#tory collapse

Our 2 main candidates for PM are the guy who got a vote of no confidence just 6 weeks ago. And a guy who is promising to bring us back from the brink of national collapse partially caused by his wife’s tax bill that got lost in the post?

How Conservative Immigration Policy Will Destroy Its Thatcherite Model

Source: The Financial Times

By Honest John

LIKE A desperate gambler deciding to bet his shirt on one last turn of the roulette wheel, Rishi Sunak has staked his entire political reputation on the latest iteration of the Tories’ Rwanda bill. This is a piece of legislation which has been declared illegal by the British Supreme Court; which has so far cost the British taxpayer £240m with a further £50m due to be paid to Rwanda next year; which is considered as impractical as it is morally questionable and which has seen precisely zero asylum seekers so far sent to Rwanda to have their claims processed. This sad wheeze is going to be dragged before the House of Commons once more, while Sunak desperately claims black is white and that Rwanda can miraculously become a safe country for asylum seekers by the passing of a law in Westminster. The Prime Minister’s determination to turn Tuesday’s vote on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill into effectively a vote of confidence in his leadership is simultaneously reckless and absurd. Sunak’s desperation to quieten the increasing insurrectionary noises from his party’s right wing in the wake of the dismissal of Suella Braverman, has led him to to invest all his hopes in a piece of legislation for which there is no evidence will succeed in deterring the “small boats” (its stated claim), which will place the U.K. once again in breach of international law and will succeed only in enriching the government of Rwanda, incredulously receiving millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money for its civic infrastructure, gifted by a country whose own infrastructure is falling apart. It is actually hard to find anyone outside the fevered confines of Sunak’s inner circle who supports the plan or thinks it will work. Apart perhaps from the government of Rwanda itself that is.

It is easy to laugh at the infantile antics of a government that, in any real sense, has ceased to function and to treat this latest act in the Tory psychodrama as the piece of absurdist political theatre it undoubtedly is, but the Rwanda bill is simply the congealing icing on the top of a poisonous cake that the Conservatives have been serving up for years, masquerading as migration “policy”. This is legislation that is as contradictory as it is cruel; as performative as it is populist. For the Conservatives, migration is their key emergency break glass area of public policy. When everything else that they and the succession of hopeless lightweights they have foisted on the country as Prime Ministers, has turned to dung at their touch, they still believe that the prejudice and hatred of “the British People” toward foreigners and immigrants has no bottom level: for Tories you simply cannot go too low on immigration. The Rwanda scheme - when it was first cooked up in the days of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel - had nothing in reality to do with deterring asylum seekers from trying to cross the Channel to Britain; it was all about trying to appeal to a mythical “Red Wall” voter for whom no amount of cruelty, illegality and contempt was too much when it came to migrants. As their polling figures slumped and by election and council election results confirmed their worst electoral fears, the Conservatives still believed that victimising the victims could yet turn it around for them - no matter the dark forces their racist and bile-filled rhetoric might unleash: if they could just once again gaslight the electorate into believing that all the catastrophes of the last fourteen years of Tory rule are, in fact, the fault of incoming foreigners, all may yet be well.

This dismal flirting with the fascist playbook may have resulted in the headline-catching idiocy of Sunak’s latest Rwanda wheeze, but beneath that blather James Cleverley has announced planned measures that are far more significant, far more damaging, and far more frightening than any amount of ludicrous assertions about the Rwanda scheme. Tired of being taunted by Labour and others about the huge rise in legal migration (its net increase topped 600,000 in 2022) despite all the Tory promises to bring the numbers down over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives’ response is to quite literally attack, and potentially destroy, its own Thatcherite economic model.

For over forty years, Tory politicians have extolled Britain’s “flexible” workforce; its deregulated system; its low wage/low unemployment economy and its marketised society. Indeed, for years we were told by politicians on the right and the left that in a globalised world, mobile and non-unionised workforces, cheap production costs, outsourced supply lines and minimal regulation was essential to the easy access, low price, and plentiful supply digital capitalism that has taken hold in Britain. Key to the success of this model has been migrant labour, first from the EU and now from a swathe of sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries whose residents have been offered visas to replace the low wage flexible European workers that post-Brexit Britain apparently no longer wants. The legal migrants that the Conservatives are now in such a lather about are an essential component of the Thatcherite economic model they have all been promoting to us for decades. If, as Cleverley maintains, the government wishes to reduce net migration figures by 300,000 in 2024, then that is 300,000 workers not available to drive lorries, deliver Amazon parcels, pick our crops, clean our offices, valet our cars, serve in our restaurants and, crucially staff our hospitals and care homes. By creating a shortage of deregulated low wage labour, the Tories will simultaneously damage large parts of the service economy and drive up wages, and with it inflation. In their desperate belief that hatred of foreigners will somehow save them from oblivion at the next General Election, the Conservatives are prepared to throw overboard an approach to employment and wages that has sustained them for nearly two generations and was one of the driving ideological impulses on the right that drove Brexit. The revolution has truly begun to eat itself.

