There’s a long list of reasons to ridicule Boris Johnson’s claim to be the new Roosevelt. First there’s the pathetic inadequacy of the programme he’s announced: £5 billion of mostly repackaged investment plans, or 0.2% of UK GDP – 200 times smaller than Roosevelt’s New Deal, which amounted to 40% of US GDP at the time.
But there is a deeper structural problem with Johnson’s approach to economic recovery – one that goes far beyond the numbers. Where Roosevelt positioned himself squarely in opposition to rentier capital – the financiers and speculators that had crashed the economy in 1929 – Johnson is positioning himself squarely as its backer.
In his first inaugural address, on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt declared that the cause of unemployment and economic distress was not scarcity. Rather, “the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence ... Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion”. He lacerated high finance: “they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers”. Unveiling the second half of the New Deal, he was crystal clear on who his political enemies were: “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking.” He decried the pre-crash situation as “government by organized money”, noting that these interests “are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
