This was a new incarnation of wet, statist Tory thinking: it must stop

Mrs May’s ‘vision’, which pandered to a soft Left view of the world, was full of ideological contradictions

Few people in politics are as intensely dutiful and as thoroughly moral as Theresa May. She cares more about this country than she does about her own well-being; and the fact that her luck turned so tragically yesterday is no justification for the cruelty and abuse that has been heaped upon her. My problem with her speech wasn’t the delivery but the substance. I would love to have been able to support it on that basis, but simply cannot.

Its philosophy, if one can call it that, appears to be a modernised form of Macmillanite social democracy, a new incarnation of wet, statist Tory thinking. It was hard to tell, exactly, because the speech was blatantly contradictory. One part was an almost uplifting endorsement of free-market economics, rightly explaining that is the greatest agent of human progress; but the actual policies amounted to a historic repudiation of these very principles.

This strange mix would have been rejected as incoherent by an A-level politics board: how can you call for greater property ownership while presenting more council house building as the answer? How can you call for capitalism, but demand price-fixing and state direction? What were her speechwriters thinking?

She certainly talked powerfully of the British dream, and her paeans to social mobility and meritocracy were much-needed. But as the speech went on, it kept conflating the politics of victimhood – an ultra-negative, almost class war-style view of the world, where oppression is routine and where groups, rather than individuals, are all that matter – with the much more prosaic reality. Millions of people of all backgrounds are struggling; and far too much injustice remains.

But what’s unusual about modern Britain is not the imperfections – they exist everywhere, and must be tackled – but the astonishing success of so many of our immigrants and ethnic minorities in business and education. It would therefore have made more sense to pledge to build on our remarkable progress – envied in the rest of Europe – and to explain how Conservative solutions and values, including fair play, can build a better society. Instead, the speech talked down to millions, rather than demonstrating how they would be empowered and able to share in a lifestyle they aspire to.

At times, it felt to many Tory faithful in Manchester that this speech could have been delivered by Ed Miliband. If anything, it was too Left-wing for Tony Blair, who was to the Right of Mrs May on everything other than Brexit; even Gordon Brown, who at least had absorbed some classical economics, wouldn’t have resorted to imploring housebuilders to “do your duty to Britain and build the homes our country needs”.

Just two years ago, Mr Miliband was attacked as a Marxist; now his policies are being put into practice, with the demagogic energy price cap guaranteed to increase the chances of an eventual collapse in our energy supply. For all its attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, this speech was an abject surrender to soft socialism: it is now officially Tory policy to entrench a Labour view of society. FA Hayek, who dedicated his Road to Serfdom to “the socialists in every party”, must be turning in his grave.

Council home tenants are the most Labour-leaning of all voters; the party used to want to privatise council homes to create new Tories. These days, it seems to have a political death wish: the Prime Minister said that she wants to “take personal charge” of “getting government back into the business of building houses”. This might ( just) have been acceptable if the aim were then to sell these homes on, and if the only way to build more homes was to get the state to do it directly (I disagree, as it happens). But that’s not what it was about.

Even on its own terms, the policy fails: if you really believe that council homes are the answer to the greatest crisis this country faces, then spend an extra £50bn a year, not a trivial £2bn. This “vision” is pathetically incremental, and it will always be outdone by the hard Left. Mrs May has rightly, if belatedly, understood the importance of mass house building but she is taking her inspiration from the wrong decade.

In the 1930s, when the government didn’t artificially restrict the supply of buildable land, Britain built more than 200,000 private homes some years; these remain desirable places to live in today. Most of the council blocks built in the after-war decades have had to be torn down, such was their disastrous impact. As the Institute of Economic Affairs reminds us, the UK still has more social housing – 19 per cent of the total – than France, Germany and Spain. We still have the highest share in Europe of families living in reduced-price tenures. We need an extra 1 million or so highquality private homes, not yet more council houses that very few would actually choose to live in if they could afford an alternative.

The Tories’ approach seems to be that they really love capitalism, but only in theory, and never in practice. They cannot describe a real-life market without describing it as “broken” and without misdiagnosing the problem. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of our economic system. Britain isn’t an anarcho-capitalist society or an Ayn Rand-style individualist heaven: the markets we do have are extremely regulated, with layer upon layer of regulation and intervention and taxation having created all sorts of distortions. The real solution is to sweep these constraints away, to allow much more land to be used for building, and to encourage truly free markets and genuine competition.

We are now on a dangerously slippery slope. If it is the Government’s job to house us when homes are expensive, so, now food prices are going up, should the state not also own the farms? Should it own the shops, and the telephone companies? Should it fix the price of milk and bread, just as it now wants to fix the price of electricity and already sets the price of university tuition and the minimum wage?

Mrs May is a woman of courage and integrity. It is with great sadness that I disagree so much with her vision. But she needs to plot a course back to true conservatism if she wants to save her premiership.