So here is the second paradox of this election: at least in the medium term, it will shift UK politics in a European direction, with two cross-class “peoples’ parties” (like the CDU and SPD in Germany) with similar approaches to economic management, but with the Tories representing the more socially conservative strands of the electorate and Labour (or its successor party) representing the more liberal strands.
That will also mean that the most free market of the big European countries does not have a party that enthusiastically represents the free market (it is hard to see the social democratic Liberal Democrats filling that gap). But the free market can probably look after itself for now, and if Britain becomes too statist, the electorate will sense it and reshuffle the pack at some point in the future.
One doubt that some people, especially on the Left, will have about this thesis is whether a modest increase in NHS investment and a slogan or two about public infrastructure really amounts to a social democratic shift in the Tory party.
It is true that the Tory manifesto in the end was more modest on public spending commitments than I had hoped, and implicitly less redistributionist than I had wanted, with the promise not to increase any of the main income related taxes. The lack of a proper commitment to a partial socialisation of adult care costs, while understandable politically, was also a disappointment.
So is the Tory party just putting on a more centrist mask to appeal temporarily to the Brexit-voting lower-middle and working classes? I do not think the world works like that. Even for our short-termist, adversarial political culture, that would be an impossibly cynical move. It also ignores the fact that the party has almost certainly lost a section of the middle class over Brexit that needs to be replaced — and not just for one election.
No, from my own observations (and I work part-time in a centre-Right think tank and meet plenty of Tory MPs), I would say that the party — thanks to Brexit — is going through another of its great evolutionary shifts. My own think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a major piece of work calling for the socialisation of adult social care costs (with a supportive forward by that well known 19th century mill-owner Jacob Rees-Mogg).
The last Tory party conference had a mantra of three policies for post-Brexit Britain: sort out social care, build a lot more houses (including public ones for rent) and invest more in non-university, post-school education for the 60% who do not go into higher education. If this is the plan for de-regulated, race-to-the-bottom Britain, it is very craftily disguised.
So why are so many Tories so passionate about leaving the EU if it is not to loosen protections that their new voters are strongly attached to? No doubt there are some who are keen to see the back of the Working Time Directive and so on, but de-regulation and autonomy are here too often confused. The moderate nationalism that Brexit appealed to is the localism of our more globalised world.
Brexit now allows us to make our own choices about immigration, about farm subsidies, about regional aid and state subsidies, about contracting out rules in the public sector, about VAT levels, about the future of our legal system and much more. In many areas we will stick close to EU rules, in other areas we will diverge, and pay some economic price for doing so, but it will be our choice.
Is all this just the grumpy rationalisations of a privileged 60-something who flirted with leftism in his youth and is now returning to his Conservative/conservative roots? Well, I was a member of the Labour party for about 35 years and continued to vote (and sometimes even canvas) for them right up to 2015. I voted Tory in 2017, largely on Brexit grounds (as a Remain voter who wanted the decision implemented), and I might vote Liberal Democrat as an anti-Corbyn tactical vote in 2019. So to the extent that beliefs are expressed through political acts, I think I can now claim a pretty sound centrist record.
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