The Stopped Clock of the Vale

Ben Wildsmith

At the Conservative conference today, Andrew RT Davies conceded that his party must change.

Having lost all its Welsh MPs at the recent election, a ‘blanket’ loss if you will, the party will welcome Mr Davies’ conversion to reality-based analysis.

The upcoming Tory leadership election may seem somewhat of a sideshow with Labour enjoying an unassailable parliamentary majority, but underlying instability within the governing party could potentially leave it vulnerable to competent opposition.

Last night’s resignation of Rosie Duffield from the Labour benches follows the removal of the whip from seven MPs who rebelled over the retention of the two-child cap on benefits. A coherent opposition would not be lost for fault lines upon which to hammer home a message of dissatisfaction with Labour’s direction of travel.

Failures

Mr Davies was not specific about his vision for the party other than in seeking to own perceived failures on immigration and offer national support to industries that have been adversely affected by globalisation.

Here, he has correctly identified a gaping hole in the UK political market.

Is there anybody left in the country who doesn’t accept that deindustrialisation was a catastrophic mistake? In centring economic activity around the City of London, successive governments have turned the regions of the UK into human warehouses where potential lies unlocked and social problems proliferate.

The fool’s gold of housing inflation has masked widespread impoverishment for decades whilst London has developed into a hostile city state.

So, at the outset of the second post-Thatcher Labour government, we’re entitled to ask what it plans to do about it.

Economically inactive

The government is mightily concerned with people being economically inactive. Keir Starmer said in an interview this week that all disabled people on benefits will be required to look for work.

His government is also seeking legal authorisation for access to benefits claimants’ bank accounts, ostensibly to combat fraud. So, there is plenty of stick around for people to respond to but where is the carrot?

Without a programme of investment to create well-paying jobs that people want to do, the party of labour is reduced to policing the populace on behalf of existing capital. It’s hardly inspiring.

There are recent precedents for Mr Davies’ line of thinking. Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ agenda was supposedly the dawn of a new post-Thatcherite Conservative ethos that recognised the mistakes of the past. I don’t know how Johnson came by this policy, it’s a stretch to imagine that he cares at all about disadvantaged areas, but its incorporation into his wider deception of the nation spread Toryism into unlikely Labour strongholds.

As Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell sought a permanent remedy. Johnson’s plan essentially rewarded constituencies for voting Conservative by doling out project-specific cash. As recalcitrant Labour areas saw their neighbours prosper, they would make the switch themselves and Tyneside would become Buckinghamshire in no time flat.

Regional banks

McDonnell’s investments were to be into permanently funded regional banks which would draw on local expertise to determine which projects to back.

Now though, with Johnson’s plan exposed as a sham and anything Corbyn-adjacent verboten in Starmer’s Labour Party, there is a genuine space left in UK politics.

If the world still made sense, this would be natural Labour territory. The clue is in the name. Labour seems, however, to be in permanent retreat. Its Green New Deal has been eroded at every juncture, and if the party has an industrial strategy beyond this, it hasn’t announced it loudly enough to reach me.

As the Conservatives weigh up how they are going to approach opposition, they would be well advised to seize this political real estate. Attempting to out-Fash Nigel Farage is a losing game.

The Tories’ reputation for being responsible was testament to its PR brilliance at the best of times, so it was never going to survive years of infantile culture wars and leadership challenges.

The party’s trick under Thatcher was to convince people to imagine themselves as captains of their own destiny.

Who needs public services when you are raking it in from your British Gas shares? Under that delusion, 40 years of theft has gone unchallenged.

Now, with nothing left to steal, the coffers need to be filled. If the Conservatives were to become the party of industry, they would have a defined, central territory from which to challenge the government.

Cynicism amongst the electorate is such that we are resigned to being exploited under all political circumstances. It would be a sound gamble that we’d rather be worked to death than starved.