One old Cameronite howler was that economic questions could be separated from cultural ones. This was one of the project’s many ‘realist’ conceits. If the British Right could be persuaded to adjourn these issues, then it would be left alone to manage the Brownite welfare state a little better.
This was the implicit bargain, and it has been a total failure. A series of ideological concessions on climate change, on diversity and inclusion, and on the devolution of power from the elected parliament, has left Britain with a raft of legislation that keeps our economy stagnant and backward.
During the 2010s this legislation, like Theresa May’s salary audits, could be sustained as an extra cost of doing business. It was another annoyance to be handled by the legal department – if you could afford one. This was the stuff of water cooler jibes. But by 2023 the laughter has died down. This legislation has started to cannibalize its host, and will ensure that the living standards of the 2010s never return. The symbol of HS2, whatever its virtues, is a potent one. Watch it inch northwards in agony, harried on every side by litigation from the pettiest of petty tyrant local authorities.
The Conservative Party’s self-styled pragmatic wing cannot ignore this any longer. Pleas for backbenchers to forego the “culture war” for quiet economic management now only ring hollow. The former keeps making the latter next to impossible.
Liz Truss’s timely intervention late last week makes her the first major British politician to recognise how inextricable these two things are. Truss led with the lowest-hanging economic fruit – shale – which is not being exploited for reasons that will one day seem like obscurantism on par with the old Victorian fear of “railway madness”. Truss also took aim at the growth of ESG regulation, which steadily chips away at firms too small to afford the costs of compliance.
However, Truss’s breach with these dogmas is still not as total as one might hope. There was no criticism of the principle of Net Zero in her speech. Absent also was any reference to mass immigration. Her failure in this area as prime minister was perhaps a fatal one. In the heady days of the mini-budget, Truss lost critical support from Suella Braverman and her circle over plans to accelerate migration from outside the EU – a policy that does not benefit the exchequer, and is only pursued out of hoary old ‘Brotherhood of Man’ romanticism. If migration really were about economic pragmatism, then what we would have is a guest worker scheme, rigorously enforced, not a pathway to citizenship. In 2023, those who want even the feeblest of economic liberalisms put themselves on a collision course with a national and global establishment. They cannot afford to alienate voters in places like Kent, Essex, and Lincolnshire – the natural social base of such a program – by repeating the tired migration cliches of the 2010s.
J. Sorel is a pseudonym.
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