For once, Boris Johnson will have had to face the facts: he will have to give way to another. But before accepting the facts, he denied them one last time and gave Britain two days of constitutional madness. Unheard of across the Channel. When a Prime Minister loses the confidence of his government and his party, it is customary for him to resign and to have the grace not to be asked. Nothing, however, obliges it to do so, and this is indeed one of the great weaknesses of British democracy. It obeys unwritten rules, “gentleman conventions” that belong to the Great Britain of yesteryear, that of before Brexit and Boris Johnson.
After months of scandals during which the tenors of his party enjoined him one after the other to retire, he locked himself in and refused for forty-eight hours to retire despite the departure of some sixty of his ministers and collaborators. Alone at the head of a government of empty chairs, Johnson still refused to see reality in the face, imagining himself the president elected by the people and not the leader appointed by the majority party in Parliament. Jon Sopel, connoisseur of American politics and author of A Year At The Circus: Inside Trump’s White House believes that Britain experienced its Capitol insurrection there: “Fomenting a constitutional crisis by refusing to accept reality is the same as an insurrection. It’s even more Trump than Trump!”
We’ll have to go get it manu militari
According to his former éminence grise Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson could be tempted to cling to power until the appointment of a new Conservative leader, instead of leaving it to his No. 2, Dominic Raab, to ensure the ‘interim. “I know him, he doesn’t think for a moment that the chips are down, posted Cummings on his Twitter account. He tells himself that with the war in Ukraine, everything is possible, he is playing for time and looking for a way to bounce back. We’ll have to go find him and get him out manu militari.” Let’s bet that the conservative party will complete as quickly as possible the process it has started and which will put an end to these crazy three years, during which “BoJo” held out, though evil, the reins of the country. And will consecrate the beginning of a new chapter: the return to the principle of reality in Great Britain.
“Oyez, oyez, the veil of illusion is dissipating and reality is back across the Channel”, could we shout in the streets of Europe. After six years during which lies, fantasies, fabrications and untruths have created a sort of parallel world, the hangover may be severe for the British, but the process will be life-saving for British democracy.
The veil is torn
Because scandals of all kinds, from drunken Downing Street evenings in total violation of health rules to Johnson’s “oversights” concerning the recruitment of collaborators whose sexual excesses he nevertheless knew, are only the submerged part of an iceberg that has led to the rebellion of the conservatives against their leader. The real reason for his forced departure is this: Britain can no longer turn a blind eye to the facts and continue to pretend that it is “the best in the world”., favorite expression of Boris Johnson and his clique of Brexiteers.
Two years of pandemic have been very convenient to hide the truth in the country. The Covid has made it possible to maintain the vagueness on the real economic consequences of Brexit, but also on the incompetence and moral bankruptcy of the Prime Minister. The success of the vaccination campaign has, for a time, calmed the concerns of public opinion. The war in Ukraine and the martial opportunism of Boris Johnson gave him further respite. But in the end, facts and figures, what others call the truth, swept away all the slogans.
With the highest inflation in Western countries, more than 9% today and 11% expected in October according to the Bank of England, a pound sterling having lost nearly 12% of its value against the dollar in one year and the return of hard strikes in transport (and soon health and education), Great Britain finds the bitter taste of the Thatcher years. The country suffers from a cruel lack of manpower, the effects of which are accentuated by Brexit. The British labor market can no longer take advantage of the free movement of European workers: the possibility of recruiting Romanian and Polish arms to take care of the crops is over.
Devastating effects of Brexit
The effects of Brexit are also beginning to be seen in the British economy. This acts as an accelerator of bad news, an amplifier of global economic tensions. The foreign trade deficit (2.6% of GDP in 2021) could reach 8.3% this year, the worst result since 1955. In terms of growth, the OECD places the country in last place among the G20 countries along with of Russia, with zero growth for 2023. As for productivity, it continues to tumble. Tea Office for Budget Responsibility predicts a decline in GDP of 4% in ten years (between 2016 and 2026) and a shortfall of around £100 billion per year, representing a shortfall in tax revenue of around £40 billion.
The challenges of the next Prime Minister will be immense, even “monstrous”, according to The Economist. To begin with, a question arises: is the Conservative Party even in a position to provide the country with a Prime Minister, the fourth in six years, honest and competent enough to run the country’s affairs? Considering that the Tories are in a position to govern, the question of the economic policy to be pursued will arise urgently. The inconsistency of the line followed by Boris Johnson, made up of both large public expenditure and tax cuts, will have to be corrected before inflation becomes endemic.
Restore trust
While Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has set October 19, 2023 as the date for an upcoming Scottish independence referendum (for which she needs the green light from Westminster), the next Prime Minister will be tasked with stem the dislocation of relations between the four nations that make up the Kingdom. The problem of the Northern Irish protocol will necessarily arise, which imposes a border in the Irish Sea for goods between the EU and the United Kingdom (in order not to re-establish a physical border between Ireland and Northern Ireland).
Unlike his predecessor, will the future leader end up honoring this agreement signed with the European Union? A sine qua non for restoring relations with its continental neighbours. “A new partnership is essential,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University. “We have to go beyond Brexit, which is no longer the subject. There are very broad possibilities for cooperation between Great Britain and Europe, whether in terms of defence, technology, energy or ‘environment.” Everything has to be rebuilt, starting with trust. good luck to the next tenant of Number Ten.