What matters more to the British public: the health service or the European convention on human rights (ECHR)? It isn’t a trick question. The obvious answer is the correct one. That is why the party that recently won a big majority began this week by launching a consultation on NHS reform, while the party that would rather talk about the ECHR does so from opposition.
Robert Jenrick, the Conservative leadership candidate who agitates to quit the ECHR, thinks it is not a marginal matter. His argument is that European human rights law interferes with summary deportation of asylum claimants, which is an affront to sovereignty and something about which voters – especially those who have switched from the Tories to Reform UK – have strong feelings.
The Conservatives are adept at the politics of cultivating those feelings, stirring indignation and fomenting blame, but they can’t compete with Nigel Farage, who is the master. The Reform leader has the edge over any party that aspires to govern because he is happy in opposition and never obliged to care what actually works.
Anyone interested in the practical reality of UK immigration policy would be talking about visa eligibility, skills shortages and administrative capacity at the Home Office. Kicking off the conversation with a court in Strasbourg signals intent not to be serious.
Kemi Badenoch, the other candidate for the Tory crown, has hinted at that point by calling Jenrick’s ECHR fixation “a distraction from bigger worries”. But Badenoch’s worries are no better aligned with public concerns. Her analysis of Britain’s problems, outlined in a 22,000-word essay, highlights the rise of a malevolent “bureaucratic class”. These are the lawyers and managers who gum up the system with growth-suffocating regulations devised for their own self-aggrandisement. They are also, in Badenoch’s telling, agents of a “new progressive ideology” that is responsible for “the rise of identity politics” and “attacks on the democratic, sovereign nation state”.
The NHS features in the Badenoch model only as a metric of resource misallocation. It wastes time and money dealing with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions (she conflates the two), which have proliferated because the woke bureaucracy generates incentives for more diagnoses.
There is a difference of tone and emphasis between Badenoch’s pseudo-academic scheme and Jenrick’s Scrappy-Doo Faragism, but they both steer the Tories away from understanding why so many people wanted them out of power in July. Both candidates indulge the convenient fantasy that voters rejected Conservative rule because it wasn’t authentically Conservative enough. “We talked right but governed left,” says Badenoch.
The assertion that Britain had leftwing governments from 2010 to 2024 doesn’t bear much rational scrutiny. It can’t explain the flight of so many former Tory heartland voters to the Liberal Democrats earlier this year, for example. (They certainly weren’t wishing that Brexit had been implemented harder and faster.)
But craving purer Conservatism is psychologically easier than the alternative, which is to accept that the party dosed Britain with its ideological medicine for 14 years and the result was a sickened body politic.
Of many disappointments from a thin legacy, Tories find their fiscal record most frustrating and mystifying: tax revenue as a share of national income at its highest level since 1948; a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 100% – higher than it has been since the 1960s. Those are humiliating statistics for a party that wants to shrink the state. To anyone disinclined to examine the real causes, it proves how deeply Rishi Sunak’s reign was contaminated with socialism.
What actually happened was a pandemic on top of dismal productivity, compounded by years of underinvestment in public services and infrastructure. A pointless campaign to introduce friction at the border with Britain’s largest trading partner didn’t help.
From the start, under David Cameron, the Conservatives were on an explicit mission to wean the public off debilitating reliance on the state. Measured on its own terms that was an exercise in sustained failure equivalent to 20th-century Marxist excursions in stubbornly dogmatic policymaking.
Underfunding the public realm, hollowing out local authorities and withdrawing benefits saved money in the short term but quickly generated higher social costs – a poorer, more miserable and less healthy society. Cutting the supply of government did not reduce demand. Chancellors were compelled to raid contingency funds and throw cash at every passing problem, most commonly in the NHS. Cash was burned up in crisis management, not invested in long-term mitigation. Taxes crept up without any dividend in improving services. The worst of both worlds.
The furore over early prisoner release is a parable of myopic austerity. It was easy to slash the justice department’s budget because MPs and rightwing newspaper editors do not hanker for a well-resourced prison estate. But they do insist on ever-higher custodial sentences for villains. More incarceration in fewer jails means overcrowding, riots or early release.
That much was understood by David Gauke who, as justice secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet, tried to rationalise sentencing within available resources. He has now been recruited by Keir Starmer to lead a review in that area. It is a revealing hire. Gauke represents a strand of liberal centre-right conservatism that would be prominent in any plan to rehabilitate the party as a serious proposition for government. Instead, he is working for a Labour prime minister, while his former colleagues wade deeper into the murky waters where hostility to state intervention shades into conspiracy theories about criminal civil servants and an obstructive “blob”.
This is the line that will divide Labour from the Tories in next week’s budget. No one expects a spectacular display of Treasury munificence. The chancellor will raise taxes, tweak fiscal rules to permit more borrowing and keep budgets tighter than her own side would like. On the right, Rachel Reeves will be denounced for reckless profligacy and on the left for cruel parsimony. She will be caricatured as Old Labour and Red Tory. She can’t be both.
There will be plenty to dispute about the pace of investment and the choice of priorities. (There always is.) Labour’s options are limited by the pre-election strategy of shadowing Conservative spending plans and forswearing recourse to the Treasury’s most powerful revenue-raising levers. Whether that was essential to secure victory is something for historians to debate without access to the counterfactual where Reeves and Starmer went to the polls promising tax hikes.
What is beyond question – or should be – is that Labour’s first budget in 15 years will represent a radical departure in the way Britain is governed. For the first time in so many years, serious government and a public sector deemed worthy of investment will be the whole point.
The contrast will be even starker when the result of the Conservative leadership contest is declared the following week. Whether it is Jenrick or Badenoch, the Tories will have a leader whose guiding doctrine has been tested beyond destruction. Labour understands the role that public services play in the economic and social wellbeing of the nation; the Conservatives don’t. Why is one of those parties in government and the other in opposition? It’s not a trick question, even if the Tories refuse to see the obvious answer.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
