Theresa May is determined to grab the worst Prime Minister ever crown from her predecessor, at least if her incompetence over the Grenfell tragedy is anything to go by. Her initial visit to the site to meet emergency service workers but pointedly not surviving residents was incredibly cold, and incredibly damaging. For millions, May's behaviour sums up the contempt she and her ilk have for working class people, and those in particular forced to get by with social security support. On top of all that, more failures have come out that impact and reinforce the reception of Grenfell as an episode in the class war. We learn the Tories were slapping each others' backs for diluting fire safety regulations earlier this year. While Tory-run Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council could have been investing more in service provision, it turns out they've doled out council tax rebates while local authorities in poorer parts of the country winced under the cosh of cuts. And lastly, according to the recently-defenestrated Nick Clegg, he met resistance on social housing from Dave and Osborne because it only "creates Labour voters". No wonder people are bloody angry.
And so the Tories are getting found out. The party of the spiv, the rentier, the money grubber, and the parasite are having their ugly character exposed to the full glare of the British public, and what they see is appalling masses of people who've previously regarded anti-Tory rhetoric as political knockabout. Grenfell has been compared to the Poll Tax, but it is more than that. Remember, the Tories got shot of Thatcher and rebooted successfully in time for the 1992 general election. No, this crisis is altogether more serious as it threatens the very party itself. For the Tories, it is a crisis of legitimation, and they run the risk of taking damage so serious that a lengthy period out of government is almost inevitable, regardless of when the next general election falls. Their deal with the DUP certainly won't save them.
This begs the question then, given Grenfell and their political complicity in the lead up to an unnecessary tragedy, how can they and Theresa May, as their reviled figurehead, stay on? Unfortunately, I am forced to report that the demands of the moment would likely see the Tories and May cling on for dear life. On the Prime Minister's fate, assuming she is still in position by the time I've finished writing this post, it suits the interests of too many for her to remain. Reports that Johnson has told his supporters to fall in behind the PM seem credible enough. He's already sharing the burden of Brexit with David Davis and disgraced serving minister Liam Fox. Does he want Brexit to be his and his alone? Absolutely not. Does he also want to take over at a time when not even his faux bonhomie can save the Tories from a looming disaster? Hell no. There is however one person who would be willing, even is she's definitely not able, and that would be the dread Leadsom. Thankfully for the Tories, there is no situation so dire that she could possibly be the solution. Yet she, unlike her titular boss, did go down and speak to residents in and around Grenfell. I wonder if she prefaced her remarks with "As a mother ...".
Because Tory fractiousness means all interests are served by May carrying on as a meat shield, it's unlikely a putsch would come. There's another reason too that increases her chances of staying, a problem (for them at least) they rate higher than the Brexit negotiations themselves. According to Tory whips, she has said there are four words explaining her decision to soak it up and stagger on: Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn. It is difficult to put into words how much the prospect of an insurgent Labour Party terrifies them. Though, irony of ironies, if everything in Corbyn's manifesto was implemented capital as a whole would benefit. But for them, it's an instinct. If capital is subject to greater controls and responsibilities by a party with a mass, politicised and radicalising base, anything could happen. Not least the relationship of command their class privileges entitle them to would be under threat. Their objections and fears is not about having to pay more tax or getting forced to recognise trade unions, it's about power. Their ideological penchant for small-statism is a recognition that their state can, on occasion, be turned against them and that certain sections of capital be made to pay the price of restructuring capital as a whole. See the Attlee government and Swedish social democracy, for example.
Whether that fear is groundless or not, for the Tories it is real. If you combine that with a sense of certainty they will lose the next election, that many of our newly-minted MPs quite like the idea of staying on in the House and aren't going to give up their seats, and the slim chance any election call would clear the provisions of the fixed term, an election looks unlikely.
While there are powerful forces that frame and are expressed through politics, is there anything May's premiership can do to stabilise the situation? Her immediate aim is getting Brexit sorted, but there are a number of other things she can do to try and detoxify the outfit she has so indelibly stained. Given that many Tories are cottoning on to how the public's patience with austerity is at an end, it would be sensible for May to try and enact some of the more Milibandist moments from her manifesto. Keeping the promised funding and parity of treatment for mental health immediately springs to mind, for example. Though going too far in this direction could invite Tory rebellion, making her fatally dependent on Labour votes - assuming Labour agrees. I also expect attempts to try and knock Labour off course - she's likely to revisit her duff counter-terror strategy and, in what would be a surreal replay of the election, dare Corbyn not to back her. Whatever May tries, it's going to be scrappy, and it will certainly be unedifying.
Quite apart from their crisis now, the election reconfirmed their declinist tendency. Managing Brexit, running a feeble government, navigating inner party division, stymieing crisis bleeds here, there, and everywhere, it would stretch the most able of politicians. Theresa May, fortunately for us, doesn't come close to this and cannot but exacerbate her party's problems further.
Time to return to a recurring theme of this blog: that the Conservative Party is an organisation in long-term decline. On its weight among the British electorate, the demographic profile of its support - particularly along the lines of age, and its long slide from a membership in the couple of million to somewhere between 130k-150k today, the tendency is pronounced and obvious. How does this argument stand up in light of the general election results? Have the Conservatives managed to revive their fortunes and seen off the decline?
Ordinarily, Theresa May's "team" would have, should have done very well indeed. 42% and 13.6m votes is in the range that delivered Margaret Thatcher her 1983 and 1987 landslides. May too could have looked forward to one if it wasn't for those pesky kids. And the small matter of genius incompetence. Nevertheless, despite losing seats and falling into chaos, the result appears to challenge the declinist thesis: the vote is the highest any party has polled since John Major's post-war record of 14m in 1992. Yes, May managed to win more ballots than even His Blairness in 1997, and she presided over a vote increase of 5.5% on 2015's tally, well over anything Dave pulled off in his confrontations with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. On her watch, the Tories made aggressive inroads into SNP-held seats, pensioning off Angus Robertson, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and Alex Salmond: Scottish nationalist scalps don't come much bigger than these. And also UKIP completely melted away with large numbers of its voters switching to the Conservatives.
May's achievement, if it can be called that, is a recomposition of the Tory vote, a rebuilding of a coalition that fractured under the hammer blows of New Labour in the 1990s, and had gradually bled away to third parties. Talking tough on immigration and sabre rattling on Brexit directly appealed to socially conservative Conservative voters put off by Dave's flashy liberalism, metro-elitism, and commitment to things like sexual and gay equality. Cornering the market as the unionist party in Scotland given Scottish Labour's disarray (at least, before the election), Ruth Davidson and friends were boosted by Nicola Sturgeon's independence ambush. Here, the usually canny SNP leader miscalculated people's appetite for another referendum. She wasn't to know a general election was hatching in Theresa May's head, but for the sake of short-termist pressure she alienated soft SNP supporters and antagonised enough unionists to electorally damage her party, whenever the election was going to drop. To demonstrate the pain, the last time Scotland returned more Conservative MPs than Thursday was 1983.
