There is an ancient Indian parable about a group of blind men encountering a huge animal for the first time. Each man grasps a different part of the creature. One thinks he is dealing with something hard and pointed, like a spear. Another thinks it is a vast leathery wall. A third presumes it is a serpentine coil. They each get part of the picture, but none can conceive of the whole elephant.
Thus does the Conservative party prod and grope at the problem of inequality.
The pandemic has made it harder to ignore this beast marauding across the social and economic landscape. Britain has some of the widest disparities of income and wealth in Europe, and the most extreme regional imbalances. Uneven distribution of money, qualifications and job opportunities feeds bitter cultural resentments on matters of identity and respect. Inequality over such a broad spectrum depletes the belief in common national endeavour that is required for stable democracy.
The Brexit referendum gave vent to decades of accrued frustration. The Tories correctly identified that as a political opportunity, but have not pursued the diagnosis much further. They have crawled over parts of the problem, grabbing at component grievances – immigration, dilapidated high streets, financial insecurity – without getting a picture of the whole elephant.
Confronting an angry public, politicians have two options: stoke the anger to exploit its energy for electoral gain, or develop policy to calm the rage by addressing its causes. Boris Johnson’s government dabbles in both. Some ministers would apply dollops of exchequer balm, spending in deprived areas to heal wounds on the body politic. Others prefer to rub in salty culture war reaction, reminding Brexit-supporting voters why they abandoned a “woke”, open-border, Europhiliac Labour party.
Before Brexit was even a word, David Cameron was feeling his way around these issues. His “big society” agenda and assertions that we were “all in it together” contained some recognition that politicians ought to care about egregious inequalities. But that insight did not survive contact with more potent ideological imperatives: hawkish fiscal conservatism, allergy to state intervention, and mistrust of the public sector.
The pandemic has imposed a limited re-evaluation of that creed. To avert apocalyptic unemployment, Rishi Sunak has embraced deficit spending at a rate well beyond what George Osborne once denounced as ruinous profligacy. Public borrowing is no longer the subject of parsimonious Tory moralising, but that argument has been postponed, not settled. The prime minister’s post-pandemic agenda is “levelling up”, which involves applying wads of Treasury money to prop up the “red wall” – former Labour heartlands that Johnson captured in 2019, overcoming historic cultural resistance to his party.
If the revenue for that project cannot all be borrowed, taxes must rise. That involves the Treasury transferring money from the traditional Conservative base, mostly in affluent southern shires, to the prime minister’s new personal base in northern and Midlands seats. Tory MPs from places footing the bill will resist.
Johnson’s route to power was paved with capitulation to the right wing of his party. It would be out of character to pick a fight with the low-tax, small-state libertarians who put him in Downing Street. If he cannot change Tory attitudes to redistribution, he will go to his default setting: cosmetic changes and snake oil salesmanship; spending too little, promising too much, filling the gap with bluster and lies. That will disappoint the clan of Tory MPs whose interest in levelling up has intellectual roots, a foundation in evidence and an eye for more than cynical electoral calculus.
They gather around the Onward thinktank, talk about reweaving the social fabric, engage respectfully with the left. That is a significant part of Johnson’s coalition, but not one he fears. Obedience to the leader and satisfaction with pathetic crumbs of policy are reliable traits in the moderate Tory.
The sight of Tories stumbling around the same old elephant supports the view once expressed by Hopi Sen, a Labour blogger, that “compassionate conservatism is social democracy for slow learners”. The Tory tradition venerates cultural continuity and civic institutions that bind individuals into communities. It also identifies markets and individual enterprise as wealth-generating engines. Every so often, the realisation dawns that those beliefs are in conflict. A market free-for-all, plus a cult of self-enrichment, separates society into winners and losers, undermining cohesion, degrading civic institutions and sowing instability. Inequality is a drag on wellbeing paid by rich as well as poor. But the repertoire of Conservative solutions is limited by resistance to state regulation and the belief that taxes offend liberty.
Plenty of Tory MPs feel the social pressure for an egalitarian correction, but they are outnumbered by those who reject the most effective methods as a slippery slope to communism. All can agree that “levelling up” is the solution as long as they do not have to define the problem.
Labour cycles through a different set of repetitive failings in this area. It struggles to persuade voters that it can be trusted with their money; that it taxes for the common interest, not from spite to punish ambition. It forgets to say a good word about private enterprise. It fails to enforce the boundary between a moderate left that would regulate markets, and revolutionary Marxists who would abolish them. Keir Starmer looks reluctant to articulate that difference.
The pandemic has made the case for social democracy better than any recent Labour leader. It has revealed the penalty we all pay for neglect of public health infrastructure. It has reminded people that social security is a moral proposition, not a subsidy for scroungers. It has illuminated a deep cultural longing for solidarity expressed in devotion to the NHS.
It should not be beyond the skills of a centre-left leader to pull those themes together with an upbeat patriotic inflection, describing the road ahead in bold, broad terms that has Conservative voters nodding along, while inviting the conclusion that Labour is better qualified to meet the challenge.