Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)In politics, victories bring problems just as often as defeats. Boris Johnson’s main claim on the affection of his electorate is that he got Brexit done. His biggest weakness is that, having got Brexit done, he has lost the issue which gives him the most energy. At the Conservative party spring conference in Blackpool this weekend the Prime Minister sounded like a man out of ideas.
Struggling for political definition he told his party that “I know that it’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom every time… When the British people voted for Brexit, in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners. It’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself”.
The comparison is grotesque in itself. To compare a free vote in a referendum, to settle the question of whether a democracy should secede from a voluntary alliance with other democracies, with the brutal invasion of a neighbouring country by a tyrant, is pathetic. There is no other response needed to the Prime Minister’s stupidity than to point out that Ukraine applied last month to become a member of the European Union which it sees, rightly, as one way of guaranteeing the security of its borders.
Yet the Prime Minister needs Brexit to be salient again. Every time Brexit has been put to the test in a vote so far, the 2019 general election being the most notable example, it has proved a popular and galvanising force. It is the perfect culture war issue, the perfect us-versus-them division. Unfortunately, Brexit seems rather beside the point when, for most households, the growing cost of their bills matters more.
The big political event of this week is the Spring Statement by the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak. The war in Ukraine has made a bad economic situation worse and the threat of a recession is now real. The combined shock of energy prices and inflation is as bad as any situation since the dark economic days of the Seventies.
The support Mr Sunak offered last month for household energy bills already seems inadequate, though he has sounded reluctant to do much more until he looks again at the energy price cap in October. Mr Sunak is also determined to press on with his plan to raise employer and employee national insurance contributions by 1.25 percentage points from next month to clear up the Covid-caused backlog in the NHS.
It is probable that he will cut fuel duty and he may well borrow Labour’s policy of cutting VAT on domestic energy bills. But unless Mr Sunak is prepared to act radically on raising benefits and pensions to keep pace with inflation, the cost of living is going to bite, hard and soon. A study by the House of Commons library, commissioned by the Labour party, showed that a working pensioner on an average salary who was liable for the rise in national insurance, would be nearly £1,400 worse off over the next two years. It won’t be lost on the Prime Minister that this stylised person is just the sort of voter the Tory party needs to keep happy. Hence the return of Brexit.
The Prime Minister would love to be in a position to fight an election next year. Yet he is going to need better arguments than he displayed at the Tory spring conference. It will never wash to describe Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party as one that would “raise the white flag” to Putin. Labour has changed completely on foreign policy from the disgrace of the Corbyn years and everyone, including the Prime Minister, knows it. Indeed, he said so himself in the House of Commons not long ago.