Kippers on the one side, Scottish unionists on the other. But May also played big for disaffected sections of Labour's vote, not all of which came via UKIP. As folks know, around a third of Labour supporters voted to leave the European Union last year. These were the sections of the party's support that tend to be older, retired, and clustered in "traditional" (i.e. labour intensive) working class occupations. They too tended to be more socially conservative and were, if you believe the amount of polling and research done over the last few years, sceptical of the London leftyism of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn - particularly the latter in regard to issues around the military and national security. Here, May's manifesto was designed to win these people over with its promises of more job security, doing something about housing, intervening in the economy, keeping "our" nukes and, yes, stopping those immigrants from nicking jobs. There was undoubtedly some success in this regard. Here in Stoke, we retreated in the north constituency and lost the south pretty much on this basis (aided in no small part by the collapse of UKIP too). Over in Ashfield the election saw it move from what seemed to be a solid Labour seat to a tight marginal with 460 votes separating the two parties. Undoubtedly the Tories would have done even better had Nick Timothy not secreted a grenade in the party's manifesto.
This then give us May's coalition: the traditional Tory base of anti-Labour workers, the petit bourgeois, the business and professional salariat, and the rich with unionist voters, former kippers, and a sizable chunk of anti-Corbyn ex-Labour voters. On this occasion it wasn't enough to win because Labour, at short notice, was able to mobilise a sizeable coalition and a movement not seen in British politics since 1945. But of that another time. Still, the question has to be asked. After cobbling together a new coalition of voters and turning the Tories around in Scotland, have the Conservatives escaped their decline?
No is the answer. Sociologically speaking, the Tories have recuperated their declining base by bringing in new voters but they haven't escaped the track they're on. The problem is these new additions are strata who are in decline too, and come with more than a degree of volatility. Their 2017 "borrowed" voters are disproportionately older than the general voting population, so while they're still more likely to vote than the young they're not getting replaced like-for-like as they shuffle off this mortal coil. Yes, age is a dynamic thing and the commonsense view that people become more conservative as they get older is true enough (or, to be more specific, people become more concerned with security). The problem the Tories have is their policies have, for the last seven years, relentlessly attacked people in work, and younger people in particular. With their indifference regarding wages, security at work, job quality, house building, and their continued application of zombie austerity, they are bedding down a reflex hostility to their party that will last for longer, which is going to negatively impact their chances among these age groups, while their present support continues to die off. Second, thanks to the UK-wide pro-Corbyn surge Scottish Labour are in contention again as a unionist left alternative that some who went Tory this time could find attractive in the future. This poses an issue for the SNP as well, as a good chunk of the support for Scottish independence is left wing and consciously anti-Tory. As the possibility of IndyRef2 recedes into the distance, Labour in Scotland become the best bet again of keeping the Tories out of power, undermining the SNP pitch. The kipper vote is also highly excitable - having broken once from mainstream parties, they could disappear again if the Brexit negotiations go down a softer (sensible) path, and Nigel Farage makes good his threatened comeback. And lastly, the ex-Labour leave voters are clustered in occupations simultaneously vulnerable to social, cultural, and political consequences that don't bode well for any kind of Conservative political project. In sum, there is a strong case for regarding Thursday's result the high tide of the Conservative vote. It is now set to go out, never to come in for a long time indeed.
The Conservatives have accomplished a temporary reprieve. While they wriggle and agonise over the predicament May's hubris has landed them in, its support is stronger (but not necessarily as stable) vis a vis the Tories were under Dave. Yet events, my boy, events could very quickly ramp up the declinist tendency. The consequences of Brexit and the toxic partnership with the Democratic Unionists look all set to do this. Therefore, that begs the question: can they get out of this pickle long-term? Having posed this question before, the answer was pretty much along the same lines Theresa May attempted. The Canadian Tories won office in 2011 on the basis of one-nationism and pitching an inclusive national identity that reached out to aboriginal peoples and the recently migrated. And they were defeated by liberal hero Justin Trudeau in 2015 because they governed just like any other bunch of toxic Tories. Pitching themselves as one-nationists has, as we've seen, helped build up a wider coalition of voters that appealed mostly to declining constituencies. The problem is this cannot possibly work again. The second option is to try and scare voters silly. While the social density and interconnected character of the electorate at large is growing, this proceeds alongside a profound atomisation inculcated through work and institutions. This reinforces a message and outlook of individual responsibility, and individualises angst and insecurity. Over the past seven years the Tories have deepened the processes driving this by introducing more marketisation and further locking down collective rights, and whipped up convenient scapegoats as means of mass distraction. Therefore cynically posing as the bearers of security while being responsible for the reproduction of insecurity is possible. However, as this election has shown the scares don't work anymore, partly because the old media pparatus used to deliver it is much diminished and the networked worker draws on other resources to help make up their mind. Nostalgia and abuse are broken as a means of winning elections and improving a Conservative party's fortunes.
Labour, as I have argued has and still is undergoing a recomposition process of its own, except it represents the rising class of networked workers who are poised to become the overwhelming majority of people-in-general. And not just here, but everywhere. The Tories if they are to comeback have to do the impossible and contest Labour for the political leadership of the networked workers, or at least persuade enough of them to keep their chances going. Looking at the state of them now it seems a massive ask, especially as more and more consciously anti-Tory young people come of age, enter the electoral rolls and get involved in wider politics. Yet that is the only way to future victories, as a party that maintains the social order - as a strong and stable institution, if you like - but does not seek to dynamite it for narrow advantage, be it party political or as favours for one section of capital over another. If the Tories are to win again, their model is the boring, plodding but dependable and uncontroversial small c conservatism of an Angela Merkel married to the seductive a-place-for-everybody inclusivity of one nation Toryism. There are Tories who see their Conservatism in this way, but getting there would require the party undergo a full body transplant, of it becoming something else. That said, no one should underestimate the British Conservative Party's capacity to do whatever it take to grab power, even when it is seemingly boxed into an impossible political situation.
If you listen hard enough, you might hear echoing off the hills the curdling screams of a Tory party in distress. I cannot lie, as a socialist, a labour movement person, and a Labour Party member I have waited a long, long time to see some proper blue-on-blue action. And what makes it all the sweeter is that a left wing leader on a left wing manifesto administered the initial kicking. With a confidence and supply arrangement fixed up with the crooks and the cranks of the Democratic Unionists, the damage is piling up. To have lost your majority so carelessly and needlessly is one thing. But to forge a pact with the most terrifyingly backward political party in Westminster is quite another. All that time, that careful time Dave spent detoxifying the Tories at least where gay rights and reproductive rights were concerned lies in tatters. This is short termism in extremis, the worst thing the Tories could do from their point of view.
To not feel schadenfreude is to not be human.
While this is tres enjoyable, a number of folks are shocked by the mess and worried about what this means for the Brexit negotiations. To be honest, I don't think there is much to be concerned about. The most ruinous, stupid, catastrophic course of action has receded somewhat: we are probably on course for a much softer, much less damaging departure from the European Union. How so? There simply isn't a majority in the House for a hard Brexit. Theresa May's napkin scribbles and whimsies over elevenses - to call them a plan would distort the language - only stood a chance of passing if she commanded a majority. However, Tory remainers and wets have had more weight thrust upon them thanks to the election debacle and with May's authority gone, they won't go for it. There is the small matter of the DUP too. They talk a good Brexit when they're not putting women on trial for seeking an abortion, but not at the expense of a hard border with the Republic. Therefore a soft Brexit orientation, like the one Labour has been pushing, has a greater chance of passing with cross-party support. Either way, the Tories descend into civil war and a soft Brexit makes a UKIP revival more likely in all those Tory-held constituencies again. Believe me, their agony is matched by my ecstasy.
