It Could Be Said #30 Vote Cooling For Tory Leader
Despite being a idiosyncratic Bennite, Will outlines his Tory Leadership manifesto
This is the closest and most unpredictable Tory Leadership since 2005, which coincidentally is the last time I was a Tory whilst they were selecting a leader. Even by the usually low standards of intra-party elections, this has been pretty thin gruel. It’s easy to forget given everything Boris Johnson has done since winning the 2019 contest, but an ordinary candidate would’ve been forced to withdraw when the police were called due to him and his girlfriend having a drunken screaming match in the early hours. Hell, you might have assumed the fact that he abandoned his cancer-stricken wife would be noted against him in dispatches. I suppose it’s fitting our secret Catholic Prime Minister most resembles Charles II in the rollcall of British Heads of Government.
But Johnson’s brief shift of the dial Mean Machine Angel-style from Disgraceful to Deranged not only means that the contest is occurring far sooner than anyone expected but is being conducted across a far more fractured landscape. As strange as it might sound, Rishi Sunak becoming the next Prime Minister would be extremely unusual by historical standards; only two previous times since 1868 have non-Cabinet ministers been elevated to the premiership mid-parliament and both were due to them having been instrumental in removing their predecessor. Sunak becoming PM would mean a once-in-a-century event had suddenly happened twice in succession.
But then you look at the alternatives to Sunak. Pritti Patel as Home Secretary is technically a holder of a Great Office of State, but due to her administrative incompetence and failure to politically neutralise the pseudo-crisis of channel crossings could not even secure enough support to be nominated. Meanwhile Liz Truss has been Foreign Secretary for ten months, in which time she has crammed few achievements and many gaffes. Her predecessor may have become a punchline for wanting to take a family holiday in August, but he managed to push through the FCO’s takeover of the International Development Office and the surprisingly generous offer of residence rights to Hong Kongers. Liz Truss somehow managed to get herself repeatedly embarrassed by Sergei Lavrov and (even worse from a FCO perspective) overshadowed by the Ministry of Defence.
The natural candidate for the Tories to rally round would indeed have been Ben Wallace. Yes, the war in Ukraine is not at the same level as either World War but then again today’s Tory Party isn’t at the same level as their predecessors at either time. As Defence Secretary, Wallace has a high-profile and perceived achievements on an important issue. His combination of loyalty to Boris Johnson, full spectrum hawkery, and positioning on the left of the party made him the centre of the chaotic evil venn diagram that is the modern Tory Party.
Alas he decided not to run. Which has ceded the space to Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch, and Tom Tugendhat. Who are sadly filling it with personal anecdotes, platitudes, and barely coherent transphobic dog whistles.
We as a country could do better. Even the Tory Party could do better. And despite still somewhat being a Bennite, I believe I have the policy platform to win this leadership election. In constructing these policies I’ve tried to think about the outcomes Tory MPs/Members want and the policies which will achieve them, and how to draw dividing lines against the likes of Sunak and Truss. They do not necessarily reflect my actual beliefs…IT’S JUST FOR FUN.
End the Hostile Environment That Is Killing Small Business and Freelancers
One of the striking things about Tory Governments these past 12 years is that they have been unusually bad at resisting the Treasury’s bad ideas, no doubt due to the fact that George Osborne was a dilettante, and his successors were eunuchs. The extent to which the Treasury has been increasingly able to indulge its obsession with catching any small business or freelancer who might have slightly underdeclared their income whilst serving a Tory Government is genuinely remarkable. No reason why we couldn’t scrap IR35, reform universal credit to be more sympathetic to freelancers, and relax accountancy standards plus increase penalties on late payments so suppliers get their money from the public sector more quickly whilst filling out fewer forms. It’s an ideologically correct policy that may well support growth and certainly tickles Tory Members bellies. It also attacks several of the current candidates who have previously served in the Treasury.
Reform The Tax System To Share The Burden And Boost Productivity
Personal Taxation is a mess with the current process having abandoned the long-time Tory aspiration of merging income tax with national insurance in favour of adding a second pseudo-income tax in the form of the Health and Social Care Levy. Promising to merge personal taxation is a way of repudiating Sunak’s record of taxation without promising wild unpledged tax cuts. And promising this form of tax reform could be a way of securing consent for increasing the progressivity of the tax system as way to support low-income households in a revenue-neutral way.
