The Binfire of the Vanities

Boris Johnson, Brexit, and Our Grifters' Paradise

Yesterday, for the first time since the Partygate scandal broke, the British electorate was given the limited opportunity to give a verdict on the ruling party and its prime minister.  As predicted, the results have not been favourable to the government, and if they don’t suggest that Labour’s tepid politics have roused the nation from its torpor, they certainly don’t augur well for Boris Johnson’s political future. 

It remains to be seen whether today’s results hasten Johnson’s downfall, or whether he and his hapless stooges stagger into another general election in an attempt to save a reputation that should be beyond salvage.

Neither outcome can be taken for granted or discounted, because no matter how low Boris Johnson’s government has sunk, these are times when governments across the world can get away with things that might once have seemed unbelievable, without facing the kind of consequences that we might once have expected.

There’s a tendency amongst the more intransigent sections of the pro-Corbyn left to argue that there is no difference between the Tories and Starmer’s Labour, or between the current government and its Tory predecessors.

But whatever Starmer’s limitations, it shouldn’t be controversial to point out that this government is spectacularly awful, and so much worse than any that came before it.  No government in British history has demonstrated such a devastating combination of cruelty, corruption, recklessness, incompetence and dishonesty.

Less than two weeks ago, the government announced a cruel new policy to deport ‘illegal immigrants’ crossing the Channel to Rwanda. Now it has admitted that it might not be possible to actually implement this policy, because of opposition from ‘lefty lawyers’ and the European Convention on Human Rights.

There is no evidence that lawyers opposing these removals are anything other than lawyers trying to uphold the law.  The ECHR is the first convention of the Council of Europe, which was adopted in 1950 with the approval of the Brexiter hero Winston Churchill. 

Yet now Johnson and the Tory press are turning the Rwanda policy into yet another Brexit ‘culture war’ to hide the fact that they didn’t seem to understand its implications in the first place. 

In the same way the ‘Minister for Brexit Opportunities, Jacob Rees-Mogg announced that the UK would not be imposing import controls on food products entering the country from the EU, because these controls would have resulted in higher costs for consumers. 

Millions of pounds have been spent building new port facilities to carry out these checks, all of which have now been wasted.  Many people have warned for years  that the fetishization of sovereignty and border control is not compatible with the quotidian practicalities of trading relationships with the UK’s neighbours.

Yet rather than admit that the UK’s decision to leave the Single Market and Customs Union has brought new ‘red tape’ instead of reducing it, and therefore incurred higher costs for the consumer, Rees-Mogg described the abandonment of sanitary and phytosanitary checks as  a Brexit benefit and a response to the EU’s ‘protectionist racket.’

This combination of knee-jerk boosterism and dishonesty has been Johnson’s kneejerk response to almost everything it does.  Again and again the government makes pronouncements about policies that it doesn’t seem to fully understand, which it doesn’t implement, and then retracts or changes later on.

On 26 April the government announced that it would relax health and safety rules to cut the cost of childcare, without apparently realising that this would make childcare unsafe and therefore unpalatable to any but the most desperate parents.

On Wednesday the Daily Express reported Johnson’s intention to ‘fire up the economy’ to beat  inflation by ‘growth and cutting waste.’

There was no indication of how Johnson intended to do this, most probably because he himself doesn’t know how to do it. But today the Bank of England announced that inflation would rise to 10 percent and the UK would enter into recession, proving once again that no amount of rabbit-out-of-a-hat policies can defy the laws of economic gravity.

None of this seems to matter to a government that seems to have no other purpose except its own survival and which sees perpetual distraction and perpetual dishonesty as the key to its survival, and whose members appear willing to lie about anything, from Angela Raynor’s crossed legs and Keir Starmer’s ‘beergate’, to their gross mismanagement of the pandemic.

On 24 April the High Court found the government’s seeding of asymptomatic Covid patients in care homes unlawful. In response Johnson and his disreputable former sidekick Matt Hancock denied being aware of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission at the time this decision was taken, despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary.

This promiscuous lying about big things and small things is consistently accompanied by puerile boasting, in which the UK is always world-beating and world-leading and definitely better than the French or the Germans.  