Apart from the casual abandonment of what has been the essence of right-wing Toryism for years, Cleverley has also managed to introduce the class-based nastiness of the Sklled Worker minimum salary threshold of £38,700 pa that legal migrants and their dependents must meet. This is a measure that will drive families apart, possibly force British citizens, married to foreigners but earning below the threshold, to emigrate to be with their loved ones and cause untold damage to the university sector (one of the few growth areas of the British economy) and the NHS and care sector, already on its knees after years of austerity and disproportionately reliant on migrant labour. It is as if the Tories are not content with the calamities that austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics have already wrought on British society: with this latest episode of ill-thought through prejudicial nonsense, they seem to want to finish it off altogether. I have predicted for some time the implosion of modern Toryism - its Thatcherite ideology a busted flush and its Brexit nationalist makeover lacking in depth or practical solutions; but what I hadn’t bargained for was that the Tories would try to take the whole country down with them.

Never has a government looked more threadbare, pointless, desperate and unlovable. All they have left to offer is hatred, racism and self-defeating vindictiveness. If Sunak’s absurd posturing over his doomed Rwanda bill results in his resignation before Christmas and a January General Election, the “British People” that this band of charlatans and incompetents keep claiming to speak for, but who in reality they do not understand, will breathe a sigh of relief, because we the people will at last be given the opportunity to cast this catastrophic version of Toryism into an electoral oblivion it so richly deserves and from which it will, hopefully, never emerge.

Migration may yet be modern Conservatism’s epitaph.

The Dishonesty at the Heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour

Source: iStock Photos

By Honest John

THAT THE Conservatives are political toast is now a truism of British politics. It seems everything Rushi Sunak touches turns to blight. With his increasingly wan smile, the Prime Minister frequently gives the impression of simply going through the motions, as though he himself no longer believes in the bizarre concoction of austerity economics and crude populism that has characterised his rudderless premiership. The latest scandal of aerated concrete threatening the physical collapse of schools and hospitals symbolises Tory Britain: after well over 13 years of ruinous Conservative rule, the country feels like it is literally falling to bits. With electoral projections predicting a Labour majority of anything between 40 and 140 seats at the next General Election, if the government ever did have a “narrow path to victory” as Isaac Levido claimed eight months ago, it now seems overgrown, mountainous and littered with fallen concrete.

With an average opinion poll lead of 18 points, historically unassailable at this stage In the electoral cycle, Keir Starmer’s Labour seem destined for power, possibly as soon as May next year. The party, pursuing an almost carbon copy of the tactics employed by New Labour in 1996/97 have been careful to shut down any conceivable Tory attack line by diluting, postponing and removing most of the headline policies that had made the Labour offer truly distinctive as recently as last year’s Party Conference. There has been much disappointment and complaining on the left at Starmer’s and Reeves’ caution, lack of ambition and even political cowardice at what appears to be a surrendering of any recognisable progressive agenda to the Tory settlement even as that very settlement appears to be in its death throes. The question of what Starmer’s Labour stands for as it gets ever closer to becoming the next government of the U.K. is constantly raised. Whereas I share those concerns, there seems to me to be something far darker at the heart of the Labour project that goes beyond normal electoral calculus: Labour is actually being wilfully or naively dishonest with the British people.

That dishonesty is fiscal, but also political.

Labour’s current fiscal policies are rightly criticised by disappointed supporters as symbolising the government-in-waiting’s lack of political courage, but are rarely taken to task for their lack of economic coherence. In short order, Rachel Reeves has “ruled out” increasing the top rate of income tax; increasing corporation tax above 25%; any increased borrowing for the first two years in government, and any form of wealth tax. Keir Starmer has recently joined the closing down of fiscal options by promising no increase in income tax at all. The Right have traditionally challenged past Labour Party spending plans with the knowing sneer “where’s the money coming from?”. Now that question is one of genuine objective political curiosity: how on earth is Labour going to govern after it has voluntarily committed to raise no new money whatsoever?

