Never has a government in Britain been so frequently relaunched. This week’s Autumn Statement from Jeremy Hunt is the fourth relaunch in 12 years of the Tory administration first formed by David Cameron in 2010. It will probably be the last, as its austerity theme is so obviously an act of desperation and impotence in response to the failure of the three previous Tory relaunches since Cameron and Osborne foolishly made austerity the theme of their first government in 2010.
In 2010, austerity was a strategy to make the Tories look “responsible” after the 2007–08 financial crash was allegedly caused by Labour “profligacy” under Gordon Brown. It was also designed to pave the way for income tax cuts, the perennial Tory prescription for achieving economic growth. Cameron and Osborne were governing in the shadow of Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, who were formative influences on both.
Labour pre-2010 hadn’t in fact been a particularly profligate government; under Blair and then Brown, public spending increases largely tracked economic growth (remember there was quite a lot of growth in those days). But as a short-term political strategy, in alliance with the Liberal Democrats (who were thereby neutered), the Conservatives’ austerity mark one worked in the face of an unconvincing Labour alternative and a surge in Scotland for the separatist SNP. It was on this basis that Cameron won a majority in 2015.
However, after a year or two, once the deep public spending cuts started to bite, austerity mark one reduced economic growth, decimated public services and made the poor poorer. In these respects it led to Cameron’s self-inflicted catastrophe of the 2016 Brexit referendum. There were lots of political factors in the Leave vote, too, including the populist Nigel Farage and a split Tory party (much of which was veering towards Farage), as well as the Corbyn-led Labour party and the now marginalised Lib Dems. But austerity, in tandem with high levels of EU immigration, was critical to the 52/48 Brexit vote.
Cameron immediately resigned on losing the referendum, which led to the first relaunch of the Tories as a Brexit party, under Theresa May. She made this strategic relaunch reluctantly and unconvincingly and within three years the project had collapsed, squeezed by Johnson/Farage and a populist “more Brexit” campaign to her right, while the centre and left sought to halt the lurch to ever-more damaging forms of economic and political divorce from our European markets and neighbours.
Johnson’s 2019 Tory relaunch mark two sought to make viable a post-austerity form of hard Brexit. “Levelling up” became its slogan, especially after Johnson’s successful 2019 election campaign, when the Tories won lots of formerly Labour northern seats which had suffered badly from austerity and long-run economic decline.
This second strategic relaunch was always doomed economically. Hard Brexit was never going to be anything other than an ultimate economic failure, and there was never going to be much meaningful levelling up in this context. But politically, while Johnson bestrode the stage as a cheery celebrity, it might have kept the Tory show on the road for a few more years and put the party in serious contention at the next election. Except that the populist Johnson collapsed this summer in the face of a mounting scandal of personal misbehaviour and sordid impropriety. All rather sub-Trump.
The rest of the story is compressed into the eventful last four months. The Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng dash for Thatcherism and huge tax cuts for the better off—with only borrowing to pay for them—represented Tory relaunch mark three since 2010. It unravelled within days as the public debt markets went on strike. And now we have the Rishi Sunak/Jeremy Hunt relaunch mark four, to put the public finances back onto some semblance of stability. Against the backdrop of an already weak post-Covid, post-Brexit, post-Truss and mid-Ukrainian-war economy, this is forcing them into a new version of austerity based on higher taxes plus spending cuts. But they will embark on this having entirely lost any reputation for Tory competence, and without the prior years of plenty—or a coalition with the Lib Dems—which made the 2010 form of austerity politically viable.
It looks like the 2024 election will have only one ending. But there are two years to go. Still time for Tory relaunch mark five.
This article is from Andrew Adonis’s weekly newsletter for Prospect—The Insider. Get The Insider straight to your inbox every week by signing up here
