The Coming Tide

Barring the unforseen, Wednesday's budget is probably the last major political initiative we'll see prior to the calling of the general election (an Autumn statement, if it happens first, is likely to be more of the same). As such, it told us little we didn't already know about the leading parties: that the Tories will emphasise their commitment to lower taxes, and that Labour will offer little in the way of differentiation. Further austerity is therefore baked-in. The decision to abolish (i.e. rebadge) non-dom tax status was as heavily trailed as the reduction in NICs. Yet Labour appear to have been wrong-footed, having no alternative up their collective sleeve for the former and quick to support the latter as part of their own commitment to lower taxes on "hardworking families". The increase in child benefit was the one (mild) surprise, but even that made perfect sense as a gesture towards a pivotal demographic inclined to turn out at the polls. Most of the benefit will accrue to higher income households and will do little to offset the cost inflation suffered by those on lower incomes.

The predictability of the budget announcement makes Rishi Sunak's hyperbolic Downing Street statement on the Friday after the Rochdale by-election seem even more of an oddity in retrospect than it appeared at the time. He clearly wasn't teeing-up some major economic or foreign policy initiative, but equally the claim of democracy in existential peril hasn't heralded any major new policies in respect of policing, just a demand that the Met in particular gets tougher. In reality, the erosion of the rights of protest has been an incremental process since the early-80s, something done as a matter of bureaucratic routine rather than a novel initiative that needs to be announced from a lectern outside Number 10. The revelation that the Prevent scheme now considers socialism and anti-fascism to be warning signs of potential terrorism is the latest fruit of that process, and also a clear sign that the Home Office is confident that an incoming government under Keir Starmer isn't going to raise an eyebrow at a definition that automatically places the left of the Labour Party under suspicion. 

Sunak's speech has been interpreted as a diversion from the Conservative Party's Islamophobia, but that strikes me as an overly negative motivation. The Prime Minister has never given the impression of being a man of strong beliefs, or of being particularly concerned about the party's public image, so it may make more sense to view this simply as an attempt to shore up support by appealing to social reactionaries and the Jewish community. But there are two problems with that. First, those are demographics that the Tories already enjoy dominance among, so appealing to them in this way seems unnecessary, unless the party's internal polls are predicting something truly dire. The second problem is that Keir Starmer's alacrity in supporting the Prime Minister's authoritarian impulse means this isn't a dividing line between the parties. Some Labour supporters will see this as evidence of Starmer's astuteness in avoiding a trap, though I think he was merely being himself. But again, the idea that outbidding Labour on the restraint of protest will be the key issue at the polls seems unlikely.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Sunak wants to remind us he is still Prime Minister, there being few other issues on which he is able to command supportive media attention. In other words, this is another symptom of a government that has run out of ideas and has yet to convince itself that it knows how to avoid the coming electoral tide. Attention switched this week to Jeremy Hunt, and we shouldn't under-estimate the possibility that Sunak's statement was simply intended to pre-emptively distract from the inevitable media attention given to the Chancellor. If there is one thing we have learnt over the last decade it is just how self-regarding and bitchy Tory politicians are. Hunt's budget sought to cement the idea that the Tories are the only party who can be relied on to deliver tax cuts, even though the popular mood is very much in favour of increasing public spending after almost a decade and a half of austerity. You could see this as a last desperate attempt to make the political weather, but I think it's more a case of the Tories going down swinging, an approach apparently alien to Labour politicians (if only Gordon Brown had had the balls to abolish the House of Lords in 2009).

