The Tory party’s empty legacy

It was Evelyn Waugh who dismissed the Tories as having ‘never put the clock back a single second’. Now, even the party’s own MPs seem similarly sceptical, with Danny Kruger lamenting the last 14 years of power as leaving the country ‘sadder, less united and less conservative’. It’s one thing for a parliamentarian to bemoan the party for dropping in the polls, but unusual for one to be so scathing of an entire period of government.

In fairness to the Conservatives, their record is not as hopeless as current polling might suggest. As Kruger himself acknowledges, education has been radically reformed. The Conservatives have introduced academies, allowing for freedom and innovation in school leadership, and reducing the centralised power of the state. This has also borne results – standards are now higher in several metrics, including the internationally regarded Pisa scores.

Crime has also fallen dramatically. Despite regular news stories about ineffective policing and weak sentencing, non-fraud crime has roughly halved since 2010. Theft and violent crime have continued their multi-decade-long fall, despite cuts to the police and the economic wake of the financial crisis. That Britain is both safer and better educated than a decade and a half ago should be something the Conservatives are boasting of – yet neither the party nor the public seem to be making this connection.

This feels in part because Tory successes seem incidental to their time in government. They seem to have lacked a central vision or mission. Instead, the party has gone through various waves of policy and direction – buffeted by its internal factions and by the pull of electoral trends. As a result, it has failed to chart a real course through these 14 years.

Whereas Tony Blair sought to change the soul of the country, the Conservatives have been content to manage its institutions. There have not been the same great constitutional realignments as under the New Labour years. None of those totemic moves – House of Lords reform, establishing the Supreme Court, or the Human Rights and Equality Acts – have been reversed or remodelled. There have been no equivalent moves to jerk the constitutional settlement to the right.

Blairite ideas have instead become embedded. Both public and private institutions have been shaped and moulded by this legislation, giving effect to it in often expansive ways. Many Tories have lamented this, but even when parliamentarians and ministers have bridled at it, they have failed to follow through. More than this, they have failed to find and articulate a vision that counters it without being emptily reactionary.

Other things the Tories have done they seem deeply conflicted about. The party has halved the UK’s carbon emissions, becoming a world leader in green policy and technology. Yet the party struggles to acknowledge this, instead of finding a way to link conservation to historically Tory ideas of stewardship and care for the environment.

Even Brexit, the abiding legacy, sits uneasily with the Tories. Though many in the party had sought it for decades, it never fully seemed a Conservative project. The vote to Leave was achieved despite the best efforts of the Tory leadership at the time. Its implementation ripped the party asunder, with Theresa May facing historic rebellions, and Boris Johnson expelling MPs with decades of service to the party to get his deal across the line. Much of Brexit was driven by those, like Farage, who left the party long ago.

The party never quite found a way to reconcile the competing arguments within it about leaving the EU. The sort of low-regulation, Singapore-on-Thames approach never gelled with more parochial interpretations of leaving. The party has still not decided which of these it considers conservative, or which it considers better, so instead flounders between both, to the disappointment of all. In the wider country, the popularity of the project has fallen and fallen.  

The same battle has been fought on immigration. Despite multiple pledges to reduce net incomers to the tens of thousands, the Tories have failed to take any necessary steps to achieve it. Immigration is higher than ever, and now more driven by low-skill, low-wage migrants from outside of Europe. The party has failed to either articulate an economic argument for liberal, free-market immigration or impose control over it. It has repeatedly said one thing and done another – a record of tough rhetoric and no action.

This managerialism might have been forgivable, had it worked. Yet the Tories have failed to fulfil the mandate they arrived with, to build Britain back from the global financial crisis. Since then, the economy has stagnated with more than a decade of sluggish growth. Wages have been frozen in real terms. House prices have escalated in many parts of the country, leaving the young adrift. At the same time, public services have decayed from austerity, becoming more stretched rather than the much-promised efficiencies.

The Tories have held power for a dozen or more continuous years three times since the war. In the fifties, they transformed a bombed-out, ailing Empire into a prosperous, well-housed and well-fed country. Under Thatcher, they rolled back the boundaries of the state and remodelled the economy. Each left the nation, and the party, renewed and redirected. The last decade and a bit seem empty in comparison.

For the last 14 years, the Conservative party has won power and held it, through an increasingly turbulent political atmosphere. Beyond that, much of a convincing narrative is hard to tweeze out. Little of the Blair years has been reversed, while many of the seeds New Labour planted have flourished. The economy has faltered, while Brexit has managed to be both a huge change and to have made little difference for those who supported it. The progress this government has achieved in other areas seems undersold and almost serendipitous.

Perhaps the only shocking thing about Kruger’s remarks is that any MP would be so bluntly honest. He may speak from the perspective of his faction, but there are few around who are satisfied with the last 14 years. From austerity to Brexit, the party has failed to find and articulate an overarching vision for what it does, making the decade in power seem like a series of problems half-managed rather than a plan, executed.

Its legacy will be similarly muddled. The Conservatives were there, they did things and then ran out of road and popularity. Aside from Brexit, even their opponents have little from this period they bristle against, desperate to repeal – a sign of how bland much of their actions have been. To recover, the Tories will have to reckon with this deeply, to understand how they squandered the time they had, how they failed to remould Britain, and how their time in charge appears so ephemeral.

It seems likely, as Kruger admits, that this will result in an electoral reckoning. For the party, that is perhaps the most concerning part of the legacy of these years in power. Its brand, its reputation, is in tatters. The Tories are polling lower than they ever had in an election year, they are set to lose seats across their historic heartlands and to perform significantly worse with younger voters than even in 1997. Perhaps that will be the greatest legacy of this era – a party that was given a second chance and failed to use it.