Could a return to its ‘nasty party’ roots save the Tories?

Next year’s general election could either be a 1992 or a 1997, commentators have speculated: a slender Tory win or a Labour landslide.

Last weekend David Blunkett suggested it is more likely to be a 1964 – the narrowest of Labour wins leading to a much bigger majority in another election called a couple of years later.

I’m afraid things are shaping up more grimly than that. The most likely outcome may be a 1974, a year which saw the replacement of a failed regime that had lost its nerve with another that proved to have no answers to a profound national malaise.

Few would dispute that Britain is in the doldrums once again – maybe not quite as broke and broken as in the mid-1970s but not far off. The overall situation is, to put it in the celebrated prose style of Sir Gavin Williamson, ‘very shit’.

Living standards are stuck where they were 15 years ago; public services and infrastructure are visibly crumbling; public sector productivity is going backwards in the era of ‘working from home’; there is an acute housing crisis that saps ambition from young adults; everyday policing barely exists; shared public spaces have become uncivil and threatening as a consequence; cohesion-sapping rates of immigration are exacerbating this social recession; the percentage of working-age people languishing on incapacity benefits has quadrupled since 1980 and higher rate taxation kicks in at such a low earnings threshold that it is a wonder anyone at all applies for promotion.