The kindest way to treat your enemies is to hate them. Hate them and you don’t understand them or their appeal. Hate them and you cannot see their own doubts and divisions.
The opponents of Conservatives see them as greed-driven monsters, concerned only with helping the rich and middle-class. They are so tawdry, so lacking in idealism, they make you hate your own country.
‘There has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse,’ sighed Alan Bennett recently, before going on to accuse the Tories of creating a one-party state (a charge which astonished everyone who 1) knew that the Tories had not had a majority from 1997 to 2015 and barely have one now; and 2) all of us who have visited an actual one party state.)
For their part, conservatives see leftists as dangerously stupid, faddish and above all corrupt. The left, they say, wants to use public money to build its own one-party state (the charge is catching) on the back of bribed and ‘dependent’ voters. It wants to increase the public sector and immigration and ‘drag’ more into welfare because unemployed benefit claimants, immigrants and public sector workers are more likely to vote Labour.
In the last decade a conspiracy theory with the suitably scandalous name of ‘Neathergate‘ was all over the Tory press. Hacks misinterpreted an article by former Blair aide Andy Neather and claimed that the then Labour government deliberately allowed mass immigration to scupper the Tory party’s chances. You won’t be surprised to learn that not one right-wing journalist apologised to his or her readers after the Conservatives took power and immigration levels remained – er – just as high as they had been in the past.
As any reader of this magazine will know, there are conservatives idealists. Unlike the left, they believe a Conservative state should help you make your own decisions, earn your own living and go where your talents take you.
The left wants to own you, they say, the right wants to set you free.
The Conservative insistence that it is on the side of strivers may not be practical in the long run . It may be that the coming revolution in robotics will prove the Luddites right – finally – and give us a new technology which creates mass unemployment without compensating jobs in new careers.
But in the here and now rather than an imagined dystopia, the Conservatives’ claim to be the new party of the workers was not quite as far-fetched as it seemed. Contrary to all predictions, the great recession did not produce mass unemployment in Britain. The work was there for those ready to take it. Labour is under the control of middle-class Marxisants who do not understand working-class concerns. The Conservative party might have been the party that made work pay, the politicians who were on the side of those who ‘did the right thing’. They might have lived according to their ideals and made Labour’s defeat total.
Instead, George Osborne’s dismal achievement has been to destroy the ideals of his supporters, while confirming all the old prejudices of his opponents – and adding some new ones of his own.
Enough has been written on the awful circumstances in which Osborne will leave working families on low incomes. The hypocrisy of his pretence of being the workers’ friend is on such a Himalayan scale it may yet scupper his ambition to be prime minister.
Certainly he is doing everything he can to confirm the left caricature of the greed-driven sectarian Tory who cares only for his own class. The Resolution Foundation set out five ways he might find the money he wants to save and spare the working poor.
- Increasing the Basic Rate Limit to rise in line with inflation – rather than accelerating it so that the higher rate threshold reaches £50,000 – would save £1.3bn by 2020.
- Reversing the increase in the inheritance tax threshold and cuts to corporation tax would save £3.4bn by 2020.
- Clawing back the over-indexation above earnings of the State Pension from the last parliament – by limiting pension rises in this parliament – would save around £6bn.
- Returning spending on tax reliefs to 2010 levels by 2020 – and thereby reducing the UK’s current £100bn spend on around 1,000 different reliefs – would save around £10bn.
A fresh personal allowance hike would benefit dual-income (and usually no-kids) middle class couples above all others. The inheritance tax hike passes unearned wealth to the children of the upper-middle class. Ending tax reliefs would save money and simplify our Byzantine tax code. And few would notice if the Chancellor slowed down the increase in tax thresholds because, as every politician knows, it is far easier to refuse to implement a new tax or benefit than take away a goody that has already been bestowed.
Osborne won’t do any of the above.He wants to cut taxes, even if the benefits will accrue to the middle class and their children, and even though the public finances remain in an appalling state, and are in no condition to cope with the next recession.
So far, Osborne is conforming to the stereotypical Tory of letifsh agitprop. He hurts the working poor, while pampering the middle class. But when they mentioned the option of cutting back on Britain’s lavish benefits for pensioners, the Resolution Foundation’s researchers showed the novelty in him.
With all the eagerness of a thuggish old Labour politician throwing public money at trade unionists, Osborne has turned the elderly into a Tory client group. No budgetary constraints can limit his determination to build the benefit culture for old people, who are growing in number, more likely to vote and much more likely to vote Conservative.
The share of state spending on old age and health is set to be more than twice that allocated to education and economic development combined by the end of the parliament. Osborne is reinforcing the growing generational gap in welfare provision since the crash. Average spending per-head is set to fall by 12 per cent for children and 9 per cent among working-age adults, while rising by around 19 per cent for pensioners.
To secure his grey vote, Osborne is turning us into an unsustainable gerontocracy. A country that neglects its young families, schools and research and development will eventually fail – and fail its pensioners too. And the architect of its failure will be remembered as a man who combined all the vices of the left and right and none of the virtues of either.
Join The Spectator’s Andrew Neil, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth on 26 November to discuss George Osborne’s Autumn Statement and any surprises the Chancellor might have in store. Click here for more information and to book tickets.
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