Don’t fall for Boris Johnson’s tricks about UK economic crash – Joyce McMillan

A 20 per cent fall in UK economy – the potential combined effect of the coronavirus crisis and a no-deal Brexit – would surely end Boris Johnson’s career, says Joyce McMillan.

Boris Johnson can be expected to try to sell the damage caused by a no-deal Brexit as part of the effect of the pandemic or somehow put the blame on Brussels (Picture: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/AFP via Getty Images)

It was just six months ago today that the British people voted in the general election to send Boris Johnson in triumph into Downing Street. Yet to most of us, that day now seems a lifetime ago; and in this strange summer of 2020 something like a perfect storm now seems to be gathering around the dishevelled figure of Britain’s Prime Minister. On one hand, a leader who until recently was happily pocketing £5,000 a time to write allegedly jocular columns featuring racist witticisms about “smiling piccaninies” hardly seems well placed to lead the country at this moment of Black Lives Matter, when Britain is finally beginning to recognise just how much of its historic wealth and imperial power was based on the brutal enslavement of black people.

On the other – and despite endless excuse-making by various government apologists – it is becoming increasingly clear that the UK Government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis has been disastrous, with Britain now showing the second highest death rate per million of population in the world, and perhaps the highest of all if we use the most statistically robust measure of excess deaths. Worse, we have blundered – predictably, since the alleged trade-off between public health and the economy was always false – into a worst-of-all-worlds scenario in which our shocking death rates are combined with an exceptionally long lockdown, the lifting of it fraught with risk. This week, the OECD forecast that even if there is no ‘second wave’ of infection, the UK’s economy is likely to take an 11.5 per cent hit this year; not much worse than some of our neighbours, but still, possibly the worst in the developed world.

And beyond both crises there is also the small matter of Brexit, the issue that, until the Covid crisis, had absolutely dominated British politics and political coverage for the last half decade. In a psychological sense, it may seem that Brexit is “over” now for most voters; the Labour leader Keir Starmer has said that Britain’s departure from the EU must be accepted, and the UK technically left the Union on 31 January, although we remain in that limbo called “transition” where nothing has actually changed yet.

The hard economic truth, though, is that Brexit is not over at all; on the contrary – and to judge by this week’s reports from both sides in the current talks – the Johnson government now seems to be motoring hard towards a no-deal Brexit, come 31 December, that could deliver another 6 to 8 per cent hammer-blow to the UK economy, just as it struggles back to its feet after the Covid crisis. The UK has refused to seek an extension of the transition period, despite the unprecedented economic circumstances; and the latest news is that the UK Government is offering to introduce a tariff regime that would make a mockery of its promise of “frictionless trade” with the EU while also briefing noisily against the political agreement signed by Boris Johnson himself, as recently as January.

The belief of those closest to Johnson, it seems, is that none of these crises necessarily poses a long-term threat to the government’s popularity. On Black Lives Matter, they doubtless feel that a little anti-racist bluster will carry the government through, and that Britain’s overwhelming white majority – 87 per cent at the last count – can be relied on not to prioritise the issue, when the chips are down. On Covid-19 they face a tougher task, with so many families bereaved, or closely in touch with front-line workers; but with the help of sympathetic headlines, they probably believe they can bamboozle most of the British public into ignoring embarrassing international comparisons and believing that Britain did the best it could in the face of an unavoidable natural disaster.

When it comes to the economy though, and the impact of Brexit on trade and employment, Boris Johnson’s chances of bluffing his way through the traumatic year to come seem much less robust. According to the New York Times, some senior Tories imagine that the Covid-19 economic collapse will actually provide good cover for the negative impact of Brexit and enable a blame-shifting exercise in which people will essentially come to believe that Covid caused the whole debacle, with no-deal Brexit as a mere footnote.

There’s something about the prospect of an overall 18 to 20 per cent decline in economic activity though – combined with massive rises in unemployment, and a new and semi-permanent round of Brexit-related supply chain nightmares affecting everything from food on supermarket shelves to essential parts for manufacturing industry – that might strike fear even into the most blindly Brexit-supporting Tory, particularly if he or she is a new MP representing a hard-hit constituency with a small majority.

In Scotland, there is recent poll evidence that the government’s continuing pursuit of a super-hard Brexit, in these circumstances, is beginning to shift growing numbers of 2016 Remain voters into the independence camp; and across the UK it could also represent a final straw for those Tory supporters who, while backing Brexit, are still able to remember that a no-deal exit was no part of the offer made by the Leave campaign, which repeatedly insisted that to leave the EU without a frictionless trade deal was unthinkable and would never happen.

It will, of course, come as no surprise to at least 16 million British voters that on that matter as on so many others the word of the Leave campaign was not to be trusted. Over the next year, though, we are about to witness a huge battle of perception on which the whole viable future of the UK may well depend.

On one side, Boris Johnson and his inner circle will be trying – and in Scotland and Northern Ireland almost certainly failing – to sell the Covid crisis, a hard Brexit, and the huge economic downturn they bring in their wake as part of that same narrative that has served them so well over the last half decade; an unavoidable disaster pluckily coped with to the sound of Vera Lynn songs, despite the evil efforts of Brussels to make it even worse for us.

And on the other there is surely now a growing chance that this crisis, in its sheer gravity and impact, may become the reality check that finally puts an end to the no-deal fantasy of complete separation from our closest neighbours and biggest trading partners; and that perhaps also ends the political career of Boris Johnson, a man without substance who, out of sheer ambition, chose the path of hard Brexit against his own better judgment, and is now doomed to play out that dangerous no-deal game in a political landscape so changed by the year of Covid that it may finally prove his undoing.

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