Even if you don’t call it “price control” (and Downing Street would prefer that you don’t), asking supermarkets to limit the cost of basic goods is an extraordinary thing for a Conservative government to contemplate.
It may not happen. If it does, it will be voluntary, say ministers – just a nudge to retailers, so they keep the cost of living down. Definitely not the sort of thing that was last attempted 50 years ago, under a weak Tory prime minister struggling to control inflation, while grappling with strikes and sliding towards election defeat. Nothing like that at all.
Rishi Sunak is unlike Ted Heath in all the ways that Britain in 2023 and 1973 are different places. The comparison reveals little, except for a familiar neurosis among those Tory MPs who will be quick to conjure spectres from the 70s if Whitehall really does start setting the price of milk.
There is no decade more ghastly in the Conservative imagination than the one that ended with Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. It is inscribed in party folklore as a parable of national decline, written by a bloated state to dictation from Bolshevik trade unions. (Heath’s eagerness for Britain to join the European Economic Community confirms his villainy.) The picture is made darker so the light of redemption in the 80s, by way of privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts, may shine brighter.
Every party-political narrative is a myth made from half-truth and fantasy. The Conservative morality tale of Thatcherism as national liberation from suffocation by socialism is no different. The most important aspect of the story, given its ongoing salience in Tory ideology, is how long ago it all happened.
Rishi Sunak was not yet born when Thatcher entered Downing Street. As much time has passed between then and now as elapsed between Queen Victoria’s funeral and the end of the second world war.
As it happens, on the very day that ministers were denying newspaper reports of imminent price controls, a British railway was renationalised. Another one. That makes four in five years. The private contract to run the TransPennine Express expired and was not renewed because the service was so bad. The trains are now controlled by the “operator of last resort” on behalf of the government.
The moment passed without hullabaloo. The guardians of Thatcher’s sacred flame don’t waste energy defending rail privatisation, which was done by John Major. Even at the time there was a last-gasp feel about it; the grey prime minister relighting stale butts from a policy ashtray at the end of the night. And that was 30 years ago.
The cycle that carries ideas from radical inception, via mainstream acceptance to outdated dogma moves slowly. Generations have been born and reached adulthood with the Conservative party fixed in orbit around a political doctrine that was written before the invention of the internet.
Intellectual stagnation invites demographic decline, which militates against fresh thinking. The youngest voters who flinch from memory of the 70s are now pushing 70. Their grandchildren are enfranchised. But older people are more reliable when it comes to actually voting. Differential turnout skews Tory policy towards the greying base. Why risk putting new homes in the backyards of rich pensioners, or asking them to cash in their assets to pay for social care?
Unsurprisingly, millennials, those aged roughly 25-40, are not voting Conservative. A polling report, published on Tuesday by Onward, a centre-right thinktank, points out that these voters make up around a quarter of the electorate. They are the largest cohort in just over half of all constituencies.
There is no mystery about their allegiance. They want secure jobs, an NHS that works, affordable homes and childcare that won’t gobble their entire income. They are socially liberal (but not moved by partisan culture wars); they care about the environment; they are not pro-Brexit. Of course they aren’t Tories.
The report’s authors, striving not to despair, point out that some millennials are well-disposed to Sunak, but that warmth isn’t yet sufficient to thaw relations with the prime minister’s party.
It is also probably a function of people not actually knowing what Sunak stands for, clocking his age, immigrant background and moderate demeanour, then extrapolating that he must be somewhere to the left of the average older, white Tory. That is a reasonable assumption in the wider context of British society, although in this case it happens to be wrong.
Sunak combines doctrinal rigidity with a pragmatic streak in ways that make him hard to read. As chancellor, he borrowed huge sums to pay people’s wages via the pandemic furlough scheme. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatened gas supplies, he subsidised household bills. Such interventions demand temporary abandonment of the Thatcherite creed. When Ed Miliband proposed freezing energy prices in 2014, the Tories denounced it as unhinged Marxism. Now it is government policy.
The difference, say Conservatives, is that their deployment of state control is expedient, short-term and reluctant, while Labour does it by default and with relish. (The same applies to tax rises.)
That presumes a return to the place where government could retreat from economic management, let the market allocate resources efficiently and distribute reward according to merit. That land never truly existed and it certainly isn’t springing to life in the foreseeable future. Most British voters know it. They want the state to be active on their behalf, and willingly so. They are bitten by winds that do not reach Sunak, insulated behind his wall of money and intellectual complacency.
The absence of a discernible strategy for adapting to volatile times makes Britain an outlier among democracies, or rather a laggard. The US and EU are racing to subsidise new technologies, secure supply chains, make themselves hospitable to innovation and resilient against global turbulence.
Labour has recently started flagging this as a dividing line between itself and the Tories. It doesn’t make headlines, but it is there, in speeches and in policy – £28bn every year for green investment, for example. They don’t get much credit for it, but Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are trying to engage with the world as it is. Sunak seems perplexed by a world that refuses to go back to the way it was.
In that respect, he is faithfully serving the cohorts that have done well for themselves over the course of his lifetime, although most of them are so much older than him. That is why he looks oddly out of place, despite being a typical Tory in every other respect. There is something especially futile about his Thatcherite faith; something doubly pointless in the spectacle of him not just running out of time, but facing the wrong way as the eager young keeper of a dying flame.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
Rafael Behr will discuss his new book, Politics: A Survivor’s Guide, at a Guardian Live event on Monday 12 June. The event will be live in London and livestreamed. Book tickets here
