Sherelle JACOBS
Like Blair before them, the Tories are misreading the very voters who handed them an electoral landslide
Boris Johnson’s government is already out of touch. This is the big revelation of an otherwise alarmingly unsensational coronavirus mini-budget. From green jobs and youth placements to 10-quid restaurant vouchers, Downing Street’s rescue plan feels like something scrawled on the back of Time Out in a Hoxton café-cum-bikeshop.
It is certainly not the recovery road map that the Red Wall expected. West Midlanders want to ease social distancing rules in favour of face masks in theatres and rock venues to save an entertainment and hospitality sector that employs one tenth of the region. The North’s multi-billion pound beauty industry is incandescent that it has been “completely forgotten” as spas and nail bars remain shut. After a fitness franchise boom outside London, gyms from Darlington to Peterborough grapple with bankruptcy. Industrial towns face joblessness unseen since the Eighties.
No wonder dismay is growing in such parts at a self-indulgent green agenda. This week, the citizens of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire have been in uproar over an £8 million plan to protect a local beauty spot by closing 35 nearby car parks. Whitley Bay residents, meanwhile, are aghast that the Victorian-pleasure-dome-turnedfood-venue Spanish City faces closure after a road was turned into a two-way cycle route during lockdown.
The most boneheaded of local green initiatives aside, a national environmental policy is not the answer for the “left behind”. However well-intentioned, green jobs are unlikely to boost total employment in the medium or long term, when you factor in the capital diverted from the rest of the economy, and the transfer of costs to other firms. Nor do such visions deliver in the short term: getting renewable projects off the ground usually takes years. And what economist honestly thinks that loft insulation will meaningfully stimulate aggregate demand?
But zeal for such ideas betrays an unexcavated political truth: an obsession with polling ultimately leads to bizarrely unpopular game plans.
To grasp the most dangerous paradox in politics, we must briefly revisit the story of Blair. In its fixation with the polls, New Labour never grasped that voters are nuanced human beings. Much to the shock of the wonks, several Red Wall seats fell to David Cameron in 2010 because the working class felt the state had become too big; confident in surveys that showed suburbia believed in “aspiration”, Gordon Brown genuinely didn’t see the backlash against unfettered greed coming.
And so today, emboldened by polls that show 90 per cent of the Red Wall want him to fulfil his manifesto, Boris Johnson seemingly believes that, as long as he delivers Brexit and the NHS’S biggest ever cash injection, northern towns won’t notice that they are being used as “green guinea pigs” to seduce London seats.
Parties that fall for the polling paradox suffer from an even more serious problem: caution to the point of cowardice. For Blairism, it meant spin instead of direction, and inventing problems rather than tackling them. New Labour was a 13-year magic show, all smoke and mirrors. That it was finally flattened by the failure of a sub-prime mortgage conjuring trick was almost artistically exquisite.
This Tory regime – which has no idea how it won a landslide or how to lead, let alone in a crisis – desperately wants to re-enact the Blair Illusion. But today is nearer to 2009 than 1997. After New Labour had proved too craven to decisively define the Third Way, the Opposition defined it for them – as spending too much. Today’s Opposition could easily define One Nation Toryism in a similarly unflattering fashion – as spending unwisely. The Chancellor’s first priority must be to “find ways to pay for the borrowed money”, wrote the
Black Country’s Express & Star this week. No shock coming from a region that turned blue because it found Corbyn’s spending pledges and the wastefulness of long-standing Labour councils revolting. Has Sir Keir Starmer quietly twigged this?
But ah, Tory MPS say, the polls show that the Red Wall is ours as long as there is a culture war. The irony is that they’ve adopted the Westminster Twitter bubble’s definition of this struggle. London Tories see the culture war as a grassroots political conflict they can tightly war-game, ripping chunks out of Whitehall and the BBC. Most of the rest of the country views it as a broader Puritan mission against bloated, self-indulgent elite virtue signalling, in all its forms. To them, it is as much about politicians who waste the nation’s cash with funky retrofitting plans as it is about hacks who waste the nation’s time with gotcha questions at press briefings. And while the country collectively struggles with an uncertain future, the people grow evermore impatient with all those who think they are somehow a special case, whether that’s Black Lives Matter, Robert Jenrick or Dominic Cummings.
Therein lies one of the ugliest quirks of governments that believe in nothing apart from power. Intent on trying to fool everyone, they end up only fooling themselves. But here is the hard truth: Britain in crisis roundly rejected slippery and uncertain Blairism once. It won’t hesitate to do so again.