Foot down on the accelerator, high on dreams, the driver plunges straight at the concrete wall that she calls “growth”. Unfortunately, we’re all in the back of her coach, front seats filled with Tories shouting “Swerve!”, “Go right!”, “Go left!”, “This way!”, “That way!”, “Reverse!”, or “Jump!” But their useless indecision, ineffectual whingeing and fractured splits condemn us all to dash towards worsening crises. What terminal damage this moribund party can do in another two years doesn’t bear contemplating.
Impossibilism used to be a Trotskyite policy – to demand the impossible to break the system. That’s Liz Truss’s tactic, by cutting taxes – creating a £62bn black hole, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies freaking out the despised markets and trashing all the “orthodox”, acronymed stabilisers: the OBR, BoE, IMF, HM Treasury and BBC, as well as the “anti-growth coalition” that comprises most of the population. She told the 1922 Committee that “the ground could have been better prepared” for the mini-budget – only by digging a hole and jumping in it.
Truss also told the Commons there would be no spending cuts to balance the books. That’s a double fib: there will be – and already her refusal to reopen the present spending review means there will be huge cuts to cover pay rises and inflation costs from existing budgets. Every department has been asked to make “efficiency savings”, with the levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, blithely saying that there’s always “fat to trim”. But he never specified where the lard lurks in departments stricken by years of austerity.
Odd Tory nostalgias grow that should be stamped on now: Robert Halfon, chair of the education select committee, said Truss has “trashed the last 10 years of workers’ Conservatism”, an era that passed most people by as wages fell. He waxed lyrical about bygone days of Cameron, May and Johnson creating apprenticeships and levelling up – even though apprenticeships fell steeply even before Covid and levelling up has merely seen London and the south-east grow richer.
Ministers are sent out daily to talk tripe about the need for tax cuts due to our taxes being at their highest for 70 years, but they’re never challenged on why our closest neighbours all have higher taxes yet higher growth, productivity and resilience. All the same, one unnamed minister told the FT: “We’re doing a whole load of unpopular stuff to pay for tax cuts that nobody wanted.”
Outside London, the only place in the UK that is growing is Northern Ireland, thanks to its lucky status in the EU single market. The only glimmers of stability in the Truss era are unexpected signs of peace with the EU. When the Northern Ireland minister and fanatical Brexiter Steve Baker apologised for how he and colleagues had behaved over the past six years, promising from now on to be “closest partners and friends” with Ireland, the Tory world spun on its axis. But watch Nigel Farage sharpen his teeth at any chance to take bites out of what is left of the Tories’ right buttock.
On Wednesday Paul Goodman, former Tory MP and editor of Conservative Home, glumly spelled out the impossibility of moving in any direction from here. He’s right: Tory backbenchers will oppose everything. They won’t vote for £62bn of spending cuts, the same or more as those imposed by draconian George Osborne. Yet they do want the tax cuts. Wait until their chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announces his eight mysterious supply-side reforms, a bonfire of regulations designed to ignite that elusive 2.5% growth on 31 October. They will refuse to vote for them, too, if it means relaxing standards in food, agriculture, environment and especially in planning controls. They won’t like free for all “investment zones” that Truss says can be limitless in number and location, including in national parks, uncosted in tax losses. Like children in a tantrum, they hate everything.
No amount of tea and unsympathy sessions with Truss will get them back in their pram. There is no acceptable solution to the catastrophic mini-budget, no way back or forwards. They can not fathom how their party of sound money has taken leave of its senses. In polling, for the first time ever in opposition – yes, ever – far more voters say they have more trust in Labour to manage the economy. Even in 1997, they only level-pegged on that. Tory MPs need only look at the polls in their oldfashioned true “blue wall” seats, where Labour leads by 13 points, to give them night sweats – while national polls are off the scale. Focus group organisers tell that me they record unprecedented fear and anger over mortgages, rents, prices and pensions. Voters see fuel prices as a global crisis, but everything else as government-created. They talk of shame at Britain’s reputation abroad, and deep fear for the future of their children and grandchildren.
But for all the talk of how only 50 Tory MPs voted for Trotskyite Truss in the first round of the leadership election, they still put her though to the final vote, giving members the opportunity to choose her. They promoted Boris Johnson and Theresa May, they voted for all those years of austerity that left Britain too weak to cope with crises – and they sold Brexit as a panacea, when Brexit and its poisonous referendum lie at the heart of their woes.
The Conservative party is dead, ceased to exist, bereft of identity, nothing left but shards and echoes of previous times. It has become a failed revolutionary faction that has blown up whatever remained of Conservatism after its undermining by the Thatcher insurgence and the Brexit explosion, leaving nothing. No solidity, no seriousness, no philosophy, its country and farming roots lost, despised by its old City base, abandoning family values as it fails all classes of family. Bogus culture wars on colonial statues or museum labels are no substitute. Tax cuts seem to be all that is left of traditional Conservatism – and look how they landed.
Presumably some centre-right or right force will eventually be recreated, but that will need swaths of these MPs to lose their seats and swaths of fresh-thinking new ones to arrive. But how likely is it that a better new cadre will ever be selected by the Tory party members’ ship of fools who brought us Liz Truss?
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
