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The clock is ticking, and the threat to livelihoods could not be clearer. Yet despite warnings from major manufacturing industries that they’re days away from having to shut down factories due to the spiralling cost of energy, this weekend all the government had to offer them was a public slanging match. When the business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said he was seeking Treasury help for those affected, a Treasury source snapped back that it wasn’t involved in any talks and that “this is not the first time the [business] secretary has made things up in interviews”.
If it’s true that we shouldn’t believe a word Kwarteng says, then he shouldn’t be business secretary. If it’s a wicked smear, then heads should roll at the Treasury instead. Eventually the prime minister might deign to prenez un grip on all this, but first he has chosen to prenez un holiday in sunny Marbella. As Whitehall reportedly ponders a contingency plan urging the public to put another jumper on and turn down the heating, perhaps Boris Johnson might like to reflect from his sun lounger on what his government is meant to be for, exactly.
Evidently the chancellor, due to unveil a tortuously negotiated comprehensive spending review in a fortnight’s time, is in no mood to rip it up in search of yet more money for bailouts. But he may not have much choice. Britain risks being sucked into a spiral of unintended consequences, where one crisis leads frighteningly quickly to another. Among the gas-guzzling industries asking for help are cement and steel production. If they’re forced back into something like a 1970s-style three-day week, there will quickly be knock-on effects for big infrastructure projects and for the construction industry on which ministers are relying to deliver 300,000 houses a year, as well as for the rest of manufacturing.
The longer this drags on, the more jobs are potentially at risk, especially in places heavily dependent on manufacturing – disproportionately the “red wall” seats supposedly closest to this government’s heart. No wonder Kwarteng still stoutly insists there have been “conversations” with the Treasury; it would be shocking if there hadn’t. But his admission that he also “hasn’t asked [Sunak] for anything” suggests those conversations may have been very one-sided.
If there’s a discernible logic to any of this – and surprisingly often with this government there isn’t – it may be that the Treasury now privately thinks Brexit, Covid-19 and the transition to a low-carbon economy are inevitably going to reshape the British economy drastically and that it’s better just to let it happen quickly than drag out the pain by intervening. It will be brutal, so the free marketeer logic goes, but ultimately a leaner, fitter economy will emerge. What will be, will be.
But even assuming that was the right strategy, it’s not what many newer Tory supporters thought they were voting for. They were promised a big-spending, big-state government that stood up for the little guy and brought back the glory days of towns where heavy industry had failed. They heard Rishi Sunak say, over and over again, that he would do “whatever it takes” to get everyone through the pandemic. They wanted change, while also craving security. But what they’re getting instead is wild uncertainty: petrol shortages, gaps on supermarket shelves, universal credit cuts, rising heating bills, and for some the worry that factory working hours are going to be cut.
It beggars belief that any government would choose this particularly chaotic moment to threaten to start a trade war with the EU too. But that is where we appear to be heading, given the Brexit minister David Frost’s petulant threat to tear up the Northern Ireland protocol unless the EU rewrites the deal that he negotiated, which has turned out to have precisely the downsides that – spoiler alert – he was repeatedly told it would. Never mind “Crisis, what crisis?”, the fatal words that Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan never actually said in 1979. This government’s motto is turning out to be more “Crisis? Which one did you mean, exactly?”
So while, of course, there will be calls for the prime minister to peel himself off his Spanish sun lounger, in the end it doesn’t really matter where in the world he is. What matters is that he has a plan for the country when he gets back that adds up to more than just “que sera, sera”. Don’t, as the saying goes, hold your breath.
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