As the Guardian notes this morning:
Danny Kruger, a leading backbencher and founder of the increasingly influential New Conservatives group, said the Conservatives risked being ejected from power this year having left the country “sadder, less united and less conservative” than they found it.
Kruger is, of course, as wrong on this as he is on everything else I have ever heard him talk about. Another Guardian report on work on the impact of inequality in the distribution of excess deaths in the UK over much of their period in office is clear evidence of that. As his work found, excess deaths were distributed by income decile as follows:
Tory policies worked, without a doubt. We did have a Conservative country. Disadvantaged people died as a result, which is a trend that the Party seems determined to continue going forward.
We did not get a less conservative country under the Tories. We got a more conservative one. It's just that, as ever, Kruger looked in the wrong place to find his evidence. Looking at his privileged mates was an insufficient sample base from which to draw conclusions, but that's all Tories do now, as Sir Howard Davies also proved last week.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
The Conservatives know they have failed, badly. They are Neoliberal, so how do they explain to themselves that they could be so wrong? The explanation they have all come up with, is not to face their own inadequacies or the failure of their ideology or even worse, but more germane, that they are largely the wrong people, in Government for the wrong reasons; that is far to hard to swallow, even if quite obvious to everyone else in the electorate. Therefore, what is left for them in self-justification, is to persuade themselves that the current Conservatives are actually Socialists, and have been inflicting socialism on the country, rather than the outcomes being the consequence of their very own incompetence, or worse. How they didn’t notice over more than a decade, allowed it to happen, or did nothing about it, if they had anything to offer they never explain. Therefore, they have to move further, and further right to find a Conservatism that they can believe in again.
They are right about one thing; the Conservatives have demonstrated in power that few of them, beyond the scale of a whelk stall, can run capitalism in the UK without big tax breaks, and even bigger, fatter subsidies.
Ref capitalism: Soviet joke: we know that everything we were told about communism was a lie, what we didn’t know was that everything the Soviet gov told us about capitalism was true.
I am reading “Late Soviet Britain” by Abby Innes. She notes that Lennist and neoliberal revolutions (a la the last 40 years in the UK) fail for broadly similar reasons. On a related note : her demolition of Hayek (page 96) left me wriggling with pleasure ditto the figure on page 257 which was a Treasury justification for reducing corporate taxation (it was hard not to snigger at the brainlessness of it). A recommended read.
Page 268 gives an interesting insight into HMRC and transfer pricing (the big four accounts employ 4x a many experts in TP as HMRC). It all echoes what Richard has been saying for more than a decade. In a normal society those responsible for the myriad failures would be………in prison.
I should get it…..
“New Conservatives” – new oxymoron.
like “Compassionate Conservatives”.
Hmmmm – I do not think the Tories think they have failed.
They have actually been the most radical party in power I have seen in my 58 years on the earth living in this country.
They have practiced a form of conservatism that was based on the premise that Thatcher was too cautious and the she had actually failed to be bolder. So they were going start where she had finished. She’d been too considerate, too accommodating in a way that Priti Patel and Dominic Raab had not in ‘Britannia Unchained’.
The Tories came in based on a pack of lies – a leader who went to the polar regions and seemed to show that he was worried about their shrinking; his ‘love a hoodie’ moment and other ‘woke’ attitudes – talking about ‘happiness’ and the ‘big society’.
On top of that there was an angry British electorate – so angry that it could not think straight and wanted blood so Labour were toast anyway – no one I was working with at Whitehall in 2009 in housing thought that Labour had a chance at the next election and this proved to be correct.
On top of that was New Labour’s oiling of the radical Tory gears courtesy of the arch numptie himself Liam Byrne who decreed via a post-it note that ‘there was no money’ to the extent that George Osbourne waved the said note in Parliament as proof that the country was in the shit and only radical austerity and state retrenchment would save it.
Liam Byrne eh? What a w****r. Thanks mate! But worse was to come.
Labour decided that fighting austerity was not as important as getting those nasty Lefties out of the party so chose to go to war with itself instead. Thanks Peter! Well done.
And that is what and why the Tories have delivered. The destruction of a such a lot things that to me the country is unrecognisable to what it was say, in 2003.
The Tories have also won because the Labour party has stolen its clothes and marched towards the lying orthodoxy about pubic finance to cosying up to proto-fascist voters through ‘Blue Labour’.
So there is a chance that a proper Tory will not be prime minister this year and many Tory MPs might lose their jobs and be bitching about that but so what? I think overall the Tories have succeeded in their aims and objectives to the extent that even if they have lost power, they have built a powerful bridge head into the Labour party which will keep things ticking over for them.
They might not be in power in person, but they will still be in control. They have still shaped what will come. And they still may well out spend every other party in the run up to the election which has yet to be had.
Where I concede Tory failure is in what they have done for ordinary people and the country – they have failed to look after it and us by any progressive standards expected by those on this blog.
But by their laissez faire and backwards standards, they – as I have set out – have succeeded.
If they didn’t realise they has failed they would not have divided so readily into ERG, New Conservatives, Common Sense Group, Conservative Growth Group, One Nation Conservatives, Northern Research/Powerhouse Group; not to mention the 55 MPs who are bailing-out altogether from the ongoing mess, and running for the hills; ……….. or moving to Reform.
That is solid a definition of Party and government failure.
