I don’t detest Tories, and it’s a dangerous idea to “other” large swathes of citizens who support democratic parties other than one’s own. But I do detest this Tory government. It is a detestable, disorganised hypocrisy.
All political parties and governments are to some extent hypocrisies. No two people agree on everything important, and parties made up of thousands of elected representatives, and hundreds of thousands of members, necessarily involve ambiguous, compromised and contradictory positions on many issues.
As an adviser and minister in the Blair/Brown governments for 12 years, I was constantly surprised and sometimes shocked at how a change of minister could often result in a wholesale change of policy, even under the same political party. The change from Frank Dobson to Alan Milburn to Andy Burnham as health secretary led to radically different and contradictory NHS policies in respect of patient choice and the use of the private sector and independent providers. In each case it felt like a change of government, not just a change of minister.
In the Blair second term I was myself responsible for transformational changes of education policy as schools minister, by introducing the London Challenge and academies programmes. Under Brown, I orchestrated a flagrant U-turn in transport policy when I pioneered high-speed rail as transport secretary, a mega policy which had been specifically rejected by my Labour predecessors in the transport department, including Alistair Darling, who was the none-too-amused chancellor I had to persuade to fund it. A whole book could be written about the tergiversations which led to the introduction of student tuition fees in 2004, after the 2001 election fought on a manifesto promising “no top-up fees”.
But like all broadly successful governments, we were an “organised hypocrisy”. I mean this in three senses: we only attempted one policy at a time; we kept the policies, and the changes in them, broadly credible to the civil service and the mainstream commentariat; and our ministers, and the parliamentary Labour party at large, didn’t routinely seek to undermine key policies of colleagues. Most vitally, they consistently supported the economic strategy of the government, the most critical element to the survival of any party in office, even where economic policy changed dramatically, as in the 2007/8 financial crash.
All this was made easier because the 13 years of Labour government only involved two leaders. And though Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had their differences, sometimes magnified for personal political effect, there was no desire or pretence by Brown to overturn the core strategy of the Blair government when he took over in 2007, least of all on the central tax-and-spend agenda for which he had been responsible for a decade as chancellor. Both Blair and Brown were mainstream social democrats who broadly subscribed to evidence-based policy and the philosophy that “what matters is what works”.
In all of these respects, the present Tory government is incoherent and undisciplined. It is the most disorganised hypocrisy of modern British politics.
Not only are we now onto the fourth Tory prime minister in 12 years, but each one has gloried in their differences on major issues from the leader they succeeded. Each one has parted from mainstream civil service and commentariat opinion, including the Tory commentariat, more than the previous one, as they have become increasingly ideological, extreme and cavalier.
I thought that after Brexit we couldn’t get a worse post-truth policy shambles as politicians repudiated their discredited predecessor. Then came Truss and Kwarteng, and last month’s so-called “mini budget”. But there was nothing “mini” about this unprecedented fiscal revolution, with its £45bn of borrowing for tax cuts for the better off, reversing the entire Johnson/Sunak economic strategy which they inherited, while the economy was already in crisis after Covid, Ukraine and the energy price spiral. It wasn’t even a budget, since the essence of a budget is that it has items with figures attached which add up, and the Kamikwasi production had none of these things and even sought to make a virtue of their omission.
In delivering his mini budget, Kwarteng declared that it heralded “a new era”. This was both brazen and true—brazen coming from Tory ministers taking office in mid-term, but true in terms of their policy and strategy.
Truss’s revolutionary libertarianism is the greatest disorganised hypocrisy of any government in my lifetime. It is also detestable in that it is playing Russian roulette with people’s lives and livelihoods on the basis of no electoral mandate whatever, in a desperate gamble by its authors to pretend that they represent a wholly new party and philosophy of government which shouldn’t be associated with the other three Tory “regimes” since 2010.
The last 12 years have been akin to the accelerating desperation and extremism of the French Revolution, though thankfully without the violence. The sudden change from Johnson to Truss is like the replacement of Danton’s Girondins by Robespierre’s Jacobins. It is thoroughly detestable. I doubt it can survive long but it will be a huge task to stabilise this revolution.
