There’s no point in Labour waiting for Britain’s economic crisis to get worse | John Harris
On the face of it, politics in England is in a weird, almost delirious state. The governing party has been in power for more than a decade and now claims to want to solve problems it has either ignored or worsened. Brexit is causing calamities that show no signs of easing; and the government’s handling of the pandemic has been largely awful, with a cost measured in tens of thousands of lives. Yet Boris Johnson and his party seem so full of confidence that the Prime Minister has flown off for a mid-crisis break on the Costa del Sol.
The Tories’ opponents, meanwhile, boggle at how a rightwing politics seemingly composed of stories and unlikely visions – as well as outright lies – can be so successful. Labour looks disoriented and downcast, its politicians aghast at the contrast between the government’s “fantasism” and hard reality. Part of 2021’s all-enveloping strangeness, they seem to think, is the fact that Johnson…
