LONDON — The flags from Elizabeth II’s Jubilee hang limp and dusty along Whitehall, and office workers sprawl in their underwear in the yellowed grass of St. James’s Park. The traffic is stalled, and drivers of London’s iconic black taxis bawl insults and make iconic gestures at the Uber drivers blocking their path. A heat wave has hit a city without air conditioning. The air is hot and dirty, and the mood is poisonous. The temperature is in the 90s, but Britain seems to be heading back to the ’70s.
Inflation is at 9%, the highest rate in 40 years, and still rising. Wages, which fell 3.4% in April, are falling faster than at any point in the past two decades. The economy, having recovered much of the ground lost to COVID-19, did not grow at all in February, then shrank by 0.1% in March and by a further 0.4% in April. The consumer price index is at 9%, the highest in its history, and consumer confidence is at its lowest since polling began in the 1970s. On its current pace, Britain will be in a recession with double-digit inflation by the end of the year.
Before the pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed that Britain had the fastest-growing economy among all the G-7 countries. Now, the OECD predicts that Britain will have zero growth in 2023: the worst performance in the G-7. The only major economy that will do worse is Russia’s.
The combination of falling wages and rising prices has already produced a cost-of-living crisis in Britain. In April, when the government raised the price cap, gas and electricity prices rose by an average of 54%. They will rise by a further 40% when the cap is raised again in October. In May, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, warned of “apocalyptic” increases in the price of food. NatWest Bank said that the poorest 20% of households must cut their spending by 20% if they are to pay for food and energy without taking on more debt. The price of a tank of gas, always heavily taxed, has passed £100 ($122). The U.S. dollar value would be higher, but a strong dollar has squashed the British pound from $1.42 in May 2021 to just over $1.20 now. The pessimists warn of a run on the pound, and even a slide to parity.
Much of this is now beyond the British government’s control. The COVID-19 shutdowns severed supply chains and tightened markets across the world. In Britain, as in the United States and elsewhere, the central bank printed billions to keep the economy going. That drove prices sharply upward, as did the release of pent-up demand after the pandemic, which Britain, having produced the AstraZeneca vaccine, exited early and quickly. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused a further spike in commodity prices and a general decline in market confidence. But the severity of Britain’s crisis suggests that the consequences of these external shocks are being worsened by other, self-inflicted weaknesses.
There can be no doubt where the responsibility lies for those weaknesses. While the economic chaos of the 1970s was the work of Labour governments, the Conservatives have been in power for 12 years. They are supposed to be the party of business and of fiscal common sense, the heirs to Margaret Thatcher. Yet they have logged lower rates of growth and higher rates of taxation than their predecessors in the Labour Party. Between 1997 and 2007, under Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, British GDP grew at an average rate of just under 3% per year. From 2010, when David Cameron brought the Conservatives back to power in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, to 2019, when Boris Johnson won the general elections, GDP struggled to break 2% growth per year.
Before the financial crash of 2007, Britain had the second-fastest growth rate in the G-7, behind only the U.S. Since 2008, Britain has had the second-slowest growth rate in the G-7. Productivity growth has slowed to a crawl, and average wages, adjusted for inflation, have barely grown at all. London, a global finance hub, pulled ahead, leaving the rest of the country in the doldrums. The Brexit vote of 2016 mapped onto the winners and losers of this economy, and so did the strategy that won Boris Johnson a landslide in the 2019 elections. The Conservatives, once the party of the southern middle classes, broke the “Red Wall” of historically Labour seats in the ex-industrial heartlands of northern England.
Finally, after decades of division over whether Britain’s future lay inside or outside Europe, the country had a government with a clear majority, and a compact with voters that reflected the society of the 21st century rather than the 19th. What happened next cannot fully be explained by COVID-19. Of course, the new government’s program was derailed by the pandemic, which struck three months into Johnson’s premiership and at one point hospitalized him in an intensive care unit. But as with the underperformance of the British economy, the failure to deliver on the promises of 2019 has more entrenched roots.
“After the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the two general elections in 2017 and 2019, there was great optimism about what could be achieved,” said Michael Mosbacher, the head of the Livable London unit at Policy Exchange, a free-market think tank. “But very little has been made of those Brexit opportunities so far.”