On the employer side you ideally want to replace employer national insurance with an aggregate workforce levy that is not only simpler to administer but rewards companies for investing in increasing the productivity of their human workers and building their digital/physical infrastructure. In this way it would reward moves to increase productivity rather than outsourcing solely for reasons of tax avoidance or retaining unproductive roles because you don’t want to invest in automation.
Scrap Tuition Fees, Create Smaller But Similarly Spread Higher Education Sector
Grasping the nettle of tax reform would also open the space to revisit student finance. The current structure of tuition fees means repayments fall hardest on middle-income graduates, exactly the group that is trending away from the Tories to an alarming extent. Changes to Government accounting standards means that there’s nothing to be gained by not reembracing free education, especially as marketisation has if anything made universities more spendthrift something that the sector is paying dearly for now that there’s no political consensus to allow fees to rise with inflation.
The Tory Party needs to ask what it wants from higher education. It surely wants a sector more dominated by its elite actors but equally it shouldn’t ignore the damage that former polytechnics going under would cause in its more provincial seats. The solution is to pair scrapping tuition fees with the reimposition of strict student number controls and then make blue chip universities expand by consuming their pink stock neighbours.
And the bow that ties this policy together is to refuse to expand University places to keep pace with the demographic surge that will begin just after the next election. At the very least it gives Labour a huge headache when they come into office and need to find money to widen participation, but at most it sets Britain on the path to have fewer graduates which would ultimately help the Tories electorally.
Protect The Green Belt But Build Houses For Young People Where They Want To Live
It is perplexing to see Tories being congratulated by British Yimbies for embracing a Street Votes system that has repeatedly proven to not work in the United States. Instead, the Tories should embrace what American Yimbies have learnt - planning decisions should be taken at the highest possible level, because the costs of building houses are ultra-local whereas the benefits are more widespread. There’s no reason why the Tories couldn’t promise to both protect the Green Belt and wider suburbia whilst removing virtually all limitations on building developments within major cities so that developers can convert vacant shops or offices into homes and demolish smaller housing units in favour of bigger apartment blocks. This would also have the benefit of stopping the sprawl of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters into the suburbs.
Cut European Regulations That Are A Handbrake On Innovation and Growth
The Brussels Effect means that the technologies of the present and past will need to retain standards closely aligned to the European Union, but that is less true in the soft or new economy. A huge part of the story about how Brexit Got Done is that both the Bank of England and City of London went from Remain to Hard Brexit due to not wanting the EU to shackle them with French-style regulations. If there is anything as crude as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s conception of Brexit Opportunities its by slashing regulations on financial services, junking the General Data Protection Requirements that has stymied online innovation within Europe, and making Britain the most permissive environment for developing Emergent Technologies or Artificial Intelligence. Move fast and break things, amirite!?
Eliminate VAT on Household Energy
Hearing Tom Tugendhat propose tax cuts to cope with the energy price increases that are the result of the sanctions he supports is the type of thing that makes me want to become the Joker. If you are focused on getting energy prices lower then do a deal with Putin, if you are focused on defeating Putin then let prices rise ever higher until consumption starts to fall and he is left out of pocket. Subsidising people to keep paying for his fuel whilst the price is artificially high due to our policies seems like the worst of all worlds.
But I would make an exception to eliminating VAT on House Energy. It’s the type of symbolic win for Brexit that gives all us Leavers talking points when arguing with Remainers in the pub and it’s baffling that such an eye-catching promise of Vote Leave hasn’t been delivered.
Invoke Article 16 & Protect British Farmers
I’m genuinely amazed that nobody has tried to exploit Liz Truss’s genuine weakness on the Irish Sea Border. As International Trade Secretary she pushed through a trade deal with Australia that Ulster farmers hate because they’ll be subjected to increased competition in Great Britain, but blocked from selling directly to Australia themselves. And as Foreign Secretary she has brought forward a bill to unilaterally solve the problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol that may be unilateral enough to provoke a trade war with the EU, but timid enough to leave the actual problems enact.
Maybe this is too clever by half but given many Tory Members are farmers or friends of farmers, I think promising to renegotiate the Australia Free Trade Deal and prolong a generous scheme of farm subsidies would create space to also advocate for concluding a veterinary and phytosanitary agreement with the EU. Galvanize rural members on the promise to better invest in British agriculture, give them better access to European markets, and stop Australia ‘dumping’ produce into Great Britain.
You’d probably also have to pledge to promptly invoke Article 16 on the grounds of trade and societal disruption to retain some Brexiter credibility. But at least you’d have charted a course to resolve the crisis in Northern Ireland and support a sector close to the hearts of Tories.