The Jeremiad of the disreputable Hunt

Hey! Why aren't you tucking into your shit sandwich? The press' autumn statement coverage reveals just how little choice we have.

Previously: Hancock’s Barf Hour

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“How will the Markets respond?”, they ask like villagers staring up at the mountain where the dragon lives. British journalists, whether gossipmongering political hacks, rune-obsessed economics correspondents or business reporters genuflecting to all kinds of suit, have to take Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement seriously because if they don’t they fear the inherent ridiculousness of much of what they do will be revealed.

The Autumn Statement — a Budget pretending it’s not a Budget by slapping on an unconvincing moustache and doing a silly voice — should provoke incredulity. The Conservative Party having crashed the car — over and over again — have stolen the mechanic’s overalls and are tutting over the wreckage, muttering: “That’s going to cost you.” But even the press’ nominally-critical voices accept ludicrous premises.

Responding to Hunt’s performance, the New Statesman’s political correspondent Freddie Hayward talks first about style:

Hunt’s purpose as Chancellor is to restore the government’s economic credibility. Simply the manner in which he turned up today, with combed hair, carefully knotted tie, gripping an Office for Budget Responsibility forecast, sent a strong signal. His assured administrator’s voice could hardly be more different to the aloof baritone of his predecessor, the ideological academic Kwasi Kwarteng. The headmaster had returned to the classroom to restore the control lost by the substitute teacher.

While he goes on to grapple with the substance (“[He] embodied “sensibilism”: ideological decisions masked by appeals to necessity,”), Hayward has accepted the idea that there is anything substantively different about Hunt. When he writes that the tie and the combed hair “sent a strong signal”, he intends to indicate that he’s not fooled by this presentation but describing it that way is falling for it.

This is an arid, technocratic response to arid, technocratic politics; the language of “tactics”, “methods”, and “narrative”. Emotion and humanity are absent from this kind of analysis. It’s like Hayward is describing the chemical composition of bullshit rather than simply telling the reader how much it stinks.

Writing about “the new administration”, as Hayward does, is to accept that Tories’ ongoing grift that shuffling the personnel and changing the face at the top represents “change”. Meanwhile, The New Statesman’s Political Editor, Andrew Marr, does the government’s job for it, arguing in a piece published before Hunt’s statement, that:

For Labour, political choices become harder despite the opinion polls. Let me put this brutally. What’s the point of a social democratic party when the Conservatives are raising taxes on the richer, protecting poorer families, and when investment is constrained?

His sentiments are identical to those of an anonymous Tory MP quoted by Christopher ‘Chopper’ Hope in his Daily Telegraph newsletter:

One rather depressed Right-wing Tory MP told me: “We have the ultimate coalition Government. Both sides of the chamber are social democrats.”

Add “social democracy” to the list of words and phrases that have been drained of all meaning by British political and media discourse.

Just as it’s difficult to discern the difference between Labour and the Conservatives on so many issues, the gap between the magazines that have traditionally been their cheerleaders — The New Statesman and The Spectator — is vanishingly narrow. The latter’s assistant editor, Isabel Hardman, says Labour’s attack lines are working and praises the Shadow Chancellor:

Rachel Reeves is getting better and better as Shadow Chancellor. Mind you, her response to Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was the second one she’s had to produce in two months, given it was only in September that she was reacting to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. There was plenty to criticise and plenty of political attacks to launch. And she offered it all with a mix of cold fury and jokes. 

There’s a reason The Spectator and its sister paper The Daily Telegraph are increasingly relaxed about the idea of a Labour government: They’re confident that not much will change and that the kinds of cruelty they most value — to foreigners and the poor — will be continued with grim middle-managerial competence by Starmer’s ghoulish shadow cabinet. Read this quote…

‘With a modern industrial strategy where government works hand in hand with business, properly fixing business rates so that small businesses and our high streets thrive again, fixing the holes in the government’s Brexit deal so that our businesses can trade on the global stage, and ensuring Britain is the best place in the world to start and grow a business.’

Who said it — Hunt or Reeves? It’s Reeves but the sentiments are such bland pablum that either politician with their early-stage android impression of humanity could have trotted them out. “Labour is still fleshing out what that means,” Hardman assures the reader. I’m sure all those donors who circled the Labour Party conference will have lots of ideas to offer.

The Times’ now-traditional panel of columnists providing an instant response to the statement offers the usual buffet of banalities. Matthew Parris says he was distracted by Rishi Sunak’s new glasses before coming to the conclusion that a former Tory MP who likes to see brutality doled out in the most boring way possible:

This was, in the most unshowy of ways, a masterly performance. It was also exceptionally well written.

Almost stealthily the chancellor’s argument and his thinking expanded across the whole range of government and politics. To this observer, today’s autumn statement was what Conservative government ought to look like.

You see, his anger at Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — for which he was showered with praise by the most gullible of FBPE liberals — was not about substance but style; he found them unforgivably embarrassing.

Alice Thompson grabs a tediously obvious analogy and swirls it together with the pervasive and damaging idea that governments need to “balance the books”:

If Rishi Sunak is the new head boy asked to lead a failing school, Jeremy Hunt is the headmaster parachuted in to resume order and balance the books after the delinquents trashed everything.

It is interesting how often the British commentariat returns to school metaphors; it’s as though they never really left.

Thompson goes on to say one of the quiet bits quite loudly (“Parts of this speech could have come straight out of Keir Starmer’s mouth…”) and appears to end with a sharp conclusion:

Merely sounding more competent than the last vandals will not be enough to help the Tories win the next election.

But this is the same lie all over again; these are the last vandals; when a gang gets a new leader, their old crimes aren’t suddenly forgotten.

Similarly, Thompson’s podcast co-host, Rachel Sylvester, plays at being critical but accepts Hunt’s premise of change:

The message was clear. Credibility, the chancellor insisted, “cannot be taken for granted” and, unlike Kwarteng, he was full of praise for the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England. Pledging to govern with compassion, he announced that both benefits and pensions will rise in line with inflation.

It is not credible for any commentator to Hunt’s talk of “credibility” even remotely seriously. It is a mirthless joke as are the continued Tory attempts to lay claim to “compassion”, which is like Domestos trying to rebrand itself as a sports drink.

The Daily Mail’s live blog is a running list of people fucked up and fucked over by Hunt’s measures but it’ll be back behind the Tory party at least by the next election, but more likely by next week.

Similarly, The Sun calls the autumn statement “Hunt’s tax raid” but frames it as a good thing “for the vulnerable”; Rupert Murdoch hasn’t decided to cut the Conservative loose yet; Starmer will have to bow and scrape a little more before that happens.

Just as we don’t have a true choice in political parties, we are stuck with a media and press that accepts and propagates a false framing of the economy. It continues to hold onto the idea of a country’s finances as equivalent to a family budget and repeats the “£50 billion blackhole” claim ad nauseum even as it is disputed.

The assumption shared by the government, opposition, newspapers and broadcasters is that we have to suffer. It’s not true but hundreds of broadcast hours and thousands upon thousands of words will be dedicated to further establishing it as “a fact”. After a budget… sorry, an autumn statement, there’s always a lot of talk about the winners and losers, but the people leading it are never really in the second category.

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