What have the Conservatives done for us?

Assuming this is the Conservative party’s last conference in power, I decided to investigate what kind of country they leave behind. Thirteen years on, are we richer, poor, happier or sadder?

I started by asking MPs to name their biggest achievement. No one said ‘the economy’; Ukraine and Brexit were popular. Two replied: ‘Kept Labour out’, which, considering Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn ran the opposition, is low hanging bananas. Nevertheless, ‘winning’ is what the Tories have done best. They slipped into office via a coalition, won a majority, then a minority, and finally a historic victory built on Red Wall seats that had backed Labour since the Norman Conquest.

Despite this, it’s tricky to say what they stood for. There have been five prime ministers, three within two months, each elected to repudiate the last – and chunks of their original plan for Britain never happened. Consider these unfulfilled pledges from the 2010 manifesto: complete HS2 to Manchester, cut the Commons by a tenth, spend 0.7 per cent of national income on aid, shrink the state, strengthen the Union, replace the Human Rights Act. David Cameron not only intended to stay in the EU, he was open to extending membership to Turkey.

Then there’s that plucky goal of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands. In 2022, net migration rose to 606,000 – boosted by ‘racist’ Britain offering safety to around 350,000 Hong Kongers and Ukrainians – and we are beset by a boats crisis. The UK is gradually turning into a multicultural society, whether Suella Braverman likes it or not, and Romanian is now the third most widely spoken language in England and Wales. ‘Salut!’

That said, our nation’s population growth is actually slowing: the latest census reveals that there are 264,650 fewer under-fours than a decade ago and the number of 90-year olds has hit an all-time high. With pensioners protected by the triple-lock and tuition fees tripling since 2010 – landing those starting out with a whopping debt – Britain has chosen to become a country for old men. As if to encapsulate our wellness-obsessed epoch, James Bond settled down with a French psychiatrist and had a daughter.

The Conservative advertising department would like you to know that Britain still has lead in its pencil, that we’ve bounced back from the pandemic and grown faster than France or Germany since 2019. Four million jobs have been gained since 2010, they say, and youth unemployment has almost halved. Manufacturing continues its slow decline as a share of GDP but we are making more goods than under Queen Victoria – and doing it with cutting-edge tech. In 2010, there were just 260 space-related businesses operating in the UK. In 2022, it was 1,590. 

The counter-argument is that we’ve developed anaemically, that average annual growth (subtracting the crisis years) is slightly slower than under Blair and Brown. The TUC calculates we’ve lost £400 billion by straying from the growth rate predicted in 2010: the Resolution Foundation says workers are about £11,000 worse off than they would have been had wages continued to grow at the pre-2008 pace, with our household gap compared to Germany rising from £500 to £4,000. In 2010, the Tories pledged a balanced recovery; this morphed into levelling up. Yet London and the south-east remain our dynamo, and if you were to remove the capital’s output, we would shave 14 per cent off our living standards and fall behind Mississippi. 

Homebuilding has been disappointing: rough sleeping is up. The Trussell Trust says that it distributed 60,000 food parcels in 2010, and over 2.5 million in 2020. In his memoir, the respected anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field observed that, whereas in the past a branch of Tesco complained kids were stealing sweets, since benefits were frozen/cut the items that most commonly went missing were sandwiches and underwear.

Such misery predates the cost-of-living crisis (last October, the inflation rate hit its highest point since 1981). A pint of milk cost you 44p in 2010; 65p now. The average house price has rocketed from £168,000 to £286,000, and anyone who managed to raise a deposit has to contend with the return of Brown-era interest rates. In 1990, Alan Clark wrote: ‘We [are] stuck with the same inflation rate as when we came into power… Eleven years of endeavour and nothing to show for it but the passage of time and the intrusion of old age.’ But at least Maggie Thatcher had nudged back the frontiers of the state, whereas her heirs have left us paying more money for a bigger government that operates, in key regards, less efficiently (thank goodness they gave up on privatising Channel 4 though: Naked Attraction is saved for the nation).

According to the TaxPayers Alliance, in 2010-11, Labour’s expenditure was 45.7 per cent of GDP; last fiscal year, it was 45.6 per cent – so no change. But take out the credit crunch and Labour spent an average of 37.6 per cent of GDP every year in office, compared to 41.5 per cent under the Tories pre-Covid. That increase has been covered in large part by tax rises and fiscal drag, penalising hard work and raising families, and though the Tories are rightly proud of taking many low paid workers out of tax, this year’s tax burden is the highest since 1949 – total current receipts.

