It’s time for real Conservative thinking, Rishi, not us-and-them bluster

Good old Rishi!

After the breezy floppy-haired largesse of the Boris Johnson years and the brief but barking days that comprised Liz Truss’s spell in office, politics has settled down under the little man in the slightly too short trousers. Prime Minister Sunak has brought boredom back into politics and that cannot be a bad thing or, at least, it must be a welcome change for Conservatives who sensed they were (and perhaps still are) in something of a death spiral. Perhaps their new pilot will be able to do the unimaginable and pull up the plane’s nose before it hits the water, but he certainly hasn’t been deliberately steering the craft towards the large expanse of the green-blue stuff like his predecessors.

Christmas was defined, rather, by government detachment from events out here in the real world. This was an administration notable by its absence. The New Year, however, has seen the Prime Minister displaying a new sense of proactive inactivity. The pantomime is fascinating to watch. It’s like one of those days in the office when you attempt to disguise the fact you spent most of the day browsing air fryers on Amazon by indulging in a sudden bout of meaningless activity around 3pm. In Sunak’s case, he faces industrial action on an epic scale, as well as various economic crises that don’t show any sign of easing soon. This could cost the country a lot of money and it’s clear that Rishi does not want to spend that money. Instead, he’s looking to delay decisions until the economic outlook is more favourable. He flies around the country. He gives interviews. He waves his arms around. He seeks cheap solutions, and it doesn’t seem to matter if the fixes are temporary. Better yet, he inflames a bit of the culture war with the Tories’ old nemesis in Scotland. Whoo hoo!

It’s why offering the nurses cash in the form of a one-off lump sum made sense when it was floated a week ago. Anything to delay a decision on pay until a later date when inflation should be more conducive to negotiations. As for the rest, his thinking seems to be that he needs to end the strikes and silence the protestors in a way that won’t cost a lot of money… Which is where the law now comes in.

It is clearly cheaper to change the laws around protests and strike action than address the matters that cause people to protest and engage in strike action in the first place. It’s a novel solution yet one that exposes some gratuitous flaws in modern conservative thinking.

Conservative thinking? Yes, it’s been a while since that was fashionable to mention.

Yet Conservatism has always been defined by clear intellectual tropes, which are not to be dismissed lightly. Tradition, stability, moderation, fiscal control, freedom, and individual rights might not get people as excited as some guy in an Afghan coat quoting Chinese philosophers, but they have achieved some pretty amazing results. It’s just that the current crop of Conservatives rarely talk about anything in such unambiguous terms. They prefer to talk in codewords, soundbites, and those awful riddles of the culture war that mean different things to different people. The disingenuous quality of Conservative rhetoric goes back at least a decade to “austerity” which was originally promoted as an admirable belt-tightening rather than the targeted squeeze on the less fortunate or, as it has appeared to become, an ideological fetish.

Now we have semantic fun and games everywhere. “Freedom” used to mean something tangible rather than another glib disposable to be squandered the first time an argument about free speech doesn’t go their way. Yet the Tory Party has always had this Janus-like quality: celebrating individual liberty whilst protecting vested interests. Even Thatcherism could be liberating and censorious at the same time.

The emphasis can often shift to the point where some manifestations of the party seem to define themselves by simple opposition, such as when they speak about “hardworking people”, itself such an innocuous term defining a certain class of voter. Look deeper, however, and you soon see that it is more about defining a negative space. It doesn’t simply mean “we’re about helping hardworking people”. It also means “we’re about excluding those that don’t work hard… Oh, you know the types… Don’t make us have to name them… Yes THEM! You know we all hate THEM…”

There has been a constant undercurrent of the Conservative Party of the past but also brings us to the very present. “We cannot have protests conducted by a small minority disrupting the lives of the ordinary public,” says Sunak, which is worth pausing on and unpacking as far as we can. Because this again is about creating hard divisions in society between the “ordinary public” and some other group.

“Protest” as defined by the OED means: “Of a (large) number of people: to express collective disapproval or dissent publicly, typically by means of an organised demonstration; to engage in a mass protest, usually against a government policy or legal decision.” The parenthesised “large” is significant because it expresses an ambiguity around the notion of protest. Any number of people can protest but, it seems to say, it applies to a large group.

Sunak is perhaps right, then, to emphasise that “small minority”. This is about small groups of people who are having a disproportionate effect on the majority. The effect is to highlight again that we’re talking about very small groups of people. But rather than justify Sunak’s actions, it raises the very real concern that the government seems willing to change fundamental laws based on trivial examples. The police have all the powers required to stop these protests. Instead, it appears that the politicians are looking to gesture towards something other than the actual solution to the problem.

“See us punishing the rule-breakers you hate,” they seem to shout.

This isn’t, of course, the first time the government has attempted to use a hammer to split a pea. Out of the millions of votes cast every time the country goes to the polls, the UK experiences very few incidents of election fraud. In 2019, there were 319 examples in local elections and just 164 in the parliamentary elections. Yet the government under Sunak continues to push ahead with changes requiring voter ID at polling stations. The government claims that allowances will be made for people who don’t have such forms of ID, but that does little to answer critics who rightly argue that the extra obstacle placed in front of people, many of whom aren’t even aware of the changes, will only increase voter disenfranchisement.

Two million people may lose their chance to vote at the next election, all in the name of preventing the possibility of a few hundred illegally submitted votes.

This obsession seems increasingly outlandish and irrelevant when the nation faces more significant issues, such as the recent ruling that will prevent the British public from camping in parts of a National Park thanks to the interference of a hedge fund manager. Isn’t that the kind of law where we should expect the government to take the lead? If only… you know… to prove whose side they’re actually on.

Follow David on Twitter: @DavidWaywell

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