Boris Johnson is not a socialist. But its large expenses will make the work of Labor more difficult | Tom Kibasi | Opinion

IBoris Johnson has been said to be now more Castro than Castro and the economy is now more socialist than at any time in British history. This is obviously not true. Socialism is normally understood as the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange with power in the hands of workers and citizens, rather than shareholders and the fundamental goal of a society of equals . The temporary expansion of state spending during a global pandemic is obviously not the same, and the current government is clearly relaxed about inequality.

Yet it is difficult to overestimate the magnitude of this expansion. Between March of this year and next year, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility foresees an increase in public borrowing of 372 billion. It is three times more annual budget for the whole NHS or about 15% of the entire prepandemic UK economy. So what are the broader implications of this expansion of public spending?

Unlike the bank bailout during the financial crisis, the government did not nationalize large companies or sectors of the economy: there was no demand for shares in British Airways or Primark, nor any significant conditionality. imposed on recipients of loans such as chemicals. the giant BASF, which received 1 billion from the government. Conditionality is perhaps what could have differentiated a Labor government’s putative economic response to the pandemic from that of the Conservatives. Workers would likely have demanded a series of changes in companies, from worker board members, to executive pay cuts, to profit sharing schemes in return for taxpayer bailouts. This government simply distributed the money without seriously considering meaningful economic reform. Cash could be found to encourage dining out during a global pandemic, but not to provide meals for poor children.

In economic terms, the pandemic is best understood as an epic, simultaneous shock of supply and demand. Demand has collapsed as incomes plummeted and workers fear for the future, and at the same time the labor market has come to a halt due to the disruption of normal working patterns. Structural changes such as the abandonment of main streets and hospitality for home entertainment and online shopping are set to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly forever. This is why the V-shaped recovery predicted by the Bank of England in May is nothing more than a pipe dream. And that is why a greatly expanded role of the state in the economy is here for the foreseeable future.

There is an argument that the state that takes center stage in the economy will necessarily help the left rather than the right in politics. But the political consequences are in fact counterintuitive. Expanding state spending is likely to help the government party rather than the opposition. Here’s why.

A central strategy of the Conservatives since Thatcher has been to use state spending to gain support from parts of the electorate. Privatization was a political strategy before crystallizing into an afterthought economic ideology: public goods were cynically sold and the proceeds were used to fund major tax cuts for conservative voters. Council houses were sold at a discount to buy the support of working class voters.

Over the past decade, successive Tory chancellors have been sure to divert resources to buy support for the over-65s through the triple pension lockdown, even as budgets have been cut elsewhere. Expanding state spending now offers new opportunities for conservatives to bribe voters. This is evidenced by the much greater support provided by the leave program to employees than to those who have precarious work and who need it much more.

In addition, the expanded role of the state presents a major challenge for the Labor Party to differentiate itself from the government. The traditional social democratic method of increasing state spending within the same framework simply won’t cut it when spending is already booming. Promising to spend more is becoming rather insignificant, even though Labor is able to gain day-to-day tactical advantages.

This leaves two choices at work. He can either overtake the conservatives with a program of profound economic reform aimed at reshaping the fundamental basis of the economy, not just the size and scope of state. Or he can try to position himself, in the face of exploding spending, like the new fiscal hawks.

Last week the Labor Party chose the latter, saying the government’s missteps would cost every household $ 110 billion or $ 4 trillion, in an increasingly familiar attempt to gain a tactical advantage. But attempting to appropriate the mantle of fiscal responsibility by channeling George Osborne around 2009 is unlikely to be successful as a political strategy.

When, in the mid-1990s, Gordon Brown pledged that a new Labor government would stick to the Tories’ spending plans, he was neutralizing a perceived weakness in a context where a booming economy meant Labor could offer to share the money. product of growth. Today, the economy is in deep recession and the recovery is likely to be long, slow, patchy and uneven. Fiscal correctness is a blatantly inadequate response that would leave Labor to splash in the shallows of politics.

Moreover, if the Labor Party leaves the territory of economic reform, it narrows the arena of political contestation to so-called cultural warfare and managerial competence. The problem for the opposition is that the Conservatives have all the power in the state to continue this war, witnessing the pathetic abuse of power by the Charity Commission which is now National Trust investigation to examine the colonial history of its buildings, for example. Labor knows that it cannot win on cultural issues; at best, he remains silent, and at worst, he finds himself on the wrong side of questions of principle, demoralize one’s own supporters, like when he failed to oppose the Spycops bill.

And so, by inference, the Labor Party reduced its politics to a struggle for managerial competence. With a prime minister beside himself and a tired government lacking in talent, it should be relatively easy to persuade the public that Labor might be more capable. But promising to be a more capable and even more compassionate version of the Tories is unlikely to build a coalition large enough to bring Labor to power. Competence cannot animate a political project.

For all its meanness and petty superficiality, politics is a grassroots intellectual endeavor. It requires an overview of the current situation in the country and careful thought on how to forge a better future. These difficult projects are the real work of the opposition. The work must show that the flame of ideas that lights up politics has not been extinguished and can shine again. The alternative is more years of Conservative mismanagement, where the price is paid by those who can least afford it.

Tom Kibasi is a writer and researcher in politics and economics