Theresa May’s conference speech — interrupted by coughing fits and with part of the set falling apart behind her — served as an unfortunate metaphor for her premiership and party. She is carrying on and in doing so, she demonstrates her resilience, but also her frailty. The horrified faces of cabinet members watching as her voice dried up on stage seemed to sum up their wider concerns about whether their party is in a fit state to see off Labour, so recently dismissed by them as a joke. Now, they are left wondering if their party is falling apart.
The Prime Minister spoke about taking the fight to Jeremy Corbyn, but her announcements suggest that she is suing for peace — accepting his argument, and seeking to copy some of his solutions. The Conservatives are talking as if they have the right answers, but acting as if they have none. They are diagnosing problems, but are strikingly unable to come up with solutions of their own, and they are looking very much like a party that is running out of ideas and options.
The main pledge from this conference was to build more social housing — but the UK already has more than almost any other country in Europe. The housing crisis is created by the lack of private supply, itself a function of the broken land market — and the many political disincentives to build. Far from being a ‘market’ crisis, the housing problem is a typical example of the failures of government — and what happens when something essential is needlessly rationed.
There is no shortage of Tory MPs who know what needs to be done: the problem of planning permission refusals needs to be dealt with — along with local councils that are anti-development.
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