The Conservatives know they are beat

The mood at the Tory conference is grim to funereal, and for good reason. They know they’re beat. There’s a sense that something has changed in British politics and we ain’t going back.

Labour is revived; the Tories are divided and unpopular. But it’s about more than just a 45p tax cut, which was a bad idea, or the U-turn, which was suicidal (if a centre-Right government can’t pass a tax cut with an 80-seat majority, it’s dead in the water). The reality is that Britain doesn’t want what the Conservative party is now selling.

Their economic message is actually sound; it’s infuriating that they can’t seem to articulate it. In short, the west is in decline. We’re not productive or innovative enough; too many people are now chasing too few products, most notably energy, causing inflation. The solution pursued since Blair has been to improve the ‘demand side’, i.e. give the consumer more money to spend via money printing, benefits, social goods etc.

Problem is, in the end the money runs out, and your economic base hasn’t modernised or grown. The Tories thus want to kick start that base, via tax cuts, infrastructure and deregulation. Privately, they resent what the market’s become – not just its panicked reaction to the Budget but its tendency towards cartels (lazy monopolies) and wokery. Believe it or not, all these pro-business policies are designed to give business a boot up the daisy.

But the very moment the Tories finally choose to do this, the national culture has moved in a very different direction – because of earlier things the Tories did.

First, Brexit. A Right-wing victory that will benefit the Left in the long-run. Why? Because it taps into collectivist themes of sovereignty, identity and community. Because promises were made to spend more and defend workers from migrant competition. And because the Tories won a landslide off it that included parts of Britain that traditionally vote Labour, compelling Boris to adopt a populist programme for government out of the Disraeli playbook. The pivot from that agenda to this, from levelling up to libertarianism, is not what people voted for.

Then Covid hit. The Tories could have taken a mighty risk and told us to wash our hands and go about our business, but instead they adopted a kind of war communism and ran the country from Whitehall. Just as the Second World War legitimised Labour’s welfare state reforms from 1945-51, so lockdown has proved that money can be conjured up in emergencies, the NHS is sacrosanct and we should always put the vulnerable first. So why not vote socialist?

And to top it all off, the late Queen died. A woman who stood for sacrifice and putting your country first. Keir Starmer has brilliantly exploited these themes, making out that Elizabeth II was a closet socialist. The Tories have failed to do the same, even though monarchy is the most conservative thing imaginable. This, I fear, betrays their cultural decline. They rarely talk about good music, art, nature; they routinely trash the humanities and are forever rowing with the church. They have lost touch with the soul of Toryism, which could conjure a gentle loyalty among many voters. In its place – their last weapon – is cultural populism, a war on gender woo woo and asylum seekers. That’s what John Major did in the Nineties.

Liz Truss’s analysis of what’s gone wrong and needs to be done has much to commend it, but the Conservatives, after 12 years of faffing about, have left the country disposed to pick redistribution instead. And I can’t entirely blame them.

One downside of the inept way we’ve managed capitalism, even with constant handouts, is gross inequality – especially in assets such as home ownership – which is ultimately unconservative. It unbalances society, feeding civil unrest. It can promote money for money’s sake, which is unpleasantly materialist. And it is just wrong that while the Tories can sign off on a 45p tax cut, they drag their feet over raising benefits.

I am against that infamous tax cut because I think it’s bad politics but also because I don’t want it. With the choir of Westminster Abbey still ringing in our ears, this might be the time to invest a little more in our people.