But the UK is clearly not world-beating. This is a country that cannot meet the basic needs of its own population; a country with the sixth richest economy in the world, where millions of people must now choose between food and heat; where you better not get sick or have an accident, because you could be waiting hours in A&E and months for a hospital appointment; where you’re lucky even to get an appointment with your GP, because there aren’t enough new doctors and so many are now leaving the NHS.

It’s a country where dentists across the country are refusing to take more NHS patients, a country where 2.5 million people used foodbanks last year, where the average house price is £287,000 and 7.5 million people can’t afford to buy any house at all.

It’s a country now facing the biggest cost-of-living crisis since records began, where millions are facing a double whammy of rising food prices and increased energy costs.

You would have to be a very good government indeed to thrive politically in such circumstances, and this government is clearly not thriving. 

Not all the problems the country is facing can be laid at Johnson’s door. Covid and Ukraine would have challenged any government.. Nine years of Tory misgovernance had hollowed out communities across the country, and left the most vulnerable sectors of the population more unprotected than they already were, even before Johnson came to power.

But Johnson’s government has compounded all the worst Tory vices and added a few new ones of its own.  It has abandoned the constituencies the Tory Party traditionally represented, from big business and small businesses, the Church of England, farmers, rural communities in the Home Counties.

Though the pandemic briefly dragged the government away from its own instincts to become a ‘big state’ government, it now represents no one except itself - and the Tory donors or lobbyists able to capture the attention of this smoking wreck of a prime minister and his avaricious cronies.

These beneficiaries include the Tory peer Michele Mone, whose house was raided by police last week, and the individuals and companies that are seeking to prise open the NHS. Because make no mistake about it, there is a reason why the likes of Kate Andrews, Fraser Nelson and the Mail are suddenly exercised about NHS waiting lists and the near-impossibility of getting a GP appointment.

Once the government asked us to clap for ‘our’ NHS, now it seeks  to run it down and sell it off.  Despite its ‘levelling up’ rhetoric, this wrecking ball government has no interest in the common good and no knowledge of what the common good even is.

This week it was revealed that Johnson and his wife spent £27,000 on takeaway organic meals. Yet now his ministers dispense patronising advice on how to avoid high prices by eating ‘value’ brands.

Presented with the case of a pensioner forced to go on the bus to stay warm, Johnson boasted that he was the man who introduced the ‘freedom pass’ – neatly combining yet another false claim with the absence of empathy that you might once have expected from the court of the Sun King.

No country that really cared about its own best interests should have placed a man like this in the highest public office in the land, and there are limits to how much of this any democracy can stand. But the ongoing descent of the UK into a dystopian grifter’s paradise is not solely due to the atrocious character of the man at the centre of this transformation.

The Elephant in the Room

Whatever his personal failings, Johnson’s fatuous narcissism echoes delusions of British ‘greatness’ that continue to obsess whole swathes of the population.  He used Brexit to gain power, and he now uses it to neutralise any opposition to his power and rally support for his flailing administration.

The result is a country in which Brexit cannot be mentioned, except to cite some mostly fictitious ‘benefit’ or ‘opportunity’; a country where public mention of the negative consequences of Brexit by an opposition politician is likely to result in accusations of treason or a desire to subvert the people’s will.

Labour is so terrified of falling into this trap that it won’t mention Brexit at all, except to suggest that it can find benefits that the governments has so far failed to find.  

It’s a standard recognition in any treatment of addiction, that addicts must first recognise they are suffering from an illness before they can be cured of it.

In this country, we haven’t done that.  Virtually the entire political class and much of the mainstream media have followed the government’s lead, and refuse to recognise the Brexit elephant in the room that looms over so many of our current crises, and which makes it more difficult to respond to them effectively.

To point this out is not an argument for rejoining the EU - a political impossibility at this point - but it should not necessary to rejoin in order to recognise the damage Brexit has done to the country, and also to the democratic conversation about how this country should be governed.

As long as this discussion is suppressed, we will have politicians like Johnson, or even worse, who will seek to extract political advantage from our collective unwillingness to recognise the gratuitous harm that Brexit has inflicted on the country.

And in the meantime, the UK will continue to rot slowly, respect for its institutions will crumble, and we will all be dragged down to the same level as the dangerous clown who still clings on to the position he never should have been given.