There could have been another way, as Michael Gove proved. The Tories entered office with a maverick plan for education, to reverse the left’s obsession with student autonomy, restore discipline, teach facts, expand academies, empower parents. Crusaders became ministers and were allowed to keep their jobs (Nick Gibb, who promoted phonics, has been running schools on-and-off for 13 years). The result: even though spending has fallen 3 per cent in real terms, England is now the best in the West when it comes to reading at primary level, exams are more rigorous, the proportion of schools rated good or outstanding has leapt from 68 to 88 per cent, and more students are now studying maths and science. Compare that to nationalist Scotland, where results worsened.

A similar triumph of will was demonstrated in Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit reform, rolling six separate benefits into one scheme to create a simplified, more flexible system that demonstrated its value during lockdown when enrolment skyrocketed. Alas, Covid weakened the ‘make work pay’ agenda and we are back to parking millions on benefits, even in the middle of a labour shortage. 

Arguably, the Tories never governed quite as effectively or imaginatively as they did when shackled to the Lib Dems. Otherwise, there has been no effort to promote a market in social care; local government spending power is now around 10.2 per cent lower than when the coalition first held hands. Health reform was begun, then watered down, now replaced with splashing the cash. Waiting lists were rising before Covid. The poor are doing DIY dentistry. The rich are boring us senseless with their ‘gluten-free’ bread. The tiny proportion of smokers left in existence has roughly halved.

The personal became political under the Tories, the body transformed into a battleground over gender, race and sexuality in an Age of Anxiety. According to the NHS, in 2022 some 18 per cent of children aged 7 to 16 had a probable mental disorder, up from 12 per cent in 2017. Among those aged 17 to 19, the figure jumped from 10.1 per cent to a shocking 25.7 per cent. The vast expansion of smartphones must be to blame, but also the stuff we’re feverishly tweeting and TikToking about. As well as being locked up and masked – traumatised by mass death – this generation has seen its history decolonised, the definition of a woman dissected, and the patriarchy exposed by #MeToo. Extraordinary to think that in 2010, Jimmy Savile was a respected children’s entertainer and Russell Brand a sex symbol.

The cultural shift from ‘toxic’ to ‘safe space’ could be called conservative – say goodnight to the sexual revolution – yet the widespread myth that this government has been the most right-wing in history has pushed an entire generation of voters towards the left by default rather than reason. In 2010, 30 per cent of under 24-year-olds voted for Cameron (31 per cent for Brown); in a recent poll, Tory support stands at an amusing 1 per cent (and all of them, said a wag, are on GB News). 

Has no one noticed that the Conservatives gave us three women PMs and our first non-white PM? That they have decarbonised rapidly, or imposed abortion access to Northern Ireland? The party’s most significant social reform was the ultra-liberal legalisation of same sex marriage. Of course, more Tory MPs voted against SSM than for it – indeed, some of the loudest critics of the Conservatives are those who say their elite has simply embedded Blairism. One might counter that the job of Toryism is not to change things but to manage an inherited order well, though this has hardly been a period of consensus. We have had riots and sticky oil protests; the Manchester conference has been almost shut down by the RMT. Devolution has been strengthened, with the result that the Left has gained regional fiefdoms from which to experiment in socialism and attack the government.

Two MPs were assassinated. Parliament’s powers of oversight are greater, which is good, but politics is as ugly as I can remember it – the passions stoked by Brexit, towards whose uplands we crawl in vain hope of sun. The romantic in me rates Brexit a success: we took back control! But what did the Tories do with it? Minus tax cuts or deregulation, we find ourselves sitting outside a protectionist trade bloc, f-ing business (as Boris might say).

No, Conservatives are meant not just to manage but to revitalise, to improve life and charge minds. The two comparable periods of centre-right government – 1951-64 and 1979-97 – expanded the middle-class and turned us into self-governing consumers. After these past 13 years, there’s a contrasting sense of material decline matched by the onward march of an incapable state – the number of civil servants has jumped 25 per cent in seven years – and the latest iteration of Toryism, under Sunak, is characterised by the correction of errors that the Tories themselves have made, to push back their own green targets or to reduce immigration. A more right-wing manifesto is their only hope of winning a fifth election, cry the pundits, but according to the Social Attitudes Survey, the country is trending woke – more tolerant of difference, worried about inequality, uncertain about British identity. In 2013, 54 per cent of us thought the UK was superior to most other countries. That has dipped to 34 per cent. Some 32 per cent said the world would be better if it was more like Britain; now, a paltry 15 per cent concurs. We have fallen out of love with ourselves.

Finally: in 2010, 31 per cent supported increasing taxes and spending; by 2021 that figure hit 52 per cent, a bounce that correlates to Brexit not Covid, and support for redistribution of income is at its highest since 1994. Despite failing to govern as conservatives, the government has pulled off the impressive feat of turning millions of voters against conservatism.