Explaining the Tory Leadership Race

What are people expecting from the Tory leadership contest? I ask because there's some genuine befuddlement among media circles and the ivory towers of the politics professoriat. They look at the dozen names that have put themselves forward and see a shared tranche of priorities that aren't really anyone's priorities. Nearly all candidates are talking about mega tax cuts, with some bandying about promises equivalent to the annual spend of the NHS. We see plenty of posturing about the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. There are attacks on trans people from all candidates, save Tom Tugendhat and Grant Shapps (pronouns they/them), and the thin Tory commitment to net zero is also in their sights. Where do you suppose these sit in the issues most "normal people" care about? Looking at data from a fortnight ago, the economy (i.e. the cost of living crisis) is top. This is followed by health, immigration, and the environment. Tax is only a pressing issue for 15% of people, and the war on woke doesn't even feature. Why are leading Tory figures so at odds with the country?

There are conjunctural explanations, and there are structural explanations. Both of which are true. The first is obvious: the candidates are pitching to their electorate. These are colleagues of the Parliamentary Conservative Party and the membership - whose size we will find out very soon. Both audiences incentivise performative right wingery, because this more or less reflects their prejudices and outlooks. During the agonies prior to the election, Boris Johnson saw off what was left of organised liberal Toryism through splits, expulsions, and resignations. In their place the party scoured the barrel to find any nodding donkey who'd sign up to the Brexit deal. Many of these turned out to be utter dross, (sex offenders, anyone?), but the party was desperate and so CVs weren't vetted too closely. And as the party had turned decidedly right in the wake of the referendum, we got perhaps the most right wing parliamentary party in Tory history. This in mind, how might you pitch your tent if you are someone like Jeremy Hunt who campaigned for remain and has cultivated an undeserved 'sensible person' image during the last three years? By promising to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol, deporting refugees to Rwanda, and appointing the always-awful Esther McVey as deputy Prime Minister.

Closely related to this are ambitions that fall short of leadership. Do the likes of Shapps, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and Reham Chisti (who?) stand a chance? I doubt it, but for them it's about carving bigger roles out or preserving their status as a big beast in the Tory jungle. Shapps, for instance, despite forswearing the bigoted anti-trans obsessions of fellow MPs has made much play of his desire to crush the RMT. Perhaps he'll be given a free hand under whoever takes Number 10.

The membership are little better. Already ageing and politically out-of-touch before the EU referendum, the polarisation of the Brexit years has chased off all but the true believers and determined politics climbers. If the Tories' disproportionate support among the old and retired make them less representative of the country as a whole than Labour, the party membership is at an even greater remove than the average person strolling down the street. With The Mail, Express, and The Sun their windows on the world is it really much of a shocker that the Tory hopefuls are appealing almost entirely within this twisted imaginary? No. Political science isn't rocket science, and this much should be obvious for anyone making a professional career out of studying politics.

And then there are the structural issues which, for analytical clarity, can be subdivided in two. The first of these is denialism. A small part of Johnson's success was his astute reading of what Brexit meant for many of its supporters. It was a protest against a country that, they believed, was going to the dogs. By electing someone who could knock heads together, a Britain they felt more secure in was possible. I.e. One that was whiter, more monolingual and monocultural, but where one could feel safe knowing Britain was secure as an independent and unique nation. For Johnson, this also meant a (weak) modernisation project to spruce up the neglected, deindustrialised corners of the country. He failed thanks to the tensions within the Tory coalition, not least thanks to the propertied interests of major Tory donors. And so prevarication, dithering, and stagnation has been the hallmark of this government. The problems we have now - the profit-price spiral (sure to be exacerbated by candidates' desires to cut corporation tax), galloping energy and food costs, the stubborn refusal of Covid to go away, the lack of progress on climate change, and the suffusion of Tory politics by sleaze to an extent that makes the 1990s look squeaky clean, these aren't just Johnson's responsibility. They're the fault of each and every member of his cabinet and all Tory MPs, none of whom have lifted a finger to challenge this state of affairs. Therefore the chase for tax cuts is displacement activity, of casting around for issues save the real problems facing the country. Problems they are on the hook for.

The second is the Tories as a class party. As an institution, the Tories condense and articulate the interests of capital. Not evenly and often not directly, but over the course of its history the Tories have prosecuted the bourgeois interest by maintaining the state. After 1979, this has taken a more authoritarian direction. Its class character has become more obvious as coercion was deployed against the labour movement and working class communities, particularly those in which minority ethnicities are concentrated. The Tories also pioneered a labyrinthine system of economic and social governance that undermines collective resistance by making it more difficult to imagine in the first place. And they have used legislation to shackle trade unions, criminalise protest, and reduce sections of our class to destitution through punitive welfare settlements. Their jobs is to keep wage labour - us - passive, quiescent, and compliant. Each of the candidates have to show the Tory base that matters - big capital - that they're a safe pair of hands where the management of labour is concerned. Braverman talks up social security "as a choice" made by the indolent, with the logic being that if claiming is tough people are more likely to accept the abundance of minimum wage jobs on offer, undermining the (potentially strong) bargaining power of labour as a whole. Likewise the obsession with tax cuts isn't just so bosses can pocket more cash. Paying for it requires an offensive against public sector workers, the strongest remaining bastion of mass trade unionism in this country. The Tories get to see off a potential threat, hundreds of thousands flood the dole queues, and the availability of labour undercuts wage claims. Of course, the possibility of pulling this off is a different proposition - but making the tax pledge tells of their readiness to discipline the workers at capital's behest.

However, what both sets of considerations, the conjunctural and the structural, show is little awareness of the creeping crisis of decline gnawing at the Tories. None of the candidates seem aware there's even a problem. By ignoring the British people's priorities so publicly now, they're hardly endearing themselves. There are no appetites for more cuts. The national debt ballooning off the backs of Covid and Brexit mismanagement is not matched for a popular enthusiasm for Dave/Osborne-style austerity. And the benefits most working age people get from pennies in the pound tax cuts are quite marginal and barely scratch the dents inflation is making on the standard of living. In other words, even the 'mass' part of the candidates' programmes for capital tickle the peccadilloes of a distinct minority only. And so the crisis of Tory political reproduction continues apace. Older people pass away, and their voters are not being replaced like for like among the under 50s - and aren't likely to when it's their turn to retire. Whichever horror wins the Tory pageant is surely going to spend the next couple of years inflicting misery, driving public services into the ground, and make the lot of our people worse. But as they do so, they're making their own collapse more rapid and more complete.

Image Credit