Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
When Ed Miliband became Labour leader in 2010, he put himself at the head of a “new generation“. It was his way of burying the Blair-Brown era.
In 2024, it’s our turn to choose a post-defeat leader. We too need to move on. But looking at the field of candidates can they really be described as a new generation?
Rishi Sunak is younger than five of the six contenders, and Liz Truss younger than four of them. They’re going to need another way of distancing themselves from the past.
The candidates have all issued ‘mistakes were made’ statements – but the detail as to what those mistakes were, and who made them, is lacking.
Kemi Badenoch is a partial exception. In a piece for the Sunday Times, she made a serious effort to analyse the causes of our failures in office. If too little was achieved, it was because of the “bureaucratic and legal constraints on ministerial action”. Trapped within a “framework bequeathed to us by Blair”, we were “prevented from being truly conservative”.
As I acknowledge elsewhere, there’s an awful lot that Badenoch gets spot on – but she doesn’t explain why Whitehall was left unreformed. We had 14 years to re-engineer the machinery of government, but we flunked the challenge.
In any case, our worst failures have nothing to do with obstructive civil servants, activist judges, or stroppy unions. We owe our fall from grace to mistakes for which we alone are to blame.
But what exactly were these unforced errors? I could go on and on, but I’ll limit myself to just two of the most fundamental:
The first is that we chose to become the pensioners’ party, alienating not just the youngest voters but the middle-aged, too. The die was cast early into the 14 years. The triple lock on pensions was introduced by the Cameron Government in 2011, with Sunak eventually promising a quadruple lock by 2024.
The original policy wasn’t without justification; measured against comparable countries, the meanness of the British state pension was a disgrace.
Yet at the same time that ministers were helping the elderly, they went out of their way to heap burdens on the young. The juxtaposition of the triple lock with the tripling of tuition fees for students could not have sent a clearer message to young Britons that the Conservative Party did not need their votes.
And to be totally cynical about it, it worked for a while. Given the demographics of the western world, the grey vote dominates contemporary elections.
However, this is a segment of the electorate which we’re losing to the grim reaper. One in ten of our 2019 voters had passed on by the time of this year’s election, and one-in-six of our 2024 voters will die by 2029. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but unless we replace our dearly departed then the party itself is heading for the point of no return.
So I’m imploring you to take another look at the generational breakdown of the electorate. The fact is that among the young (and not-so-young) we’ve already been reduced to minor party status. A while back, I mentioned our dire position among twenty-something voters to a Conservative MP. “We can build on that”, he joked. He’s an ex-MP now.
In Badenoch’s latest campaign video she correctly states that the Conservative Party is facing an “existential” crisis. But she doesn’t say that this is first-and-foremost an intergenerational problem that, to date, we’ve only made worse.
Just look at what we did in office during the pandemic. The country was locked down to protect the old and infirm, but it was the young who had to bear the heaviest costs: to their education, their working lives and their private lives. At the very least, the country could have recognised their sacrifice by doing more to provide them with affordable homes.
But instead, Tory backbenchers were in the forefront of efforts to kill off planning reform, while Tory governments persisted with the counter-productive policy of subsidising demand.
Another example is Brexit, on which the generations are deeply polarised. Though the case for restoring full British sovereignty was overwhelmingly powerful, it would have been politically astute if we’d also swung behind a cause close to youthful hearts.
The obvious example is the fight against climate change, where young people aren’t just swayed by political fashion, but by the fact that they’ll be living longer into an uncertain future than the rest of us.
Yet instead of being conservative about the composition of the very air we breathe, large parts of the Right have embraced the most selfish and short-termist thinking, relying on the sort of cost-benefit analysis that literally discounts the interests of future generations.
It wasn’t just the so-called climate sceptics of Tufton Street to blame for this, but also the denizens of Downing Street who imagined that the Uxbridge by-election was a good reason to trash the Tory green legacy. Uxbridge has a Labour MP now.
Edmund Burke taught us that society is a contract between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” In ruthlessly targeting the grey vote, we have broken that contract – and, as a result, an ever-growing proportion of the electorate have broken with us.
Will the leadership candidates do what it takes to heal this breach? Or are they still content to sell our party’s future for a mess of dotage?
Now on to the second of my terrible truths: we’ve mismanaged the economy by prioritising tax cuts over investment.
This one’s going to be even harder for the candidates to admit to. It’s not that low taxes aren’t a good thing, or that the tax burden hasn’t gone up. Rather, it’s because we’ve come to believe – against all reason = that tax cuts are always and everywhere the cause, not a benefit, of healthy economic growth. The effort, not the reward.
This is to live in denial of Britain’s flatlining productivity, a chronic economic crisis now well into its second decade (as documented by Gavin Rice and Nick Timothy for the Future of Conservatism project).
The UK’s poor record can’t be blamed on tax levels; not when our tax burden, though rising, is lower than our European neighbours. Rather, the root cause, in both the private and public sectors, is chronic underinvestment.
When we came into office in 2010, we messed-up badly by implementing Labour’s planned cuts to capital spending. When anaemic growth resumed, we compounded the error by devoting the extra headroom to tax cuts (like the big reductions in corporation tax) which failed to stimulate business investment.
It’s tempting to view the disastrous Truss experiment as an aberration, but really it was the whole of post-2010 Tory economics in dangerously concentrated form.
Sunak and Jeremy Hunt may have undone the worst of the damage, but they continued to prioritise tax cuts over investment. HS2 was cancelled and the levelling-up programme gutted in favour of cuts to national insurance. When the 2023 Autumn Statement failed to do much for GDP or Tory poll ratings, Hunt gave the same policy another go in this year’s Spring Budget — again to little effect.
A policy of third time lucky was on the cards for the forthcoming Autumn Budget, but Sunak, finally accepting his strategy had failed, opted for the sweet release of a summer election.
So, no, it wasn’t just the cluster-Truss. The party as a whole has become so beguiled by the shimmering mirage of the free-lunch tax cut that we’ve forgotten that British entrepreneurs don’t just need financial incentives, they also need a country that works on a basic infrastructural level.
Similarly, the NHS doesn’t only need an injection of market discipline, but enough MRI scanners etc. to process patients and clear waiting lists.
As for controlling our borders, tough rhetoric is great if it betokens political will. But we still need the means of tracking the movements of people in and out of our country – and detaining those who’ve outstayed their welcome.
All of this requires investment, both public and private. In an unproductive economy, diverting the funds into tax cuts (or public sector pay rises) should viewed in the same way as excessive borrowing i.e. a short-term fix that loads long-term liabilities onto future generations.
There are other fundamental errors I could talk about here, from our betrayal of the property-owning democracy to the way we’ve privileged the cult of comms over policy development.
But unfortunately I’ve run out of space. Perhaps the leadership candidates might like a go? There’s more than enough material here for a meaningful contest – and, luckily, there’s still time to have one.