How the Tories have managed local politics in the Potteries always springs to mind when I see people complaining about the Tories on social media. A favourite is 'the Conservatives are asleep at the wheel'. This could be forgiven if coming from ordinary punters who don't follow politics closely, but it's a well-mined seam senior Labour people go digging in. Telling the government to "get a grip" on the crisis is a common missive in what passes for Keir Starmer's invective. Claiming the Tories don't have a handle on people's problems, or are "out of touch" is another favourite. And then we have the pretence, in-keeping with parliamentary norms, that Conservative MPs act in good faith. That they enter into public service to help their communities but are just wrong or misguided in their policies.
Time this was knocked on its head is long overdue.
Consider the evidence. Between 2010 and the Covid outbreak, the Tories oversaw crippling cuts to local authorities, schools, the NHS, social services, the civil service, and social security. As they've swung the axe the number of foodbanks and the people dependent on them have rocketed. In the old job we used to handle the consequences of this week in, week out. People with no money due to getting sanctioned. People with no income because they were deemed fit for work. People having to find extra cash that did not exist to cover the bedroom tax. People having to give back huge sums because the DWP had "overpaid" them. The support we could offer was usually quite limited, and only in a few cases were we able to mitigate what were often horrendous situations. Tory MPs would also have had these issues pouring into their inboxes and mailbags, and encountered the same desperation at constituency surgeries. Replying to this correspondence is the bread and butter of their offices. And yet, despite coming into contact with exactly the same stuff we dealt with, they carried on making life worse for the worst off.
"Ignorance" especially does not wash at senior level. When writing to ministers about social security and/or cuts, the responses would always start with "I can't comment on the specifics of the case", before giving the impression that they were entirely ignorant of the consequences of their policies, or that if such-and-such a constituent got themselves a job everything would be peachy. The always awful Iain Duncan Smith during his time as Dave's welfare supremo was a particularly egregious case, with his standard letters waxing lyrical about what wonders work does for individual wellbeing. But IDS did know about the suffering he was causing. No cabinet member can plead ignorance on this score given the briefing notes and reams of stats shoved their way. They can try and ignore it, but when it catches up with them so does the discomfiture - as one particularly memorable occasion on Question Time when Owen Jones brought IDS face-to-face with what he was doing showed.
And we should turn attention to how the Tories handled the pandemic. The lockdowns and the job retention scheme undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives, and even more from the disabling consequences of long Covid. Yet the government dithered and delayed, unnecessarily causing avoidable injury and loss of life, and have since enabled infection with the removal of all mitigations, simply because it conflicted with their political priorities. Are we to assume Boris Johnson and friends were ignorant of their drives to normality and repeated disregard of the science, or that they knew but simply did not care - as typified by remarks attributed to the Prime Minister that the bodies should be left to pile high?
This brings us up to date with the two fresh Tory outrages: the dumping of sewerage into the rivers and seas around Britain to the extent they're not safe to swim in, and the energy price spiral. Are we meant to believe Tory MPs, pompously styled as the most sophisticated electorate in the world when their semi-regular leadership contests swing round, haven't got a clue what these mean? Did they think allowing water companies to flood the country's waterways with faeces would have no consequences? That the joke of an energy price cap doesn't spell ruin for millions of people, including those on decent money but manage a fine balance between incomings and outgoings? As Liz Truss affects ambiguity about the energy price crisis, it would do well for naive critics of the Tories to remember that allaying people's worries by coming up with a comprehensive answer that can meet the moment is subordinate to the farce of the leadership contest, and the interests - above all the fossil fuel interests - the Tories happily serve.
To pretend that the Tories don't know what they're doing is to provide them with political cover. As argued here many times, the Conservative Party is a fundamentally dishonest enterprise. Its job is to present the minority interest - of capital and of capitalists - as the universal, popular interest. Every concession of good faith, every criticism voiced that fights shy of the structural underpinnings of the party, its politicians, and its policies, even everything that does not depart the terrain of moral outrage can only ever at best strike a glancing blow. Criticising the Tories has to be about understanding the Tories and what they really are, because without that the challenge of defeating them and ensuring they stay defeated will never be met.
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5 comments:
I did not know about the resource switch in the North to give the leveling up look, but I should have guessed. Spot on analysis.
«Its job is to present the minority interest - of capital and of capitalists»
Both big and "small", the 0.1%, and the 20-40%, both predominantly finance and land rentiers in our times, rather than productive capitalists.
«- as the universal, popular interest.»
And that is quite legitimate, as after all "Middle England" (and the upper class) is everybody who matters to "Middle England" voters (and upper class "sponsors") :-).
