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Last autumn, Rishi Sunak stopped pretending that HS2 was a conscionable use of finite public resources. He wasn’t thanked. In fact, for scrapping the Birmingham to Manchester leg of the high-speed rail line, the prime minister took more flak than his predecessors had for overseeing the astronomical cost overrun of the project. Such is politics. Joe Biden’s approval rating has never recovered from his exit from Afghanistan. The previous three presidents, who spent $2tn and two decades on that fool’s errand of an occupation, suffered less.
Still, Sunak has gone on in a Thatcherite vein. He cut taxes in November. To make fiscal room for them, he set out levels of public spending in the future that are so tight as to be scarcely plausible. All the while, the pressure from his colleagues is not for a reversal, but for more tax cuts.
And so it is with some justification that I announce the death (through natural causes) of big-government Toryism. Towards the end of the last decade, under Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, a paternalist fad gripped the British right. Margaret Thatcher lost ground to the old imperial protectionist Joseph Chamberlain as the party’s source of historic inspiration. One-time neoliberals promised to use the state to enrich luckless regions far from London, because no one has ever thought of that before. In a “realignment” of politics, the Tories were evolving from Anglo-individualism towards a programme that might be described as Gaullist or Christian Democrat, if that didn’t entail a continental European allusion.
All that is over. Don’t be sad. The “red wall” agenda was nonsense on three counts.
First, to characterise the previous few decades as laissez-faire was, and remains, unserious. Public spending went up a huge amount under the last Labour government. As a share of national output, Conservative “austerity” took it back to the level that was obtained in the notorious Dark Age we know as 2007, the year Tony Blair left office. The tax burden has been rising since the early 1990s. Paid parental leave became law in the supposedly neoliberal Britain, as did the minimum wage, which the Tories then upgraded. Even before all this, Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan, made a much smaller dent in the state than either her apostles or her sworn enemies imagine.
It is natural that, on the left, governments are accused of abandoning their citizens to market forces over those 20 or 30 years. The fact that conservatives go along with this travesty of the recent past is harder to fathom.
And red wall Tories didn’t just overstate the need for a rupture with liberalism. They exaggerated, too, the feasibility of one.
A nation’s economic model isn’t the choice of its present government. It is determined to a large extent before then: by geographic circumstance, by centuries-ingrained habit. I suspect, for example, that the protectionist turn in America right now is tenable. The US has been a closed economy for long sections of its history. It has the resources and the domestic market. The UK is an open nation or a poor one. How telling that even Brexiters justified leaving the EU as a chance to trade more. Tories tend to have no idea how aberrant this is for an ostensibly populist movement. (Imagine Marine Le Pen doing it.) Some leaders can change national habits, of course. Johnson, who is 90 per cent smoke, was never one of them.
It isn’t even clear that red wall economics was popular. The Tories won a landslide in 2019 because, in Jeremy Corbyn, Labour put up the worst ever major-party candidate for prime minister. (And unlike in 2017, when he received tactical votes galore, the public feared he might win.) This dumb luck was then interpreted as popular endorsement of rightwing statism. Well, if that holds, the Tories, who are going into an election with public debt equal to annual national output, and a leader who furloughed workers at vast fiscal cost, should be competitive. I refer you to the polls.
In retrospect, when Sunak cut high-speed rail, commentators drew the wrong lesson. It was seen as betrayal of the red wall vision. In truth, the vision itself stood exposed. Having overseen such a multi-decade fiasco as HS2, how can the British state direct the economy? Who thinks its civil servants have the training, its politicians the stamina and its voters the appetite for more tax? Which of the UK’s previous attempts at dirigisme, such as those of the postwar decades, are grounds for optimism? Who pines for British Leyland? Not, it seems, the Tories of recent months. Here’s to the re-re-alignment.