Can the Tories afford not to be nasty?
The party may have successfully shed the image of uncaring capitalism, but Boris Johnson ignores the needs of business at his peril
WWhat we witnessed at the conference this week was a rather antibusiness offering
ith the benefit of hindsight, Angela Rayner probably wouldn’t have described Tories as “scum”. Not just because it reaffirmed the deputy Labour leader’s cloddish credentials, nor even that Sir Iain Duncan Smith was afterwards attacked with a traffic cone by some of her knuckleheaded supporters.
No, what must really grate for Ms Rayner is that what was originally intended as a slur to galvanise the support of foaming-at-the-mouth Labour activists has actually done the opposite and brought the Conservatives together.
I was struck by how many delegates in Manchester this week were literally wearing the insult as a badge of honour. After Conservativehome chief executive Mark Wallace tweeted that he had an “exclusive supply” of “Tory scum” badges, Dehenna Davison, the Tory MP for Bishop Auckland, led the stampede. If Conservative Campaign Headquarters had any sense, they’d be firing up the production line on a new range of T-shirts, mugs and tea towels as we speak.
Like the Vermin Club of the 1940s, accidentally formed by Right-wingers after Aneurin Bevan described Tories as “lower than vermin”, Conservatives are rightly embracing their scum status. Of course, being called Tory scum is nothing new, but the reaction to it has changed as dramatically as the face – and demographic – of the party.
While it may have been an appropriate obloquy to lob at the likes of Alan B’stard or Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy, as the daughter of a stonemason who grew up on a Sheffield council estate, MPS like Ms Davison don’t wear it quite as well. And neither did James Brokenshire, the former secretary of state for Northern Ireland and for communities and local government who died of lung cancer on Thursday, aged 53.
Described by all who met him as a thoroughly decent, unfailingly polite and hugely dedicated man in politics for all the right reasons, the mildmannered father-of-three could not be further from the “scum” brush with which Rayner has tried to tar all Tories. Again displaying her trademark brass, even she was forced to admit that “he cared deeply about his work and public service” in a rare straying from the shallow end of her cerebral cortex.
The ugly truth for the Opposition is that the Tories no longer resemble anything close to the “nasty party” Theresa May warned about in 2002.
By 1997 and after 18 years of Tory rule, the Conservatives had acquired such a bad reputation that even William Hague was forced to admit in his first speech to the Tory party conference as its leader that the party had become “divided, arrogant, selfish and conceited ... out of touch and irrelevant”.
When the former prime minister, then party chairman, made her controversial remark five years later, she was not only referring to oldfashioned views on social issues like gay marriage but also a perception that the Tories expected the poor to digest paving slabs.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and we now have Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, admitting she has been “moved to tears” over LGBT hate and the bigspending Prime Minister facing criticism for doing too much to help those hit hardest by the pandemic. Having agreed to a 1.25 per cent increase in National Insurance to claw back the multibillion-pound cost of Covid, Mr Johnson has managed to reposition the Tories as the “party of the NHS” (if not low taxes).
So while some in the party may decry the destruction of Thatcher’s anti-tax and spend economics, the milk-snatcher side of her legacy appears to have finally been expunged.
The only question that remains is, at what cost? Some of the most interesting polling to have come out of conference was Opinium’s survey about the electoral centre ground for the Social Market Foundation think tank. As well as revealing that Conservatives had grown much more worried about inequality, the survey found that fewer Tories were now in favour of cutting red tape on business.
Showing a significant shift in attitudes on economic issues, the polling found that in 2016, some 48 per cent of Conservative voters said that government should “make it as easy as possible to run a business by removing regulations and rules”. Now only 27 per cent of Tories support that position.
Meanwhile, the percentage of Tories who say that business will find a way to make money despite government interventions has risen from 26 per cent to 34 per cent.
Five years ago, more than threequarters (78 per cent) of Tories said that “people should be able to earn whatever they want as long as they pay the amount of tax they legally owe”. Now that is down to 55 per cent, with more than a quarter (28 per cent) arguing that society must not become “too unequal” as the “super rich live in a different world to the underclass”. (In 2016, just 15 per cent of Tories were worried about inequality).
While Mr Johnson’s new “heir to Blair” centrist offering may well be in tune with an electorate that has moved Leftwards on economic questions, he ignores the concerns faced by businesses – big and small – at his peril. As former US president Calvin Coolidge put it: “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
What we witnessed from the Conservatives this week was a rather anti-business offering, with Cabinet ministers seemingly lining up to blame the recent shortages on firms’ failure to prepare for Brexit. Accusing businesses of being “drunk on cheap labour”, one senior source insisted it was “a failure of the free market, not the state” that was behind the fuel crisis and empty shelves.
Yet the plain truth here is that the Government had been warned months ago about the shortage of lorry drivers behind the current problems, and should have determined that sufficient drivers would be allowed into the country from abroad to fill the gaps. While the appointment of ex-tesco CEO Sir David Lewis as the Government’s new supply chain adviser is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, that role should have been filled the day we left the EU.
Moreover, the Government should have ensured that the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) – the body responsible for granting HGV licences – wasn’t sitting on 54,000 unprocessed applications. Since we managed to get a national newspaper out every day of lockdown, what on earth is the DVLA’S excuse for not doing the job taxpayers subsidise? Had someone in Government got, dare I say it, “nastier” with this arms-length organisation then perhaps we wouldn’t be in quite such a mess. It was the same with Public Health England’s shambolic handling of the PPE (personal protective equipment) crisis at the start of the pandemic, which was greeted with a pathetic sort of pandering rather than a properly punchy response.
It strikes me as rather contradictory for Mr Johnson to praise the “capitalist energy” behind the vaccine rollout while failing to apply the same no-compromise, private-sector thinking to some of our public bodies that are unfit for purpose.
Currently, the only person in Government who is actively seeking to “level up” businesses with a deregulatory Brexit dividend is Lord Frost. Armed with the report released in May by Duncan Smith’s Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform, “Frosty” appears to be taking no prisoners when it comes to the Northern Ireland protocol as well as the divergence from EU rules that the 52 per cent voted for in 2016. Refreshingly, this straight-talking former diplomat isn’t trying to win a popularity contest either – unlike almost all of his Cabinet colleagues.
No one wants to see a return of the nasty party. But if the Tories lose their teeth, not least when it comes to competence in a crisis, then they are in danger of biting the dust.