Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Boris Johnson’s half-baked economic reset

(Credit: Getty images)

As part of his revival (and survival) strategy, Boris Johnson is trying his hardest to convince the public and fellow MPs that he can get the cost of living crisis under control. But did today’s speech help him make that case?

His wide-ranging speech in Lancashire covered a vast array of economic, policy and trade topics, which he struggled to pull into a cohesive theme. ‘We do not grow many olives in the UK,’ he pointed out. ‘Why do we have tariffs on bananas?’ Both excellent points when it comes to liberalising trade, but not obviously at the top of people’s priority lists when it comes to tackling energy bills in the next few months.

‘We do not grow many olives in the UK,’ he pointed out. ‘Why do we have tariffs on bananas?’

If there was one point the PM wanted to make, it seemed to be that we can all be ‘confident that things will get better, that we will emerge from this a strong country with a healthy economy.’ But repeated pledges that ‘things will get better’ isn’t what inspires confidence for businesses or consumers; it’s concrete policy action that makes a difference. And this is precisely where Johnson’s government continues to fall short.

Johnson wanted to emphasise a commitment to economic growth, proclaiming ‘the answer to the current economic predicament is not more tax and more spending. The answer is economic growth’. Yet there were no serious supply-side reforms to go along with this vision. Take the housing announcements. Having abandoned planning reform over a by-election, Johnson has opted instead for gimmicks and government support schemes to help get people on the housing ladder. But with a dramatic under-supply of homes increasingly understood to be one of the biggest problems in the housing market, today’s extension of right-to-buy could actually make the housing crunch worse: similar to the help-to-buy scheme, it creates more demand in the housing market without increasing the number of homes, thereby upping housing prices for everyone apart from the protected minority that will benefit from the scheme.

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