Britain can’t afford a Labour government
Last week represented a new low for the Conservative Party. The loss of a prime minister after just 44 days in office was bad enough, but now Liz Truss’s successor faces a series of interlocking economic and political challenges that many fear will be almost impossible to master.
The winner of the leadership contest will have to steer the nation through a period of historic turmoil – an energy crisis, soaring inflation, an NHS on the brink – but also somehow reunite a fractious parliamentary party and rescue it from near-extinction-level polling.
History may remember Ms Truss more kindly than many of her critics now believe. Her central analysis of the problems facing our economy – that we have been too reliant on cheap money, and not focused enough on encouraging real growth – was absolutely correct.
The developed world, not just Britain, is trying to wean itself off a damaging period of ultra-low interest rates and irresponsible money printing. The Prime Minister had hoped to revive the country’s animal spirits by improving incentives and removing the barriers to enterprise.
Unfortunately, her team bungled her project to create a more competitive Britain. Ms Truss, to her credit, recognised that she was unable to follow through on her mandate and therefore had to resign.
But it would be a tragedy if her successor were to conclude from this that the country’s only possible future is a social democratic, declinist one. Indeed, whatever fiscal retrenchment is judged necessary in the coming weeks by the Chancellor must be heavily weighted towards spending cuts – not tax rises. To increase taxation even further, when the burden already sits at a 70-year high, would be economically calamitous as Britain teeters on the edge of recession.
It would also only serve to inflame the existing splits within the Tory Party, at a time when the next leader’s other priority must be to unite them. He or she will have to somehow steady the ship of state, but also devise a political programme around which the vast majority of MPs can organise.
It will not be easy. Indeed, there are some who seem to think it would be acceptable for the Conservatives simply to give up. They assert that a Labour government would not be that bad. They contrast Sir Keir Starmer favourably with Jeremy Corbyn, ignoring the former’s deeply problematic views. They argue that the Tories might benefit from a spell of opposition, as a chance to regroup and rebrand.
This is delusional nonsense.
Labour does pose a real danger. Its frontbench has scant ministerial experience – Ed Miliband is what passes for an elder statesman in the court of Sir Keir. Labour’s leadership might have learnt to sing the national anthem at their conference, but these are the same men and women who wanted to reverse Brexit and who campaigned to put Mr Corbyn into No 10.
Today, they might claim that their economic and fiscal plans are sensible and common sense, but they still channel the failed old Leftist ideas that have pitched Britain into crisis so many times before. Labour remains addicted to tax-andspend and interventionism.
The party has little interest in the enterprise economy: it is still in hock to the public sector unions that are causing so much chaos with their disruptive strike action. Labour’s leaders say that they are committed to fiscal discipline, but there is every chance that they will seek to “fund” their public spending pledges through wealth taxes, windfall taxes on “excess profits” and by finding other ways of soaking the moderately well-off.
This is why the Conservatives have to get their act together, and why there is no alternative except for them to pick a leader and then coalesce around them as quickly as possible. A formal party split would be a catastrophe, precipitating a general election that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party would surely win.
The Conservatives have managed to ride the revolutions of the last decade, winning an historic landslide only three years ago. But the experience of their opponents serves as a warning.
In 2015, the Lib Dems got their worst result since their formation in 1988. In 2019, Labour endured its greatest humiliation since 1935. The Conservatives, if they don’t turn things around fast, face an historic reckoning of their own.