Back to the ’80s? Rishi should borrow from the playbook
An embattled Tory Prime Minister hunkered down in Westminster. A cost of living crisis becoming the defining issue of the political age. Unions plotting strike action. The similarities between 1982 and 2022 are eerie, and they don’t even stop there: it was that year that a promising England team headed off to a World Cup full of optimism, only to be knocked out in thoroughly uninspiring fashion. Let’s hope that one is different, at least.
It has become one of the truisms of British politics that what dragged Britain out of that early-80s rut were two things: a decisive military victory in the Falklands, and the political heft that that victory in turn gave Margaret Thatcher’s government to carry out sweeping reforms of much of Britain’s creaking post-war infrastructure. For the sake of a column it may be possible to draw a line between the Falklands and Ukraine, but in truth the two are vastly different enterprises. That doesn’t mean the second element of Britain’s resurgence that decade should be forgotten too, however.
Economics crises are just that: crises. But that doesn’t make one heartless to think they present opportunity.
Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson had what looked like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the Covid-19 pandemic to reshape Britain’s economic playing field. It is safe to say that a temporary ‘super-deduction’ on investment was some way short of revolutionary.
They now have, amidst a more traditional economic shock, a second shot. It is only in tough times that you can get away with drastic reform: a simplification of the tax code, for instance, or driving through post-Brexit reform of financial services to create a kind of Big Bang 2.0. Even temporary measures – like a tax cut for under-40s, for instance – can at least signal a willingness to think outside the box.
The criticism that Johnsonism (and perhaps Sunakism by extension) doesn’t have much substance to its style is a fair one. On the economy, they have an opportunity to leave a mark.