Zoe Strimpel

Jeremy Hunt is wrong about ‘British compassion’

(Photo: Getty)

Delivering his Autumn Statement on Thursday, Jeremy Hunt specified two ‘great national’ qualities: genius and ‘British compassion’. The Chancellor’s announcements made it clear what he was doing: raiding the incomes of the decently well off to fund benefits rises and protect pensions. Talk of our shared compassion then seems a bit off.

Politicians should exploit ideas of Britishness less, or at least do so less explicitly. They should focus on what Britain actually needs in order to be uniquely good in a British way. That isn’t hollow words for a population imagined to be at Key Stage One. It’s coherence: a decent economic model, a political philosophy, and a theory of how humans tick. 

Invoking a “great’ national trait or two during a war or a pandemic is patronising, but understandable. To do so on the British population now is wrong, especially from a chancellor. If you’ve just announced you will take thousands off millions of people and scythe off the ‘excess profits’ of energy firms, it is just insulting to tell the same people their innate British ‘compassion’ will sweeten the pill. And what about their great British ‘genius’? After that statement they’d be well justified in taking it elsewhere, especially when they learn, courtesy of a Telegraph investigation, that billions have been wasted by Whitehall on, to name a few items, vegan ice cream, Covid payouts to fraudsters, and a luxury villa in Naples. These are among expenditures that British ‘compassion’ may not stretch to.

It’s not just wrong for a chancellor to emotionally blackmail a nation while raiding its pockets. It’s also none of his business what the emotional make-up of Britons is, compassionate or otherwise.  National character isn’t something to be wheeled out cynically and thrown back at people; it’s a delicate thing of porous edges that does not profit by being sized up and spat out in the Commons on budget day.

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