What of Theresa May? She is yesterday's woman, and deservedly so after the the worst campaign in modern British history. Swapping Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill won't keep the Tory wolves from Number 10's door either, even with the drafting in of Gavin "Gizza Job" Barwell as chief of staff. A hard man of the Norman Tebbit variety he is not. With Tory MPs calling for her head, Johnson and friends on manoeuvres, Ruth Davidson going for a power grab over the control of the Scottish Tories, and the members want her gone, too, it is incredibly difficult to see how she can hold on. Perhaps she should ask Jeremy Corbyn for some advice? Yet there are things would-be challengers must think about before plunging in the knife.
Hard or soft, Brexit comes with political penalties. The most obvious is the damage it will do to the economy. If say Johnson makes his move and he's PM by next Wednesday, his reputation - which definitely isn't what it used to be - is going to take a hit, damaging his chances ahead of another general election. It therefore doesn't suit anyone's interests to be that leader in the medium term. May on the other hand is broken, so why not let her limp on to oversee the Brexit negotiations and hope that any toxicity will go into the ground when they come to bury her career afterwards? That would seem sensible. The second issue is Tory factionalism itself. There are plenty of Tory MPs who hate Johnson, there are plenty of Tory MPs who hate "call me" Philip Hammond, plenty who hate David Davis, Liam Fox, IDS, Gove, you get the picture. Ambitious folks on the backbenches, like Heidi Allen, are not going to throw their hats into the ring either. What this amounts to is an absurdist drama where everyone's united against May. The lack of confidence in her strikes a weird equilibrium that could get them through the next couple of years as they settle into a temporary non-aggression treaty - at the price of abandoning everything else in the manifesto.
I've just checked, in the half-hour it's taken to write to this point Theresa May is still Prime Minister. With every second that passes her survival as a caretaker PM becomes more likely. But whatever happens, as the fall out of the election continues settling down, it's the Tories and their future chances that will bear the brunt of the poison.
Thought I'd make myself super useful last Saturday and head to my nearest ultra-marginal, which happens to be Derby North (coincidentally, I work there too). Readers may recall this was unexpectedly snatched from Labour by a cruel 41 votes, and Parliament lost Chris Williamson, bête noire to rightwingers (and Masters of Hounds) everywhere. This time, the Greens - who polled 1,300 votes last time - are not standing so everything is up for grabs. If most of those voters simply switched to Labour, we'll romp home. But as politics is politics nothing is so simple. The collapse of UKIP as an electoral force is disproportionately favouring the Tories in the polls, even though they are standing a candidate in the constituency. And, it's worth noting, from our experience in Stoke a lot of what was a protest vote is returning to Labour. Could that happen in Derby North? It's very difficult to say. It's close.
Anyway, there I was with 120 or so other volunteers ready for a mass canvas of the constituency. I was paired up with Paul and Dave who'd also travelled in from outside the area and, with board in hand, off we were packed to do our round. Our destination was Darley Abbey, which is well known in Derby as the main "rich area". Huddled in a patch of greenery that stretches around the Derwent, we were in the bit that was built around the mid 1980s where the average house price weighs in at the £450k bracket. Tidy. We spent a couple of hours knocking on doors and trying to avoid the sun burn, but apart from a caught neck there were two things that stood out.
First was the novelty of working such an area. I've campaigned in safe Labour seats and marginals, but never what you would describe as safe Tory areas in either. Seeing consistent records of Tory support for a lot of voters was an entirely new experience. We also spotted a sign for Amanda Solloway, their candidate and incumbent, in one of the gardens - a Tory sign in a city is not something you see everyday. There was also a Labour poster up in one window, unfortunately tucked away down a cul-de-sac where approximately two neighbours and the postie will see it. Also, those Tory voters were pretty much staying Tory - not that their past records showed much movement. We did find some Labour voters on the round, including two switches from 2015, but definitely not the most fertile patches in the city for us.
The second problem, and a salutary lesson for any Labour supporter tempted to sack the polling station off for Jeremy Kyle, the pub, or whatevs, is this. Every Tory voter, every one who clearly weren't voting for us, every won't say had either posted their vote or were definitely turning out on Thursday. I have never done a round before where we didn't encounter a single non-voter. What does that tell you? It indicates that the better off, those who feel they have a wee bit to lose (despite the dementia tax and other idiocies) will turn out to cast their ballots for the party they feel best defends their interests. Meanwhile, and every comrade who came to the Stoke Central by-election knows this, those people who need a Labour government to take the pressure off their lives, who would materially benefit from a changing of the guard are those least likely to vote to further their interests.
As we know, the wildly variant figures reported by the pollsters hinge on turnout. We're playing a mobilisation game, and here the Tories have an advantage as their core support - the better off, a majority of older voters - are much more likely to vote. Luckily, because the party is a ridiculous size, a veritable mobilising machine, and there has been a shifting politicisation of the young in Labour's direction, there is a possibility that the nice Conservative voters of Darley Abbey will be matched vote for vote for a change, and then some.
It takes chutzpah to suspend national campaigning and then give a political speech about Saturday night's terror attack. But this is Theresa May and the modern Conservative Party has no qualms when it comes to turning a crisis into an opportunity. Naturally, May and her advisors are wily enough not to play the big P politics card but you have the genesis of a simple, touch-sounding black and white position they will use to browbeat voters into backing them as we enter the final stretch.
This morning May said "enough is enough", implying that Britain has been a soft touch for Islamist radicalism which, if that was the case, means she oversaw a dereliction of duty for the last seven years. But she doesn't mean that at all, it signifies a serious and potentially calamitous switch in direction when it comes to counter-radicalism and anti-terrorism. This is plain to see in all of her proposed four changes to policy. She said:
They [the terrorists] are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism ... it will only be defeated when we turn people's minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values - pluralistic British values - are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.
Well, yes. But no. The problem is this comes from the Douglas Murray/Henry Jackson Society's Islamism for Dummies guide. As Murray is bound to say something on this topic again soon, we'll save up a polemic until then. For the time being, it is enough to note that showing off British values to a bunch of befuddled thugs and telling them they are superior to the idiocies of Islamism isn't going to work. May is firmly on the terrain of the ideas delusion, that ideas in terms of elaborate and sketched out ideologies are the prime motivators of jihad. Yes. No. Why does a minuscule subset of Muslims find these views compelling and convincing? What is it about them that makes sense according to their everyday life? How are emotions - anger, frustration, anxiety, companionship, hope - fermented by Islamist ideas into intoxicating zealotry? Why is it men, and young men in particular, are the ones carrying out acts of violence informed by this crackers creed? After all, no women have undertaken Islamist terrorism in the West. And what of those who turn to Islamism without becoming ideologues, without chowing down on the virgins-in-the-afterlife hook? Homing in on just the ideas effaces individual biographies of jihadis, of the material circumstances of their life and their positions in the fabric of social life. We make our own history, but not under the conditions of our choosing as someone once said. Focusing on just Islamism is tantamount to saying Islamists are Islamists because Islamism. Not helpful, and it doesn't bode well for May's first "change".
