Sherelle JACOBS

The Conservatives will lose their new voters if all they can offer is lavish public spending promises

In the tumult of this pandemic, two nasty little truths are surfacing like a double-headed hydra from the deep. First, Britain is broke. Second, the Conservatives are on course for electoral defeat. Plunged into a panic over the state of the country, the party has predictably opted for an amateur PR campaign over proper leadership.

The Tory attempt to charm the Red Wall with pop-socialism in the wake of our biggest economic crisis in 300 years is doomed. Rishi Sunak’s new £4 billion Levelling Up Fund, announced yesterday, squeaks with petrified slickness. Financing will be there for any local project that meets the reassuringly focused objective of making a “real impact”. The Chancellor has also set up a Northern Infrastructure Bank that will, no doubt, finance a variegation of shiny and pointless white elephants of utter irrelevance to Red Wall voters who, in the wake of the pandemic, face not just an economic but an existential crisis.

In Red Wall towns, where home and car ownership is higher than in metropolitan Britain, people are grappling with the indignities of having their houses repossessed and swapping their cars for public transport. People who were relatively well off before the crisis are now living on benefits in neighbourhoods where the cultural dividing lines between grafters and scroungers are harsh and deep.

One can only assume that the tone-deaf tokenism of the Chancellor’s spending gestures is a half-hearted attempt to keep the flame of Vote Leave alive following the departure of Dominic Cummings in a ball of fire. This is a mistake. Vote Leave was brilliant in many ways. Not least wresting power from snobbus conservativus, who views provincial Britons as an alien species who buy cushions on credit at Debenhams and want to bring back hanging.

But there was one basic problem: the flaws in the Vote Leave approach were almost metaphysical. It never really understood the political base that gave it life. It consoled itself with a technocratic leap of faith in the mystic powers of empirical political reasoning – drawing abstract truths about What The People Want from opinion polls. It refused to accept that useful polling is impossible in a volatile universe in which humans lie; that the opinion poll is little more than what a group of people pretend to think at a passing point in time. A jumble of magical phrases deciphered from the datasets by No 10 cosmologists – tougher lockdowns, new schools, better bus services – have become the basis for government. The populist revolutionaries have merely overthrown political judgment for following the polls.

It is curious that so many Tory MPS have failed to speak out against this absurd misreading of the mood in the Red Wall. Perhaps lavishing these areas with money has proved dangerously compatible with the party’s patrician instincts. In any case, offering stuff rather than a guiding philosophy has proved fatal.

Before the pandemic, the centreRight talked exclusively in terms of deliverables: get Brexit done, level-up the North, make America Great, build a wall. But then Covid hit. The experts screwed up. The world economy blew up. And the promises couldn’t be honoured. It is why Trump lost – and the clock is ticking for Boris Johnson. Even if the Tories find the cash for the cosmetic tweaks they hope could create a “feel-good-factor” before the next election – from spruced-up high streets to new hospitals – they are no longer vote winners in areas with deep economic scarring.

Take Back Control was the clue we all ignored. What the Red Wall craves – but the pollsters never ask – is a conservative approach to dealing with risk in an uncertain world. An approach that sees change as something to be shaped and limited – protecting what matters to people – rather than suffered. Or worse, seized upon with the manic enthusiasm of liberals who want to reshape Britain into a green corporatist utopia, with individuals morphed into stakeholders subordinate to a caste of power-grubbing managerialists.

The irony is that while ideologically aroused politicians strive to smash risk, the working class has long taken the pragmatic approach of learning to live with it.while Thatcher saw the miners as the “enemy within” to be vanquished, for better or worse, the miners saw continuity in risking their lives daily down the pits and staking their jobs and reputations on the picket line. Today Boris Johnson incomprehensibly promises a future purged of risk to squeezed-middle families that live in high debt and mediocre health, a job loss away from falling below the poverty line.

The Tory party machine is wrong in its belief that the Red Wall isn’t conservative enough for Toryism. In fact, the Tories aren’t conservative enough for the Red Wall. Better than any group, these voters grasp the cornerstone of conservatism, as articulated by the thinker David Stove, that the party has left buried in the debris of the Eighties: every action has consequences, and so the burden of proof is on the person who proposes change. It is why the region has over the years rejected not just the sanctimonious dogmatism of Corbyn, but also the single-minded liberalism of Thatcher, brilliant woman that she was. And it is why it will reject this equally blinkered – but much less brilliant – gang of Tories.