In politics, I’m a loser. Over the past decade, pretty much everything I regarded as important — Britain’s membership of the European Union, fiscal responsibility, free trade, globalisation, the rules-based international order — has been washed away. So it may not be a great comfort to Kemi Badenoch to know that if there were an election tomorrow I would vote for her.
I say that with some reluctance. Although I am a tribal Tory, brought up in the depths of the Yorkshire countryside with a Tory MP as a stepfather, I have regarded the party for the past ten years with about as much enthusiasm as I do the little green bags that I carry to bins when I take my dog for a walk. I was infuriated by Brexit and the chaos that followed it. But the policies and vision that Badenoch unveiled at the conference were closer to mine than any of her recent predecessors’.
Conservatism used to be about running the economy properly. Labour would tax the rich and hand the money out to the poor, then the Conservatives would rein it back and incentivise the rich to make some more so that Labour could tax some more and hand more out. There were a few aberrations, like Tony Barber’s bonkers 1972 budget and Gordon Brown’s two years of spending-splurge self-denial; but that was broadly the story until ten years ago.
That changed with Brexit, both a dramatic cultural shift and a startling act of economic self-harm. In order to distract the electorate from the damage it was doing to the economy, the government banged on about cultural issues — trans rights, Black Lives Matter and suchlike. Those issues do not make a blind bit of difference to most people’s lives but they get voters worked up in a way that the country’s finances do not.
In the meantime, the fiscal position deteriorated. It takes good economic management to deal with shocks like Covid and war in Europe, and the Tories produced leaders like Boris Johnson, who knew what damage he was doing but didn’t care, and Liz Truss, who cared but didn’t know what she was doing.
The rise of right-wing economic irresponsibility is not specific to the Tory party. Around the world, formerly conservative movements have moved in a national-socialist direction. I’m not saying that they’ve all become Nazis but that while the Reagan-Thatcher era was characterised by individualistic, small-state conservatism, the conservatism of the past decade has been of the big-state, high-spending, nationalistic variety. Donald Trump has taken this tendency to extremes. While he drives out foreigners and raises barriers to trade, America’s debt pile is now far higher than ours as a percentage of GDP, and its deficit is larger, too.
Britain’s version of Maga, Reform UK, has no interest in fiscal responsibility either. Its focus is on cultural issues: immigration, wokery and the like. Its economic policies include unaffordable tax cuts and an ill-founded claim that there are vast sums to be made from changing the interest-rate payments on Bank of England reserves.
I will never vote for this sort of right-wing party. It’s not just that I dislike many of the cultural attitudes displayed by Maga and Reform; it’s also that I think their priorities are wrong. The most important issue in politics is economics. Countries and political parties forget that at their peril. When the government fails to manage the economy properly, the political system is eventually engulfed by crisis. If you’re Greece, and you’re lucky enough to have the Germans at your back, you can recover; if you don’t, you risk becoming Argentina.
The Tory party was so shattered by the last election that Badenoch was free to choose its future path. She could have stuck with cultural conservatism, and fought Nigel Farage on the territory he has made his own. That is the direction in which Robert Jenrick is gesturing, as he complains about the dearth of white faces in Handsworth.
Badenoch is taking the alternative route. She has chosen to portray herself as a good economic manager. She signalled this at the conference not just by announcing big cuts in welfare and the civil service, but also by promising that half of the savings would go towards reducing the debt pile. The one big tax cut she announced was the abolition of stamp duty. It is, as Badenoch says, a terrible tax, for it penalises mobility, which is essential to growth.
I reckon Badenoch has made a smart move. It’s not just Reform that has left this territory wide open: it’s also the government. Rachel Reeves’s claims of fiscal rectitude are undermined by the government’s inability to reduce even the future growth rate of the disabilities bill. The welfare debacle came on top of a disastrous series of decisions to harm business by imposing higher national insurance, a higher minimum wage and £5 billion worth of costs in employment rights on firms. If the government fails either to cut spending or to promote growth, it cannot sell itself as the party best qualified to manage the economy properly.
Voters are currently fixated on immigration but it is usually the economy that decides elections. The leader who looks most committed to managing it properly should have an advantage in 2029. Right now, that’s Badenoch.
Of course, she may not survive that long. Parties that lose as badly as the Tories did last year tend to return to office only after going through a number of leaders. Sometimes they never do. If I had to put money on it, I would bet against Badenoch being a contender for power in the next election. But then, like I said, I’m a loser.