Lockdown is demolishing the squeezed middle

The Tories have nothing to offer aspirational voters who have been driven to bankruptcy under Covid

Outside the centrally heated lockdown bubble of the professional classes, something profound is happening. The squeezed middle is evaporating. The upperworking and lower-middle classes may have grafted over the years to achieve a certain level of comfort and status. But many are seeing their old lives vanish in the righteous delirium of lockdown.

The stories I have encountered in recent weeks offer just a small glimpse of their humiliation: laid-off breadwinners walking miles to a food bank, ashamed of being spotted by a neighbour; jobseeker charities inundated with calls from mid-level executives in a panic that they are “middle class and want to stay that way”. A supermarket security guard’s observation that shoplifting had soared – and the worst offenders were, mere months ago, respectable customers who paid for their weekly shop.

It is too early to fully comprehend what is going on, as lockdown drives small firms to bankruptcy and forces hundreds of thousands out of work. But it’s already clear that these are politically uncharted waters. The Tories are tasked with managing an economic crisis that affects their voting base disproportionately. Thatcher could afford high unemployment because the jobless tended to be tribally Labour. Austerity-hit lower-income voters were irrelevant to Cameron’s loveless marriage between affluent metropolitan and Tory England.

Which makes it all the more ominous that the Tories seem so divided on what to do. The party should be reassuring those who have fallen on hard times that a safety net will remain in place until lockdown is lifted. Instead, it is in a muddle. In the glossy glare of Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign, MPS snipe over whether offering out-of-term help is pragmatic or a theoretic breach of conservatism. Rishi Sunak dithers over extending the £20-a-week uplift to Universal Credit without presenting an alternative (such as slashing consumption taxes).

Nor is there enthusiasm for the kind of creative accounting that might cut welfare costs while helping those in need – not least access to a one-off emergency fund. (If mum can tap a £100 grant when her washing machine packs in, she avoids getting trapped in the cycle of spending £10 a week at the launderette, and needs fewer benefits.)

Behind the scenes there is much frustration among Tory backbenchers at the inability of the party to decide on a plan and stick to it. It has got to the point where they would prefer an unpopular policy to U-turns that leave them exposed to ridicule in their seats. Such hapless dithering at the top and lack of initiative among the rank and file bring us to one conclusion: the party doesn’t get the squeezed middle.

Lockdown has exacerbated the Tories’ existing lack of understanding of their Red Wall voters, many of whom are part of this aspirational but stretched class. Remember Workington Man, that dismal archetype who loves Brexit, hates immigrants and likes his Tories to be free-spending? One Nationers are eager to lavish him with every benefit solicited on his behalf by the Fabian intelligentsia. The party’s libertarians eye him with suspicion. Show him too much compassion, and they fear he will be swallowed into a dank haze of mental health therapy and daytime television.

But such caricatures overlook two things: first, how many of those who are near bankrupted by this pandemic – from plumbers to shopkeepers – are part of Britain’s plucky self-employed; and second, there are Tory solutions to their woes. The “petty bourgeoisie” have run their small firms for years in a hostile climate of high taxes, crushing bureaucracy and competition from international chains. They are not indestructible, but they are staggeringly resilient – and from cutting income tax to slashing business rates, the Tories should throw the kitchen sink at helping them.

We also forget that the squeezed middle is so squeezed because it is so rampantly aspirational. It has been working hard and racking up debt since the Sixties when white goods went mass market. The newly unemployed who have mortgages to pay and credit cards to service need the Tories to go for jobs, jobs, jobs, as lockdown is lifted so they can get on with paying their dues. (And those who wonder if this cohort prefers a life on benefits to paying them off might do well to remember how stridently the guiltily indebted middle supported austerity, to Labour’s horror.)

To give them the best shot at recovery, social distancing should be scrapped so retail and hospitality can recover. Employer National Insurance should be abolished to incentivise firms to keep on staff. Word of an initiative enabling adults to take out a “student loan” to reskill is good news.

But Tory messaging needs to change drastically – to focus on investing in individuals rather than “communities”. As nice as spruced-up high streets and new bus shelters might be, putting food on the table takes priority. And there is no “third way”. Any Cameroonian impulse to attempt a new Big Society must also be crushed. It flopped because Middle England was too busy dusting itself off and getting ahead to indulge in blue-blooded fantasies of philanthropy. An expensive emergency welfare state is, then, in a perverse way, the price of red-blooded selfishness.

The Tories have one chance to make up for the lockdown catastrophe. If they fail to help those in need off their knees, they are finished.