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“Scandal-ridden Boris Johnson announced on Thursday he would quit as British prime minister after he dramatically lost the support of his ministers and most Conservative lawmakers, but said he would stay on until his successor was chosen.” Reuters
The right criticizes Johnson for failing to implement conservative policies.
“Everyone knew Boris’s strengths and weaknesses when he was elected… At first, his contempt for convention was just what the country needed. No one else could have broken the deadlock that set in after 2017, when a pro-EU majority in Parliament refused to allow Brexit but also blocked fresh elections. It was bold, bombastic Boris who beat Corbyn, delivered Brexit, and, again defying all procedures, procured the fastest vaccine rollout in the world…
“But, as I kept lamenting in these pages at the time, the lockdown altered people’s psychology… Boris bowed to the authoritarian mood ushered in by COVID and his unwillingness to say no led, paradoxically, to greater unpopularity."
Dan Hannan, Washington Examiner
“The state of lockdown imposed by Johnson’s supposedly freedom-loving party was nightmarish, far beyond anything that any political leader would have dared try to impose on Americans. A pair of women were stopped and fined for going for a walk five miles from home, and told that the hot drinks they carried with them constituted a further violation for making them guilty of having a picnic. From before Christmas of 2020, and for months thereafter, it was illegal for people from different households — even families — to socialize together indoors…
“And what was happening at Boris Johnson’s office? People gathered again and again for drinks, just as you’d expect… By the final, appropriately farcical scandal — Johnson was found to have lied yet again… Johnson had managed to unite the country in despising him.”
Kyle Smith, National Review
“The real problem now is finding someone better than Johnson, not in the sense of someone who has scattered his seed less carelessly than he, or who isn’t a jolly toper having forbidden such jolly toping to others, but someone better in the economic policy sense—that is, someone who believes in economic principles that will deliver the country from the appalling mess that Johnson has left behind: stagnation, high inflation and taxation, an incompetent state more preponderant in the economy than ever before, and indebtedness on a vast scale…
“Having spent much of his career mocking the absurdities of extreme environmentalism, Johnson did an abrupt U-turn (under the influence of his wife, it is widely believed) and shackled the British economy with his net-zero carbon emissions policy, putting a halt to hydrocarbon prospection at precisely the worst moment in history to do so… Britons are [also] supposedly to be converting to electric cars, though without the electricity to charge them.”
Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal
“[Johnson] had no idea how to capitalize on Brexit and turn Britain into an economic island powerhouse. He planned to raise the corporate tax rate to 26% from 19% when he should have been cutting it to attract investment. His government claimed that cutting EU-style regulations would be too hard. The agenda to invest in the disadvantaged north of England never took shape, and he seemed to have in mind the sort of redistribution that wouldn’t have worked anyway. Britain is now in the grip of an inflation crisis that Mr. Johnson has made worse at every turn.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left blames Brexit, Johnson’s signature policy, for Britain’s economic woes.
The left blames Brexit, Johnson’s signature policy, for Britain’s economic woes.
“Although Johnson's tenure has been defined by scandal, one can argue (and we are) that it was Britain's lousy economy that ultimately did him in. The United Kingdom has the highest inflation among G7 nations -- 9.1% in May and forecast to go to 11% later this year…
“The rise in food and fuel prices has created the UK's worst cost-of-living crisis in decades: Disposable incomes are on track for the second steepest decline since records began in 1964, according to the Bank of England. And typical wages in the UK haven't grown at all since the 2008 financial crisis, the Resolution Foundation said [on] Monday.”
David Goldman, CNN
“By ending the free movement of labor between Britain and the continent, Brexit is hollowing out the workforce. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of job vacancies in the first half of this year rose to a record 1.3 million, up from about 504,000 before Brexit and covid-19 set in. The shortages afflict businesses large and small, from cafes and pubs to farms and manufacturing plants. Within the National Health Service, the shortfall early last year amounted to 6 percent of 1.5 million employees…
“If there’s an economic silver lining to Brexit, researchers scouring the data have yet to find it. ‘A less-open UK will mean a poorer and less productive one by the end of the decade, with real wages expected to fall by 1.8 per cent, a loss of £470 [$564] per worker a year, and labour productivity by 1.3 per cent,’ according to a June report by the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance…
“[It’s] predicted that British economic growth will grind to a halt next year, likely making it the worst-performing economy in the Group of 20 — aside from Russia… Brexit is doing serious and lasting damage to the British economy.”
Stryker McGuire, Washington Post
“[Johnson] has often been compared to Donald Trump, right down to the poufy yellow hair. Their political careers have certain parallels. The shocking success of the Brexit referendum, the cause Johnson eventually rode to power, presaged Trump’s even more shocking presidential victory. Both men created new electoral coalitions by making inroads with disaffected working-class voters. Both were given to cruel anti-immigrant stunts, like the Johnson government’s recent plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Both shared a contempt for truth and the norms of their respective governments…
“But, of course, Britain and the United States are very different countries, and not just because the U.K. is a parliamentary system, a generally more effective form of government than our own presidential system. British people are still evidently capable of being shocked by officials’ sexual harassment and shameless untruths, even when those officials are on their side. Their country is not heavily armed, and does not have a powerful faction that regularly threatens violence…
“Britain still appears to have some minimal social agreement about acceptable political behavior. Its government is falling apart precisely because its society is not… Johnson’s career is ending, at least for now, the way Trump’s should have ended.”
Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
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