As someone who has been interested in and aware of politics since I was a pre-teen, there’s something really odd about the Boris Johnson government. We are now approaching the mid term of this government yet much of what we could expect to happen regarding polls is not happening.
Usually it would be expected that a UK government in its mid term period would take a polling hit as fatigue sets in among the voters, scandals erupt and people start to wonder whether they should consider voting for the opposition. We’ve seen this with almost every government since at least the 1970’s. Voters punish the Government at by-elections and at local council elections for the Government’s perceived failures and we often see councils change hands or Parliamentary seats lost by the government in this mid term period.
But not this time. Partly because of the success of the Covid vaccination programme, partly because of Brexit and partly because the opposition Labour Party is in such absolute disarray, we have the odd situation where the governing Conservatives are still holding on to their mid term polling lead. I don’t recall this being the situation in the past not even when Tory titans like Margaret Thatcher were leading the party.
But Andrew Neil writing in the Mail seems to think that this positive situation cannot last. Boris Johnson is going into the Tory conference with a perfect storm on the horizon.
Mr Neil said:
But, despite Brexit, the UK has adhered to the European Union’s high tax on carbon and added its own British premium in a fit of virtue-signalling to the rest of the world.
Both will be part of your rising domestic gas and electricity bills this winter.
Rising prices at the petrol pump and in supermarkets are being blamed on a shortage of HGV drivers. Industry has been predicting this shortage for months, if not years.
Yet more than 54,000 HGV licences applications are waiting to be processed at the DVLA. In January, you can normally expect 3,000 licences to be granted; last January the agency managed just 173.
Perhaps we should not be surprised by such incompetence. After all, this is a government which regularly boasts about its commitment to law and order yet cannot stop a bunch of teenage trustafarians and aging Swampies from repeatedly blocking the Queen’s highways.
It bigs up its vision of Global Britain yet presides over five-hour queues at Heathrow for folks trying to enter Britain to do business.
It speaks endlessly of ‘levelling up’ the North with the South, yet when Johnson made his keynote speech about it in July all he offered was £50 million for northern football pitches.
When I asked a Cabinet minister a few days ago by what metrics we could measure the success of levelling up come the next election, he was unable to give any.
The blunt truth is that Johnson is running out of time to make any difference to the prosperity of the Red Wall seats that swept him to power two years ago.
Mr Neil is correct. Boris Johnson is risking the loss of the Red Wall seats and that risk might be even greater if working class Britons find themselves impoverished due to tax rises to feed the insatiable inefficient monster that is the NHS and the failure to secure Britain’s gas supplies via fracking and an over-reliance on unreliable renewables for energy production.
Then there’s the prospect of 1970’s style inflation on the horizon. A lot of people have forgotten how bad inflation was back then. The CPI inflation rate was well over 20% in the early 1970’s and there was a prices and wage demand spiral that crippled the country. I remember it, just, but a lot of people do not and it’s going to hit a lot of people very hard. What may turn people against the Tories and towards Labour, especially if they can sort themselves out before the next General Election, will be energy prices. Some of the energy price rises are outside the Government’s control and are down to market factors but the Green virtue signalling and the failure to go for fracking are not. It is those factors that are within the Government’s hands and where the government has failed which will cause the voters to turn on a government that so far has been given quite a lot of leeway by the electorate.
We may be fast approaching a situation where people who voted for the Tories primarily because of Brexit start to look at Labour as being a viable alternative again despite the many problems that Labour have. When and if that occurs Boris Johnson will not be able to bluster his way out of the corner that he will have painted himself in.