It actually gets worse. It seems to have been forgotten (and I sometimes think by Rachel Reeves too) that Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement last year, designed to stabilise the money markets after Liz Truss’ crazed tax cutting experiment, not only launched Tory Austerity 2.0 by keeping public spending below headline inflation, but also committed to reduce current spending by £22bn and capital spending by £14bn in 2025/26. Labour has signed up to the government’s spending plans and therefore has effectively committed itself to public spending cuts in its second year in office. Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule (public debt to be less than public income by 2029) is of a piece with this.

The Labour response to criticism of its lack of spending plans, in a reprise of Truss’ mantras, is that Labour wishes to grow the economy and that this cannot be achieved by increased taxation. This of course takes as read the tired Tory assertion that all taxation is derived from income and that increased taxation therefore suppresses consumer demand. This sophistry ignores what governments can do to stimulate the economy with increased revenues, from whatever source, and refuses to countenance the reform of taxation of wealth and property. Even if one puts unexplored policy options to one side (including the rebasing of Council Tax) Labour seems to believe that the economy will grow as if by magic; that the very appearance of a Labour government will automatically attract inward investment, stimulate new businesses, fund capital infrastructure projects and increase wages. To the question “How?” the Labour front bench has no answer.

The fact is that Reeves at least, as a former economist at the Bank of England, knows full well that growth does not occur spontaneously. Investment-led growth requires deployment of fiscal actions by the government, whether that is through the tax breaks, quantitative easing, low corporation tax, low interest rates or the selling off of state assets favoured by the Right, or through the stimulus economics, capital infrastructure spend, government-backed lending and job creation initiatives favoured by the Left. Growth always requires decisive action by the Treasury. To pretend otherwise is either delusional, economically illiterate or, that word again, dishonest.

Starmer and his front bench, given their relentless and highly effective, critique of modern Toryism, also understand that the series of policy disasters inflicted by successive Conservative regimes - the social vandalism of austerity; the self harm of Brexit; the magical thinking of Trussonomics and the inadequate neo-Thatcherism of the hapless Sunak - has resulted in untold damage to the fabric of the British economy, to the resilience and adequacy of public services and to people’s standards of living. Labour know that the unprecedented ruin wrought by the various Tory iterations can’t be “fixed” by a little policy tinkering, some structural reform and fiscal conservatism. To imply otherwise is beyond dishonesty; it is a lie.

Politically, the public’s disgust with the Tories is real. The inchoate anti-austerity that could be detected in the Brexit vote, and even in the vote for Boris Johnson’s offer in 2019, is real. However, unlike its response to those choices, this time the public refuses to be gaslighted by the right wing media. Voters have accurately joined up the dots between Cameron’s “debt reduction” falsehoods of 2010 and the lived reality today of a collapsing NHS and crumbling classrooms. The public not unreasonably want ambulances to turn up, police to manage low level crime, their councils to have enough money to regenerate their town centres, for the unaccountable water companies to stop spewing sewage into the nation’s waterways, for trains to run on time, waiting lists to come down, courts to function and public buildings not to collapse. The Labour critique has done its job, but the opposition’s implication that these public expectations can be met solely by growth and “reform” and no restitution of the public spending cuts implemented by the Tories, is fundamentally and politically dishonest.

In truth, Labour once in office, will live its dishonesty. Perhaps, like Starmer’s cheerleaders earnestly hope, the new government will reverse all its commitments not to increase existing or introduce new taxes, drop Reeves’ fiscal rule and its proclaimed adherence to the 2022 Tory financial settlement, and set about raising revenue in order to stimulate the growth it claims it wants. Or perhaps it will militantly keep its financial word but achieve no meaningful change and let down the millions of voters Labour had encouraged to turn to it to reverse the destruction of the Tory years. There is no way out of this bind - Labour will be unable to avoid the charge of dishonesty whatever it does, or chooses not to do. Starmer and his team may be able lie to themselves in opposition, but as the Tories have discovered to their cost, you can’t lie to the electorate when in government and hope, for any length of time, to get away with it.