Boris Johnson’s road to nowhere
The revelations about the series of “lockdown parties” held at 10 Downing Street (the office and residence of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson) and elsewhere in the centres of government in London have exposed a deep decay at the heart of the ruling Conservatives. The true extent of Tory elitism and disregard for human life—things they work very hard to keep under wraps—has once again been thrust into the spotlight, and Johnson’s position as leader is under serious threat.
Throughout a pandemic that has claimed more than 155,000 lives in the UK, Tory ministers and staffers repeatedly congregated to sing along to ABBA, eat cake and drink suitcases’ worth of wine. The fact that many of these events were held in direct breach of the government’s own COVID-19 restrictions only confirms that the Tories view themselves as a special breed, subject to different rules from the rest of the population.
Johnson’s nonchalant response to the “partygate” affair, the widespread public anger it has provoked,and the accompanying steep fall in the government’s popularity have precipitated a crisis inside the Tory party. Johnson initially denied any knowledge of the parties, but was forced to apologise last month after images of him in attendance at some functions were leaked to the press. Still, he tried to deflect blame by claiming he wasn’t aware that these were non-work events that violated lockdown rules. Given, however, that police now have photographs of Johnson nursing a beer at his own birthday celebration—held in direct contravention to rules limiting in-person gatherings—the claim that he didn’t know he was at a party is unlikely to stand up in a criminal investigation.
The prime minister has less to fear from law enforcement, however, than from mutiny in his own ranks. Fifteen Tory MPs have publicly called for Johnson to resign, and it’s rumoured that the threshold for a vote of no confidence could be reached at any time. Of course, none of the Conservatives speaking out against Johnson are doing so because they believe it was wrong for him to party in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Rather, they are using the scandal as an opportunity to topple a leader they see as having outlived his purpose and become an electoral liability for the party as a whole.
Before the pandemic hit two years ago, Johnson’s leadership was already more precarious than it may have appeared. The British state was still reeling from the result of the 2016 “Brexit” referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The referendum had been initiated by the Tory leadership with a view to stifling eurosceptic sentiment within the party. Almost the entire British ruling class, including the mainstream of the Tory government under David Cameron, campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU. British capital—heavily financialised and reliant on access to European markets—felt that leaving Europe would be a disaster.
The fact that a majority of the British population voted to leave largely reflected a deep resentment of the neoliberal establishment—especially after the austerity years that followed the eurozone crisis in 2011. The Tories, traditionally the ruling class’s preferred representatives, were left bitterly divided and discredited in the eyes of big business.
Even after the British ruling class had largely reconciled itself to the reality of Brexit, it seemed negotiations would drag on forever and that a satisfactory trade deal with the EU would never be reached. Johnson, an opportunistic latecomer to the eurosceptic wing of the Tories, was elected party leader and appointed prime minister after Theresa May resigned in June 2019. He then led the Conservatives to a crushing victory against the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party in the December 2019 general election on the back of the slogan “Get Brexit done”. His strongly pro-Brexit stance, combined with a vague promise to do away with austerity, resonated with many traditional Labour voters, particularly in the de-industrialised north and the Midlands.
Johnson was remarkably successful, initially, in rejuvenating the Tories and carving out a new popular base. He was able to cohere warring factions around his leadership and skilfully outflank a far-right electoral challenge from the UK Independence Party. And he did in fact get Brexit done—with unexpected proficiency. Johnson negotiated a deal with the EU that allowed Britain to “set its own rules” on labour and environmental regulations while retaining its trade privileges in Europe. This had the effect of pacifying hard Brexiters in the Conservative ranks at the same time as reassuring British capital that its substantial international connections would be protected.
Despite some early wins, however, Brexit would persist as a destabilising factor for Johnson’s leadership. Before the ink was dry on the new EU trade deal, cleavages were already opening over the way forward for British capital after its exit from Europe. Johnson was caught between two poles. On the one hand he needed to limit immediate disruptions to business, such as those arising from new customs arrangements, while on the other he had to deliver on the long-term perspectives of eurosceptic Tories who had backed him as leader. This faction expects a transition to a deregulated, low-tax “global Britain” with independent trade relations in Asia and other emerging markets—more the die-hard fantasy of a fallen empire than a genuinely viable strategy for British capital.
As COVID-19 hit UK shores in January 2020, then, there were already some emerging threats to Johnson’s position. In this context, it’s little surprise he preferred to try to ignore the existence of the virus for as long as possible, insisting instead that natural “herd immunity” would solve the problem. The pandemic confronted Johnson as an inconvenient disruption to his project of restabilising the Tory party and winning back the trust of big business.
