ERA OF THE VICAR’S DAUGHTER
SOMe quarters consider it fashionable to dismiss election manifestos. They don’t matter, say the sceptics. No one reads them, and the politicians never keep their promises anyway.
I have never found that argument convincing. Indeed, since the parties agonise over every detail of their manifestos, I think there are few better guides to the ambitions and assumptions of the men and women who would steer the ship of state.
If you doubt it, look at the manifesto that Theresa May launched yesterday.
For perhaps the first time since the days of Margaret Thatcher, this feels like a document indelibly stamped with the personality and values of the Conservative leader.
In those days, the Tories channelled the entrepreneurial spirit of the grocer’s daughter. In turn this, I think, is a fitting manifesto for a vicar’s daughter: serious, moral, pragmatic and meritocratic.
Look, for example, at the cover. In stark contrast to the glossy efforts of recent years, it could hardly be more sober.
With no pictures, just white text on a navy background, it looks old-fashioned, and a far cry from the shiny gimmickry of David Cameron’s era — for which the document sounded his death knell.
even the words ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’ are an explicit nod to tradition, and a welcome rebuke to the separatism of the Scottish Nationalists. And when you turn the pages, it is clear this is very much Mrs May’s manifesto, banishing memories of the Cameron- Osborne ascendancy while rekindling Mrs Thatcher’s successful appeal to aspirational working-class families.
Time and again we are told that this is a manifesto for ‘ ordinary working families’, with the aim of turning Britain into the world’s Great Meritocracy. This is just rhetoric, of course, but it is revealing and admirable nonetheless.
As you read on, it is easy to detect the hand of Mrs May’s cerebral aide Nick Timothy, a steel worker’s son from Birmingham, educated at a grammar school, who has consistently argued for ‘ bluecollar Conservatism’.
The
text opens on a remarkably sober note, with Mrs May warning that ‘the next five years are the most challenging that Britain has faced in my lifetime’.
In stark contrast to the fantastical chaos of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour programme, there is no cascade of imaginary freebies. For as the manifesto adds, ‘people are rightly sceptical of politicians who claim to have easy answers to deeply complex problems’.
Anyone expecting the equivalent of a magic wand, then, will be disappointed. Wisely, given the uncertainties of the next few years, the promises are strikingly modest. even the deadline for eliminating our national deficit, once the defining issue of British politics, is postponed to the mid-2020s. Still, it is surely better to be realistic about it than to set implausible targets that you end up breaking, as George Osborne did.
As for the hugely controversial proposals to tackle the social care crisis, whereby people with assets worth more than £ 100,000 posthumously paying for their own care, I think Mrs May deserves huge credit for her courage in taking on such a thorny issue.
Unlike Mr Corbyn, she knows very well that there is no Marxist money tree. The cash has to come from somewhere.
Yesterday, Mrs May was keen to play down any hint of radicalism. When questioned by journalists, she laughed off suggestions of ‘Mayism’, insisting that all this was ‘good, solid Conservatism’.
In some ways that is clearly true. every Tory manifesto since the Party’s birth has promised to keep taxes low; so does this one, though it abandons Mr Cameron’s Utopian pledge never to raise income tax or National Insurance.
In other areas, too, this is traditional Conservative fare, from the promise to increase the defence budget above inflation every year to the commitment to offering parents more choice in education, with 100 new free schools a year and no block on the introduction of grammar schools.
Yet this is not just your stereotypical Conservative manifesto. Indeed, on issues such as social care, industrial strategy and market regulation, and especially in its language and philosophy, it is, I think, one of the most remarkable manifestos in the party’s modern history.
Since becoming Prime Minister last summer, Mrs May has made it her mission to establish a new political consensus. In her talk of the national interest and a government working for everybody, she is clearly trying to reach aspirational working- class voters, many of them ex-Labour loyalists.
So the preamble to the manifesto goes out of its way to distance itself from the more wild-eyed kind of Tory libertarianism.
‘ We do not believe in untrammelled free markets,’ it says. ‘We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality. We see rigid dogma and ideology not just as needless but dangerous.’
hence all the talk of new houses, with a promise to build 1.5 million homes by 2022. hence the emphasis on grammar schools and ‘T-levels’ — practical vocational qualifications for 16- to 19-yearolds — which are likely to appeal to voters from aspirational skilled households. hence the promise to make listed companies put workers on their boards, create advisory workers’ councils or have directors specifically to represent employees.
This is all clearly part of Mrs May’s attempt to re-brand the Tories as the true workers’ party, as are her promises of a clean Brexit and reduced immigration, which are bound to play well with traditional Labour voters.
AND
TheRe is red meat, too, for tens of millions of people who are rightly sick of our London- centric political and cultural elites, with the promise to drag Channel 4 out of the capital and relocate the civil service around the country.
What struck me most, though, was the commitment to government as ‘a force for good’. For the first time in decades, this is a Conservative manifesto that boasts about using the power of the State, whether to support strategic industries or to regulate the failed energy markets.
From the more excitable commentators, there was wild talk of Mrs May breaking with Margaret Thatcher’s free-market Toryism. But I think that is nonsense. Mrs Thatcher was better than anyone at wooing working- class Labour voters, notably by enabling them to buy their council houses.
And she was never a rigid libertarian: her first government spent £ 125 million supporting the computer industry alone.
In this respect, the vicar’s daughter is singing from a similar hymn sheet. Yet it is clear that Mrs May and her advisers have also reached further back into their party’s history for inspiration.
her confidence in the power of government, for example, recalls Nick Timothy’s political hero, the Victorian titan Joseph Chamberlain. As a pioneering mayor of Birmingham, Chamberlain brought gas and water companies under municipal control, built schools, parks and libraries and gave working- class people the sense that government was their ally.
And as a patriotic populist who became a great Conservative imperial statesman, Chamberlain would undoubtedly have approved of Mrs May’s trenchant approach to the Brexit negotiations.
I was struck, too, by the promise to restore ‘the contract between the generations’. That is pure edmund Burke, the greatest political thinker of the 18th century and conservatism’s intellectual godfather.
It was Burke who, in perhaps the most influential definition of conservatism ever written, insisted that each generation is merely a link in the great chain stretching through history, and therefore has a duty to its predecessors and successors alike.
‘Society is indeed a contract,’ he wrote. ‘It is a partnership . . . not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’
You wouldn’t have found edmund Burke in one of Mr Cameron’s glossy manifestos.
The paradox, therefore, is that this most modest of manifestos, which talks of tough challenges and makes few specific promises, should also be one of the most intellectually and politically ambitious documents in living memory.
Not only does it revive a tradition of working- class Conservatism stretching back for more than a century, but it represents an extraordinarily daring attempt to reshape our electoral landscape for a generation to come.
And if she gets her electoral reward on June 8, then the Prime Minister will not just have redefined what it means to be a Conservative.
Like the Methodist preacher’s daughter from Lincolnshire before her, the vicar’s daughter from Oxfordshire will have seized control of British politics, and stamped her personality on our age.