No stunts. Just a long-overdue moral vision for Britain

Theresa May’s speech was certainly not one of the greatest pieces of oratory ever delivered at Tory Party conference. It was never going to be. There were no gimmicks, no sound-bites and, at times, the Prime Minister’s delivery was frankly leaden.

yet she nevertheless delivered yesterday a carefully considered mission statement which made it crystal clear on whose behalf she plans to govern.

Our Prime Minister is on the side of working people who have found life a real struggle during the past 20 years.

Their salaries have fallen in real terms. They have been unable to get on the housing ladder, partly because of ever-higher property prices, and partly because of the pressure from migrants. In some cases, their jobs have been undermined or even stolen as a result of mass immigration.

These are decent working people — Mrs May’s people. yesterday she dedicated her premiership to looking after their interests.

No political party — certainly not Tony Blair’s Labour or David Cameron’s Tories — has stood up for them in recent times.

Metropolitan commentators on the grand London newspapers and inside the BBC have frequently sneered at these people for their basic decency and simple patriotism.

But Mrs May’s Conservative Party is, she says, unequivocally on their side.

she clearly reckons that the rich can look after themselves. and if you dodge your taxes or don’t treat your workers fairly, she is very seriously going to be on your case. as far as the Prime Minister is concerned, the tax-avoider in the Cayman Islands is every bit as contemptible as the benefits cheat on the housing estate.

This moral vision means that if you are a member of David Cameron’s high-living Chipping Norton set, then Mrs May is definitely not the Prime Minister for you.

she will make life even more difficult for the super-rich groupies which buzzed about Tony and Cherie Blair.

Blair knighted the stinking rich but morally revolting high street retailer sir Philip Green — while David Cameron put him on a government task force. Mrs May held sir Philip up to excoriating contempt yesterday.

she has higher standards than her predecessors. at the heart of her brand of conservatism is the strong ethical belief that people should put back into society what they take out.

Where Cameron and Blair were metropolitan, Mrs May is provincial. The Camerons and the Blairs were fashionable. her shoes apart, Mrs May is defiantly unfashionable.

she is most at home with her suburban Maidenhead constituents.

This is indeed a welcome departure in British political life.

here is another, crucial difference between Mrs May and her predecessor. David Cameron was, in essence, a liberal prime minister. Mrs May marks a reversion to traditional conservatism.

She intends her premiership to challenge the liberal internationalism of Cameron and Blair. They assumed that nation states — including Britain — count for less and less in the modern world.

They accepted the liberal dogma that nations are essentially powerless against huge international corporations, mass immigration, the relentless advance of communications, and untrammelled free movement of international capital — the cumulative process often known as globalisation.

But now Mrs May has rejected this consensus, and in doing so she is attempting to define what it means to be British. her speech amounted to a passionate statement that she believed in the nation state, and she spelt out her reason: that it has a fundamental role in supporting the weak and vulnerable.

It is a well-established fact that globalisation has been a brilliant bonus for the talented, the affluent, the privileged and the well-educated.

It has done brilliantly for a relatively small but hugely influential international elite.

But others have paid a huge price. There are many communities in Britain which have changed beyond recognition thanks to mass immigration, or whose access to public services is under threat because too many people are now having to share school places, doctors’ surgeries and hospital beds.

For the Chipping Norton set, immigration means cheap and efficient domestic service. For the big corporate bosses it means cheap labour. Mrs May showed yesterday what a heavy price in job insecurity and lower living standards many ordinary people have been obliged to pay for this mass immigration.

Like all substantial political speeches, her Tory conference oration was highly controversial, which is why yesterday her vision for Britain came under a pincer attack from two apparently contradictory directions — big corporate bodies like the Institute of Directors, which benefit from the cheap foreign labour that globalisation offers — and Left-wingers who have long despised the very idea of the simple British patriotism articulated by the Prime Minister yesterday.

Criticism from City bosses is based on naked self-interest. a strong nation state stands in the way of corporate tyranny and makes sure unscrupulous companies pay their taxes.

as for the Left-wing critique — it is based on a misplaced idealism which would have been well understood by George Orwell, the great 20th-century socialist writer. he described brilliantly the type of Left-wing intellectual who instinctively hates the very idea of Britain, in his classic essay The Lion and The Unicorn.

‘england is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,’ wrote Orwell. ‘In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every english institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.

‘It is ... unquestionably true that almost any english intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save The King than of stealing from a poor box.’ (This brings to mind Jeremy Corbyn refusing to sing the national anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial last year.)

The contemptuous reaction to Mrs May’s speech from The Guardian and parts of the BBC showed that Orwell’s comments are as relevant today as ever. There is just one difference.

In Orwell’s day, the intellectuals contemptuous of British patriotism owed their allegiance to Moscow. Today they are more likely to feel loyalty to Brussels.

To be fair, there were faults in Mrs May’s speech. at times, it was simply too short on detail.

FOR example the Prime Minister rightly observed that exceptionally low interest rates unfairly penalise savers. she promised to address this problem, but did not give even the faintest hint of how.

and large problems lie ahead. If Mrs May goes ahead with her promise to make big international companies pay more tax, it is certain some will threaten to depart these shores, with a cost to British jobs.

It is far too soon to say for certain whether this Government will succeed in its aims, and there are many serious obstacles ahead as we enter a crucial stage of British history.

But this much can be said: if Mrs May brings even half of her remarkable vision to reality, then she will deserve to be classed among Britain’s greatest prime ministers.