A doomed party in freefall loses whatever shred of sanity it had left. After byelections that show no seat is safe, Tory MPs shriek at the pilot, turn right, turn back – pull that tax-cut joystick! The chancellor, it’s said, is reaching for the eject button. Nearing political death, they abandon all the cunning pretences deployed by David Cameron and Boris Johnson to disguise everything repellent about their party. In panic, their true nature is stripped bare.
Look at some of the extraordinarily mistaken measures they plan, propelling them faster to the ground. MPs and their newspaper backers are desperate for tax cuts and call for benefits to be cut yet again. “Time to be bold, prime minister,” the Telegraph editorial says. The government must “restrict” the benefits bill and our “out-of-control welfare state”, according to the newspaper.
In his autumn statement, due next month, Jeremy Hunt sets benefit levels for next April, which traditionally rise by September’s inflation rate. But there’s a growing expectation that there will be another freeze or a rise that doesn’t match inflation – a real-terms cut. Unemployment benefits have fallen by 9% since 2010. UK unemployment pay is the lowest in western Europe, paying just 17% of previous in-work income. France and Germany pay 66%, while Belgium pays 90%.
Is tightening that screw a vote winner? No longer. The annual British Social Attitudes survey has asked the same questions for 40 years and shows a seismic shift in public sympathy for households sinking into poverty. In response to the statement “Most people who get social security don’t really deserve any help”, only 19% agree, a marked change from 2005 when the number was 40%.
Poll after poll says the same: Save the Children found three-quarters of voters want benefits preserved, including 69% of Tory voters. The Tamworth Tory candidate, Andrew Cooper, in 2020 shared a diagram on Facebook that poured scorn on benefit claimants for having a mobile phone contract, ignoring the fact that you need an online account to claim benefits. Tory nastiness did him no good on election day.
The Treasury saves £1.4bn for every 1% benefits fall below inflation, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies. So how would it spend a windfall taken from low-earning food-bank users? Ah, easy. Cut taxes for the best off by raising the threshold for top-rate taxpayers. Downing Street thinks this would benefit 5 million higher-rate payers. Forget levelling up, here’s a defeatist core-vote strategy. Terrible optics, but so what?
Meanwhile, a groundswell of Trussite Tory MPs calls for £75bn sucked in from frozen tax thresholds to be used for multiple tax cuts for the better off, including stamp duty. There has even been mention of abolishing inheritance tax, an “aspirational” pledge apparently, even though only 4% of estates are liable for it. All these proposed tax cuts would probably pay out to the same higher earners, over and over.
Tin-eared MPs, deaf to the whirlwind of political change, call for the abandonment of the renters reform bill in the Commons this week, as up to 40 Tory MPs threaten to rebel against protecting tenants from no-fault eviction. Jacob Rees-Mogg damns the bill as a “socialist belief”, while David Frost calls it “anti-property rights”. Use the widely discredited “Brexit freedoms”, declares Rees-Mogg. Frost, meanwhile, is a good proxy for a party on the far side of the moon, as he calls for “an end to the dead weight of net zero”. This is despite the government’s own survey showing three-quarters of adults worry about the climate. This is not the US.
As the Tories obsess over their litany of hates, and ignore actual public concerns and feelings, they make enemies of virtually everyone. They reject those living in cities and graduates as the “metropolitan elite”, though graduates predominate in every cohort under 50. They loathe the “blob”, whether it’s the civil service, the law, educationists, “woke” universities or the arts. They view public servants as idlers, and are at war with the NHS and the railway workers. Business organisations which were sworn at, and had their interests ignored by Johnson, are now turning towards Labour.
The “no one likes us and we don’t care” defiance shows why they may be out of office for a very long time. And the worse their defeat, the more their rump of safest seat survivors will be extremists, devising more of the same electoral poison. Devoured on the right by Reform and Nigel Farage, it may take eons to regroup into anything recognisably electable.
Labour dare not say it, but 2024 may mark much more than a pendulum swing by voters repelled by the worst government in living memory. Something more seismic is afoot: Tory observers such as Daniel Hannan note with alarm that the bankers’ crash, pandemic and energy price crisis alerted people to how much we all rely on a strong state. A wrecked public realm and sympathy for the struggles of low earners, alongside revulsion at obscenely swelling wealth, has changed the political psyche.
The tide has turned on Thatcherism’s individualist age, her nostrums exposed as snake-oil remedies. Even Tory voters think her utility privatisations failed. Her sale of 2m council homes without replacement is key to the housing crisis. “No such thing as society” were not her actual words, but they were her thoughts and deeds: each for themself. But where she was politically canny, George Osborne, Johnson and Liz Truss killed off her vision by pushing it to crude extremes. What’s clear is how badly the Tory press mislead their party on Britain’s present state of mind. Byelections show a country repelled by austerity moving increasingly towards social democracy.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
