Just how much can he get away with? It’s extraordinary what Boris Johnson can do and still not lose the support of his voters.
People I know who were quick to condemn Tony Blair for lying over Iraq, or Bill Clinton for his extramarital dalliances, put up just fine with Johnson who won’t even say how many children he’s fathered, and who seems only to breathe to lie. Take the way that during the campaign over Britain leaving the EU, he posed in front of a bus painted with the message that Brexit would deliver £350 million a week for the NHS. Now, less than three months into full Brexit, he claims the exchequer can’t afford more than a 1% increase in salaries for NHS staff.
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| The big lie: Boris Johnson by the Brexit bus with its suggestion that leaving the EU would free £350m a week which could be used for the NHS |
There’s been much talk recently of the Peak End Rule proposed by the Israeli-American psychologist and philosopher Daniel Kahneman. This suggests that in a series of experiences, the one that matters is the last.
By way of example, imagine a British government committing a string of unprincipled and grossly incompetent errors, such as taking inadequate action against a pandemic, failing to order enough equipment to combat it, and dismally under-delivering on promises to provide adequate testing. Those errors lead to the nation having one of the world’s highest death rates from the disease, and suffering the worst damage economically of any G7 country.
In the Kahneman hypothesis, that lamentable sequence matters not a jot if it’s followed by one good decision, such as launching a successful vaccination campaign ahead of other nations.
That’s what seems to have happened in Britain. The vaccination programme went well and voters who were turning away from Johnson, have flooded back. Even though the mortality from the disease is still at a record level globally.
Rather than the Peak End Rule, it sometimes seems to me that we’re looking at another principle, possibly first proposed by the US journalist H L Mencken, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”.
Replace “American” by “British” and you have a possible explanation of the behaviour of many Johnson voters.
The other phenomenon here is simple cheapskatery. The British, and in particular the British Conservative Party, do sometimes want to do the right thing. But they always want to do it on the cheap.
When David Cameron came to power in 2010, many of his supporters told me that it was quite impossible to keep carrying the level of public debt the previous (Labour) government had accrued.
The conclusion was that what was needed was a period of austerity. Public spending cuts. Putting government finances back on a sound footing.
The trouble is that cutting spending puts people out of work, it eliminates money-earning projects, and it reduces the government’s tax take. Paradoxically – the great economist James Maynard Keynes called it the paradox of thrift – reduced expenditure can lead to increased indebtedness.
As has happened. Even before Covid struck, the UK’s public debt had more than doubled over the period of austerity. Its effect hadn’t been at all to reduce the burden being left to future generations, as Conservatives had claimed, it was merely to leave public services dangerously under-resourced. One of the results was that the NHS had to fight the pandemic with far too few people and too little equipment. Reports of exhausted NHS staff, sick NHS staff, even dead NHS staff, became commonplace.
It’s no surprise that most people now want to see them generously rewarded.
The cheapskates in government, however, have come up with that 1% figure, claiming as the austerity fans used to, that it was as much as they could afford. With inflation, it represents a real-term pay cut.
In the end, the salary increase probably won’t be quite that awful. A hallmark of this government, alongside lying, is making screaming U-turns, completely reversing a previously announced policy. Polls show that 72% of people are against the skinflint offer made, and the Tories are above all good at getting elected, so they won’t want to offend that many voters.
Still, the fact that they could come up with the suggestion at all shows they remain true to their old, mean-spirited selves. It also suggests they remain as clever as ever at sleight of hand: while opposition focuses on the NHS, far too few people are recognising how mean their other recently announced financial policies, dressed up as generous, really are.
There are some sops thrown to business, but they are too little to repair the damage of the pandemic. As for individuals, proposals on tax and benefits will mean that most people will find their real incomes falling over the next few years, and the poorest will suffer the most. I wonder whether the Tories are hoping this slips through unnoticed as the row centres on nurses’ pay?
They may be playing a long game. Betting on the lack of intelligence of the British electorate. A bet, as the saying suggests, that no one ever lost. Champions only of cheapskatery, Boris Johnson’s Tories, but undisputed champions all the same.
Voters need to wake up. Or the Opposition must at last find a way of waking them. Otherwise, Johnson will just keep right on getting away with ever more actions that are ever more unforgivable, right up to re-election next time around.
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