James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
When a party loses an election, recriminations follow. But when it wins, an argument that is often as vicious breaks out over why it triumphed. This debate matters because, as Winston Smith knew, he who controls the past controls the future. The Tory party is preparing for such an argument right now. Those on the right are gearing up to say that it was the tax cut wot won it; while the so-called modernisers counter that the tax cut was illusory — and that the victory is a result of abandoning the old Tory tunes.
That the Tories are preparing for this argument shows that they now expect to win. The jitters of a fortnight ago have been replaced by a quiet confidence that the party will gain an overall majority. Number-crunchers at Conservative Campaign Headquarters now believe that the party needs to be only five points ahead in the polls to secure outright victory — and recent polls suggests the Tories are eight or nine points ahead. Previously, the target for victory was put at seven percentage points. But the Tory vote in the battleground seats held up better than expected when their poll lead dipped. This, the Tories believe, has made them more resilient to the yo-yoing of the polls.
The cause of the latest upswing is linked, by those on the right of the party, to the National Insurance tax cut. They argue that every time the leadership offers a tax cut — now, and at conference 2007, with the promise to take every estate worth less than a million pounds out of inheritance tax — the public respond well. As one right-wing member of the shadow Cabinet jokes, ‘a little Conservatism goes a long way’. This is backed up by anecdotal evidence. A Tory candidate in a Labour marginal says he has had a string of converts because of the National Insurance announcement. Previously, he said, he had not met a single voter who was switching to the Tories for a positive reason.
So why should a section of the party dispute this? The phrase ‘modernisers’ is slightly misleading, in that these were the dividing lines of the Tory wars of years gone by. But the word is used to refer to those who, in 2005, were determined not to repeat what they regarded as the mistakes of the losing campaigns of the recent past. This led to an allergy to anything redolent of those campaigns — which, some argue, includes tax cuts. Under William Hague’s leadership the Tories offered a tax guarantee, a commitment that the tax burden would fall over a parliament. In 2005, they were actually proposing an increase in the tax burden, but Michael Howard’s rhetoric suggested the Tories were offering tax cuts. The resounding rejection of both offers has led the modernisers to believe that tax cuts don’t work electorally, that voters simply don’t believe them.
Last week, they say, the Tories didn’t cut National Insurance but merely promised to offset the increase Labour is proposing by increasing the thresholds. Crucially, to their mind, there was no tax cut for the electorate to respond favourably to. They counter that the so-called inheritance tax cut of 2007 was also nothing of the sort — that it was funded by the introduction of a new tax, the introduction of a £25,000 charge levied on non-doms.
The modernisers have technical detail on their side in both cases. But surely what the electorate took away from these announcements was not the detail of the policy but the general idea that they would be able to keep more of their own money under the Conservatives? Shortly after George Osborne announced his inheritance tax move in 2007, I was having a conversation with one of the architects of the policy. I called it a ‘tax cut’. He corrected me. Then I did it again. ‘Look,’ he replied, ‘this is really important. It wasn’t a tax cut.’ The idea of tax cuts being electorally popular, he feared, would lead to pressure to offer more of them. The same fear is felt today.
Both analyses miss the point. For almost a decade, there has been an argument in the Tory party about what it needs to do to win again. One group argues that raw Conservatism is the answer — and that the electorate will come around to it eventually. A second group, on the opposite extreme, has become so obsessed by its internal battles with the old right that it judges success by keeping as far away as possible from anything associated with the old right. For example, this group is terrified of mentioning immigration, despite it being one of voters’ top three concerns, because the party handled the issue so badly in the past. But thankfully for the Tory party, a third strain of opinion has come to the fore in the last couple of years.
This third group call themselves ‘hard modernisers’ — but fear not, they are better than their name suggests. They grasped that the Tories did need to change their image, to talk about a wider range of issues — but for a purpose. And that purpose was to persuade swing voters of centre-right arguments. One of their leading lights, who is now playing a key role in the Tory election campaign, explains it to me thus: ‘It was an attempt to secure a proper hearing for centre-right arguments.’ They were the ones displaying the traditional Tory genius for adaptation, for working out how best to advanced classic insights in new circumstances. If the Tories do win the election, it is this group that should take the credit.
The event launching the Tory campaign on Tuesday showed how this viewpoint has triumphed. Great pains had been taken to show that this was a Conservative party that had changed. Samantha Cameron was flanked by two black candidates, David Cameron repeatedly referred to the ‘modern Conservative alternative’ and made clear his personal commitments to public services. But the beef of the message was traditional Toryism: we’ll cut government waste to keep taxes down.
Whether this strategy succeeds might determine not only the future of the Conservative party but the direction of the centre-right across the English-speaking world. There is no model for the English-speaking centre-right at the moment and in Australia and the United States the right is retreating into the laager. So from Canberra to Washington all eyes are on David Cameron — who is regarded as champion of the soften-your-message school of Toryism. If the Tories lose, the whole idea of trying to broaden out the issues you talk about and the candidates you choose will be discredited. But if the Tories win, the old model of modernisation may (wrongly) be given the credit.
The lesson that should be taken away by Conservatives at home and abroad if Cameron wins is that you do need to update your image and fight on your opponents’ turf. But you also need to remember why you are a Conservative and why voters elect Conservative leaders.
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