently between nods to small-state economic liberalism and fiscal giveaways to placate One Nation interventionists.
At one point, Johnson seemed to be the British representative of the 'neo-statist' turn occurring across the world--'the great recoil' from globalised markets and limited government, as Paulo Gerbaudo puts it. (1) A quarter of a century after Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over, his Democratic Party successor Joe Biden was attempting one of the most comprehensive expansions of public spending and the welfare state since the New Deal. The European Union had overcome Germany's long-term opposition to common debt to inject huge stimulus funds into a hamstrung post-COVID economy. Johnson, unlike his immediate predecessors, was comfortable with spending vast amounts of money, creating what his old employer The Spectator lamented as a 'new leviathan'; and he seemed unconvinced of the benefits of liberalised, open markets when he prioritised sovereignty over free trade in Brexit talks. (2)
With Liz Truss, the Conservative Party has undergone its Thermidorean reaction, jolting back to its comfort zone--even as the conditions for the original great recoil are more pronounced than ever: demographic trends will see increasing pressures on health and social care services and state pensions; the transition to net zero becomes ever more urgent along with climate change mitigation strategies; and demands for better national economic resilience grow in the face of strained post-COVID supply chains, a new Cold War and rapid deglobalisation. In the face of all this, plus a cost-of-living crisis thrown in for good measure, Truss offered little but a Reaganite rhetoric of unfunded tax cuts, pursuit of 'growth' (but for whom?) and 'economic freedom'. She at first displayed a desire to lower the tax burden for the wealthiest Britons that was so great that she was willing to provoke a run on the pound and a rout in bond markets just to achieve a modest return to pre-COVID levels of taxation. But she was disciplined by the market forces and sections of international finance capital she so vocally celebrated. The appointment of Jeremy Hunt as chancellor was a humiliating volte face and Truss's own, right-wing, equivalent of the French President Mitterrand's 'tournant de la rigueur' in the 1980s --the move to austerity provoked by the globalised power of gilt traders, capital markets and currency speculators, to which all governments must conform or else face financial ruin. At the time of writing (20 October), Truss has resigned; it is unclear who the next prime minister will be. But in the aftermath of the Truss debacle, with the newly elevated cost of government borrowing and the economy in recession, austerity looks to be baked in.
It seems likely that Johnsonism will appear as a blip on the otherwise steady course of British conservatism post-Thatcher, with its antipathy towards the transformational power of the state, tax and spending cuts as its constant mantra, and a heavy reluctance to intervene in the operation of markets--save for when the widespread social catastrophe that would have resulted from [pounds sterling]7,000-a-year energy bills forced them reluctantly into action. Trussonomics wasn't, at first, a return to traditional fiscal conservatism. But now the austerity-obsessed deficit hawkishness of George Osborne and David Cameron's tenure is back on the agenda. Truss's fiscal incontinence would largely have seen borrowed cash flow towards the wealthy rather than pay for public investment, improved wages or basic services, even if that had resulted in higher interest rates and interventions from the Bank of England to shore up confidence in gilts and sterling. Now that agenda is dead, the only place for the Conservatives to turn is back towards their orthodoxies, with services and livelihoods sacrificed on the altar of 'sound money'. The sections of the left who openly cheered on Johnson's demise should have been careful what they wished for.
In the last issue of Renewal, Christine Berry and Laurie Macfarlane identified a difference between the political projects of the left that attempt to rebalance the relationship between labour and capital in favour of the former, and political projects of the right that use the state to bolster the position of capital against labour. The left-right axis is not merely a function of the balance between government and free markets, or intervention and non-intervention, but is defined by what kind of intervention--'why, how, and for whom?' (3) And yet, notwithstanding the fact that Johnson's Number 10 was surrounded by a murky whiff of clientelist and pork barrel public spending, his time at the helm of government opened up space on the left for a re-legitimisation of a robust, protective state that uses its fiscal firepower to help its citizens withstand the fallouts from market failure and unprecedented geopolitical and global health shocks.
Disappointingly, Labour has so far shirked this opportunity. Johnsonism's obvious inability to deal with the structural roots of our multiplying social crises was tempered by palliative measures reminiscent of the political economy of the Third Way: more public money channelled to 'left behind' Britain, a reversal of cuts to some public services, partnership between the public and private sectors to boost employment and skills.
Nevertheless, Johnson's lack of deference towards business officialdom and his willingness to rhetorically spurn British industry's...
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