In recent days I have come across a couple of insightful
articles which expose the lack of new thinking at the heart of the Conservative
Party which goes a long way towards explaining why the Brexit vote happened and
why the negotiations are not going as hoped. In an article at the weekend, Will
Hutton argued very forcibly that the party’s inability to consign the Thatcher
years to history is preventing it from moving forward (here).
We have to allow for the fact that Hutton has a particular political bent, with
his Wikipedia page describing him as being “widely known for his advocacy of
centre-left policies.” That said, his article did hit many issues on the nail.
Hutton was particularly critical of former chancellor Nigel
Lawson who “in any league table of
national figures who have been consistently wrong on almost every major
judgment … must rank close to number one … Yet, extraordinarily, he is the
ringleader of a group of Thatcherite ultras who now crowd on to our airwaves,
exploiting the mythology of Thatcherite greatness to insist Britain must make a
complete break with the EU.” In 2016, Lawson wrote an article for the FT in which he claimed “Brexit gives us a
chance to finish the Thatcher revolution.” But Hutton points out that many
of the supply-side reforms of which Lawson is so proud are now beginning to
unravel. The tide of opinion has turned against privatisation as society
increasingly questions who has reaped the benefits. The financial deregulation
over which Lawson presided was one of the contributory factors to the UK
banking collapse in 2008, and also helped to widen regional imbalances as
London benefited whilst other parts of the country lagged behind. Finally, the
labour market reforms of the 1980s, which emasculated the trade unions, are
increasingly being seen as one of the reasons why workers are being squeezed
despite unemployment at 40-year lows.
It also raises a question of why a politician who left
front-line politics almost 30 years ago should still be invited to opine on economic
matters. Is the party
really so devoid of new thinking? Indeed, I still find it odd that a man who was aged 84 at the time of
the EU referendum should have had such a prominent role in the Leave campaign,
when he is unlikely to be around to see the long-term effects. Moreover, I do not recall that in the 1980s
any of Nigel Lawson’s predecessors from 30 years previously enjoyed such a
prominent media profile as he does today (still less calling for the sacking of the incumbent, as Lawson recently demanded of Philip Hammond). Lawson was a bold, self-confident
reformer in his day but his time has passed. Unfortunately, many members of his
party appear not to have realised that time has moved on and that the solutions
of the 1980s may not be appropriate today.
This is indeed a point I have made on this blog in recent
months (here, for example).
But the blogger Pete North offered an impassioned critique of the problems
facing the Conservatives (here – it’s a fine post which deserves a read).
More to the point, it explains very eloquently how the current iteration of
Conservative economic policy differs from what went before, and gets to the
heart of an issue that I have spent much time trying to explain to foreign
friends and family. North notes that whilst aspiration was at the centre of
Conservative policy during the Thatcher era “there was also something about Mrs Thatcher's values that made her
version of conservatism the definitive one. There was something more than just
the slash and burn free market instinct. There was still an underlying
obligation to observe that, as citizens, we are custodians of a particularly
British order where enterprise sits comfortably alongside the institutions of
state.” He goes on to state (admittedly in a less than temperate fashion)
that “I don't see that in the modern
Conservative Party. For the most part I see the dregs of Thatcherism and the
second generation Toryboys wedded to extreme free market dogma - which is no
respecter of anything … It is this corrosive trend that is ultimately shredding
the social contract.”
You can argue about the nature of the language he uses, but
his point about the shredding of the social contract is a valid one. The recent
experience of having to wait almost four weeks for an appointment with my local
GP is an indication that there is something badly wrong with local health
provision. Indeed, North argues, as I have done, that if this were consistent
with the operation of a free market policy “we
should at least be seeing some sort of corresponding tax cuts” as
compensation for the reduction in service.
But the wider point is this: A large swathe of the
Conservative party has been captured by the ultras who see Brexit as an end in
itself. This in turn has divided the party which is scared that the
diametrically opposing economic solutions offered by the Labour Party are
increasingly finding electoral favour. As a result, the whole government
appears to have turned in on itself in a bout of vicious in-fighting and has
less time (or perhaps just the stomach) to tackle the mounting economic
problems caused by failed welfare reforms such as the botched rollout of
Universal Credit (here and here).
We may not yet be quite at the McCarthyism stage here in the
UK but as Robert Peston tweeted today, the current state of public discourse “is redolent of a country suffering a
Brexit-induced nervous breakdown.” Given the magnitude of the economic challenges ahead (Brexit, flatlining
productivity, overly-indebted households, the lack of adequate pension savings
for many people), the UK really needs a government that can get a grip – and
fast.
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