Wanted: Tory moderates willing to halt their party’s lurch to the right

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/27/wanted-tory-moderates-party-right

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One feature of coalition government, starkly exposed by its sudden absence, is the way rival parties’ views of each other mattered. For five years, the attitude of Liberal Democrats towards Tories and vice versa was relevant to the direction of government. Party leaders had to consider which of their policies might be palatable to MPs from another tribe.

It is unlikely that David Cameron misses that obligation. The need to consult a coalition partner was a chore. Losing ministerial appointments that might otherwise have been used to procure the loyalty of Tory MPs was a pain. Those were only practical impediments in Downing Street. The sense of liberation, palpable now among Conservative MPs, comes from no longer having to care what anyone who isn’t another Conservative thinks.

The size of Cameron’s election victory has been inflated by the low expectations that came before. For years Tory MPs fretted about the impossibility of reaching a Commons majority. Many felt their reputation for indifference to social deprivation and intimacy with the super-rich were insurmountable barriers. Only Ed Miliband’s deficiencies as Labour leader sustained hope that a second term was possible.

Related: George Osborne calls emergency July budget to reveal next wave of austerity

Some Tories would even concede that Miliband had valid points: his criticism of an economy where the proceeds of growth are shared unfairly; and his targeting of “vested interests” that hoarded opportunity for the wealthy few. The big difference was that Conservatives mistrust state control as a mechanism for smashing the cartels of privilege. That was the case made by Michael Gove in a speech in March, urging fellow Conservatives to stand as “warriors of the dispossessed”, advocating free enterprise as a moral means to liberate people from poverty.

That argument probes a political weakness of the anti-capitalist left, which is its tendency to discount any prosperity that market liberalism generates because a minority are left behind. That leads to unhealthy contempt for people, including former Labour voters, who saw the Thatcher years as an age of opportunity. It conflates the urge to get on in life through individual initiative with greed or false consciousness manufactured by wicked press barons.

The equivalent failing on the right is to let faith in the redemptive power of enterprise become disregard for anyone who doesn’t seize their life chances – casting poverty as a product of flaccid will or infantilised state dependency. The left’s attachment to public spending is then cast as misguided cruelty, sustaining the habits of indolence, with welfare cuts a form of long-term compassion: tough love. But most people’s understanding of compassion doesn’t come with economic caveats that require a precursor of cruelty. It just means not being nasty.

George Osborne has so far been effective in casting austerity as the unavoidable consequence of Labour’s misrule, with unpleasant consequences as a marginal cost. That justification will decay over time. The next £12bn to come out of welfare spending, with a disproportionate impact on the low-paid and disabled, will inevitably look vindictive.

Already it seems perverse for the chancellor to be publishing an “emergency” budget in July, just four months after a budget that he described as a model of long-term planning. The “emergency” element is the need to write the remnants of Lib Dem influence out of the fiscal programme and bring it in line with a manifesto that hardly anyone in the Treasury expected to have to implement undiluted by concessions in a renewed coalition.

Some Tories would even concede Miliband had valid points on the economy and his targeting of 'vested interests'

Osborne’s calculation is that, with Labour and Lib Dems routed, the only source of dangerous dissent in the coming months – perhaps years – will be other Tories. Precedent says it is the right who will kick up a fuss. So it is in satisfying their appetites that the political capital amassed by a surprise election victory must be spent.

An alternative would be to confound expectations with an act of humility, acknowledging that millions of voters are still unpersuaded that Tory hearts are in the right place – scrapping the bedroom tax, for example, or reviewing the sanctions that punish jobseekers for the tiniest failure to meet conditions set for the receipt of benefits. (I’m told by friends of Nick Clegg that he expected Cameron to offer such a gesture in his first 100 days.)

I have tested this idea on a range of Tory MPs and it gets no traction. Some accept that even well-intentioned welfare reforms have vicious unintended consequences but balk at the prospect of a humiliating U-turn. Others seem to see any loosening of the screws as a concession to weak-minded socialism. This hardening is not exclusive to the neo-Thatcherite ultras. There is a mood of exuberant vindication in the parliamentary Conservative party that is treating the election as the irrefutable demolition of every complaint made about the party over the past five years. Several times I have heard Tory MPs wonder aloud if there is any point to Labour or Lib Dems anymore. “The hubris is through the roof,” says one disillusioned liberal Tory.

Cameron thinks he is responding to victory magnanimously, reaching for the rhetorical centre. He has rehabilitated the language of “one-nation” Conservatism; he expects Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” plans for regional devolution to restore Tory fortunes beyond the party’s southern heartlands. He will find an extra £8bn for the NHS budget. But those measures will not diminish perceptions of Tory heartlessness because they all flow from the same habit of treating social conscience as something to be simulated with political tactics or subsumed into long-term economic reform. True compassion means helping people in need now, not explaining how today’s pain is required to save future generations.

It is not clear where that pressure will now come from. In coalition, the moderate “wet” side of the Tory party was largely silent: partly because Clegg monopolised liberal dissent within government; partly for fear of undermining Cameron and ending up with a leader who would be even less interested in their qualms. Some secretly felt that another coalition might be preferable to a situation where the hard right called the shots. Well that is what they have now and still they are silent. So if there are Conservatives with reservations about Cameron’s rightward course they should make themselves heard. Otherwise they may as well go looking for their lost political purpose elsewhere. Perhaps they could join the Lib Dems.