Dr Tom Hoctor is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire. He has published and lectured extensively on the ideological direction of the Conservative Party, the relationship between political theory and the economy, and the sociology of work.
With the six candidates for the Conservative leadership contest now confirmed, the battle lines around which this contest will be fought are slowly being drawn.
With forces massing on both sides the front is simplifying around two chief explanations for the historic loss suffered on 24 June: the “we were too left wing” camp and the “we were too incompetent” camps.
The first position argues that the Conservatives lost because they governed as a social democratic party rather than on true-blue conservative policies. For those in the “we were too left wing” camp, this appears to mean that there was not enough focus on tax cuts and immigration causing votes to bleed to Reform UK on the right.
The “we were too incompetent” camp cites the chaotic premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as shredding the Tory reputation for good governance. But over the last fourteen years the Tories were sometimes very competent, the problem was that they efficiently set about doing the wrong things.
The seeds of both these analyses lie in Johnson’s whopping majority in December 2019 and his torrid premiership respectively. So it behoves us to consider carefully the Johnson Government’s record.
One way of looking at the 2019 majority is that it was won on a simple prospectus: Get Brexit Done. Given that Brexit was a right-wing cause célèbre for three decades before the EU referendum, it is easy to see why this argument is appealing.
A caveat though is that by the time Johnson ran on his Get Brexit Done prospectus, the government had been paralysed for three years and, in hindsight, the result showed that the coalition was likely to be unstable; the Conservative vote declined by three per cent in southern, remain-voting seats, many of which ultimately tumbled in 2024.
Another way of looking at the Johnson majority is that a large part of the appeal for key constituencies in the North and Midlands was “Levelling Up”. The rarely-acknowledged degree to which Reform voters agree with propositions such as higher taxes on the wealthy (69 per cent) and that big businesses take advantage of ordinary people (74 per cent) throws a bit of a spanner in the works for the “we were too left wing” camp.
For the competence camp, the issue with the Johnson Government was not so much what it did as what it didn’t do. It made big promises, notably on Levelling Up and immigration, and then failed to keep them.
Other than the vaccine rollout, its response to the outbreak of a global pandemic was slow, callous, and led to a great deal of suffering. To add insult to injury, Number 10 partied while Rome burned. This was indisputably a bad look.
However, Johnson, despite his many flaws as a day-to-day prime minister, was correct about Levelling Up, at least in broad terms. Between 2010 and 2019 the UK had an annual growth rate of between one and three per cent. This puts Britain consistently in the bottom half of OECD countries.
Disparities between wage and employment levels persist aggressively between the UK’s regions and while London and the South East consistently experience growth above the British average, other areas, notably, the North East, East Midlands and Wales fall well below it. The difference between two per cent and 1.4 per cent may not seem much, but over time that 0.6 per cent gap starts to really add up.
In classic Johnsonian fashion, Levelling Up was a fantastic slogan which sat atop a pretty thin policy. Levelling Up funds were significant – around £10 billion was allocated. However, only about ten per cent of that was actually spent; to make matters more complex, EU funds were previously worth around 5.5 billion per year, meaning that in practice the cumbersome, bureaucratic, and politicised bidding process actually ended up reducing funding by about £4 billion.
Nonetheless, there is no obvious path to a Tory government in the next two electoral cycles which does not make some kind of attempt to get to grips with a) why this slogan was so resonant and b) why it turned into a total Horlicks in practice.
So what would a second attempt at Levelling Up look like? First of all, it should emphasise substance as well as style. It must be built on proper economic foundations.
This means that on top of new regional development programmes, a serious examination of the causes of low private investment is required alongside changes to the tax system to incentivise businesses to spend capital rather than stockpile it. To his credit, Rishi Sunak did this during his time as chancellor. This should be retained and extended.
Secondly, the Party needs to get to grips with issues confronting the working-age population: good jobs (or the lack of them), housing, childcare, training, and skills.
To take childcare as an example, Conservatives needs to discard the simple argument that there isn’t any money. In a well-organised economy with decent levels of investment, childcare pays for itself through increased tax returns. It is also good for families in general, and would likely produce some of the law-and-order effects which Conservatives tend to associate with the police and courts.
Thirdly, it needs to draw its lines against Labour carefully in areas where it can actually score points. If the Tories campaign on abolishing national insurance and slashing capital gains tax they will be savaged at the dispatch box and win little ground back from Labour and the Liberal Democrats at local and national mid-term elections.
An important area of contention will likely be immigration, but this is a double-edged sword: nothing the Tories do will ever be good enough for Nigel Farage. To fight coherently on this territory, the Conservatives need to reflect on why net migration more than doubled under Johnson, to levels unprecedented even in the supposedly wild mid-2000s.
The answer to this question is not a much-hyped new deal with the Mongolian government to send asylum seekers to the Gobi desert. If a qualified British person can do the job, there is no need to sponsor a visa. It is as simple as that.
More effective than sabre rattling will be boring economic measures to boost private investment and raise wages, with an associated policy to encourage skills development in sectors such as health and social care and engineering. Unflashy proposals like this one have the additional benefit – unlike gimmicky numerical targets or militarising the Channel – of standing a chance of working.
The Conservatives have long styled themselves the party of difficult decisions, and they are about to be confronted with a real doozy. Inevitably, people will be unhappy about the outcome of this leadership election.
Unfortunately, no comfortable synthesis of “we were too left wing” and “we were too incompetent” is possible; both positions ignore too many inconvenient features of the Party’s record since 2010. It will take a brave and nimble leader indeed to understand and communicate this to members and then voters.
But if the Tories are to recover then they will have to tell a more compelling story about the economy than they have done in a long while. Difficult but timely decisions now could be the difference between spending half a decade in opposition or spending much, much longer.
This is the second in a two-part series, the first of which was published yesterday.
