Spare a moment’s thought for Britain, a country twice used as a laboratory for the latest trend in rightwing politics. Four decades ago, we were the Tories’ lab rats for what became known as neoliberalism – mass privatisation, slashed taxes for the rich, the crushing of trade unions – and it delivered weak long-term growth that was inequitably distributed. This time round, their grand experiment has been rightwing populism: a fusion of crude nationalism, demagoguery, culture wars and migrant bashing.
One of its hallmarks has been to dress a rightwing party bankrolled by hedgefunds and City slickers in the sort of garb normally worn by the left – posing as insurgent tribunes of the people against contemptuous elites. This was always a perverse con: and, helpfully, new government plans being floated underline why. Reports – yet to be denied – suggest that chancellor Jeremy Hunt is considering slashing benefits in real terms in order to fund tax cuts. Achieved by a devious sleight of hand – benefits would not be explicitly cut, but rather would “fail to rise in line with inflation” – this represents a straightforward redistribution of money from the struggling to the well-off.
Other nations have shown that they are at risk of succumbing to rightwing populism, and so British Conservatives believe they can nick this winning formula to encourage working-class citizens to vote against their own interests. The results of this experiment so far should be instructive: ours is a country in which household incomes are set to be 4% lower next year than they were at the 2019 election – a decline with no precedent in living memory. And how did we get here? The Conservatives leveraged the populist wave that underpinned the vote to leave the EU, to encourage those immiserated by the Tory’s own policies to vote for them. Research suggests that the communities most hit by benefit cuts disproportionately voted leave, and the Tories subsequently appealed to them as the party most committed to honouring the referendum vote.
In her notorious 2016 “citizen of nowhere” speech, Theresa May unapologetically raided leftwing rhetoric, promising to shift “the balance of Britain decisively in favour of ordinary working-class people”. What her political project really sought to do was to redefine class politics. It was no longer about championing workers’ economic interests against rapacious bosses: the working-class was redefined as a cultural concept based around narrow nationalism and opposition to immigration, and oppressed by a supposedly progressive elite which had contempt for its own country. Boris Johnson simply expanded on her strategy – however farcical it was coming from an Etonian who once wrote that blue collar men are “likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”.
Rishi Sunak has a more technocratic public persona, but that is no cover for his use of rightwing populism: this Tory Brexiter relies on culture wars to deflect from economic and social turmoil. Witness his “war on woke”, the grandstanding over Ulez, and his obsession with cruelty to migrants. That he’s seeking to shore up support among relatively well-to-do voters by raiding the living standards of poorer people only exposes this “populism” for what it is. Indeed, consider the already devastated welfare system this government is considering taking a scalpel to. After the first decade of Tory rule, it was estimated that 1.5 million people had been driven into poverty by benefit cuts. And according to poverty charities, basic benefits for struggling households are at least £140 a month less than the cost of life’s essentials.
The Tories’ hope is that their latest victims will be faceless and silent, their pain ignored as better-off voters offer this sinking government a political life raft. These victims include those who were applauded from the nation’s porches and balconies by Tory ministers during the pandemic: like Samantha, a single mum I spoke to with two boys who works for the NHS, who was recently transferred from tax credits to universal credit. “It’s a nightmare trying to prove childcare costs,” she tells me. “I’ve recently had to attend a food bank with rising costs and wages not keeping up.” Or consider Margaret, a civil servant whose partner is an ambulance care assistant: both are reliant on universal credit. “We are currently able to pay our bills but we are in significant debt as our budget doesn’t stretch to any extras such as school shoes and uniform for our daughter,” she tells me. “Any reduction to universal credit would make things even harder.”
These are families already punished by a shredded welfare system and an economy defined by low pay. Emptying their pockets to fund tax cuts for favoured would-be Tory voters is not just political callousness. It exposes where rightwing populism inevitably leads. This project has constructed a nation in which rampant corporate profits fuel surging prices, while workers hammered by an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis face having their incomes further squeezed to hand tax cuts to the affluent.
The rest of the world beware. Britain is once again being used as a laboratory to pioneer a new phase of rightwing politics. It claimed to champion the ordinary citizen against the elites: instead, it inflicted hardship on them. Don’t let this national disaster be for naught.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
