'The government’ s cost of living crisis is entirely of its own making'

Diane Abbott is the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington

The Downing Street farce of ‘partygate’ rumbles on, but it is in danger of obscuring some very serious problems. These do not relate to Boris Johnson’s job, although that appears to be largely ceremonial and his real function is wine-taster-in-chief.

The serious issues relate to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people both in this country and overseas. While many in Westminster focus on the Westminster bubble itself, like a monkey with a mirror, the public is actually becoming more despairing and getting angrier.

On the ‘partygate’ farce itself, we have a Prime Minister who invites us to believe he is really rather stupid as he cannot tell the difference between a party and a work meeting.

He had previously told the Commons that he was assured that there were no parties or events in breach of lockdown rules. It is now admitted that not only was he informed of them but actually attended a fair few of these regular shindigs himself. For misleading the Commons alone, he should resign.

Instead, we have the sorry spectacle of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police trying to come to his rescue. Having previously foresworn any involvement in the case, ‘we don’t retrospectively investigate breaches of the Covid regulations’, the Met intoned, we now find that it does.

What changed?

Perhaps it was the imminent publication of a damning report from Sue Gray, which had been strengthened by Boris Johnson’s own injudicious threats to decimate his own aides. The condemned aides in the firing line may well have felt they had nothing to lose in telling all.

Not only do we have a Prime Minister willing to mislead both the Commons and the public, but there is a widespread feeling that he has suborned the most senior police officer the in country simply to save his own skin.

There is deep public anger about all of this. Contrary to repeated assertion, the government’s popularity has been on the slide since the spring of 2020, and the Prime Minister’s approval rating has plummeted alongside it. The public is not giving him or them the ‘benefit of the doubt’ on the response to the pandemic. Polling shows the opposite, that it is at a low-point. This should not be at all surprising when 175,000 of their friends and loved ones have suffered an avoidable death and many more are facing the horrors of Long Covid.

Similarly, the government’ s cost of living crisis is entirely of its own making but is hurting tens of millions of people. Cutting Universal Credit, raising taxes, energy bills and National Insurance payments are all government policies. The inflationary impulse may have come from US fiscal policy, but the lack of energy storage capacity, and the laisser-faire approach to energy pricing (and ownership) are all the government’s own.

Whoever replaces Boris Johnson, or even if he manages to cling on, these issues are unlikely to fade away any time soon. Instead, continued removal of all restrictions on the virus as well as continuous austerity measures almost ensure that these factors, and popular opposition to them are set to last. The latest of these measures is freezing the repayment threshold on student loan fees. Even if our beleaguered young people do manage to get a pay rise, for many a large chunk will be eaten up by loan repayments.

Boris Johnson should be careful what he wishes for. He might indeed be able to stay on. But it will be ordinary people who pay the real price.

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