Her second argument flows from the first. Islamism should be denied the safe space it needs to incubate, and that means governments should work in tandem to "regulate cyberspace". She'll be calling for traffic stops and toll booths on the internet superhighway next. Retro (out-of-touch?) buzztalk aside, this is more evidence of the ideas delusion. Jihadi content is easy to access with a little bit of Google wizardry. The violent imagery and propaganda vids of IS certainly act as bridging tools for some would-be Islamists. However, it's not the case that an exposure to this material causes Islamists. If you start watching this stuff rooting for IS indicates something else has already gone on. Mobilising people for any kind of politics is a process. Ideas have efficacy if, as we've already noted, it speaks a truth about someone's individual existence. Of crucial importance are the networks and relationships one has, and real or imagined grievances. The reason jihadi propaganda slides off most people is because those things do not align. Indeed, for a large number of young people who watch them, IS propaganda vids are merely an edgy subset of gross out videos. In short, for all sorts of reasons governments want tighter control of the internet and bedroom radicalisation offers a handy pretext.
Third, May wants to take on the real world safe spaces in which Islamism thrives. That means more bombing abroad, because that is sure to kick away a grievance prop jihadism draws upon, and taking the fight to Islamism at home. She said "there is - to be frank - far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society." What on earth does this mean? Is she thinking about the Birmingham Trojan horse scandal, which was shown to be rubbish? Is she expecting educators to police the classroom to root out would-be jihadis from among the student body? And how about the safe space she reserves in Downing Street for delegations from Saudi Arabia, whose largesse for Wahhabism in the West is so well known that the EU officially regards it as the primary wellspring of Islamist terror. This is just incoherent and hypocritical nonsense playing to the gallery of newspaper editorials and the inchoate notion that "they", the public sector lefties, the cultural Marxists and the race relations professionals are destroying the fabric of Britain with liberal tolerance. Getting tough here is code for kicking experts and intellectuals, traditional hate figures for Tories and right wing hacks.
Her last pledge is to review the counter-terrorism strategy, which is just about the only thing I do agree with. Though you might have thought what with the security of the people at stake, this would be under constant monitoring and review. Therefore May would look at introducing new powers for the intelligence services and police, which takes us back to more monitoring, more surveillance. However, there is something very clearly missing from her pledge: more police. With 20,000 fewer coppers on her watch and firm refusal to rule out more recruitment or even further cuts, this is not a serious strategy for dealing with the problem. As former Met officer Peter Kirkham argued this afternoon, the government are lying about the number of armed officers and their funding, and no full well the removal of community constables has hampered the intelligence capabilities of our counter-terrorism efforts.
In short then, May's proposed strategy from the off is not interested in understanding the radicalisation process, thinks clamping down on the internet will fix it, and giving the security services new powers - and presumably new responsibilities - without reversing the cuts she personally oversaw and implemented. It's a bloody shambles, offers no improvements over what already exists that I can see, and one doomed never to work. A recipe that promises security, but will do nothing to stymie Islamism.
The pundits muttered dismissively about YouGov's shock poll putting the Tories just three points ahead of Labour, suggesting the election's outcome is edging toward a hung parliament. Reportedly, Jim Messina, the Conservatives' stat whizz on loan from the liberal heroes at Team Obama threw his head back and laughed. Just like someone else we know. And then today Ipsos Mori dropped their bomb: Tories 45%, Labour 40%. The unweighted poll (i.e. not controlling for differentiated turn out) actually puts Labour three points ahead. I can feel hope cloying its way into my heart.
This is no substitute for analysis, however. Cool heads are essential if the newly mobilised aren't to suffer disillusionment and despair if, after everything, the polls are proven wrong and Labour does worse than now expected. On this score, there are two tallies we need to keep an eye on: perceived economic competence and leader ratings. Since these questions have been asked, no party has won a general election who are behind on both. And, unfortunately, Labour is. That said the volatility of politics are proving Theresa May's undoing as her ratings plummet and Jeremy Corbyn's rocket upward. It is quite possible over the weekend the sliver of a gap between them vanishes and starts opening up on the other side. This. Election. Is. Killing. Me.
After an excruciating week for May that saw her nearly crumble in front of a below-par Jeremy Paxman, refuse to take part in the leaders' debate and sent a grieving Amber Rudd in her place, turn down Woman's Hour, rule out any local radio interviews for the remainder of the campaign, and now reeling under the news that the CPS are charging Craig McKinley, his South Thanet agent, and "campaign specialist" Marion Little for alleged electoral expense fraud, May had to really pull it out the bag for tonight's Question Time special. For his part, Jeremy's insurgency is assuming juggernautish properties. Unlike May, he's not under siege from a collapsing campaign nor a simmering rebellion, and a strong and stable performance in front of the Question Time audience would be the icing on the cake for a brilliant week. Who remembers Tuesday's stumble in the Radio 4 studio now?
May came first and needed to knock it out of the park. The first thing to remember is while May isn't comfortable in front of the public, tonight was her 24th appearance on Question Time. If she's no good with that format now, she never will be. And, overall, I think she came off alright. There were no stunning rhetorical flourishes, nor were there any big stumbles. It was competent enough - not polished, plenty vague, but little to frighten away the already committed Tory voter. The problem, however, is with the large numbers of undecideds out there. Here we have someone hyped by the media as the supreme politician, as a grown up versus the seat-of-the-pants juvenilia of Dave and Osborne. Coming across well matters. Relatable matters. Warmth matters. And she just can't do it. Asked about the public sector pay freeze for nurses, there was little sense of sympathy. Confronted by a woman with mental health difficulties and was dragged through a work capability assessment, there was no compassion in her response - just a technocrat's answer. As a rule, electorates are okay with people who don't connect as long as they understand ordinary people's problems, and unfortunately for May she tanks this every time.
Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand had a much better time of it - for the most part. He was more relaxed, more assured in his answers, more interested in listening to what people had to say. On every indicator, he as the anti-May. He showed command of his brief and was able to talk in detail about policy areas, which, considering May is the incumbent and offered vagueness and generality, is a key difference between the two and reflects terribly on the PM. This was especially the case on Brexit - May wouldn't be drawn on no deal, while Jeremy talked about the need to protect jobs and building a more equal society. Brexit means Brexit for May, for Corbyn Brexit means the fight for more and better jobs, and a more pleasant, safer, fairer Britain. A key difference.
Jeremy was doing extremely well until we came to Trident and nuclear weapons. He answered the points on Trident and the first use of nuclear weapons sensibly, on the importance of talking and diplomacy to ever avoid a situation where atomic warfare is a possibility, but some in the Tory third of the audience were determined to get blood and kept asking him whether he'd press the button. He wobbled and didn't offer a clear answer. There are various ways he could have answered it without a straight yes or no, like keeping all options open, doing whatever it takes to defend the country, listening to what the military experts say, and what not. But the audience member who came in after to attack the others who were gleefully criticising Corbyn for refusing to aggressively incinerate millions of people just about spared his blushes. However, the job was done and the press have got their meat for the weekend. Which, to be honest, is hardly news. Later on the IRA came back up and this presented him no difficulties whatsoever, revealing that he had defended Ian Paisley when moves were afoot to bar him from Westminster on the grounds that all voices needed to be party to a peace process, not just the ones you agree with. In all a good performance, sans the handling of the nuclear issue.