In 2016, Johnson was the acceptable face of the Brexit campaign. He left the dirty work and most of the dog-whistling to his nationalist ally Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, and sold Brexit as an opening to the global economy, rather than a raising of the drawbridge. When Farage posed with a poster depicting a horde of swarthy, young, male migrants under the slogan “Breaking point: The EU has failed us,” Johnson said that the poster was “not my campaign” and “not my politics.” His vision for life after Brexit was “Global Britain”: Unshackled from the European Union’s red tape and protectionism, the British would revert to their historic habits of rampaging around the world, free-trading as they went. That, at least, was the idea.
“They should have had a package of policies: ‘Look, we can do this now that we’ve achieved Brexit!’” Mosbacher said. “But very little has been done. The tough economic policy changes which they were promising haven’t happened. It’s bizarre. It’s a totally missed opportunity.”
Johnson had the intellectual capacity to understand what needed to be done. And thanks to Dominic Cummings, a wonkish adviser who had planned the Brexit campaign, he had “a very strong agenda to modernize the civil service,” according to Mosbacher. The bureaucracy was ossified, and the Treasury, which controlled economic policy, was opposed to Brexit. Yet Johnson fired Cummings in November 2020, only a year into his premiership. Cummings’s feud with the Treasury had destabilized the government. He had been caught violating the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions that he had lobbied for and also, rumor had it, fallen out with Johnson’s new wife, Carrie.
Cummings’s meteoric passage continues to define Johnson’s term. The press feasted on rumors that Johnson’s wife, part-Lady Macbeth, part-green activist, wore the trousers when it came to government policy. Stories about “the court of Carrie Antoinette” were traditional tabloid fun, but when Cummings avenged himself upon Johnson by leaking stories to the press about drinking parties in 10 Downing St. during the COVID lockdowns, he wrecked Johnson’s credibility with the Conservative Party and the voters.
The scandal, dubbed “Partygate,” led to a parliamentary inquiry. Johnson and his finance minister, Rishi Sunak, were fined for breaching their own laws. Johnson had to apologize personally to Queen Elizabeth when it emerged that his staff had been secretly boozing on the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. When Johnson had insisted on three arduous lockdowns, he had appealed to collective solidarity. The country had been in lockdown, and ordinary people were banned from socializing and visiting the dying. The sight of the frail and newly widowed queen, mourning on her own in the chapel of Windsor Castle as the law prescribed, was the image of duty. The blurry snapshots of Johnson’s staff partying were proof that the government had betrayed the people.
The unspoken contract between the government and the voters in Britain is almost feudal. The voters, especially working-class voters, do not care about Johnson’s numerous marriages, or that he might be the first prime minister since Georgian times who is not certain how many children he has fathered; if anything, this brings him closer to his electorate. They do care, however, that the rulers respect the ruled. Johnson has forfeited that respect. In early June, when he and Carrie walked up the steps of Westminster Abbey for the service of thanksgiving that marked Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the throne, they were booed by the crowd. The pollsters don’t bother canvassing the kind of people who wear Union Jack outfits and sleep all night on the sidewalk so they can get a better view of the royal family. They already know whom they vote for. When Parliament resumed, the parliamentary Conservatives held a vote of no confidence.
“He won the vote, but not very decisively,” Michael Mosbacher said. “Margaret Thatcher won hers decisively, and she was still pushed out. It’s weakened Boris, but without threatening his position. I think Boris is safe for now.” In part, this is because there is no Conservative challenger possessed of sufficient charisma to challenge Johnson, and sufficient recklessness to grab the poisoned chalice as the economy goes under. In part, it is because the Labour Party is still contaminated by its last leader, the Trotskyite Jeremy Corbyn, and because his successor, Keir Starmer, is a chronic dullard.
Johnson’s problem is less the Labour Party than the paralysis of his own party. After 12 years in power, the Conservatives are succumbing to exhaustion and sleaze. The talent on their front bench is thinning out, and the tide of scandal is rising. Johnson’s next hurdle is two by-elections. One is being held because the sitting Conservative was convicted of sexually assaulting an underage boy, the other because the sitting Conservative was caught watching pornography on his cellphone during a House of Commons debate.
“Labour are leading by 6% in the polls,” Mosbacher said. “If you consider everything that’s happened — the prime minister being fined, the sleaze, the scandals — Labour should be where they would have been under Tony Blair: a 20-point lead.”
