Below I’ve lifted one of my favourite even election maps from the vault – Local Elections 1995. As you can see plenty of amber, a profusion of red, almost no blue on the map. John Major took as big a kicking here as he did in 1997. Why was it quite so bad? It’s my belief that if you sell Joe Public a dream and it turns sour they will really turn on you.
Before 1995 the Tories had tried to sell the unsuspecting British public two dreams – a property-owning democracy and a share-owning democracy. The property-owning side of things had gone spectacularly wrong by 1995, people had endured years of cripplingly high mortgage repayments, house repossessions and negative equality. As for owning shares, turns out people weren’t interested, they did buy stakes in privatised utilities, but only to sell them for a quick buck.
A new shattered dream
This year we’re looking at a similar shattered dream scenario – The Tories sold millions the idea of Brexit as a dream for taking back control, genuine independence and sovereignty – only upsides, no downsides. Nobody voted to make themselves poorer, but unfortunately it’s working out pretty much as Remainers predicted.
In my case, I said that it would lead to a period of sustained economic mediocrity, where we’d lag behind our neighbours, and that no other EU country would contemplate leaving, so the domino effect would turn out to be a myth. Life in no growth Britain is tough, with millions living with food insecurity and struggling to pay their monthly bills.
It’s quite remarkable, therefore, that the Conservatives’ flagship policy of the last election – Get Brexit Done – is hardly mentioned by surviving Tories fighting this campaign. They know Brexit is increasingly unpopular and cannot be linked to any tangible and worthwhile improvements in people’s lives. If the best you can offer is selling wine by the pint, you’re really struggling.
If you’ve been paying close attention to the election campaign so far what the Tories are doing amounts to a rhetorical inversion – this a debating trick whereby you accuse your opponent of the exact thing you’re doing yourself. People only tend to do this when they know they’re losing and get desperate.
Rishi Sunak and the rest of the cabinet go on and on about Labour not having a plan. Let’s just step back and look at recent history – we’ve had five different Prime Ministers in nine years, Sunak has attempted to impose a large number of policies not included in the 2019 manifesto (cancelling HS2 Northern, making Maths compulsory until 18, fining people for missing doctor’s appointments), and their biggest policy, Brexit, had no implementation plan attached to it.
Brexit headless chickens
Having studied Economic History, I had a fair idea of the problems Brexit would bring to the British economy, there is no example from history of a capitalist economy putting up tariffs, non-tariff barriers, imposing quotas to make trade less free and going from strength to strength afterwards. There are plenty of examples where the tightening of trade undermined economic growth, the most notorious being in the mid-1930s where tariffs jeopardised the post-Wall Street Crash recovery around the industrial world.
The headbangers in UKIP agitated for leave for decades before the referendum, without any concrete plan in terms of economic impacts or navigating the constitutional legal aspects of disentangling ourselves from the EU. It’s not that surprising, therefore that HM Treasury did no modelling of likely Brexit outcomes. This is in marked contrast to exhaustive studies carried out at Gordon Brown’s behest about the potential impact of Britain adopting the Euro around the turn of the millennium. In the end we blinked and decided to keep the pound, this was only after much well-informed debate, deliberation and study.
There is no compass, there is no route map with Brexit, no other major economy has voluntarily left a trading bloc like Britain has. Any notion we could ape other successful countries – Norway, Switzerland, Singapore is fanciful. They’re low population countries, or city states, that have key characteristics that can’t be replicated in the UK such as vast hydrocarbon reserves or notoriously opaque banking.
The Conservatives never formulated a serious plan to ‘make Brexit work’ because that’s not possible, it’s a bit like trying to squeeze both ends of a rugby ball hard in order to turn it into a football. Try as you might, you can’t turn it into something it’s not.
Apres le deluge, gimmicks
So Brexit has turned out to be as bad the Eurotrash generation predicted, we’ve seen the worst growth performance in peacetime since the Agrarian Revolution, public services, amenities and infrastructure are crumbling. Everywhere you look – Schools, Hospitals, Prisons, Council Houses, Police Stations, MoD accommodation, roads – there are multi-billion £ repair backlogs.
Instead of addressing the problems and delivering investment the Tories have procrastinated and wasted the opportunity of low interest rates (a window of opportunity now closed) – they’ve barely got started with the 40 hospitals they promised, their extremely modest schools rebuilding programme doesn’t keep up with dilapidation rates, they launched a ‘Restoring Your Railway’ programme, except it isn’t a programme, it’s one minor scheme every 2/3 years.
What have the Tories got to offer instead? Vacuous pointless rubbish such as reintroducing National Service, endless dunking on small vulnerable minorities like asylum seekers and trans, and a tissue of lies about ULEZ, meat taxes, recycling and forced car sharing.
We shouldn’t be too surprised by this, in 2019 the Conservative manifesto was the shortest and vaguest document in a generation. They don’t really know what they’re doing until prompted by the Murdoch press, or dark money think tanks like the IEA, Policy Exchange or Centre for Policy Studies. Expect another slim and vague manifesto this time, for all the bluster of claiming to have a plan. They’ll stand on a platform that is painfully short on detail and won’t address the major problems facing Britain. It’s the Tories that have no effective plan, and offer no future.
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