Who won? As a Labour supporter I'm obviously going to say Corbyn. But where it counted - on character, on giving a vision, on policy detail he was much better, clearer, and more serious than the Prime Minister. Nukes presented him a problem but his attitude is already baked into nearly everyone's choice, though that won't stop the press from using it to mobilise the Tory vote and try and snatch back some of the volatile ex-kippers that are slipping toward Labour. But even if he gave a totally flat performance, he still would have won. Theresa May strikes as an unsympathetic figure, and she needed something special tonight to try and put her crisis-ridden campaign back on course. She wasn't able to do that. Labour goes into the final weekend of campaigning with the wind in its sails. All the Tories have is scaremongering. It worked in 2015, will it work now? Or can Labour confound all the sage expectations - including my own - and deliver the biggest, most surprising, and sweetest victory in our party's history?
Brexit is calamitous and regressive. But do you know what would be even worse? Ignoring a democratic vote and staying in the EU. That is why Labour were absolutely right to ignore the siren calls of the hard remainers, and why it will oversee Brexit if we're able to pull off the biggest political upset since 1945. However, the polls are against us still so I want to concentrate on the imminent danger: Theresa May's approach to Brexit. Not because she won't get a better deal than Labour. It's far more likely that she won't get a deal at all and crash us out of the EU. A disaster that doesn't bear thinking about.
In her trailed speech today, May returned to the Brexit theme. Anything to put distance between polling day and her abject cowardice. She talked about the "national mission", of talking up the opportunities of Britain and seizing a place for it in the international firmament. This will be a Britain that matters again, a Britain free to make its own opportunities and its own success. In her usual projection tactics straight from the Tory playbook, Labour "haven't got a plan", "doesn't have what it takes" and, bizarrely, "doesn't respect the decision made by the British people". The Maybot is clearly malfunctioning.
May's speech was a word stew designed to make good gravy for the right wing press and shore up her fracturing coalition. Unfortunately, her hardcore vote would guzzle up the Brexit dumplings rather than choke on them. But, again, that ominous and moronic phrase - no deal is better than a bad deal - keeps getting repeated. Like so much of the Tory manifesto, she refused to put specifics and a cost on what this actually means when she faced Paxo on Monday. And it's this vagueness that is so dangerous and makes the possibility of crashing out more likely.
Want my workings? Here you go. Repeatedly, the Tories have shown themselves utterly unfit to be the custodians of the interests they represent, let alone preside over the rest of the country. Since 2010, for example, the Tories cut public spending when the economy was crying out for stimulus. That meant jobs lost unnecessarily, hard times inflicted on millions, and a further deterioration of Britain's competitive position in world markets. Then we had Dave gamble Britain's future on a minor threat to the Tories in a handful of constituencies - and lost. And now May and her car crash election, wasting Article 50 negotiation time just to wrack up a few score more seats in the house. Petty minded and stupid about sums this lot up. They are not to be trusted.
With 'no deal is better than a bad deal', May has painted herself into a corner. Consider for a moment, who gets to define what is a good or bad deal? One that sees Britain hand over an annual sub for tariff free access to the single market, plus cooperation on science, security, trading standards and so on seems totally reasonable to me. However, May and her ghastly Brexit team - Boris Johnson, David Davis, and disgraced serving minister Liam Fox, are operating according to a different set of stakes. Details of the negotiations are going to leak like Trump's White House and the government are in for constant badgering by the right wing press. As soon as costs come in, they will splash them, particularly if the sums are large - which they will be. Ditto with Britain's Brexit bill. May will be under constant pressure to reject them. Furthermore, as she has set herself up as a "bloody difficult woman" the temptation to grandstand the EU27 will be too much. Thatcher had her Falklands moment, and May is not averse to cast herself as the mother of the nation standing up for British pluck against the continental monster. Never mind that she can't even stand up to Woman's Hour on Radio 4.
The sad truth of the matter is all the pressures on May, all the political capital she can reap will come from refusing to sign a deal. What small details the interests of our people and the health of British capitalism are compared to favourable Daily Mail headlines and wrapping the Tory party in the flag of British intransigence. The additional danger is the stupidly bellicose rhetoric indulged by the government is setting up the same dynamic for the EU27 negotiators. If May is behaving like a petulant child, so the political benefits of collapsing the talks and booting Britain out grows. Here too, remember, for their own short-sighted reasons the EU were (and still are) happy to destroy Greece's economy even though the interests of EU capital-in-general was and remains in a speedy return to solvency, not eternal debt and austerity.
These are the stakes then. It's not inevitably, but the stars are aligning for the most ruinous of Brexits and no deal with the EU. That will damage economies across Europe, but would prove to be a catastrophe for our faltering recovery. A Conservative government led by Theresa May makes this all the more likely, and why she must be stopped.
It's a misnomer to describe this as May vs Corbyn seeing as it's not a head-to-head debate, but it is true that tonight's Battle for Downing Street could settle the question of who-to-vote-for for millions of undecided people. As anyone who's been out canvassing in this campaign will tell you, there are plenty of them about. For each leader their encounter with Paxman relates to their campaigns differently. For Theresa May, whose strategy and messaging has collapsed, it's about turning round the Tory party's fortunes. They still command leads in the polls but have lost ground thanks to three things: the dementia tax, a rubbish, arrogant campaign, and the strong campaign Labour has run. While for May tonight was about salvaging a victory from the mess, for Jeremy Corbyn it has to be on building on Labour's dynamism and carry the poll surge upwards. Success for either leader can be measured by how convincingly May depicts Labour as a security risk, and how Corbyn paints the Tories as a risk to self-security. Paxman's job, meanwhile, was to get under their skin and show up the contradictions and problems of both.
How did it go?
Like last time, each 45 minute slot was broken into two parts - questions from the audience (one third Tory, one third Labour, one third undecided), and the second half a grilling from Paxman. Corbyn went first and took questions on the IRA and nuclear weapons - following a path firmly trod by a right wing media and a government increasingly desperate to weaponise any old rope against him. Unexpectedly, he received applause for setting out Labour's position on immigration (which subordinates numbers to perceived economic necessity) when, previously, this has was regarded a major Achilles Heel. He took a question from an alleged former Labour supporter who owned a small business and was worried about a rise in corporation tax, plans to introduce VAT charges to his children's school fees, and zero hour contracts. Very sensibly Corbyn hit the one nationist high road to talk about how spreading fairness was in everyone's interests, and that businesses like his would benefit from operating in a more benign environment. Not the class struggle Trot response many Tory supporters, and no doubt the questioner himself was hoping for. Also asked on his fitness to lead, he replied that telling people what to do isn't a sign of leadership - listening is. As he put it, "You should never be so high and mighty that you can't listen to someone else and learn something".
It was a very strong performance that attracted praise from across the commentariat, including unlikely plaudits from your Dan Hodges and Nigel Farages. We then moved into the grilling from Paxman and, to be honest, Corbyn looked just as unruffled as he was during the first half. Some frustration did get the better of him as Paxo kept jumping in without giving him chance to answer a question. And what questions. Considering this man used to be regarded as Britain's best political interviewer, he wasn't on form tonight. Totally misunderstanding how Labour's manifesto is put together and having no clue about our traditions of collective discipline made him look bad and ill-tempered. You knew Paxo was in a sticky wicket when he was berating Corbyn for not getting the abolition of the monarchy and scrapping Trident into the manifesto. Bizarre. He then reverted to IRA/Hamas and state security matters. Corbyn is so practiced now at handling these sorts of questions that an interviewer of Paxo's experience should perhaps have focused on other things instead. Nevertheless, Corbyn escaped unscathed without a single glove landing. A commanding performance. Strong and stable, you might say.
