In modern British politics, there are two versions of “the long term”. The first is the real future, which will actually arrive at some point, and in which difficult decisions taken today will pay off – or the costs of difficult decisions deferred come due. We very rarely encounter this version.
The second is a time, an indeterminate but comfortably distant point in the future, at which we will get around to taking those difficult decisions once the urgent demands of our present moment – which must, of course, be our immediate priority – have abated. Crucially, it is always in the future. As I wrote in May about the Government’s immigration policy:
“Sounds good. But airy talk about the long term is easy – the problem is that the moment for starting the difficult spade-work of tackling the long term seldom obviously arrives. And in the short term, it is always most expedient to hit the immigration button, as the Chancellor did in his first budget.”
In a similarly sceptical vein, I wrote last month of the Government’s much-trumpeted NHS Long Term Workforce Plan:
“But remember that this is a nice idea projected over a decade and a half. It is easy to promise to do things in 15 years’ time. It is much harder, year on year, amidst mounting budget pressures, to resist the temptation to resort to the short-term fix – in this case, spending the money on fully-qualified nurses from overseas with lower wage expectations.”
Both of these pieces sprang unbidden to mind on Tuesday night as I was listening to Jeremy Hunt address a dinner hosted by Onward.
That the Chancellor chose to explicitly address the need for the Conservatives to have a pitch for younger voters (read: under-40s) was welcome; the latest sign that this issue might be just starting to penetrate the Party’s political consciousness.
All the more pity that the speech didn’t actually contain such a pitch. Instead, we got another paean to the bad sort of long term. The great thing about younger people, said Hunt, is that they can look at the long horizon, apply a sense of perspective impliedly lacking in their elders.
To which: sure, to an extent. The prospect of the United Kingdom falling into the middle income trap because it insists on hosing money at pensioners (despite the average income of retirees passing that of working families in 2017) certainly hits different if you’ll live to see it; likewise the prospect of missing a fleeting chance to become a hub for vital 21st-century technologies because doing so would inconvenience the residents of Cambridge.
If the Government were talking about the good sort of long-term thinking, it might well be that younger voters would be more inclined to endure transitional hardships for the sake of benefiting down the line.
But it generally isn’t. Cambridge 2040 could be great, but at present it’s a spectral thing from the Department which killed off the Ox-Cam Arc, a tangible project. Spades are in the ground on HS2, as the Chancellor noted in his speech, but it keeps getting pared back and the Treasury can’t resist making it more expensive to gerrymander its sacred five-year spending plans.
Beyond that, well. Large parts of England suffer avoidable drought every summer because we’ve spent 13 years not giving planning permission to the Abingdon Reservoir (which, again, the Secretary of State could do by fiat under existing legislation). There is still no decision on whether to allow Heathrow or Gatwick (let alone both) to expand, despite a dire shortage of runway capacity.
And faced with the increasingly pressing problem of paying for social care, the best the Government could come up with was a hike in… National Insurance. A tax paid exclusively by working-age people.
None of this is the difficult spadework of laying the foundations for a more prosperous future.
Besides which, that point about the longer horizons of younger voters has its limits. The rent crisis is biting now – one of my flatmates was just told her rent and costs are going up by over £250 a month, no negotiations. People looking to start families have to worry about their fertility; others are passing the only twenties they’ll ever get in a capital which is strangling its own night economy.
Dealing with any of those issues, or most likely any other you can think of, cannot be done overnight. Any solution must, necessarily, be a long-term one.
But that delayed payoff means that if the Conservatives were serious about giving younger people a reason to vote for them, they’d need to start doing it now. But that would involve confronting other parts of the Tory coalition, not just older voters but also Conservative councillors who keep blocking housing, late licences, and so on.
That’s going to be difficult – and there’s never going to be a point when it isn’t difficult. If by some act of providence the Party does manage to retain power after the next election, its position is going to be even more precarious than now, and the demands of the short term (read: the old) will carry, if it’s possible, even greater weight.
But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. In the long run, after all, we’re all old. Perhaps that’s the far horizon the Chancellor wants younger voters to look to.