Warning: the following video contains scenes which may upset some viewers:
Politics is about gut instincts, and ideologies are our ways to explain away what those gut instincts lead us to.
If this is true then we are learning a lot about the Conservative Party. The old Conservative Party, that wanted to conserve what was good in society, is long gone. The ideologies that have shaped it’s modern replacement – from Brexit to deregulated free market economics – have failed, and failed spectacularly. There is still a crank fringe clinging to the wreckage of Trussism, but frankly they are bonkers. Even Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood, still popular on the Tory fringes, has palpably failed to come true, leading to the ridiculous spectacle of an Asian Home Secretary telling us multi-culturalism has failed.
Their last great policy initiative, levelling up, is defunct, ending with the utter humiliation of a Prime Minister flying into Manchester to announce that the HS2 rail line won’t be coming to Manchester. Any defence of the red wall is over, and those MPs left are abandoned to their fate, which in a lot of cases means trying to join the crowded field of professional reactionary gobshites on GBNews and TalkTV.
The Conservative Party are have run out of ideas, and with all ideology stripped away we can see the gut instincts and new jerk reactions that drive the Party on.
What’s left behind is gibberish, knee jerk nonsense about immigration and benefits.
This was apparently announced by a Government Minister:
Of course Robert Jenrick made no comment on the 2 child limit on benefits set to specifically reduce the number of children being born, as facing the inevitable consequence of their own decisions might make them sad.
And to go with more children born into preventable poverty we had more conditionality and a clamp down on benefits
It is hard to avoid thinking back to the Major years, key policy announcements like the cones hotline, and this speech which brings together the cringey and the creepy.
The benefit system is already too complex, and too expensive to administer. The benefits system costs over £200bn a year, most of which goes on pensions. The cost of administering the benefits system has soared as well – nearly £10bn a year.
I am sure that having a system of conditions and sanctions is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that more conditions and more sanctions work better. Each new set has diminishing returns and rising costs.
The system is now so complex that it no longer fulfils it’s 2 key roles- to support those who need help, and to incentivise people to find work.
Universal Credits was meant to solve the incentive problem once and for all, and the introduction of yet more conditionality is a tacit admission that UC doesn’t work and all of the billions have been wasted. All of the hardship caused by it’s implementation achieved nothing but the state brutalisation of the poor and vulnerable.
The problem the Government has is that the majority of benefits go to retired people. It is hard to make any savings from the benefits budget without taking money away from retired voters.
The Conservative electoral coalition is built around home owners who are either over 65 or close to retirement, and economically inactive. The vast majority of Tory voters, and Brexiters, don’t work. . The problem, for a Tory party that says it wants low taxes, is that older voters do not want cuts in NHS, pensions or social care spending.
The triple lock was unaffordable when inflation was 1%. Now it is closer to 10% it eats up a huge amount of public spending, all of which comes from the benefit spend.
All of this means that the Government will be going into an election with:
1. the largest tax burden in living memory
2. nearly 20% of the UK population on NHS waiting lists
3. a falling housing market, high interest rates and inflation
And while the Tories were talking to themselves the yield on 30-year UK government bonds hit 5.115%, higher than it was when Liz Truss tanked the economy.
No wonder they are retreating into conspiracy theories about 15 minute cities, woke banks, fake meat and multiplying wheelie bins. All they have left are the basic instincts of modern Conservatism – blame benefit claimants, demonise immigrants, and retreat into paranoid fantasies.
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