Rhetoric about the “the universal, popular interest”is somewhat futile: if a democratic-socialist party (like Labour used to be) went to elections in England proposing to extend the NHS Yemen, Haiti, Uzbekistan, Laos, etc., they would not get many votes, even if the “universal, popular interest” does not stop at the border, especially considering the UK is 85% white and in the rest of the world "people of global majority" are 85% not-white.
All major parties in the UK, right or left, represent mainly self-interested UK lobbies (even if a small minority of voters do think in terms of "values"), the main difference between Conservatives plus LibDems and a democratic-socialist party is that the UK lobby that were represented by the latter would be bigger and composed by people in harder circumstances than "Middle England"; such a difference is still quite important, even if neither lobbies pursue the universal, popular interest”.
G Mikes "How to be an alien" (1954), a humorous book from the 1950s about english culture:
“The Labour party is a fair compromise between Socialism and Bureaucracy; the Beveridge Plan is a fair compromise between being and not being a Socialist at the same time; the Liberal Party is a fair compromise between the Beveridge Plan and Toryism; the Independent Labour Party is a fair compromise between Independent Labour and a political party; the Tory-reformers are a fair compromise between revolutionary conservatism and retrograde progress;
and the whole British political life is a huge and non-compromising fight between compromising Conservatives and compromising Socialists.”
That last sentence was written decades before New Labour, of course :-).
Great post Phil.
Bringing what's happened under Tory local government in Stoke-on-Trent must be the same in many places. It sounds like life in the Suffolk Tory councils, though (except in Lowestoft) the poverty is largely hidden). One of those district councils, East Suffolk is a merger between Waveney and Suffolk Coastal, the constituency of IDF's successor at Work and Pensions, one Thérèse Coffey.
One long standing unemployed activist has been pointing all in the last few days that not only is the Minister using her last days in office to push people off various forms of disability benefit but that the standard rate for Universal Credit (without local housing allowance) is under £80 a week. It simply will is not enough to pay energy bills and all the other basic living expenses.
As a sociologist you know that it isn't as simple as people pursuing their own interests with no regard for anyone or anything else. We all have a range of motives which collide and mix. The reason people vote Tory isn't because they consciously choose to put their own interests above everything else, but because they have been convinced that what is in their interest is also what is best for the country. Despite all the evidence, they are able to tell themselves that in the long run it will turn out best.
Obviously this is facilitated to a huge extent by the press who pump out a relentless stream of propaganda supporting this premise. Times like now, when reality most starkly contrasts with theory, are when minds can be changed. That is one reason why the PLP are so desperate to not look supportive of anything challenging to the orthodoxy. Because fundamentally they also believe that what is in their interest as comfortable members of the establishment, is ultimately best for everyone.
Of course some have to suffer, and that should be ameliorated as much as is "affordable", but better that suffering be restricted to a defined group than it be spread uncontrollably. Why? Because they believe that those are the only options. Their world view is broadly the same as that of the Conservatives, but with added sugar.
We are all continually bombarded with this "framing", so it takes a real effort of will, and a strong streak of rebellion, to shake off the filters and see the contradictions and distortions that are all around us. Political parties are not welcoming to rebellious individuals who question everything, and most organisations find it difficult to develop if they contain too many. There is a new mood of questioning, but generally this is one where there are already pre-prepared alternative explanations that are even less reflective of reality. As a result society seems to be fracturing between those who cling to the mainstream, now matter how inadequate it seems in the face of multiple crises, and those who plunge into fantasy because it offers a simple explanation and someone else to blame. Lost between these two extremes are those who think there must be a better way, but have nobody to follow, and no prospect of taking the lead.
«As a sociologist you know that it isn't as simple as people pursuing their own interests with no regard for anyone or anything else. We all have a range of motives which collide and mix.»
Indeed, but voters have only one vote and they need to spend it on what political scientists call the "vote moving issue". There is also a "spatial" theory of voting which says that voters spend their one vote on the party that *on average* has the position nearest to the *average* issues of voters, but that only applies if they are very similar and of similar magnitude, e.g. if the choice is between spending a bit more on welfare and a bit less on defense or vice-versa; if the voters have issues of very different importance to them, or they are very different from the positions of parties, voters will vote on their "vote moving" issue primarily. My usual example from Grover Norquist's excellent interview:
http://www.prospect.org/article/world-according-grover
«But on the vote-moving primary issue, everybody's got their foot in the center and they're not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That's pretty weird, that's not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids.
[...] Spending's a problem because spending's not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. Everybody around the room wishes you'd spend less money. Don't raise my taxes; please spend less. Don't take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles … no one walks out the door. So the temptation for a Republican is to let that one slide. And I don't have the answer as to how we fix that. But it does explain how could it possibly be that everyone in the room wants something and doesn't end up getting it because it's not a vote-moving issue. [...]
Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are skeptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.”
He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?»
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