High wages, high productivity – what’s not to like?

Nothing! Except you have to be dreaming, or living in Utopia, and Ryanair ain’t flying there yet. But this is the cheery British prime minister’s upbeat prediction for his country in the future. Boris Johnson really wants us all to think of him as the new Winston Churchill. Or rather, he wants the jolly old Brits who cherish Rule Britannia and that mostly-pink map of the world to think of him as WC reincarnated. These are the people who gave him his 80-seat majority in the British lower house of Parliament. Possibly the attack on Ivor Roberts-Jones’s wonderful statue of Winnie opposite the House of Commons in London, which happenedin June 2020, might have given him a brief pause, but only the briefest. Does Johnson’s attention focus on anything for more than goldfish-memory time, apart from the great endeavour of Making Boris Great Again, and Again, and Again … ?

Waspish it sounds and waspish it is, after suffering through the insult which was BoJo’s comedy routine at the Conservative Party Conference. Policy and serious discussion of how to improve the nation are not clickbait, his people have decided, but lovable old Boris and his witty repartee are sure winners. And is the lack of lorry drivers, turkey pullers, pig slaughterers, affordable energy, anything to do with the xenophobia of Brexit? Of course, not, you fool! (Well, the energy price isn’t.) Boris and his “vengeful third-rate Cabinet”, to quote a description when it was formed, are creating a high wage, high productivity Britain! All children will have prizes! There will be a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage, as Herbert Hoover, channelling Henry IV, promised US voters in 1928.

This idyllic vision harkens back to one of Johnson’s first speeches as prime minister, when, conjuring up the ambition and noble spirit of his idol Churchill, he declared: “By 2050 it is more than possible that the United Kingdom will be the greatest and most prosperous economy in Europe – at the centre of a new network of trade deals that we have pioneered.” (25/7/2019) Like that fabodelicious deal with Australia, perhaps nursed into daylight by trade genius and former Aussie leader Tony Abbott? Most famous for declaring himself “the suppository of all wisdom”.

The high wage, high productivity Britain is a lovely notion, but really only a flash of the old smoke and mirrors that Bertie Ahern, former Irish Taoiseach, would invoke. Just see what British business leaders think about this wheeze of getting employers to start doling out big rises. Responses range from the polite “compelling vision” to the more acid “populist tirade”. But of course, everyone will work so much harder because of the extra dough. (Or will they? See the Harvard Business Review.)

Boris, deeply unserious about nearly everything, loves the dash of Churchillian rhetoric. However, one feature of the great Englishman that Johnson did not mention in his 2014 biography is Churchill’s ongoing battle with depression, which he himself referred to as his “black dog”. There’s no mention of depression or mental health in the index, and I can’t remember it in the text I read. It is – thankfully – much more acceptable to discuss mental health in the 2020s than it was 100 years, 50 years, ago. Churchill was ahead of his time in being frank about his condition, and his struggles with it, leading to his hyperactivity. Boris Johnson seems blessed with robust health in every department, although one never can judge on appearances alone. Many people have become highly skilled at hiding their depression, anxiety, confusion. Great advances have been made in public attitudes to health as a holistic matter, dependent on luck and management, either in body or mind. But Johnson’s appeal to people with the mindset of the 1940s would rule out any admission of illness or weakness in the current Prime Minister’s narrative. Because everything is just great, isn’t it?