The start of the Conservatives’ election campaign was defined by spectacular errors of judgment, but even the slickest launch would have come unstuck on the question of whether the incumbent party deserves a fifth term in office. The record is too grim.
The manifesto published on Tuesday did nothing to dispel the impression of a demoralised party bereft of ideas. The ideological kernel of the document is a conviction that cutting taxes and social security boosts enterprise and prosperity. Rishi Sunak proposes a 2p reduction in national insurance and its abolition for people who are self-employed. The prime minister pledged to reverse what he called the “unsustainable rise in working-age welfare”. Hypothetical revenue is also conjured up by shrinking the civil service. Relying on a crackdown on tax avoidance raises the question of why it hasn’t been done over the last 14 years.
Nothing in the recent experience of British politics suggests this offer will change the Conservatives’ election prospects. The chancellor has already cut national insurance twice, with no polling dividend.
To compensate for the associated revenue shortfall, under self-imposed fiscal rules, the Tories have lined up a programme of brutal spending cuts. Once funding pledges for health and defence are taken into account, the plans require around £20bn in savings from “unprotected” departments even before the new manifesto commitments are factored in. Nobody who uses public services believes more money can be withdrawn without aggravating a crisis of provision. If Mr Sunak were forced by some extraordinary polling upset to implement his plans in government, the result would be devastation of the public realm.
Either Mr Sunak has no conception of what is really happening on the ground or he doesn’t care. It could be both. The prime minister has never shown much interest in public services, nor any empathy with people who rely on them. In targeting welfare budgets, he indulges lazy assumptions about benefits as a “lifestyle choice” that were tenuous even in the days when payments were more generous. Now it is a fossilised prejudice buried under layers of ignorance and ideological complacency. Many of the working-age benefits he despises help people who are already in employment. The effect of further restricting help from the state would be to fully submerge in penury claimants who are already struggling to keep their heads above water.
Whether indulging the fetish for perpetual tax cuts or denigrating any function of the state in supporting citizens in need, Mr Sunak’s vision sounds more like a tribute to the heyday of 20th-century Thatcherite Conservatism than a prescription for the future.
That is a function of ideological obsolescence and demographic decline. The main factor defining Conservative policy is a near total reliance on the support of older voters. They are the target audience for fiscal favours in the form of pension protections, plus a reactionary gimmick in the restoration of national service.
Much of Mr Sunak’s rhetoric at the manifesto launch was not even aimed at the general public, but tailored to niche rightwing Conservative fixations – readiness to reject European court of human rights jurisdiction; dismissal of measures to avert climate catastrophe as “eco-zealotry”.
This is not the agenda of a man who expects to be in office after polling day. It was not even a dignified attempt at winning back credibility; just a desperate plea for leniency from a country that is minded to punish the Tories for 14 years of bad government. No amount of repeating the word “plan” can conceal the deficit of ideas in this manifesto, shaped by a denial of the challenges Britain faces and of the change it needs.
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