We all know Theresa May avoids the public like a vampire recoils from garlic, so in many ways she approached this as an unknown quantity for millions of people. And how did she do? With the audience she took questions on police numbers, the NHS, and the dementia tax. While some were hoping for a collapse that didn't happen, but her approach wasn't relaxed either. It was classical Westminster: you take the question and make a real meal of it, refusing to answer and covering up gaping chasms with vague generalisations and padding in the hope of crowding further questions out. I didn't find it convincing, but then I know what to look for. The method aims to convey the impression that the speaker knows what they're talking about and draw any controversial sting from it. Here May performed competently enough, though a quick aside on the "uncosted" Labour manifesto drew snorts of derision and mocking laughter from the audience.
How did she do with Paxo? Remarkably, or not considering he is a self-confessed one nation Tory, the question style was a relaxed but occasionally awkward chat. Less politics, more the analyst's couch. There were next to no interruptions and May was allowed to waffle on as she pleased. However, she almost came unstuck at this more sedate pace. She was troubled by the dementia tax, repeating her pat answers of the last week. She was taken to task for going back on her word over calling the general election and was challenged over Brexit. As Paxo had it, the people in Brussels would look at Theresa May and see "a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire". Unfortunately, his loyalties got the better of going for the jugular and she was given the space to row back and waffle some more. In sum, she didn't perform badly but almost came undone under the gentlest of pressures. Not a good look.
While it didn't have any material outcome on the 2015 election, The Battle for Number 10 was part of the theatre of that campaign. David Cameron was slippery and slick, yet mostly able to look the part - which was his sole discernible talent as Prime Minister. And Ed Miliband came over as passionate but a little bit awkward. Remember "hell yeah I'm tough enough"? It confirmed opinions already baked into voters' decisions. Tonight? Most people have an opinion about Corbyn, for good or ill, thanks to the blanket coverage he's received for nearly two years. And after his exceptional performance, some may have had their expectations confounded. May on the other hand can give good speech at set piece events without questions, but did she look like someone who can cope with criticisms? Did she look like someone competent enough to oversee the Brexit negotiations? To Labour people and others who follow such things, obviously not. It is to be hoped that after tonight many millions more have drawn a similar conclusion.
It's hard to feel sorry for Theresa May. So hard even a big old softie like me can't manage it. She might presently enjoy double-digit leads in some polls, but the campaign is not going to plan. To think, it could have been very simple. It should have been very simple. With a huge lead in the polls all May had to do was be very boring and robotic - an effortless task - and carry on Brexiting this and Brexiting that. The public would have switched off, but she'd have got back into Number 10 over the electorate's snoozing bodies. Everyone knows strong and stable is a load of bollocks, but you've got to at least look the part. And she did, for a time.
Consider the dementia tax debacle alongside the means test for winter fuel payments and abandoning the triple lock on the state pension. Just why? Dave achieved a Tory victory because his scaremongering about nuclear weapons and a Labour/SNP coalition frightened enough people into voting for them. When you make people feel insecure, it gives the Tories an advantage. The lesson lost on May, however, is you're not supposed to issue naked threats. When your passage to victory demands the annexation of the volatile UKIP vote, it's the height of stupidity to be seen to destabilise the core support in the arrogant belief they have nowhere to go. The question going begging is why a politician of May's experience and her aide, Nick Timothy, could make such a mistake?
Consider this. Labour's manifesto is a collaborative effort. Shadow cabinet members and their spads all contributed to the drafting process. There were debates and discussions among the leadership and it finally went to the NEC for approval. At each and every stage more than one brain was making a contribution. How different this is from the Tory approach. Timothy, intuiting his boss's intentions, was left to get on with it himself in the utmost secrecy. Apparently, not even Lynton Crosby himself saw a draft until the day before it went to the printers. And we know what happened - because no one saw it, no one was exercising oversight, no one was there to say "hold on Nick, this isn't a good idea". That's how we have the politically damaging dementia tax and the gross underestimation of the schools' breakfast spending (Timothy had budgeted 7p per day per child), and why the manifesto spectacularly unraveled. Such is Timothy's much-vaunted genius that he derailed the campaign and forced May to make a humiliating climb down almost entirely on his own. Labour couldn't ask for a more effective sleeper agent.
After a few days pause which Theresa May tried her presidential damnedest to look like a strong leader, uncomfortably for her her past has come up. While the Tories and their media friends are determined to drag politics back onto Jeremy Corbyn's relationship with Sinn Fein in the 1980s and 90s, it's May's relationship to police and intelligence budgets that's now posing the Tories the most difficulty. Yes, crime is in long-term decline, but we know that has little to do with the reduction in police numbers. Deficit determinism was the hallmark of the coalition government - actual need (as well as economic realities) played second fiddle while the Treasury taps were turned off. And Theresa May as Home Secretary was perfectly happy to go along with this. Therefore, if the attack lines cast by Amber Rudd and "Handbags" Fallon this weekend are how the Tories are going to play it over the next 10 days, banging on about how terrorist attacks are more likely under Labour is going to be a bit of a risk. Firstly, because cutting the police by 20,000 over the last seven years is hardly the actions of a government "serious" about security, second it just draws attention to Labour's manifesto pledge for more coppers and extra help for the spooks - points on which the Tory manifesto is silent, and third it's downright distasteful - to use the murder of 22 people for electioneering while there isn't a palpable national panic about terror attacks is risky bordering on reckless as far as Tory chances go.
There is also the game we've seen the Tories play time after time. It's called 'project your weakness and watch us get away with it'. Wibbly-wobblyness is a characteristic of Jeremy Corbyn, so Rudd will declare as she stands in for her frit leader at Wednesday evening's debate. Uncosted pledges and a burgeoning debt mountain are the price paid by Labour's plans, despite the provision of figures that say otherwise and the government's own spending record. It's Labour's plans that will turn Britain's streets into a terrorist playground, despite 10,000 extra police and the promise of 3,000 intelligence service recruits. And it's Labour who are going to put taxes up and cost you your home for adult social care, while the manifesto pledges to the contrary.
In short, the Tory campaign is in disarray. As it relaunches, they will be using their leverage in the media to hammer Brexit and counterpose May to Corbyn. Their problem is she has already got found out and further blunders could put the election into question, never mind the promised landslide. A month ago, the Prime Minister was unquestioningly the greatest asset the Tory party has possessed since Thatcher in the early 80s. Now she is increasingly looking like an albatross.
Another night, another poll. The latest for The Telegraph puts the Tories on 44% and Labour on 38%. A gap of six points, which follows last week's YouGov effort reporting a five per cent gap. I'm trying not to hope, so that excitable little beastie is getting packed away as we look at what's going on at the bottom of the polling. There's still no sign of the LibDem revival, and as we've talked about them recently it's time UKIP had their turn. For poll after poll has them tanking badly. Four per cent in this ORB poll, two per cent in YouGov. To think this ex-party, this brittle husk held together by small mindedness and the ambition to keep hold of one's councillor allowances once held British politics to ransom. Times they are a-changin' and they're changin' bloody quickly.
