Johnson's closing speech to conference yesterday was by all accounts more like a warm up act for Jim Davidson, delivered by a third rate comedian on LSD, full of jokes and sketching out a fantasy vision of Britain after he’s finished with it. He was gaslighting the nation with party members as unwitting bit players, cheering to order. John Crace has a terrific description of Johnson in The Guardian as a sort of Kim Jong-un saying whatever he likes, true or false, knowing that whatever it was would be applauded with furious enthusiasm by his adoring audience.
Outside in the real world things were a bit different. People were still finding it hard to obtain fuel and supermarkets were struggling to put food on their shelves. It was quite a contrast.
Commentators seem to see the speech as a problem for Labour in that the PM is now occupying their territory. Tim Shipman, political editor at The Sunday Times tweeted:
Boris Johnson now squats like a giant toad across British politics. He has expanded the Overton window in both directions. Praising bankers and drug companies, while tight on immigration and woke history. Cheered for lauding the NHS and pro LGBT. Where does Labour find a gap?
— Tim Shipman (@ShippersUnbound) October 6, 2021
The answer of course is that there is actually a yawning chasm between what Johnson says and what actually happens. This will be his problem. The Overton window by the way, is the range of acceptable or possible political positions.
Johnson doesn’t use a speechwriter like conventional politicians, he drafts them himself. The Spectator published the full text and I assume they simply copied and pasted it because the formatting is really odd, almost random. It looks just like how Johnson is in real life, totally disorganised.
But imagine any other political figure trying to appeal to both Corbynistas and fiscally dehydrated Tories, to social liberals and the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade. You could draft a speech with all the elements that seemed to do so but you couldn’t do it in practice.
On Newsnight, the political commentator Steve Richards said the prime minister's philosophy of restricting immigration to force up wages was the policy Tony Benn used to advocate. Imagine that. A Tory prime minister accused of being a Bennite. Nothing will ever surprise me again.
His speech was like producing in written form one of those optical illusions that can’t exist in reality. Only Johnson would think of doing it because he lives in his own fantasy dream world where everything is possible. Plus, he’s not worried about being exposed as a liar because he and we already know he is one.
I didn’t watch the speech - I can't bear to look at him or hear his voice - but I caught various clips on the news. It was like watching a master con man reassuring the mark again and again, in the way that Bernie Madoff, the convicted Ponzi scheme fraudster, did for years.
Party activists in the audience went away reassured yesterday, and no doubt millions of others watching at home were too. Did that make Johnson’s Ponzi scheme right? Err, no.
Johnson is blaming industry for not coping with a massive change of rules that he chose to introduce overnight on January 1st this year, after business spent the previous 18 months pleading with him and other ministers to give them time to prepare. Johnson now says we should not rely on the lever marked ‘cheap labour’ to solve our problems - quite a statement from a Conservative prime minister. No doubt the trade unions representing civil servants or the NHS will have made a note of it.
If however, anyone thinks that cheap labour is the problem, wait and see what expensive labour is like.
It has been reported that broccoli pickers can now earn £30 an hour in some places. Think about that when you look at the price of fresh British vegetables in the supermarket in a few weeks' time. I wonder how much of that broccoli went for export?
I venture to suggest the party’s coming problems will be magnified later when it dawns on them that none of the things the prime minister promised yesterday are likely to happen or are remotely possible or even desirable in some cases.
Everything points to a period of stagflation, to interest rates having to rise to control spiralling inflation, this will push a lot of people with large mortgages into financial problems and increase repayments on the huge amount of government debt we have. It will make the sale of government bonds more difficult and expensive in future.
Coming on top of ten or more years of austerity, it will be a disaster for us and him.
It cannot be too long before voters see through him. The Conservative chief whip has suggested he could be in office for twenty years. God help us if that happens. I doubt very much that it will, the next twenty weeks may see the end of him. Britain has its share of stupid people but they aren’t that stupid.
Sooner or later some of them will realise the Conservatives have been in charge since 2010 and while the PM is good at deflecting blame, even he isn’t that good. Voters will eventually come to their senses.
Johnson may have wowed the faithful in Manchester yesterday but people who aren’t total halfwits condemned it as “economically illiterate” although to be clear that was the Adam Smith Institute who, despite saying they have no official position on Brexit, seem to support it, which makes them partial halfwits in my eyes.
Others in the business community were scathing at his attempts to shift the blame onto them. In a series of pre-conference interviews the prime minister insisted that it was not his job to “fix every problem in business”, dismissing claims of labour shortages and supply chain problems that are fuelling inflation. The word 'fix' might be seen as not quite the word industry has in mind for Johnson's role in our present difficulties.
He told the BBC that the disruption had been caused “very largely by the strength of the economic recovery” and that industry was “getting to grips with it, finding the staff that they need”.
A few quotes from The Times; article:
David Page, chairman and co-founder of Fulham Shore, which runs the Franco Manca and Real Greek restaurant chains, said Johnson had never “driven a truck, made a pizza, picked a root vegetable in the winter in the rain. He knows nothing of the above. It’s going Pete Tong and he’s in denial. Let’s hope he’s well advised and does a U-turn regarding lengthy visas. Are the cabinet all brainless? Or are they nodding donkeys?”
Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “Wage growth, without economic growth, will add to inflationary pressure. If the government wants to see more high-quality job creation it needs to remove barriers to recruitment and upskilling. As things stand, it’s adding to them.
“A hike in employers’ national insurance, which essentially serves as a jobs tax, in the spring will leave a lot of small businesses with tough decisions to make as they grapple with inflation and cash reserves seriously depleted by months of Covid-linked disruption.”
Roger Whiteside, chief executive of Greggs, which warned yesterday of disruption to its supply of staff and ingredients, told The Times: “There are so many black swans, a flock of black swans . . . every morning you have to wake up and expect the unexpected.”
Government sources told The Times that the prime minister was 'frustrated' by public calls to relax post-Brexit immigration rules to address labour shortages. Downing Street believes that Johnson’s tough stance is popular with Brexit supporters because of his pledge to tackle uncontrolled immigration.
Mmmm, we shall see.
