Can Boris Johnson avoid being blamed for post-pandemic ‘austerity’?

The prime minister faces intense pressure for more public spending on schools, the NHS and foreign aid. John Rentoul writes on the financial battle to come

Boris Johnson in an upbeat mood at a whisky distillery today – but there are hard choices to come (PA)

The shape of post-pandemic politics is emerging. We need to look ahead only a few months to a future like Israel’s, where coronavirus cases are so rare that hand sanitisers on buses have been converted to dispense sun cream.

Israel’s turbulent politics might also be a warning to Boris Johnson. When the pandemic is over, his vaccine-boosted popularity will be over too. Today, we saw what sort of issues will crowd in to replace headlines about what restrictions might be lifted when.

Many of them are about money: foreign aid; schools catch-up; the NHS backlog. The demands for extra public spending are intense, and cannot all be satisfied. How can the Conservatives avoid being blamed for a new “austerity”?

The foreign aid story may be the least worrying for the prime minister. To be cynical about it, it suits Johnson to have a row about his attempt to cut aid, which is easily the most unpopular heading of public spending. It is quite hard for him actually to cut the aid budget, because there is a majority in parliament for meeting the target of 0.7 percent of gross national income, but he has managed to slash it this year without having to put this to the Commons.

Even if Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, succeeds in his attempt to force a vote on Monday, this will only restore the budget for next year. Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, may not allow a vote on Monday because Mitchell is trying to amend a bill setting up a science research agency, which has nothing to do with foreign aid. But Mitchell, and his cohort of Tory MPs who want the party to stand by its manifesto promise, will succeed at some point.

The prime minister will be defeated on this, or he will retreat tactically. He will try to have it both ways, claiming that he never intended to cut aid permanently, while knowing that most voters think he is on their side. Margaret Thatcher did it on the death penalty and Tony Blair did it on 90-day detention of terrorist suspects – they were on the side of the public against parliament. That means Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, will have to find another £4bn a year. But this is a trivial sum compared with what is coming down the track.

Sir Kevan Collins, the catch-up adviser, has resigned because schools didn’t get the £15bn he asked for. Sunak tried to stall for time, offering £1.4bn over the next three years, and suggesting that more might be available in the autumn budget, but Sir Kevan said in his resignation letter that this “falls far short of what is needed … and will be delivered too slowly”.

Sunak has a stronger argument than the headlines allow. The idea that students can simply “catch up” on lost learning by the application of extra public money is doubtful. The Treasury is entitled to point out that there is no evidence that one-to-one tuition is effective – apart from the amounts spent on private tuition by parents.

The Treasury is also right to be sceptical about Sir Kevan’s claim that the £15bn is a one-off cost. If any part of the programme does work in boosting academic standards, it would then be difficult to refuse to fund it in future. The nation owes this cohort of young people an attempt to make amends for what they have lost, but it is not going to be cheap, or a one-off.

Beyond that stretches what looks like a decade-long crisis in the NHS. No sooner has the pressure of coronavirus eased than demoralised NHS staff are faced with a huge wave of suppressed demand and serious illnesses that have been made worse by more than a year’s neglect.

Public opinion will demand that nurses, care workers and support staff be paid significantly more, and that NHS capacity be increased up to and beyond the achievement of the Labour government, which got close to clearing waiting lists altogether in 2010.

As ever, though, the public will be less willing to pay the taxes needed to fund it all, having discovered over the past 15 months that what Sunak called the “overwhelming might of the British state” could be mobilised temporarily to pay the wages of much of the country’s workforce by borrowing.

This could set up the dividing line of post-pandemic politics over Austerity Mark II (or Mark III if we accept that the original was the period after the Second World War). This is fraught with danger for Johnson, but it is not a straightforward opportunity for Keir Starmer.

The austerity line against David Cameron and George Osborne did not end well for Ed Miliband, and it is not clear how it played in the 2017 election except that it helped the Labour Party to have Theresa May as its opponent.

Big-spender Johnson is a trickier proposition, and it was notable yesterday that Kate Green, the shadow education secretary, responded to the government’s schools catch-up plans – one-tenth of what Sir Kevan had asked for – by saying: “It’s not all about money.” It is clear that Keir Starmer is wary of being seen to promise more public spending than the government as Labour’s default response.

We have not yet heard from Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s new shadow chancellor. The outcome of the next election might depend on what she says next.