If UKIP doesn't disintegrate following post-general election acrimony, its dirty bomb of backward, hateful politics could see it eke out a long half life on the fringes of politics. The odd council seat could tip into its radioactive soup, but for the most part the party's own decay shall keep it contained. Harmless if handled properly, at least until such a time when powerful forces need a faux anti-establishment outfit for their establishment interests. Broken as the party is (and never forget who smoked them), shedding votes, members disappearing, it does still have a little room for manoeuvre. Parties may well be aspects of classes and class interests, but they still have agency, and it is within UKIP's gift to remain half-way relevant.
Understanding this requires a very brief lesson in recent history. At the European elections in 1999, 2004, and 2009 UKIP slowly built up a base of voters as the preferred middle finger to mainstream politics. It guaranteed air time here and there, but they were not regarded with the same degree of seriousness afforded the less influential but even more repugnant British National Party. They were a nuisance, particularly to those in mainstream parties wanting to get to Brussels. And that way they could have stayed, were it not for Dave's uncharacteristic stand over a matter of principle: equal marriage. The blue rinsed bigots, the turnip taliban, and those who get excitable (if not excited) about what other people get up to in their bedrooms decamped from the Tory party en masse. Constituency chairs, Association board members, councillors, the yellowing grass roots were all outraged by Dave's concession to 21st century life. UKIP with its strident anti-Europeanism, little England sensibilities, its free market fundamentalism and, under Nigel Farage, its "libertarian" opposition to equal marriage hoovered these people up as members and supporters. It was this more than anything else that catapulted UKIP into the big leagues, it was a crisis in the Tory party that gave the UKIP project legs.
As we know, Dave completely and disastrously misread the danger to his own electoral coalition. Rather than fight them politically, he conceded ground on the EU referendum and immigration to try and lock them out from the right. And, well, here we are. However, while UKIP rode high and bagged themselves a couple of Tory MPs, from the standpoint of their own viability they made a critical mistake. In the local elections following the equal marriage crisis, in 2013, the year UKIP went big, they gained 139 councillors. In 2014, they went up 163 and won the European elections. And in 2015 they gained another 176 local authority seats. These gains came disproportionately from the Tories and yet, part connivance, part stupidity - I can't decide which - UKIP was said to pose Labour an existential crisis - a position they were happy to talk up. Lazy London commentators lapped it up too. Nigel Farage was the authentic voice of the non-metropolitan British working class (which they always identify with middle-aged-to-elderly white men). And while they were an irritant, they did not endanger Labour. For example, in the 2016 local elections, Labour was defending the 2012 high watermark established under Ed Miliband, with poor poll ratings and months of public infighting, the kippers netted just 25 while Labour suffered a net loss of 11. Despite the hype, Labour support was more resistant and proved so time and again.
Every new (or renewed) political party has to build a base around a stable(ish) set of interests if it's to enjoy a long shelf life. UKIP's error was believing its own hype. Had it gone harder on the Tories after 2013, it is reasonable to assume it would have been more stable and better placed to resist the exodus back. Last year they had the chance to change course, but instead plumped for the empty-headed Paul Nuttall, a man lacking thought beyond that morning's Daily Mail headline. He, his dimwitted followers, and not a few arms-length cheerleaders thought a Scouse accent would be enough to see Labour's northern strongholds fall to a purple surge. If only someone had argued this was bollocks all along. If UKIP wants to bump along the bottom of the polls and fall behind the Greens, then they should carry on with the "Labour first" strategy.
That said, humiliation in Stoke followed by an organisational and vote collapse, it appears that Nuttall has finally twigged, that it might be an idea to go for the voters that made the party and Farage a household name. He's standing in Boston and Skegness, a Tory-held seat in which UKIP finished a very strong second in 2015. It is also the Brexit capital of Britain. Yes, even more so than the Potteries. At the UKIP manifesto launch, apart from the ritual opportunistic sop to the NHS, this was "blukip", not "red UKIP": of holding the government to account on any Brexit backslides, of stressing one-in-one-out immigration over Theresa May's aspirational "tens of thousands" figures, and calling for a splendid isolationist foreign policy to keep Britain terrorism-free. Stuff plenty of hard right Tory voters would find attractive. The problem for UKIP is it might be too little too late, and the window of opportunity has slammed shut with them on the wrong side.
Police numbers are falling. In England and Wales between March 2015 and March 2016 (the most recent government figures), "frontline" positions shrank from 110,853 to 106,411. Recruitment was down and the number of dismissals and resignations were up, continuing a five-year trend.
It has also been widely acknowledged, not least by the Prime Minister herself, that her decision to deploy troops to guard key public buildings today frees up some armed police to do policing. Of course, the optics of looking very serious by calling in the military has absolutely nothing to do with a certain date in the diary, especially after Conservative campaign strategy has collapsed. It also helps cover the fact that the numbers of coppers have slid since her "team" took power with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, at least for those folks who look at politics askance.
As campaigning starts returning to normal after Monday night's outrage, the Tories and their media friends will probably throw propriety aside and scaremonger. Threat and the threat of threat is what they do and how they won last time. They don't really need to explicitly say it, though. The mood among some is bound to be unsettled. As @IanPMcLaughlin put it, "I don't feel particularly reassured by seeing several heavily armed officers today. I feel like I'm being reminded to be fearful."
The police have repeatedly called for intelligence and counter-terrorism to be properly financed, and these were pleas that fell on Theresa May's tin ear. While there is no guarantee any amount of security can stop a suicide bomber, more resources makes the uncovering and thwarting of plots more likely. Here below then are two charts for England and Wales that show how policing numbers have fallen since 2010 in context. The first are the government's figures looking at absolute numbers. The second, by Matt Ashby from Notts Trent University looks at the numbers of police per 100,000 of the general population. On this metric the cuts are even starker. As the number of Britons grow, forces are having to do more with less.
Please feel free to share far and wide on social media.
On page 67 of the Conservative Party manifesto (analysis here), Theresa May's "team" announces a significant shift in the way elderly care is going to be paid for. Their plans have generated a great deal of controversy which, combined with means testing for winter fuel payments and ending the triple lock on pensions, moves the Tories away from protecting pensioners from the squeeze they unnecessarily put on public finances to one where they're going to have to also pay. It has proven hugely controversial. Some Conservatives are very unhappy with it, and you can bet this view is shared by more than a few of their MPs. Setting aside the politics of the changes and why the Tories have decided to put this policy in their manifesto, what do the measures mean and why is Labour dubbing it the 'Dementia Tax'?
Presently, recipients of residential care have to part fund the service they receive if they have assets in excess of £23,250. If they are applying for a place in a home, they have to include the value of their house in the means test. As around two thirds of pensioners are home owners, this often means selling the house from under them to pay for their care package - though an option exists to defer costs. To demonstrate, assume a 75 year old pensioner requiring residential care has £25k in savings and their house is worth £89k. Leaving aside income and assuming that person then lives for a further six years (in line with current life expectancy), according to care costs calculators for Staffordshire (because that's where I live) you're talking upwards of £190k. Note this will vary from county-to-county and by local authority area. Therefore, our pensioner would presently be required "contribute" almost £91,000. The remaining £23k of their assets will remain theirs. If on the other hand our pensioner requires domiciliary (at home) care, the application in this case would take into account their savings only. This care is cheaper, costing between 70-75% of being in a home and their contribution would be just £1,750 (again, leaving aside income from their pension(s)).
