PM must not forget voters’ aspirations

Conservative success in last week’s local elections will turn out to have been just the beginning: a poll for this newspaper suggests the party could win the biggest share of the vote since 1970 and sweep to a historic victory next month. The Prime Minister is right to warn against complacency, as anything can happen between now and June 8, but the Tories are clearly putting back together a national coalition not seen for many decades. The last Tory leader who understood how to do this was Margaret Thatcher.

Lady Thatcher’s patriotism, her grocer’s daughter values and her moral strength appealed to millions of voters disgusted with the hard-Left, pacifist drift of the contemporary Labour Party. Theresa May is tapping, in a modernised way, into the same sentiments. The public loves her seriousness and her spirit of public service, but this time the other key ingredient is Brexit and regaining control of immigration. In the Eighties it was the Falklands and the Cold War.

Yet the two leaders differ in one key respect. Lady Thatcher allied her Middle England instincts with a pro-growth economic philosophy – she mixed traditional values with an enthusiastic materialism designed to spread prosperity and ownership. She tapped into the zeitgeist of a newly individualistic, consumerist ethic in which most wanted to own their own home. She took the side of those who wanted to get on in life.

Mrs May appeals to the same people, and also promises to make them better off. But her tone is less optimistic and she prefers to use the power of the state – through a higher minimum wage or energy price controls – rather than the free market to help the Just About Managings. As Mrs May puts the finishing touches to her manifesto, she needs to add some Eighties-style aspirational conservatism to her agenda, and remember that only capitalism can drive the rise in living standards that this new army of Tory voters still rightly wants.

Britain needs far more economic growth. We cannot just focus on sharing its proceeds. The May agenda, including a successful Brexit, is contingent upon a strong economy. If she wants to convert a historic victory into a new political era, she must marry national and personal aspiration.

Assuming the 2017 local elections do hail the arrival of a fresh coalition, then it is just as national and cross-class as Thatcher’s was: the Tory victories ran from the Kent county council to the Tees Valley mayoralty; from the mayor of West Midlands to council seats in Glasgow. Mrs May has Lady Thatcher’s cultural conservatism under her belt. A majority of the country shares her goal of reviving national sovereignty and rejecting spin.

But Brexit is about advancing personal autonomy, too. The EU’s bureaucracy, regulations and protectionism crush the individual. Labour wants either to maintain EU control or replace it with a bigger state at Westminster. The Lib Dems are just as bad: yesterday they announced they would raise every rate of income tax. There has to be clear blue water between the Tories and what it dubs the coalition of chaos, to show that the country post-Brexit can be a radically different and better place.

After the wasted Labour years and the halfhearted reforms of the Cameron/Osborne era, the next Conservative government must have a new vision for wealth creation. The Prime Minister needs to explain how she will accelerate income growth, foreign investment, competitiveness – how she will make the UK a place that business people and entrepreneurs from all over the world will want to come to invest in. We cannot regulate or legislate our way to prosperity.

Giving more so-called rights to workers may be popular in the short-term, but what is needed in the long-term to really deliver results is higher productivity and an economy that can compete in the world. It is easy to slash, say, the profits of the energy industry, but much harder to encourage it to build power plants and update infrastructure. Price caps won’t remain popular for very long if they lead to blackouts.

Mrs May, alone among her rivals for No 10, understands the values of the country that she leads. It is time for her to start talking about how she will make Britain richer and more prosperous, as well as free and self-governing.