According to the myth, Catherine II’s courtier Grigory Potemkin recruited peasants to populate fake villages erected along the Dnipro River, so the Russian empress, passing in her barge, might get a favourable impression of conditions in newly conquered Crimea. Historians doubt that it happened, but the idea of counterfeiting progress to appease the boss was plausible enough for the name “Potemkin village” to have stuck.
In a democracy, the boss is the electorate, which leads governments to erect Potemkin policies – paper pledges puffed up as substantial measures – to convince voters that all is well. Rishi Sunak’s announcement on defence spending this week is a case in point.
The prime minister promised an extra £75bn over six years, with most of the cost met by cuts to the civil service. Those were the Potemkin headlines. The £75bn number is confected by imagining that defence spending would otherwise be frozen in cash terms – a scenario that no one proposes, not least because it would breach the UK’s commitments to Nato. By this method, anything that isn’t a cut in real terms could be cast as “additional” spending. But that isn’t how fiscal policy actually works.
The accounting chicanery is then reversed to minimise the revenue that the government says it will have to raise to fund higher budgets. Here, the assumption of “additional” spending shrinks to £20bn.Even the lower figure implies a significant reduction in other Whitehall departments, on top of the brutal cuts already envisaged in Jeremy Hunt’s Potemkin budget last month. Following the letter of his fiscal rules, the chancellor gave himself permission to cut national insurance this year by projecting austerity for most of the public sector from 2025.
No one thinks that is wise, or even politically feasible, given the already parlous state of services and looming bankruptcies in local government. The whole fiction relies on the calculation that Labour, craving credentials as fiscal disciplinarians, will feel obliged to match Tory plans. If they win an election, they will find themselves saddled with budgets that forbid effective government.
In the same budget, Mr Hunt announced an expansion of free childcare places, building on a similar pledge from 2023. On Wednesday, the National Audit Office published a report warning that the government’s plan faces “significant uncertainty” amid a shortage of nursery places and doubts about financial viability in the sector. In other words, it was another Potemkin promise.
But perhaps the most egregious case is the scheme for deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. The necessary legislation was passed on Monday night, giving Mr Sunak some hope of getting a flight to Kigali off the ground over the summer. But that will not “stop the boats”, nor will it deal with the backlog of unprocessed asylum claims. The whole thing is an expensive, dishonest and cruel performance of tough action in place of serious engagement with a complex policy challenge – Potemkin politics.
And it isn’t working. There is no evidence that voters are taken in by Mr Sunak’s increasingly desperate manoeuvres to claw back some public support in the hope of limiting the scale of an election defeat. The cynical motivation and abdication of responsibility are too obvious. British voters need and want policy that stands up to scrutiny, and plans conceived for more than a fleeting headline, not this flimsy facade of a government.
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