What they giveth in one hand they taketh with the other. Under the proposals in their manifesto, our imaginary pensioner above wouldn't have to pay anywhere near as much as the Conservatives promise to raise the capital floor to £100,000. Their contribution would shrink to just £14,000. Sounds alright, doesn't it? But here's the catch. The Conservatives want to redefine the asset base so the house is counted for residential and domiciliary care. Another change is they will only come for the assets after the person in receipt of care has died. On the surface then, pensioners who are poorer or moderately okay like the example given would benefit. But older people whose combined assets are in excess of £100,000 are going to get clobbered. Or, rather, their families and children are. The problem for the Tories is this is their vote base, and there are millions of pensioners in this position. All of a sudden, estates of people in receipt of domiciliary care are going to receive steep bills after their loved one has died.
This sets up all kinds of problems and difficulties. For pensioners living as couples, how does this recoup costs from shared assets like a home? If their house is £250,000, would the estate be expected to pay £150,000 or £25,000? And in either case, would the surviving partner be expected to liquidate their shared asset to pay the bill? Likewise, for live-in carers who might be sons, daughters or whatever, can we safely assume that they will be expected to sell up their inheritance to pay the balance off? And what will they do about the scramble of elderly people transferring ownership of assets to relatives before they put in a care application and therefore avoid the charges? Unfortunately, none of this is clarified in their manifesto. Unlike Labour who provided costings for their pledges, the Tories chose not to.
The Conservatives say they're doing this to put adult social care on a firmer footing. Since 2010, the Coalition and then the Tory majority government have foisted tough cuts on most local authorities by chopping down the local government grant year-on-year. As budgets have got tighter, councils of all political complexions have had to redesign, strip down, and withdraw services. This has mean adult care could not but be hit too. Waking up to it belatedly last year, partly thanks to the winter beds crisis in the NHS, the government have allowed councils to increase council tax by an addition 2% to pay for adult social care only. But this cannot fill the gap, and so the Tories are moving to a model whereby the user pays after the fact.
The result would be to grow the number of people eligible to pay more for their care. Hence why it has been dubbed the dementia tax. None of us know what care needs we might require when we get old. None of us can really do anything about avoiding them either. We all get weaker, a good chunk of us will suffer health complications, an unlucky number are going to develop dementia. Whatever happens, the state will look after us and when we die, grieving relatives can look forward to demanding letters from the council asking them to hand over tens, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of pounds. The dementia tax is a tax on old age and that's why, despite everything, it could cost the Tories the general election.
Chatting to Alex Nunns on the Twitter earlier, he suggested the Conservative (and Unionist) Manifesto was a Blairite document. And he's entirely right. Not because of the substance of the politics, but because what Theresa May and "her team" are trying to do with it.
Looking at the manifesto, if Labour's was the best manifesto I've seen then, arguably, the Tory document is probably their least worst. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that is deeply discomfiting here. Yet at the same time it's a patrician (matrician?) work invoking the spirit of manor-house-knows-best Toryism of Harold Macmillan and Enoch Powell. All the one nation lines are in there about tackling insecurity, sorting out mental health, and even a pledge promising to eradicate homelessness by 2027. And no, it doesn't mean dragging them off to the workhouse. There's some interesting wonkish stuff about investment banks, working with 'old' industries, introducing the variously floated 'T'-levels to replace the plethora of vocationally-based qualifications, redistributing government bureaucracies to outside of London (hurrah!) and a few other things. It's all there for the regen geeks.
This togetherness, of repositioning Britain as a giant community in which everyone knows their place and everyone is treated fairly is the running theme of the manifesto. Check this out, for example:
If you are at a state school you are less likely to reach the top professions than if you are educated privately. If you are a white, working-class boy, you are less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university. If you are black, you are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you are white. If you are born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you are a woman, you will earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there is not enough help at hand. These are burning injustices that damage the unity of our country, and we will address them. (p.51)
Can you imagine such lines even appearing in the 2015 Tory manifesto? Incredible.
Or not. Theresa May thinks the Tories have the election in the bag. That's why the chapter on Brexit is short on detail but long on optimistic rhetoric. A few trade treaties and technical terms are thrown into the mix to convey the impression the government know what they're doing. Though their persistence with the "no deal is better than a bad deal" idiocy shows they really don't. It's also why costings are entirely absent from the manifesto. Labour always get a hard time about such things. If they so much as want to repaint a school bus up pops talking heads demanding to know where the money's coming from. Not so with the Tories. There might be a day of froth before it subsides. After all, Dave got away with it last time. The size of her predicted victory is why May feels comfortable going out of the way with her bastardised Milibandism. The petit bourgeois-types usually suspicious of big statism have nowhere else to go, and May sniffs a big opportunity to inflict major damage on Labour that could take years to recover from.
And it's also why she may have made a big misstep. As the Tories are in the business of constructing a cult of the personality around a woman completely lacking in personal qualities, the leadership fetish commands an expression of toughness. And here it is:
First, we will align the future basis for means-testing for domiciliary care with that for residential care, so that people are looked after in the place that is best for them. This will mean that the value of the family home will be taken into account along with other assets and income, whether care is provided at home, or in a residential or nursing care home.
Second, to ensure this is fair, we will introduce a single capital floor, set at £100,000, more than four times the current means test threshold. This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets, including value in the family home.
Third, we will extend the current freedom to defer payments for residential
care to those receiving care at home, so no-one will have to sell their home in their lifetime to pay for care. (p.67)
In 2010, David Cameron attacked Gordon Brown's proposals about using a person's estate to posthumously pay for care costs as a "death tax". And here it is, again. Rather than releasing monies to deal with the growing adult social care crisis they are shifting the costs onto individuals and their families. Well, not all. In the name of obligationism, this would not effect the very poorest elderly, but it would hit millions of better off pensioners. Some are bound to pass ownership of their assets to the children in the manner of the rich dodging inheritance taxes to get round it, but most won't. To be sure there's going to be a lot of people in Daily Mail land deeply upset about this.
May thinks she can get away with it because this is the core vote and the Tories reason they have nowhere else to go. Are leave-voting pensioners going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and his plans to nationalise window cleaning? This is why this manifesto is a Blairite manifesto. With the core vote in the bag, the party is free to reach out well beyond its base to gain the thumping majority May craves. Clobbering pensioners' estates with care costs and rowing back on the triple lock might be enough to persuade younger voters that the Tories aren't just about the oldies and that they're trying to address age-related injustices in social policy.
Here, the Tories may have miscalculated. Looking at the polls, politics appears to have undergone a realignment again with the total collapse of UKIP (remember, we did this). Yet the vote the Tories have drawn in from UKIP is highly volatile, which is why the purples were always a declining force, even when, paradoxically, they were on the rise. That vote, which is mostly old, are going to have to weigh up how much a vote for Theresa May is going to cost their families. It will certainly put some off and, even though a switch to Labour might not be on the cards, them staying at home, or voting for another party threatens the prospects of a Tory landslide. If you're going in for voter suppression, then going after the new supporters you've just won over should do it.
This Blairite manifesto is ultimately another episode in keeping the balance of Britain's class forces tilted toward capital. It's conservatism doing what conservatism does: adapting, shifting, changing, responding to new situations and protecting what's theirs. The adoption of a Blairite approach to politics is from a position of perceived strength, but one that is not as certain as that enjoyed by The Master 20 years ago. It is our job in Labour to seize this and drive home what could be the Tories' most serious mistake.