Johnson’s first attempt to reboot his premiership after the Partygate scandal has also turned into a fiasco. Despite his Brexit promises, illegal immigration continues to rise. Small but telegenic parties of desperate migrants now cross the English Channel, one of the world’s busiest seaways, in tiny dinghies. The government’s proposal to deport them was highly popular. But instead of confronting the French, from whose shores the migrants cast off, the government cut a deal with the government of Rwanda. This insulted the dignity of all parties, the Rwandans included. The government brazened it out — even the Prince of Wales said it was appalling — and then, just as the first flight to Rwanda was booked, the government was informed that it had no legal right to deport the migrants.
It turns out that, Brexit or no Brexit, the government is bound by a Blair-era commitment to the European Human Rights Act. The European Human Rights Commission is not part of the EU; it is part of the Council of Europe. “They could have dealt with it in the spring of 2020,” Mosbacher said. “But the optics of leaving the Human Rights Act now look bad. You would be joining Russia and Belarus, and you can, in theory, bring back torture.” This week, the government proposed its alternative, a new Bill of Rights, but the debate over that, Mosbacher warns, may be exploited by a legacy of the Blair years, an alliance of legal activists anti-Brexit peers in the House of Lords.
If Brexit means anything, it means legal sovereignty. For decades, a career in law or the civil service meant working toward the harmonization of British and European law, and the subordination of British law to European law. Brexit means disaggregating them and restoring Britain’s sovereignty, but the bureaucracy is against it. A “large cross section” of the House of Lords, Mosbacher says, is with them. It’s not clear that the Conservatives in the Commons, who remain divided about Brexit, want to fight their erstwhile partners in the bureaucracy. And Johnson, for all his bluster, is shy of confrontation. Tony Blair and the Westminster Blob are having the last laugh — at the expense of democracy.
“Theresa May famously said that the Tories were the nasty party,” Mosbacher reflected. “Boris wants the party to be more cuddly. The way to do that is on environmental issues and animal welfare issues.” Pandering to the obsession of the southern middle classes, Johnson has committed to banning foie gras production and the importation of shark-fin soup. These are not big issues in the Red Wall constituencies. His commitment to a net-zero economy, however, is a guaranteed vote-loser that will hit ordinary people in the wallet.
“Britain is a tragedy,” Henry Kissinger told Gerald Ford in 1975. “It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in.” The tragedy now is that, like the U.S. and Germany, Johnson has committed to a transition to green energy without securing its sources and without considering the financial burden on ordinary consumers. A stopgap plan to buy nuclear reactors from China fell through after human rights groups objected. Instead of buying one from France, the government is pursuing wind farms despite Britain’s high population density and, in a country notorious for its rainy weather, solar power. Add the Ukraine war, and you have a creative recipe for an energy crisis.
Boris Johnson is frequently called a man without principles. If that were the case, his premiership would be in better shape. Since December 2019, he has demonstrated his principles. Unfortunately, they are not the principles he campaigned on. Some of them are principles that he seems to have discovered overnight. Few of them are conservative; if anything, they resemble the Thatcherism-lite triangulation of Tony Blair. And if the future of right-wing parties means populism and protectionism, then Johnson is missing the boat on that, too.
Johnson has always been lucky, and the absence of serious challengers from within or without his own party suggests that his luck still holds. He has always been adept at seizing opportunities, too. But it is not clear that he has seized on the right ones so far.
“Boris is the sort of person who can hold three contradictory views and believe he holds all of them dearly, depending on who he is with,” Mosbacher noted. “He was a newspaper columnist for years. He’s very much used to banging out very strident opinions which he might not hold to sincerely, and without having to do too much homework.”
Johnson has more than two years, until early 2025, before the next elections. Barring the kind of unnecessary disaster that his party is increasingly good at generating, he will lead them into that election. Barring an economic catastrophe, which is also not impossible to imagine, his 80-seat majority will be enough of a cushion. There is still time for him to discover a new set of principles. The question is whether the Thatcherite solution, lowering taxes and cutting red tape, will be enough. The prime minister who promised to save Britain from the European Union now must save it from a global economy in disarray.
Dominic Green is a historian and critic. His latest book is The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898.
