The young face a lifetime bill for lockdowns
The Tories have trashed the futures of the younger generation, and have no plan to start repaying them
The Tories have become too clever for their own good. In his Budget speech, Rishi Sunak appeared to set a new electoral (rather than merely economic) narrative around the idea of “debt”. There are tough times ahead, he warned, and the people have an obligation to help the state get through them.
It would be political suicide, of course, for the Tories to admit that the opposite is true. They cannot acknowledge that the people made colossal sacrifices during the pandemic because the state failed, as that would heap pressure on No 10 to speed up our exit from lockdown. It would raise the public’s expectations for a brighter future in return for their sufferings. Most dangerous of all, it wouldbring to light the bombshell that the price of the Tory Covid response is the prospects of younger generations. Given the scale of the national debt and the absence of a credible plan to renew the economy, the young will be paying the cost of lockdown for the rest of their lives in higher taxes and worse public services.
Perhaps this is why the Chancellor felt obliged to refer defensively and repeatedly to the Government’s “generosity” as he tallied up the grants, loans and furlough schemes that have been lavished on the British people, among the most generous in the world. Arguably, he had no political choice but to then attempt the astonishing claim that only the Tories can be trusted with the multi-decade task of making sure the country can pay the bill. It is worth taking a step back to admire the audacity: not only is the party determined to get away with trashing the futures of the young, it intends to get re-elected multiple times off the back of it.
It is unlikely that Keir Starmer has failed to grasp all this. But he is incapacitated by Labour’s unwillingness to criticise lockdowns. It has deprived him of a chance to expose the disgrace that, every day, the Tories sacrifice the futures of more young people on the altar of the Conservative Party’s reputation – its over-cautious roadmap is, after all, partly designed to neutralise accusations that No10 was slow to take the pandemic seriously. It has left Starmer unable to make the powerful case that the exhausted and remote Tories are too emotionally detached from the damage they have caused to do anything useful about it. Unable to champion the future, the Labour leader can only nostalgically invoke the past, wittering about the need for a “Beveridge moment” and recovery bonds.
That isn’t to say that the Tories have it all sewn up. No 10 overlooks that political ruptures are triggered by the simplest revelations. Thatcherism became “too divisive”. Labour spent too much. Although the electorate thinks austerity went too far and Theresa May was “a disappointment”, these aren’t quite the kind of failures that might prompt a change of guard. But so wilfully failing the future of this country might do the trick.
If the Tories think that such a moment of reckoning is another generation away, they miscalculate. For all their attempts to “frame the debate” and manage expectations, the discrepancy between what voters expect to see after the pandemic and what the Government is planning is widening. This unprecedented crisis has whet the country’s appetite for an unprecedented response to rebuild the economy. The public’s sympathy for “business” (associating it more with local pubs rather than parasitic banks) is higher than it has been since before the financial crash. The rise of China has put Britain’s self-sufficiency and manufacturing prowess on the public’s radar in a way we haven’t seen since the end of the Second World War. The feeling that, after all it has been through, the country deserves at least an attempt at not just a stabler future, but a better future, unites old and young, Remainer and Brexiteer.
Millennials, who will spend several years playing catch-up, now have an almost psychological need to see their country leapfrog into a cutting-edge and outward-looking nation that thrives on tomorrow’s industries, from green tech to robotics and AI. Meanwhile, patriotic baby boomers, anguished and guilt-ridden by the fiscal wreckage that has been laid at the door of their children and grandchildren, desperately want to see their post-pandemic nation become more confident and self-reliant.
Token gestures like 5 per cent deposit mortgages, that will only drive up house prices, a smattering of freeports and a few more apprenticeship grants will not distract from Tory inadequacy. Public suspicions will crystallise as they realise that nothing has changed. This Chancellor – like almost every other before him – will carry on kidding himself that raising taxes will fill the coffers while the economy stagnates. The PM will go on running Britain like a backwards nation, rather than improving its performance. Britain will continue to attract unimpressive levels of investment as wages stagnate. And, at the expense of the young, the politico-economic machinery will fixate on totemic symbols rather than actual growth.
In short, it will not take long for the public to twig that, as the young face life-altering carnage, the cunning Tory gameplan is business as usual. At some point when lockdown ends, Labour may stop tying itself in knots and finally grasp the nettle. At which point, the Tories will be in trouble.