John
Everything you say here is very solid and well observed and I find much to agree with and support. You get more likes from me than you might imagine – not out of sycophancy but because you make excellent points.
But I maintain that your definition of failure is based on the better more humane expectations and you have always been consistent in your view about the party mentality in politics.
I see the splintering of the Tory party differently John. The Tories have successfully created a political economy of cruelty and neglect – a monoculture in this country.
So, far from this splintering being a negative impact on the party (which prima facie it is), I see this cruelty as actually becoming unchained and rampant and dragging the rest of society with it into the abyss.
That just happens to be my position. It does not reduce you or your point of view at all.
It is just my perspective that I am partial to in this instance.
PSR,
“I see this cruelty as actually becoming unchained and rampant “.
I agree; my difference with you is that it does not follow that the Conservative Party is not splintered. It is splintered. Whether it can be mended is another matter, I hesitate to forecast. It is however a plausible contingency that it is left a broken rump. It is a mistake to see a drastic change round every corner; but nothing is forever; not even the Conservative Party.
I am not saying there is not worse to come, just around the corner either (forgive the double negative). I read an interview with a recent British US Ambassador to the US, on his assessment of the consequences of (an alarmingly possible) return to the White House by Donald Trump. It would be exceedingly bad for Europe, Ukraine, NATO; and very bad for the UK. For those who think the US is a malign influence, wait until they aren’t there; or to put it another way; beware what you look for. All this merely highlights the UK’s long delusion about the “Special Relationship”, which would finally come home to roost; with unexpected suddenness. There are watersheds, and then there are Watersheds..
It was obvious to me for a long time (I have written about it) that the critical US special relationship has not been the UK, for many decades (the US always wanted us inside the EU; and we first messed that up with Thatcher’s handbag tactics instead of co-operative diplomacy; and then the UK finally blew it completely, with Brexit); but quite obviously the real US Special Relationship has long been with Israel..
Clear example of the costs to the public when the conservatives pursue misguided adventures in the name of ‘Creative Destruction’. He has helped to create a state of self-centered narcissists; and still, he finds the ability to blame the public for being ‘revolutionary’.
I agree Kruger is a dangerous extremist who usually talks total nonsense, but on this occassion Richard he is 2/3 correct. “Sadder, less united and less conservative”?
Yes, we’re certainly a much sadder and less united country than when his wretched party came to power in 2010. But the reason for that is exactly what you and PSR have pointed out, which is the effects of their conservative policies. If being conservative now means going ever further to the right, that’s exactly what he and his party have done.
More inequality, more poverty, more early deaths due to poverty, corruption in Covid procurement, breaking international law regarding asylum, destroying the UK’s credibility over the climate crisis, and finally, the Brexit disaster with all the consequences that have arisen from that, are ongoing, and will arrive in future to make our lives even worse.
Well done Kruger, well done.
I hope his mother, Prue Leith, has completely disowned him.
She wants to be able to decide when she dies if she becomes ill. He disagrees with her.
As it stands she can go to Switzerland, but those in poverty can’t.
Another 28,000 excess deaths since then, by the way. Those figures are pre-covid.
What a stupid comparison!
For a start look at smoking incidence in the population – it is massively skewed towards the lower deciles, so it is hardly surprising that a disease that targets the lungs might adversely impact smokers more than non-smokers.
Unless you allow for this and other similar factors then the comparison is meaningless.
Another co-called professional offering abuse without admitting their own real status
And the comment also makes no sense unless it is asked why substance abuse is skweed as it it – which oibviously is a factor that this ‘actuary’ cannot think about
Here is the way to do it. Comment under your own name, and thus stand openly behind the opinions you offer; and if you are an actuary, demonstrate your professional insight by the range and forensic precision of the argument you offer. Posing is never a good look.
Meanwhile I am left wondering, merely for example, at the opinions of highly educated and skilled public health professionals in Scotland who are totally convinced that there is a strong and impregnable correlation between poverty and desperately poor health outcomes; and believe the only way to break the cycle is through the alleviation of poverty first (which is manifested in a de facto inability of the deprived to break out of their predicament; and a notably ineffective solution is lecturing them or depriving them more – which is what Conservatives prefer to do). Meanwhile there are limits to a Scottish government response to the problem, given the long-term budgetary impact of Austerity.
The irony here is that the Scottish government, totally unlike the UK can do very little to tackle such a large and deeply endemic problem; because it has an Annual Budget it HAS TO BALANCE, and has very little borrowing power. The only deficits conjured up, are those the British government creates out of thin air as journal entries. The Scottish government is given a Budget of £60Bn for 2023-4, and that must balance. The Scottish Conservatives and Labour oppositions present the Scottish Budget, as if Scotland was already independent; the whole political-financial clamjamfry is as big a financial farce as the Post Office. The common factor?
Westminster controls both the Post Office, and the Scottish Budget.
Furthermore:
The Scottish government, in order to do something to address the Austerity budget problem, has raised taxes. The tax it must rely on most are income tax rate (but not thresholds – Reserved), because the devolved taxes were carefully selected by Westminster – to give the SNP maximum political problems if they raised taxes; the ‘headline’ taxes. It is a political straightjacket designed, along with a very low borrowing capacity – solely to dish the Nats.
It works quite well, because devolution was designed to make sure ‘the ordinary person’ would never adequately understand what was devolved and what was reserved to Westminster; and Westminster can make political hay at leisure while they trash devolution; like they trash everything else they touch.