Frank Augstein/AP Photo
A man fills his car at a London gas station, September 29, 2021. The U.K. has endured long lines and fuel shortages, in part caused by a lack of truck drivers.
It’s a good thing Britain doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving as the great family fall get-together. There is a nationwide shortage of turkeys, which may stay off the menu until Christmas. Her Majesty’s increasingly Divided Kingdom is faced with the worst crisis since the oil shock and stagflation days of the 1970s, a decade which devoured three prime ministers in nine years.
British gas stations are besieged by drivers as many pumps have run out of petrol and diesel. Go into any supermarket and there is fair chance half or more of the shelves will be empty. Farmers are having to slaughter thousands of pigs as there are not enough pork abatoir workers.
Nearly all the current crisis in Britain has its roots in Brexit. Missing food deliveries are caused by the lack of truckers. Johnson did offer 5,000 visas to European truckers, but only 27 applied. They were told they could work in the U.K. but would be expelled on Christmas Eve. It was an offer most could refuse.
Bit by bit, British capitalism is shrinking. The U.S. chip maker Intel says it will not invest in Britain because of Brexit complicating trade with European customers. In the City of London, Britain’s financial center, there is a steady transfer of activity and personnel to European capitals which allow free travel and residence for financial-sector workers.
Johnson is promising higher wages but not explaining how small firms or micro firms can afford them and stay profitable. Market stalls in many British towns are run by Europeans importing French cheese, or Italian salami. They are going out of business as the time spent filling in Brexit customs forms and the extra charges Johnson is imposing are making impossible running a successful business based on artisan trade with Europe.
It is five years since the Brexit plebiscite when 36 percent of all registered voters backed breaking links with Europe. That vote propelled Johnson into Downing Street. But he is struggling to run the country.
Johnson is promising higher wages but not explaining how small firms or micro firms can afford them and stay profitable.
A devastating report on Johnson’s handling of COVID just published by two committees of the House of Commons says Johnson’s handling of the pandemic is “one of the UK’s worst ever public health failures.” The prime minister, inspired by Republican governors in Florida or Texas, bowed to rightist pressure and delayed imposing lockdowns for several weeks in 2020, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, especially in care homes for the elderly.
Now Britain has five times the number of new COVID cases as France or Germany. Britain’s National Health Service has said millions of operations will have to be postponed until later in the decade.
At the same time, Johnson is both raising taxes—a hike in social security contributions which is no different from a tax rise, as in the U.K. state welfare and pension payment are unfunded and come from general government revenue—and cutting government support for all public services. He has just imposed a £20-a-week cut in support for the poorest. As winter approaches, families and elderly people will have to choose between eating and heating.
He is promising more government investment in jobs, house building, and higher wages in the rust belt of Northern England, where he hopes to find votes among middle-class voters who see themselves, rightly, as the victims of the long 40-year run of neoliberal globalized capitalism with its hostility to labor rights, fair wages, or any sense of responsibility by the firms run by the Davos elite crowd.
The paradox is that Johnson is a fully paid-up member of that elite. He disappeared before the Commons report condemning his Trumpian management of the pandemic to go to a luxury villa in Spain’s Palm Beach—the millionaire resort of Marbella. A friend from Eton whom Johnson had placed in the House of Lords has given the prime minister a $35,000-a-week villa to enjoy the warmth of the Mediterranean fall as England shivers.
Johnson, fast approaching 60, has a new baby son and another on the way with his latest partner, a Tory Party press officer, to add to six or seven children with different women whom he dumps with an insouciance that in most countries would be career-ending for a politician.
Britain is in major conflict with the European Union and France especially as Johnson tries to wriggle out of the deal he signed with Brussels that allowed him to win the December 2019 general election as the man who “had got Brexit done.” The Tories have shifted hard to the identity nationalist right. They have lined up with the anti-Europe, anti-Dublin, anti-Catholic, and homophobic Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
Its leaders have described the Good Friday Agreement as a “capitulation.” They want to see the six counties of Northern Ireland that were partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1921 return to being a Protestant supremacist statelet.
Reporters in Paris and Berlin report that Johnson is not trusted or seen as honest by political leaders in France and Germany, and he has no friends left in Europe as he keeps refusing all compromise to make work Britain’s leaving the European Union.
Like America moving to isolate itself from Europe after 1920, Johnson sees any cooperation with the European Union as unacceptable. Johnson is lucky as he faces so far no internal opposition from within Tory ranks. He has expelled Tory MPs who refused to accept his anti-EU line or bribed others with plum government posts to fall in behind him.
Yet the opposition Labour Party has yet to recover from its unhappy leadership, divided membership, and election defeats since Labour lost power in 2010. Labour’s new leader, Sir Keir Starmer, was a legal bureaucrat who never sought election, or wrote or campaigned on political issues before entering Parliament in his mid-fifties in 2015.
He refuses to criticize Brexit even if latest polls show a 3-1 majority thinking Brexit is going badly. There is now a narrow majority of voters who would reverse the 2016 referendum if it were held today. But Labour refuses to speak for them.
Sir Keir is stuck. Just as it took U.S. Democrats more than a decade to find the courage to say that 1920s isolationism was bad for American interests, it will take time for opposition to Brexit to grow and sink roots in Britain.
But Labour’s current policy is to say as little as possible and hope that Johnson’s mistakes and stupidities and Trump-like excesses will shift the dial to Labour. There is no evidence so far that the tactic is working. Nearly every poll since Sir Keir became leader of the Labour Party in April 2020 shows the Tories with a strong lead.
Labour lost its way for 15 years after Margaret Thatcher won power in 1979. It seems Labour history is repeating itself. There is a crisis in British society and economics and a crisis in the Labour Party. In 2019, I wrote a book called Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain. I wish I could say I have been proved wrong. But the crisis continues.
