Boris Johnson from Post Modernism to Post Truth.
Boris Johnson is sometimes compared to Donald Trump in the sense that he tends to tells obvious lies about things and expects to get away with it.
Michael Rosen has posted on social media a marvellous stream about Alice in Wonderland visiting 10 Downing St and encountering Cummings and Johnson.
In an historical context we can understand however that Trump is an ignoramus who fairly obviously struggles to understand the difference between fact and fiction or why it is important.
Johnson on the other is, up to a point, an astute politician, although deeply flawed by a range of personal characteristics which I’m sure are clear enough to most who read this post.
Johnson made a rare appearance at Prime Ministers Questions on Wednesday 23rd October and afterwards Peter Walker of The Guardian tweeted about his performance:
But what strikes me as different is the lack of any shame or discomfort at saying things which are simply not true, and which people know are not true.
When Johnson, was crowned Tory leader and Prime Minister his reputation was already well established as someone who says and believes whatever is convenient to him at the time.
During his Tory leadership campaign he made some play of his, for many, disastrous time as London Mayor from water cannon to garden bridge, and also he claimed he was a ‘one-nation’ Tory despite attracting the support of hard-right MPs like Esther McVey
In a pre-2015 General Election interview with the London Evening Standard, now under the Editorship of George Osborne who backed him for PM, Boris Johnson, then London Mayor and Tory candidate for Uxbridge, spoke of his view of a ‘moral capitalism’.
It could be seen, perhaps, as the equivalent of David Cameron’s modern Conservatism, heralded before 2010 but little seen since.
Academically speaking, as he often reminds us, Boris Johnson is an ancient scholar so it is doubtful if he is aware of the moral economy that was central to the way Britain was run until the rise of industrial capitalism. It was then replaced by the political economy of Adam Smith, essentially capitalism with most of the moral bits left out.
The pre-eminent historian of the moral economy was the late EP Thompson. He argued that it represented a contract between an eighteenth century agricultural and industrial workforce and at least some elements of local ruling classes.
It meant that, for example, the prices and quality of staples like wheat, bread, and beer could, if need be, be legally enforced or at any rate influenced by crowd protests that were seen on all sides as legitimate (except by the forestallers or middlemen who sought to make profit out of unfair prices).
The moral economy here is a conservative traditional culture, sometimes enforced by radical means including on occasion, riot. It involved a recognition not that society was equal or should be so but that the poor were entitled at least to a basic standard of living.
Johnson’s interview with the Standard had some of this understanding.
He argued that wealth creation by capitalists, whatever their intention, is the thing that helps to fund public services. He also said of those self-same capitalists that since they are making good profits they can afford to pay the London Living Wage and not expect the wages of their employees to be topped up by the taxpayer.
Johnson argued that there is a ‘moral purpose to wealth creation’. Adam Smith might have grudgingly conceded the point, the eighteenth century crowd (who Johnson would probably call the mob) would certainly agree.
Was there anything in Johnson’s period as London Mayor that made it appear that his moral economy for the twenty-first century is something that he will actually implement as a Tory Prime Minister? Despite his claim that London became a less unequal City there seems little evidence for it. His support for the London Living Wage was not for example matched by any actual action to get more employers to pay it.
Here he differs from his eighteenth-century predecessors. Not only did they support the notion of a moral economy they were, particularly in hard times, prepared to use the law to make sure it was enforced.
Johnson’s record of saying whatever is convenient at the time and doing as little as possible about anything is a sign more than anything of the decline of the Tory Party, its ability to represent business or attract the support of some working people. A Party for the few not the many.
