Throughout the election campaign it proved impossible to put the sneering aristocrat Jacob Rees Mogg in front of the electorate because his smug arrogance was losing them votes. His sole contribution was to pontificate that clever people like him wouldn’t have stayed put in the Grenfell Tower. His reward for the sickening idea that those victims of his enthusiasm for light touch regulation were too stupid to live was to keep his Ministerial seat. Now the election is safely out of the way he has been given the nod to carry on lolling about on the front benches reeking of contempt for the poor.
By comparison anyone who showed the remotest hint of independent thinking has been given a very different message. They have been forced out or sacked. Former Chancellor Sajid Javid went for refusing to allow Johnson to surround him with a team of advisers who were hand-picked for blind loyalty to the PM. Julian Smith, an ultra-loyal quiet man who in public always supported whatever line the party announced, got sacked for daring to ask awkward questions in private. The fact that in a remarkably short time he had got the Northern Ireland Assembly up and running and had the trust of all sides on the island of Ireland was ignored. He was sacked for not being sufficiently blind in his loyalty.
Loyalty to one faction of one party has become the only benchmark for becoming a government Minister. Independent thinking is not required. Nor is an interest in trying to work out how policies might actually function. The civil service is being deliberately politicised. Any senior civil servant who dares to try and ask how a policy might be successfully implemented is simply moved aside or briefed against until their position becomes unsustainable. Pritti Patel once got sacked for breaking the Ministerial codes and holding unauthorised meetings with Israeli lobbyists. Now she does the sacking of anyone who dares to point out to her that any of her policies have practical implications and might require a little more thought.
When it comes to the media the government is following exactly the same game plan. Intimidate all opposition. After the 2017 General Election the BBC was punished for displaying its required impartiality by having around a billion pounds taken off it unless it took the blame for charging pensioners for their licence fee. At the same time political appointments were made to the BBC boards that made it a much more right-wing broadcaster. That wasn’t enough for Johnson. He and his advisers aren’t happy with a BBC that displays a right-wing bias but also makes some kind of effort to broadcast other ideas. He wants a cheer leader not an independent broadcaster. So, he is now threatening to destroy the organisation completely by making it optional to pay the licence fee. He avoids giving any interviews with journalists who might actually ask hard questions. Instead he occasionally goes to a breakfast TV studio or opens a new Primary School hoping that the hardest question will be what grooming products he uses on his mop of blonde hair.
Then there is the judiciary. Apparently, it is no longer a good idea to have an independent Supreme Court in the UK. What we need is for all appointments to it to be politically vetted by the Prime Minister. In Johnson’s world justice shouldn’t be a matter of fair-minded examination of all the evidence followed by a professional opinion on the law. He wants it dependent on the political loyalty of judges he has chosen for their correct party line.
All this is very dangerous stuff but it doesn’t come from the mind of one evil genius advisor called Cummings. It stems directly from the choices of a British Prime Minister who displays utter contempt for the traditions of his office. The first thing he did after being elected was to go on a long holiday. To a destination that someone else paid for. Then he issued instructions to delay the investigation into the way he used public office to support the career of his former girlfriend. Before filing away the investigation into connections between the Vote Leave campaign that he headed up and money from Russia. Normal leadership duties like visiting victims of major floods have been ignored in case the photo opportunity looks bad.
He is now gearing up for what will be sold as a ‘giveaway’ budget. So, get ready for a lot of spin and no substance. The budget will contain as many gestures as it possibly can that sound nice. There will be money for the neglected regions. No mention will be made of the loss of European Social Fund support for those regions and the absence of any meaningful net gain. Nor will there be serious new money for local government. The cost of care for the elderly will be fudged, confused and blustered with real skill. Their actual care by actual people will continue to be neglected. New and wonderful transport services will be promised for the regions. Which will turn out to be located where the votes are needed not where the transport connections are and we’ll continue to have a mess of private rail companies operating under weak contracts that they can walk away from if they prove unprofitable. There will be announcements about funding for extra hospitals and more money for the NHS. Actual payments per patient per operation in real terms will continue to go down Schools will be told that they have a great settlement. Only for Head Teachers to discover that they are once again desperately short of cash and having to increase class sizes.
Worst of all is that we are heading for a budget that will be trumpeted as being “the greenest ever”. You can pretty much bet the bank on nice sounding sugar coated environmental initiatives being given prominent billing. Who could possibly object to a budget that paves the way for electric cars? Or one that finally provides some money for improved local bus services? I would also be astonished if the new Chancellor doesn’t find a way to create a headline about tackling plastic pollution.
Owt is, of course, better than nowt. We must be grateful for small mercies and for knowing that even a far-right British government now needs to be seen to be doing something to tackle the multiple environmental crises that currently engulf us. But these mercies are going to be very small indeed compared to the extent of the need. You can’t fix a climate emergency on soundbites and spin. The contrast between the urgency of the need for action and the cynicism of the treatment of the issue as a nice little side line will remain.
This government has at its head a liar, a cheat and a man who regularly betrays the women in his private life. There is therefore only one thing that we can rely on from him. Every policy that he announces will be in his own self interest and be about his own self-aggrandisement. For a while this smack of strong and determined government may prove an acceptable change for a public that has been utterly unimpressed by the political chaos that followed Brexit. But arrogant self confidence surrounded by blindly loyal supporters never works out well in the long run. It is a matter of time before this government begins to unravel under the weight of its own incompetence.
I would go so far as to put a date on that matter of time. Things will start to go much more seriously wrong for this government around the 1st January next year. When propaganda begins to run into the realities of the hardest of badly organised Brexits and there is going to be only one man to blame. Rarely will extreme unpopularity have been so richly deserved.