The Guardian has noted that:
MPs have suggested that a “north-south divide” in the Conservative party could be its “undoing” and lead to a string of rebellions against Boris Johnson unless he commits to moving northern cities and regions out of the harsh coronavirus lockdown.
They have added:
Fifty-five MPs representing northern regions of Britain signed a letter calling for a focus on “levelling up” the regions and a roadmap out of Covid-19 restrictions, saying it was a warning shot to show they had the numbers to inflict a government defeat.
And there we have it writ large: these are the irreconcilable conflicts within a Tory Party that promised what it never intended to deliver.
A party dedicated to the continuation, and even exaggeration of, inequality cannot level up. And since the north was poorer than the south when it made the claim that it would address the issue of inequality that is beyond its ability to understand, let alone address, of course the promise was false. Not only had it no idea how to deliver, it never had any intention of doing so.
Nor can a party that refuses, as a matter of principle, to think that it can successfully intervene in any part of society because that, according to its pervading ethos, is a tautological impossibility, say how and when it might deliver a roadmap for Covid management, because it does not believe such a thing possible to create or deliver. By definition, it's only belief is that it must stand back and watch what happens.
In 2011 I put it like this in my book 'The Courageous State':
Cameron and Osborne, with their allies Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander ….have become the apotheosis of something that has been thirty years in the making: they are the personification of what I call the cowardly state. The cowardly state in the UK is the creation of Margaret Thatcher, although its US version is of course the creation of Ronald Reagan. It was these two politicians who swept neoliberalism into the political arena in 1979 and 1980 respectively. Since then its progress has been continual: now it forms the consensus of thinking across the political divide within the UK, Europe and the US.
The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform the market, which will always, it says, allocate resources better and so increase human well-being more than government can.
That thinking is the reason why we have ended up with cowardly government. That is why in August 2011, when we had riots on streets of London we also had Conservative politicians on holiday, reluctant to return because they were quite sure that nothing they could do and no action they could take would make any difference to the outcome of the situation. What began as an economic idea has now swept across government as a whole: we have got a class of politicians who think that the only useful function for the power that they hold is to dismantle the state they have been elected to govern while transferring as many of its functions as possible to unelected businesses that have bankrolled their path to power.
And that's how we end with a government that thinks there is nothing it can do now.
Which is why it has to be replaced, and its ethos has to be consigned to history.
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You would think that the record levels of income unfairness, the continued migration of money to the few at the top and the gross unfairness in terms of resource allocation all created when markets are left to (ahem) ‘work’ would have helped the penny to drop by now wouldn’t you?
You can’t work with extremists Richard – because that’s what Boris and Co really are. They get away with it because of their plummy accents and background makes them sound like ‘decent chaps’ – we Brits are still good at deferring to our social betters (the rich) because to be seen to have money these days means that you must be clever = you must know what you’re doing because you have more money than me = therefore I have no option but to believe you because the others who say differently are not as rich and therefore not as clever.
The fact is that being good at acquiring money does not mean that you can run a country or manage a pandemic – or anything for that matter. It just means that you are…well….good at making yourself rich or you were into it.
We too often conflate affluence with intelligence I’m afraid and are condemned to a bad end because of this.
Richard,
excellent piece. The neoliberal agenda has been effectively in operation since the great reform act. The push-back of the landed classes and their cohorts in the industrial sector then grew apace since the end of WWII and the post-war settlement. The established social contracts in westernised polities are now under increasing attack. I wonder how future historians will look back on the period we are living through in comparison say to feudal times, the first industrial revolution etc?
Was there ever a time when human society wasn’t ruled by some kind of self-appointed, self-serving elite? Research suggests that hunter-gatherer societies were (and still are) more egalitarian than contemporary “developed” societies. As soon as we settled and began agriculture and livestock keeping things became less egalitarian and elites, usually strongmen, began appropriating the surplus, by violence, or the threat of, and through taxation. (early tax is theft?) In return, the strongmen offered protection from enemies.
I don’t think much has changed in essence, it’s still an elite, not necessarily an aristocracy, but people with advantages over the masses: money, education, contacts, a profession, success in business….The public school route to lording it over the rest of us whether in journalism, academia, the law, or politics is still a prime suspect, as is wealth, allowing dilettantes to rise to the top, like scum in a bath tub.
It really is outrageous that these people of great wealth, or a “good education” or plenty of contacts in the right places can tell the rest of us what’s good for us, and allow us the charade of confirming their domination every few years by way of a rigged anti-democratic voting system which allows them to continue rake in the privileges and rewards for themselves and their pals.
And what is even more astounding is that so many “ordinary” folk seem to think this is just fine and will vote for these bar stewards.
Nicely put.
I think that if it had not been for the tragic early death of the Labour leader John Smith we would be in a different place today
These new northern conservative MPs are going to find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They want to get re-elected obviously. I think you are right that in the end the Conservative party is going to abandon the north.
They have already formed a party within the party and that is less than a year since the last election.
What will they do? Normally splitting off from your party is a bad idea as you lose all the goodwill that the party has built up over years. But wait, the conservative party never did build up any historic goodwill in the north. And this isn’t just a ragtag of a dozen MPs. It’s 50 with a regional identity. Potentially interesting prospects for undermining this government in less than 5 Years.
Could be a game changer – I live in hope that there are some decent Tory MPs who have enough backbone to stand up to Johnson and his chums.