COVID-19 UK Political Analysis by Tim Hames – 3rd July 2020

In advance of the reopening of pubs and restaurants tomorrow, Boris Johnson decided to offer a sense of the political direction that he and the Conservative Government would take once the coronavirus crisis is deemed to be contained, if not completely over. He did so in a speech in Dudley, a town symbolic both of the Industrial Revolution of yesteryear and of the so-called “Red Wall” constituencies that switched from Labour to the Conservatives at the December 2019 General Election. His address was nothing if not audacious. He adopted a hero of the American Left – Franklin Delano Roosevelt – as his model and appropriated the language of “building back better” that had been first deployed by advocates of sustainable finance who had in many cases been very critical of the globalised capitalism largely in vogue before the virus struck. He also made it clear that he had little interest in the austerity agenda that had been Conservative orthodoxy until really quite recently, and he was more than happy to wave the cheque book at the new circumstances in which the country finds itself. A different and distinct Conservative approach had, in fairness, already emerged before COVID-19 arrived and was signalled in the March 11 Budget, issued shortly before the road to lockdown became all but certain. That strategy has, though, been hardened by recent events and will be the fundamental theme of government and politics in the UK throughout the duration of this Parliament.