The British Conservative Party Conference is now over. The Tory ranks, represented at their Conference, appear pleased with their new leader and her new policy. Certainly virtually all of the traditional media seem entranced. While assorted reporters, analysts and even TV comics smirk at Labour leader Corbyn for his old hat inspiration deriving from what they call '1970s policies', May is the subject of acute admiration for her rehash of Joseph Chamberlain's municipal reforming zeal, in Birmingham, when he took the mayoralty in 1873, a whole century earlier. The mainstream media have commented widely and with favour on May's insistence that she is bringing back 'an industrial strategy', thus stealing traditional Labour Party terminology. But the same media have almost entirely missed May's resurrection of the term 'working class' back into mainstream political vocabulary. Since Blair we were all supposed to believe that the working class had disappeared. Instead the working class, May has discovered, not only exists but has had to carry the burden of inequality in the last period. (She elects to ignore the beginning of austerity and its unequal distribution since 2008, as well as her own 6 years at the heart of that austerity government.) Indeed, May is going to turn the Tory Party into 'the party for the working class.'
Moving behind the confusion of commentators about May's lurch to the left when she supports the working class and to the right when she promotes Grammar Schools and wants employers to count their migrant workers, the essence of her political aim is clear for those who really want to see. First, what of her appeal to Britain's working class?
This is in fact a very old strand in Tory thinking. From the time of the vote partly won by workers in 1867 and finally completed for all in 1928, leading Tories have offered a host of mechanisms designed at least to split the British working class vote. From Disraeli's 'One Nation' Conservatism to a series of minor concessions sprayed out, including Chamberlaine's new roads and proper sewage arrangements in Birmingham, the Tories first used the immense wealth provided by Empire to assuage at least the most 'priviledged' parts of their historic enemy. Latterly, and in the absence of the historic wealth of the British ruling class being so accessible, the fire-sale of public assets, most dramatically council houses, had the same splitting effect.
In periods where ruling class control is more fragile or where new possibilities for accumulation present themselves, then the wholesale theft and manipulation of social property is often opened up. The peasants in post Tudor England found themselves as temporary owners of what turned out to be unlivable plots of land, then quickly sold off to new landlords, when the 'enclosures' of vast tracts of what had been common land were sold off by Parliament in the 17th and 18th centuries. In modern times versions of these tactics are often repeated as with Prime Minister Thatcher's cheap sale of council houses, dressed up as 'property owning democracy' in the 1980s. The initial political effects of such 'bounties' are designed to reduce the insurgency of subordinate classes.
Today, in the absence of Empire, and as the 'family silver', as ex British PM Macmillan once called it, has mostly been sold off, PM May's offerings to the working class are more meagre and rarely have any real content at all. May proposes places on boards of companies to workers (a 1970s idea if ever there was one.) She has taken the edge off some of the more outrageous attacks on the poor, as with the inspections of the sick who are chronically ill, that were indefensible anyway. On this basis she now announces that the Tories are the new party of the working class. But on the three main problems that the working class in Britain face, incomes, the health service and housing, she offers next to nothing and worse than nothing. Private house building will get further stimulation. Borrowing for major infrastructure as a gift to big multinationals will carry on. (The previous Tory regime had already started this program.) Meanwhile no social homes will be built. The health service (one of the least well funded in the EU) will continue having to cut a further £20 billion by 2020 and austerity will continue - at least on the wages front. In fact incomes will take a further hit as a result of rising inflation caused by the 14% (so far) devaluation of sterling.
There is one 'offer' to the working class that May believes will distract from her empty bag of beneficence to the working classes. Like Tory leaders in the past she is promoting racism as a means of dividing those who would naturally oppose her. 'Brexit means Brexit' she insisted, following her miraculous ascension into the Tory leadership and the post of Prime Minister. Well, now we know Brexit means racism. We are going to count the immigrants in the workplaces, build up the number of British doctors in the NHS, cut back 'foreign' students who want to study the Arts or History and even risk free trade with the EU because the priority is to stop open immigration from Europe. This is the hardest, ongoing racist programme presented to the British people by a government in modern times.
At the core of May's concerns are the 4 million UKIP voters, many of whom left Labour at the last General Election. That is the 'bounty' she expects as a result of a 'hard', read racist, Brexit. May and her advisors have a simple project. She hopes, as the economic waters get choppier (across Europe in particular) that she can split the working class, and in the process, marginalise the Labour Party for good. It is a vigorous new effort to consolidate a overtly racist, endless austerity Tory Party as dominant political force for the next period. This is the 'new world' and the 'quiet revolution' that she hopes will be bent to her purpose.
No comments:
Post a Comment