Britain’s Prime Minister needs to remember which party he belongs to. He seems to have forgotten.
Each passing day, Conservative leader Boris Johnson seems to introduce a new policy to increase Britain’s already enormous national debt. And yes, before you ask, the national debt does matter.
Take Johnson’s latest pledge to cancel the cap on U.K. welfare payments. Introduced a few years back, that cap has helped restrain Britain’s ballooning welfare budget. The left-wing Labour Party opposition says that the cap has been unfair and immoral. But with more and more Britons seeking welfare payments for disabilities and other health-related issues, it is clear that reform is needed. After all, it’s not as if Britons have suddenly become more predisposed to disabilities.
So why is the rate of new disability claimants spiking? Poor management of entitlements. The solution is certainly not to throw more money at the problem.
That’s just the start. Other expensive policies introduced by Johnson in recent weeks include a plan to hire 20,000 more police officers and inject billions of dollars extra per year into the British health system.
Now perhaps some of these investments are necessary. If so, Johnson should have the courage to introduce commensurate spending cuts in other areas or to raise taxes to pay for these new programs. But he has not. Instead, Johnson claims that the U.K. economy will boom after Brexit is finally carried out. Few economists expect that to be the case, at least not in the short term.
But the basic point is that Britain can ill-afford all this — its debt-to-GDP ratio is already above 80%.
Johnson has also made another idiotic decision in recent days by banning fracking. Fracking has proven its benefits in the U.S. energy market by providing a price cap on conventional energy extraction methods. That has also enabled fracking to undercut Vladimir Putin’s energy blackmail strategy. Unfortunately, Johnson has endorsed Britain’s always-NIMBY minded rural approach to energy infrastructure. But this is incompatible with the notion of a post-Brexit Britain that’s open for investment and business.
So what’s going on here? Why is a Conservative Prime Minister breaking the bank and looking more like a socialist?
Well, it’s the upcoming Dec. 12 election, stupid.
Johnson wants to consolidate voters who are wearied by years of spending restraint. However, I think Johnson is making a mistake here. Showing such a profligate attitude to the government balance, Johnson undercuts his distinction from Labour’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. But he also misses an opportunity to use his impressive oratory towards a nobler cause: that of a free market Britain, unshackled from European Union regulations.
