Why the Conservative Party has lost its way
Why the Conservative Party has lost its way
The Conservative Party mostly held to its mission: making life better for ordinary British families. When the Party lost sight of this mission, it was rightly sent packing by those ordinary families
“We should set about creating a nation where a 27 year old with a good professional job or an established trade can afford to buy a home on that wage while still affording holidays, cars and nights out.”
This is the opening statement in a Twitter thread of mine. It sets out an ambition for a future government that sees itself as conservative. The thread continues by stressing the essentials of a good nation - support for family, good schools, accessible government, a sense of duty. But the opening statement that young people with a good job should be able to get a mortgage to buy a house funded by the wages from that ordinary job gives an appeal far beyond the world of conservatism. And this is still more true if we add my view that buying the house should not involve obscene amounts of what some of my generation call ‘sacrifice’.
It is true that many people who bought homes in the 1970s, ‘80s and 90s look back and recall the cheap dinners, holidays in the in-laws’ spare room and a car that only worked downhill with a favourable wind. Some who experienced this privation like to moan about how today’s youngsters want everything on a plate when they see me saying I want people to afford a decent home as well as holidays, a car that works and some fun in their lives. I think, however, that we should be more ambitious for future generations and work to make their lives a little easier than ours. After all, what's the point of economic growth and betterment if it doesn’t make peoples’ lives easier?
This offer is the offer that Benjamin Disraeli made to the British public in a speech at the Crystal Palace in which, while defending the Empire and the institutions of church and monarchy, the great man reminded his rich audience that the purpose of government is the betterment of conditions for the working man. For much of the 150 years since that speech, the Conservative Party has held to its mission: making life better for ordinary British families. When the Party has lost sight of this mission, it was always - and rightly - sent packing by those ordinary Britons.
Now is such a time. While the slings and arrows of economic misfortune or the fall out from a worldwide pandemic cannot be wholly blamed on those in government at the time, the manner in which politicians respond, rhetorically and practically, tells us a great deal about whether those people deserve to keep the grand positions they hold. Right now the leadership of the Conservative Party speaks a language of sacrifice to people who are struggling to pay daily bills, promises jam tomorrow without first picking the fruit for that jam, and indulges a vocal but selfish minority who want to protect their wealth and privilege at the expense of other people’s future. Until this changes and we stop hearing ‘let them eat cake’ comments from Tory MPs alongside well organised campaigns to protect the interests of wealthy property owners then the Party is reneging on Disraeli’s deal and deserves to lose.
The Party’s problems were summed up for me in a response to my Tweet about housing from a former minister and vociferous Tory, Edwina Currie. Far from recognising the genuine ambition in the statement, Currie chose instead to say it was ‘cloud cuckoo land’ and that no Conservative should make these arguments. I’m at a loss to understand quite what ambition for Britain we are supposed to set out? Should we say to working men and women that, despite record high taxes, they have to get used to poor local services, declining real earnings and unaffordable housing? Are we supposed to applaud multi-millionaire Jeremy Hunt when he says he’s prepared to push the nation into recession - to make ordinary men and women poorer? This isn’t what we stand for, is it?
With the rapid defenestration of Liz Truss, the Conservative Party embraced a sort of declinist, anti-growth ideology with whirring printers churning out money for inflation-creating price fixing, five million people who could be working sat on benefits and record levels of immigration. By rejecting even the most modest of supply-side reform, the Conservative Party under Sunak and Hunt is crash testing the sort of high tax profligacy the nation rejected when it told Jeremy Corbyn to get lost in 2019. When the Labour Party can attack Conservatives on sound money, housing development and economic management, we know there’s a problem.
And that problem? Put simply the current Conservative Party has no vision for Britain and no mission to get there. While likes on Twitter aren’t necessarily a guide to anything much, the statement opening this article has 12,000 of those likes suggesting that it might have struck a chord. Those likes come from across the political spectrum, from Corbyn fans through to those who think the sun shines out of Nigel Farage’s backside. We have a government so as to make people’s lives better than if we didn’t have a government. When the politicians in charge of the government tell people they can’t have a better life, that’s when those ordinary people go and find a different set of politicians.
I see little prospect of the Conservative Party extricating itself from this mess of its own making. Every response from leaders is short term, too many are gimmicky and they seem wedded to the idea that people aren’t really going to vote for the Labour Party. When a leader, however flawed their strategy, started to peel off from the Conservative Party’s declinist ideology the response from inside the Party was to tear that leader down. The Labour Party embraces the same declinist orthodoxy as the Conservatives (as witnessed by their stellar ambition of having growth just a little bit better than struggling Germany) and adds an overlay of economic illiteracy - the lie that the greening of energy and transport is an opportunity rather than a cost. But this doesn’t matter because Labour’s rhetoric is right, they talk about building houses, planning reform, jobs, lowering the cost of living and they promise that the trashing of our energy infrastructure will result in millions more jobs while that energy gets cheaper. For the first time since the early 2000s, Labour sounds like it is on your side.
