This Budget had no principles – it was pure populism

This Budget does not fit any particular ideological template. It is giving people want they want, simply because they want it

Was this the Budget that defined Johnsonism?

Trying to understand what the Johnson government is about is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork. Some of its rhetoric – about reducing taxation and boosting enterprise, that sort of thing – seem pure Thatcherite. Then again, the phrase “One Nation” falls far more readily from the lips of Johnson’s ministers than Mrs Thatcher’s. In many ways, Johnson’s gang looks and sounds like the Conservative Party always did: posh, public-school-educated, wealthy. Some of its leading lights, not least the prime minister, have said and written some things that people have said are old-fashioned to the point of racism, and there are credible accusations of Islamophobia. But then again, there is substantial Bame representation in the cabinet, and at least the lip service paid to tolerance.

Rishi Sunak’s Budget is similarly perplexing: lots and lots of public borrowing, an ambitious programme of investment in public services and infrastructure, and arguably an end to austerity. In the Budget there was plenty of “picking winners” – space, electric cars – and state interference in markets, such as the new plastic packaging tax. This is the kind of thing that the interventionist Michael Heseltine used to try and get his party to do, with mixed results. Maybe that’s why Johnson once called himself “basically a Brexity Hezza”.

Then again, some less voter-friendly public services – local authorities, the criminal justice system, welfare benefits – remain as emaciated as ever, while voter-friendlier ones – such as the NHS and schools – are (relatively) well funded. It seems to be less about the size of the state than its shape, and how far it conforms to popular tastes.

I think the answer to what this Budget was all about, and what Johnson’s government is all about, requires discarding the old labels of left, right, centrist, social liberal, fiscal conservative, Keynesian, social democrat, neoclassical, neoliberal and all the rest and instead recognising that this is the first populist Budget from a populist government in Britain’s history. Sunak said as much in his peroration, in a phrase possibly written by Dominic Cummings himself: “A people’s Budget from a people’s government.” Of course, David Lloyd George actually delivered the original “people’s Budget” back in 1909. Though nominally a Liberal, Lloyd George was, like Johnson, not so much worried about party values as about popular instincts and holding on to power no matter what. Incidentally, he too enjoyed, shall we say, living life to the full.

Such chameleonic political behaviour confounded Lloyd George’s enemies in the Edwardian era, just as Tony Blair’s ideological fluidity bamboozled the Conservatives a century later. But what we have here is both a more complicated and a simpler phenomenon. More complicated because it can be unpredictable. It is an error, for example, to think that the newly elected “blue wall” MPs want what their Labour predecessors wanted. They might in some areas, such as schools and the NHS, but they also want tax cuts and are unsympathetic to public spending more broadly (not to mention Brexit).

Populism in Britain today, then, does not fit any particular ideological template. It is, in essence, giving people want they want because they want it. Whatever the people want becomes “the right thing to do”, particularly because the people have been disdained for so long. Those that get in the way – judges, civil servants, journalists – are attempting to frustrate “the will of the people”. Populism is a simple concept – but its very simplicity makes it difficult to defeat.