As it became clear the pandemic wouldn’t pass quickly, further divisions arose. The Conservative hard right cohered around an anti-lockdown program, and quarrels escalated over the extent of state intervention into the economy. Johnson’s furlough scheme for workers and handouts to business propelled UK government debt to its highest point since World War Two. This is intolerable to large swathes of Tory parliamentarians and donors who still subscribe to Thatcherite fiscal doctrine. Other so-called “tax and spend” Conservatives feel historically low interest rates and declining profitability justify a more interventionist approach. This is the dominant tendency within Johnson’s cabinet. But their vision is one of taxpayer-funded handouts for business, not of state spending on public welfare.
The fallout from the “partygate” scandal, and the precarious state of Johnson’s leadership, can be understood only with these longer-term intra-party tensions in mind.
Whether Johnson stays or goes, however, 2022 is set to be another nightmarish year for workers and the poor in Britain. Some economists predict British households will be hit harder over the next twelve months than they were during the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The UK’s consumer prices index (a measure of inflation) rose by 5.4 percent in the year to December 2021—its highest level in 30 years. At the same time, wages increased by only 3.8 percent on an annualised basis between September and November, meaning workers are forking out a higher portion of their income just to access basic goods and services.
Households also face a looming blowout in energy prices. Annual costs are expected to spiral by 54 percent, or an additional £600 per year on average, when government regulators lift the rates ceiling in April. This comes in a context in which almost 10,000 excess deaths per year are already caused by fuel poverty, according to research by National Energy Action, an NGO. Changes to National Insurance taxes in the same month will disproportionately affect those on lower incomes, and a threshold freeze means that if wages do rise they will, in many cases, be immediately offset by higher taxes.
The Tories and the mainstream press blame rising prices on the COVID-19 pandemic, and tax increases for workers are spun as a necessary sacrifice to save the National Health Service from collapse. In reality, this is the return of austerity by stealth. The regressive taxation system that funds the NHS, for example, is designed so that earnings under £50,000 per year are taxed at 12 percent, while earnings over that threshold attract only a 2 percent tax rate (meaning those on higher incomes pay a significantly lower rate overall). The pandemic should have forced governments to demand more from the rich, but instead they’re pushing the burden further onto the poorest with a 1.25 percent tax increase across the board. Wage stagnation means this is a real pay cut for many workers.
This cost of living crisis is far from a pandemic-induced inevitability; it’s a deliberate assault on the working class. The government could, for instance, have limited price rises in energy by enforcing price caps or providing rebates funded by taxes on the windfall profits of the fossil fuel industry. Shell and British Petroleum posted a combined profit of almost £40 billion last year. If there’s one thing the Tories are united on, however, it’s that a particularly ruthless pro-business approach has been essential in regaining the trust of Britain’s capitalists after Brexit, and they have no intention of changing that approach in the pandemic era.
The problem for the Tories is that voters tend to resent governments that send living standards off a cliff, especially if the members of those governments were caught partying while people died in their thousands, and even more so if the prime minister was elected on a promise never to reintroduce austerity. Local elections will be held across England in May, less than a month after the changes to National Insurance and energy prices come into effect, and Johnson’s tainted image, combined with mounting anger over the cost of living, threatens them with a wipe-out at the polls.
Until recently, the received wisdom inside the party was that Johnson might be removed after the local elections, a poor result providing a legitimate excuse for an orderly changing of the guard. A post-election change of leader would, by providing a natural bookend to the Johnson era, win the Tories breathing space to continue pursuing the same reactionary agenda with a “fresh face”—relatively untainted by association with events of recent months. The “partygate” scandal has complicated this schedule. Were Johnson to step down unexpectedly or be removed by a vote of no confidence in advance of the elections, it could—by the greater impression of continuity given by the act of “changing horses mid-stream”—doom his successor, and by extension the party, to carry the much deteriorated public regard for the government through the elections and beyond.
There are significant potential dangers for the Tories, in short, both in letting Johnson continue as leader and in removing him. So for now he continues as prime minister—stumbling on from scandal to scandal, crisis to crisis, with no clear end in sight.
In a last-ditch attempt to pacify his most rabid critics on the right, Johnson has promised a complete end to COVID-19 restrictions (including isolation requirements for the infected). There have already been more than 8,000 deaths from the virus in the UK since the start of the year. Johnson’s move will condemn thousands more to death. This, and all the similar decisions he has made in the course of the pandemic that have contributed to Britain’s horrific COVID-19 death toll, are a much greater crime than any amount of carousing in 10 Downing Street—and one that, given the normalisation of death on a massive scale around the world, he is unlikely ever to be held accountable for.
The response to the barbarism of Tory rule, whether it’s Johnson at the helm or one of his various potential successors, should be to rebuild resistance in the workplaces and on the streets. Significant concessions can often be won in moments of political crisis such as this. Now, with the Conservative government weak and divided, there has never been a more important time to fight.
