The New Deal was about more than a phrase, Boris. Michael Gove knows it and is bidding to be the government’s man of substance

Photo: The Guardian

We knew in advance where Boris Johnson got “Rooseveltian” from. The inspiration came from Michael Gove, his friend and sometime rival who pre-announced Boris’s “bonanza”  and gave him a sort of intellectual alibi in his Ditchley lecture last week.  Johnson has the spectre of 3 million unemployed hanging over him and has had to think of something quick. Other than  borrowing  the phrase,  he baulks at a New Deal. He warms up the old Tory manifesto, throws in a few Borisisms and serves.

We’re not going to cheese-pare our way out of trouble, because the world has moved on since 2008,” he said, warning that, “too many parts of our country have felt left behind, neglected, unloved”.

He said planning rules would be changed by September, to allow:

• Developers to “demolish and rebuild” vacant and redundant residential and commercial buildings if they are rebuilt as homes.
• A wider range of commercial buildings to be switched to housing without a planning application.
• Property owners to build “additional space above their properties”, via a “fast track approval process”.

The government said the changes would allow defunct buildings on high streets to be repurposed to create homes more easily, helping to reduce pressure on the greenbelt

But when asked whether he would stick by his manifesto promise not to raise the rates of income tax, VAT or national insurance, he said: “You should wait to see what the chancellor has to say in the course of the next few weeks and months. I remain absolutely determined to ensure that the tax burden, insofar as we possibly can, is reasonable.”

The initial verdict is cool...

…it was pointed out the money announced at his “build, build, build” speech in Dudley equates to around just £75 per person.

And the figure represents around 0.2.% of the UK’s current GDP, while the spending in the original “New Deal” from American president Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s was around 40% of that country’s economic output before the Great Depression.

+Labour’s Keir Starmer said there was “not much that’s new and it’s not much of a deal”.

Michael Gove’s lecture  was designed to give  intellectual  heft to Johnson’s phrase making .  Gove is another journalist although with a higher brow than his boss . He made a good  start with a quote from a Roosevelt contemporary  the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Although this was far from his mind it serves as an apt description for the suspended state of Northern Ireland.

“The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying – and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Developing his  theme..

.. as we contemplate new technological and scientific breakthroughs we must also consider the ethical and political challenges they bring. Unless they are thoughtfully addressed, we risk worsening the morbid symptoms of our times…

If we are to be equal to all these challenges, then – as the Prime Minister knows and feels passionately – we need to both acknowledge the scale of the change and be ready to change ourselves. Those in political leadership most of all.

And for me, no one walked that path better, in what W.H Auden called the low, dishonest, decade that was the Thirties, than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he assumed office in 1933, faith in free markets and the capitalist economy was ebbing dramatically. Indeed confidence in democracy itself was fragile – with, even in America, the idea of dictatorial executive authority was winning surprising support. 

We have set out plans for reform in technical education, schools, the environment, international development, housing and planning, science, digital infrastructure, taxation, public procurement, transport and across the whole field of Government. 

But if this Government is to reform so much, it must also reform itself. 

Of the 108 major programmes for which Government is responsible, only 8 per cent are actually assessed to judge if they have been delivered effectively and brought about the desired results. ..

Now of course, we politicians are principally to blame. We go for the sugar rush that comes from announcing radical initiatives, unveiling dramatic overhauls, launching new spending programmes, ramping up this and rolling out that. Done right, such moments can galvanise the system into action. But at times we risk the hunger for new policy announcements becoming insatiable.

There is also a tendency in Government to applaud the gracefully performative and overlook the boringly transformative….

The whole culture of Government, and the wider world of political commentary, is hostile to risk, adventure, experimentation and novelty

The heart of my case, as I hope you now appreciate, is simple. 

Faith in conventional political parties, their leadership and their allies in business has been broken. 

Failures of policy and judgment have put previously existing elites in the dock. 

Their misjudgements, in the eyes of many, have been compounded by cultural condescension and insulation from accountability. 

The concerns of our fellow citizens are real. They matter. Their analysis is resonant. To carry on rejecting it will only weaken our politics and strengthen division. 

We have faced similar, though not identical, crises, before. 

To face the crisis honestly, we must change. 

Gove  matches  alienation theory with embracing big data, Dominic Cummings’ big thing. Those of us with long memories have heard much the same all our adult lives:  Harold Wilson’s “white heat of the technological revolution”  decentralisation of government,  reform of the civil service. Politicians obsessed with “delivery” since at least Tony Blair.

Gove has sounded  the warning note against Boris’s weakness,  “to applaud the gracefully performative and overlook the boringly transformative”. Can he stiffen Johnson’s phrasemaking with more substance? Has Cummings hypnotised them both with his big thing of big data? Data by itself can  overwhelm. it must be read critically and understood. Sharing data and Gove’s dream of transferring civil servants to all points out of London ( except Northern Ireland) doesn’t seem compatible with the centralising, controlling instincts of Cummings’ No 10.

If  this is the most substance available it’s sure to  disappoint.

Four years ago,  Gove killed off  Johnson’s initial bid for the Tory leadership in the most humiliating circumstances. He is now back well onside but ready and waiting if Johnson seriously stumbles.