Meanwhile away from the leadership, Conservatives are indulging a sort of ‘Donald Trump with a friendly face’ approach driven by a new mythology. This corpus of myth tells us that the problem is a thing called ‘globalism’ and that the nation is what matters. Worse still these thinkers adopt a sort of autarky and use the term ‘security’ to cover up for a protectionist agenda around manufacturing, agriculture and energy. These thinkers hold the view that conservatives can blame ‘johnny foreigner’ for all our problems and people will flock back to the Tory banner. None of this will work, regardless of how many opinion polls Matt Goodwin or Onward conduct. People want to feel better off, to know that they can plan their future. Making things more expensive by putting up barriers to foreign goods while mithering about China isn’t going to wash. It isn’t that these things don’t matter but rather that they pale into nothing besides this month’s eye-watering mortgage bill.
Back in 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville reminded us that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ and nothing has changed since. At a time when ordinary people are struggling, talk of sacrifice and ‘we’re all in this together’ is counter-productive compared to a positive rhetoric saying we’ll get you out of this mess (even when Labour, unlike Clinton, hasn’t the first idea what it will do when it is in change). The problem is not ‘woke’, the problem is not ‘greens’, the problem is not immigration. The problem is that people feel financially pressured. They work as hard as ever but the money doesn’t stretch so far.
Conservatives should be offering a better future and setting out, as I did when I said young people should be able to afford a home on a normal wage, a clear ambition for our nation. Not one that’s about cowering behind walls, barriers and tariffs terrified on the world but one that says we’re a great nation and can stand tall in the world. A nation that wants a better future for everyone fortunate to live in a beautiful place, brimming with history and excited about what the future holds for all of us.
The inability of young people to buy a house is evident in Continental Europe and USA, and is not a matter of politics per se. It is a complex issue but here’s one factor to consider. Nothing has any intrinsic value - money doesn’t - so value is a matter of perception. If two parties A & B agree, one A to sell and the other B to buy a house for £100 000 then A values the money more than the house, B values the house more than the money. So what is the ‘true’ value of the house? There is none. If twenty years later B looks at house prices in his street and finds his house probably would sell for £120 000, that does not mean his house has increased in value by 20%, it means money has devalued by 20%. So inflation. It is well understood that property is inflation-proof, money not. This pushes asset prices up with inflation. If you want to inflation-proof your money, put it in property. If B sells his house, the £120 000 will not buy him any more then the £100 000 twenty years prior, but it won’t buy less. There is always a significant lag between wage rises and inflation, and wages never catch up. We have cyclic Government caused bouts of high inflation which each time push asset/house prices way ahead of wages so that the asset/wage ration increases. Added to this is too low interest rates causing property booms. This part explains why in the 1970s, a ratio of three times salary would get you a mortgage enough to cover 85% of the purchase cost of a property, whereas now it won’t go anywhere near. To address this requires a fundamental rethink of our economy. First, the welfare state needs to be abolished and most public services returned to the private sector as this is a huge cost to the public purse, cannot be covered by tax receipts, requires borrowing and money printing = inflation. Next more land for building must be made available, so goodby ‘green belt’ and current planning rules. NIMBYs Ahoy! Then abolish the idiotic building regs designed to ‘save the planet’. One more factor. Economists all (most) agree increased labour productivity results in higher wages. So we have a labour market problem to fix. Sucking in an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap labour has driven down our labour productivity and thus wages. (Employers have no incentive to change their business model to be more productive with so much cheap labour available.) Since wage differentials matter, wages depressed at the bottom, have a downward pressure on wages all up the wage ladder. Another problem is feeding 50% of school output into universities. This inevitably increases output, gluts the market so pushes wages down. Now the real problem. There has been no Conservative Party with Conservative principles since 1945. Each successive Conservative Government continued Labours post- war Socialism, even Thatcher. Yes she got rid of the State owned companies and clipped the Unions’ wings, but she left the rest of the Socialist enterprise alive and well. As for Conservative grass roots - I think they are a rare breed indeed. Next time you chat to an alleged Conservative grass roots person ask: should we abolish the NHS and restore provision/insurance to the competitive private sector? If the answer is ‘yes’ you have found a Conservative. Good hunting.