You cannot understand the failure of Conservative rule unless you accept that we are living with the failure of honestly held Conservative beliefs. The UK is in crisis, not because Tories are criminals or charlatans or fools, although they can be all of these things, but because they tried to govern according to their sincerely held beliefs and sent us into a deep crisis.
I accept that this is a hard concession for the government’s opponents to make. They like to think of Conservatives as crooks. And they are right in part. The Tory administration from 2010 to the present, which offers peerages for £3 million to passing bidders, has been the most corrupt government of the modern era.
Why, then, pay these crooks the courtesy of taking them seriously?
Meanwhile, those of us brought up in the British class system have a second reason for refusing to offer Conservatives the smallest mercy.
David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and, for a while, their Liberal sidekick Nick Clegg, fit our resentful image of dilettantish public-school boys: foppish wreckers, who do not care about the damage they inflict as long as they can stay at the top of the heap.
I have lost count of the number of times anti-Tory columnists have reached for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lines from the Great Gatsby to describe our rulers.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
There is a terrific piece in the current edition of the New Yorker on fin de regime UK by Sam Knight. Without endorsing the notion that we have been ruined by dilettantes, his interviewees provide plenty of evidence to support it.
“It’s all about constantly drawing dividing lines,” a former Conservative party strategist told him. “That’s all you need. It’s not about big ideological debates or policies or anything.”
“He is not a Brexiteer,” George Osborne said of Boris Johnson. “I really would go to my grave saying, deep down, Boris Johnson did not want to leave the E.U”.
Knight himself, while never losing sight of the suffering austerity brought, says that the best way to think about the ruling politics of the past 14 years is to see it as a “psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life” ever since.
Clearly, there is truth in this. But we will not save the country merely by replacing upper-class chancers with middle-class moralists.
However satisfying a rhetorical tactic, dismissing you opponents as liars and crooks misses that they can be far more dangerous when they are wholly in earnest. As the Conservatives were when they were at their most destructive.
The damage austerity caused to schools, local authorities, the criminal justice system and national defence (a subject, incidentally, we should worry more about given Russia’s aggression) flowed from the authentic Conservative belief that lower rates of taxation produced economic growth.
There is a strong link between Liz Truss and George Osborne.
The 2010 Cameron government cold-bloodedly refused to take advantage of a once-in-300-years opportunity to borrow to invest in infrastructure at next-to-zero interest rates.
Instead, it paid off the debt accrued in the finance crisis by cutting public expenditure rather than raising taxes.
Do not underestimate the extremism that followed.
The Office for Budget Responsibility said of the period up to 2018
“In the 12 years from the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007-08 the UK public finances will have suffered their largest peacetime shock in living memory, followed – on current policy – by one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since World War II.”
From Osborne to Truss, Conservatives genuinely believed that low taxes would produce economic growth, and they have never had a programme to turn to when their strategy failed.
As we can now see.
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