This determination to unashamedly do what Tories do should be borne in mind when we consider the growing body of commentary on the future of the Conservative Party. This can be broadly divided between the psephological focus of the moment and the longer-term analysis of the Tories as a historical and sociological force. For the first, there has been much heated talk of "meltdown" and "wipeout". In a first-past-the-post system this is conceivable: there is an inflexion point at which falling levels of support lead to an exponential increase in seats lost (i.e. getting into what might be called Lib Dem territory in terms of national levels of votes-per-seat). However, opinion polls and by-elections are rarely wholly reliable guides to general elections, and we must never under-estimate the fact that conservative voters are by temperament conservative and so stick with the devil they know. The second approach has tended to focus on the long-term demographic and material challenges for the party: in short, that they've lost the young (actually all cohorts up to about 60) and that their dominance among the old means their base will gradually shrink. The traditional transmission of youthful liberals into middle-aged conservatives appears to have broken down under the weight of unaffordable housing and rising income inequality. 

In this context, the "culture wars" and the associated authoritarian turn against youthful protest are seen as an attempt to motivate that elderly base and retain the social reactionary vote detached from Labour in the so-called "Red Wall" seats of the 2019 general election. There are a number of problems with this theory, not least whether the Red Wall even exists independent of Brexit and why the only people in small Midlands and Northern towns who vote are apparently either OAPs or crypto-Fascists. But if there is one thing we know about the political commentariat it is that it remains endlessly fascinated by the far-right, hence the outsize attention given in recent weeks to Liz Truss's attempt to carve out a speaking career in America, the anti-Enlightenment New Conservatives, and the ever-present Nigel Farage. While the media's intermittent focus on the left is always about preserving the Parliamentary Labour Party's ideological conservatism, its focus on the far-right is about normalising the idea that the Tories are a genuinely broad church and that radical shifts are natural and welcome (consider Chamberlain to Churchill, or Heath to Thatcher).

One product of this broad church assessment is the idea that the Conservative Party is an unstable alliance between conservatism and liberalism, hence it is apparently at risk of being "torn apart" by someone as intellectually shallow as Suella Braverman. But the party's actual raison d'etre is simply a defence of hierarchy, which makes it inherently stable. The default governing mode, which we are experiencing at the moment, is do-nothing because doing nothing preserves existing hierarchies. When the party has shifted to an activist mode, as in its adoption of neoliberalism in the 1970s, that has invariably been an attempt to restore hierarchy and its associated privileges. Thatcher's "Let managers manage" sought to restore capitalist power in the workplace while policies such as privatisation and right-to-buy sought to restore the privileges of property ownership (that ex-council houses ended up in the hands of petty landlords was a feature, not a bug).

Likewise, the idea that Labour is united by a common cause but divided by strategy misunderstands that socialism seeks to supersede liberalism, which is why the latter seeks to restrain and impede the former. This idea also ignores the structural imperatives to preserve hierarchies (consider the motivations and behaviours of the PLP). The motor of UK politics since 1832 has always been liberal "reformism", and the practical application of that has always been the creation of novel forms of governance and representation that preserve existing hierarchies while accommodating limited "progress". For example, nationalisation took industries into public ownership but largely retained and reinforced the existing management, which meant moves towards workers' control were stymied and the prospect of future privatisation preserved. Likewise, the return of those nationalised industries to private ownership has seen not only non-exec sinecures for helpful ex-politicians but the growth of a parallel bureaucracy of market regulation that shows a marked continuity with the QUANGOs of old.

The Conservative Party does not face an existential crisis, any more than democracy itself does, however both the party and our political system are subject to secular trends and material factors that will inevitably alter them. The Tories are facing a period out of office because the model of transferring economic control of public services to privileged private interests has finally hit the buffers. The crass profiteering around Covid contracts was like stripping an already emptied shop of its shelving. To paraphrase the lady, "The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of state resources to loot". The state has not shrunk, because it can't, and the rents extracted from it are now too high to bear, a point the public have got if the Westminster parties haven't. The challenge to democracy is that both the Conservatives and Labour remain in denial about the death of Thatcherism, despite standing amidst the mounting wreckage of the financial crash, auserity, Brexit and the pandemic. The palpable lack of enthusiasm for Labour, and the likelihood that enough of us will wearily troop to the polls to consign the Tories to temporary electoral oblivion, is a reflection of that sea-change.