UK’s Boris Johnson has a new American hero

Boris Johnson wants Britons to lift their eyes to the horizon, forget Covid for a while and dream again. No longer cast as a Churchill at war, the British prime minister seems more inclined now to conjure up the healing figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the US president whose New Deal sought to pull America out of the Great Depression.
In an interview, Johnson spoke of a new “Rooseveltian approach to the UK” The FDR reference wasn’t an accident. Michael Gove, a senior cabinet minister, devoted much of a weekend speech to the example of FDR, who “managed to save capitalism, restore faith in democracy, indeed extend its dominion, renovate the reputation of government, [and] set his country on a course of increasing prosperity and equality of opportunity for decades.”
Johnson will lay out more of his own new deal, including 5 billion pounds ($6.1 billion) of infrastructure spending, in a speech on Tuesday. He has already lifted the curtain a little this week, unveiling a 1 billion-pound school-building project, concentrated mainly in England’s more deprived
Midlands and northern regions, and another 560 million pounds in school renovations.
Whether or not such a modest spending plan really matches the FDR rhetoric, it is meant to signal a break from Johnson’s pretty disastrous management of the Covid-19 pandemic. It puts him on more familiar territory — painting in broad, optimistic brushstrokes rather than explaining cumbersome quarantine rules. He also wants to reassure working-class voters, who abandoned their support of the Labour Party and switched to Johnson’s Conservatives in the December election, that he remains committed to his promise to rebalance Britain’s economy. He has a more formidable opponent now in Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer.
It’s easy to see what attracts Johnson to FDR. Roosevelt was deeply attuned to the public mood, something Johnson values hugely. He projected an irrepressible cheerfulness, whatever his private worries. His theme song, “Happy days are here again,” was a refreshing change from the Herbert Hoover Depression anthem, “Brother Can you Spare a Dime?”
Like Johnson, FDR had a knack for co-opting good ideas. Many of his New Deal programs were adaptations of policies started by Hoover. Roosevelt leaned heavily on key advisors, such as Jesse Jones, the Texan Democrat who ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Commerce Department and so much else that Roosevelt referred to him as “Jesus Jones.” Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings has similar power, though not the official titles.
FDR also offers a cautionary tale. His policies were often confusing and counterproductive. A fiscal conservative rather than a Keynesian deficit spender, he hiked income taxes, corporate taxes, taxes on “excess profits” and inheritance taxes, all of which slowed a recovery that took a decade. Historians disagree about his impact on the Depression. It was monetary expansion and meeting wartime orders that seemed to help most.
And yet, Roosevelt restored public faith in government. He’s considered one of the greatest US presidents because in establishing a welfare safety net, he gave Americans their dignity back, if not much of a living standard until later. As FDR’s biographer Robert Dallek wrote, he “humanised the American industrial system.”
Unfortunately for Johnson, restoring faith takes more than a couple of speeches and some good intentions. If Johnson’s economic reforms aren’t done right, they will further erode trust in government and land Britain in a deeper hole.

—Bloomberg