Unlike Corbyn, Theresa May understands Britain – and likes it

The Tories need to keep the focus on Brexit as voters flirt with Labour’s madcap fiscal policies

Perhaps it was always too much to expect that voters might endorse the Tories with anything like enthusiasm. Less than two weeks ago, Theresa May was sitting on a double-digit poll lead and looked unassailable. Now, though, the polls are narrowing. It turns out that, having voted for Brexit – an enormous and unpredictable policy change – voters are not all in a conservative mood. Some have even taken a fancy to the petulant revolutionary leading the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn does not have much to say about Brexit, but he does see the election as an opportunity to advance his radical economic agenda. To the surprise of many Tories, that agenda is alarmingly popular. A thumping Tory victory will therefore rely on the extent to which Mrs May can keep the focus firmly on Brexit, security and migration – and off the very topic that Conservatives often see as their natural ground: the economy.

This feels a bit unfair. After all, the British economy has performed well. It is close to full employment, even with enormous influxes of cheap labour from abroad. For much of the last seven years, Britain’s GDP has grown faster than that of its peers. The government deficit has fallen slowly but steadily. The country’s financial system is now in good health. Britain continues to attract the largest share of all foreign investment going into Europe.

Voters, though, feel fractious. Seven years into the budget cuts, much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Mrs May might strike a different tone from her predecessors, which is important, but the Tory proposition is the same: a gradual repair of government finances, in aid of which we’ll see slowly deteriorating services and creeping tax rises. It might be realistic, but it’s not inspiring.

Labour’s hard Left leadership, on the other hand, is full of promises. Free childcare, free training, free university, free care, free houses and so on, all paid for solely by the mega-rich and corporations. It’ll deliver a massive rise in the minimum wage, vastly extend the role of Britain’s declining unions and take all sorts of infrastructure back into public ownership. None of this, we’re told, will increase borrowing by a penny.

For those on the Right, the incredible riskiness of Mr Corbyn’s plans is self-evident. It amounts to an unprecedented transformation of the economy. Never in Britain’s history have tax revenues reached more than 39 per cent of GDP; current levels of spending stand at 41 per cent. Labour’s manifesto commits the country to increasing tax revenues and government spending to levels never achieved before, at the same time as implementing Brexit – a huge structural change in our economy and politics.

The Conservatives’ response has been to make similar-sounding but smaller promises. The Tories will also get wages up by increasing the minimum wage, but by less than Labour. The Tories will cap energy prices, but only in a careful way. They would prefer not to raise taxes, but can’t make any promises. Mrs May did try to be brave by promising to tackle the unaffordability of state-run social care, but when it came under attack, she immediately backtracked and made another weak-sounding promise about capping costs, rather than explaining the sound rationale of her original policy.

The truth is that in a world of constrained public finances, continuing with a cautious economic approach just doesn’t sound very appealing to voters. The public appetite for fiscal responsibility, justified by 2008 and the euro crisis, is waning. The politics of giveaways practised by the Left is therefore back in fashion – and Mr Corbyn is offering the biggest goody bag.

The good news for the Conservatives is that this isn’t actually an economy or public services election. June 8 is about Brexit and the Brexit mood is about culture, national pride, sovereignty and democracy. These are themes the Tories understand well.

They are also the areas in which Labour is weakest. How can anyone trust Mr Corbyn, who has spent his career commemorating and honouring communists, IRA terrorists and Islamist murderers, and blaming Britain for the world’s ills, to defend the country’s interests in Brussels – or anywhere else, for that matter?

This is a man who has called for the “rehabilitation” of Leon Trotsky’s memory, who has spoken at dozens of gatherings for radical Islamists, who said that the beheading of British aid worker and former taxi driver Alan FOLLOW Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion Henning was the “price of [Western] jingoism” and who blamed an IRA bombing on Britain’s “occupation” of Northern Ireland. Having belatedly acquired the politician’s predilection for weasel words, Mr Corbyn is trying to play down his murky history, but it could not be clearer: in his heart, he has always thought of Britain as a malign force in the world.

Mrs May might not be a leader who inspires her followers to wave placards or attach an “ism” to her name. She might not be an economic whizz or an audacious charmer, nor even a particularly devious and strategic negotiator, but she shares the sympathies, instincts and culture of the British people. She rather likes Britain and wants to fight its corner. She thinks, unlike Mr Corbyn, that it is morally acceptable for public policy to distinguish between British people and foreigners. Her purpose is not the defence of the workers of the world, but the more humble protection of this corner’s lot.

Voters are flirting with Mr Corbyn because he is promising change without risk. They are listening to his madcap fiscal policies because they are tired of austerity. Irresponsible economic populism was never defeated, as the Tories supposed, but was merely subdued by crisis. Mrs May cannot win by venturing on to that turf because the Conservatives are not traditionally the party of inspiring dreams or utopianism. They are the political killjoys, the ones who turn on the lights to stop the party, send everyone to bed and deal with the angry neighbours.

Brexit has left us with plenty of angry neighbours. Mrs May’s task is to remind voters she will face them down more effectively than a hard-left radical who thinks Britain is the problem.