Midway through her conference speech, Amber Rudd paused and waited for the applause. At first, her announcement that only the “brightest and best” foreign students would be welcome in British universities, and that those wanting to join “lower quality courses” should be kept out because they would be economically unproductive, drew none. She smiled expectantly, and then came a ripple. Was her Tory audience a little confused? Was this really the same Amber Rudd who only weeks before had warned that Brexit would do untold damage to the nation and cause an “electric shock” to the UK economy? The same Amber Rudd who had said before the EU referendum that Boris Johnson was not fit to run you home after a party, never mind run anything else? The same person who had appeared on TV over the summer fulminating against those misguided, narrow-minded Brexiters?
Last week’s Tory conference required everyone to clear their memory banks and delete all such inconvenient details of recent history. Never mind what Rudd had believed so passionately in June. Here was the new-look home secretary embracing a hard Brexit as a fantastic opportunity to slash immigration, keep young foreigners out if they were judged second-rate, and shame British companies who signed up too many overseas workers and not enough Brits. “Work with us, not against us, and we’ll better control immigration and protect our economy,” was her message now. When Theresa May spoke the following day, Rudd and Johnson, the prime minister’s surprise choice for the post of foreign secretary, were new best friends, sitting side by side, glancing approvingly at one another time after time as ovation followed ovation.
In party political terms, the Conservatives will look back on their four days in Birmingham as a success. Unity was what mattered most, not consistency. In the insulated confines of Birmingham’s International Convention Centre, it seemed to matter little that the pound was diving on world markets or that representatives of the UK car industry were touring the bars warning that Nissan and other big companies might well decide to move their plants to Slovakia within months because a hard Brexit would be a disaster, and a soft one little better. “We can see no outcome for us from all of this that is better than what we have now,” said one senior car industry figure.
Most Brexit-supporting Tory MPs seemed not the least bit alarmed by such talk. They convinced each other that it was all going very well indeed. “We are resetting the dial on British politics,” one remarked. “Markets fluctuate. The pound will recover. Look what the falling pound is doing for our exports!” While most Conservatives wore looks of cheery optimism that bordered in some cases on smugness, Labour, the supposedly pro-EU party to which the forgotten 48% who voted to remain are looking to for reassurance and hope, was notably quiet.
After his own difficult party conference the week before, Jeremy Corbyn was pictured walking in Northumberland with his wife as the Tories got under way in Birmingham. Later in the week he was more concerned with reshuffling his shadow cabinet than commenting on the country’s future in Europe.
The frustration of those who want to fight against hard Brexit and who are tearing their hair out at Labour’s divisions on issues as central to the Brexit debate as immigration was perhaps best exemplified by news that an exasperated Tony Blair was considering returning to some role in front-line politics. “Frankly, it’s a tragedy for British politics if the choice before the country is a Conservative government going for a hard Brexit and an ultra-left Labour party that believes in a set of policies that takes us back to the 60s,” Blair told Esquire magazine. “Do I feel strongly about it? Yes, I do. Am I very motivated by that? Yes. Where do I go from here? What exactly do I do? That’s an open question.”
He and others could see that the Tories were wide open to challenge but were being allowed, by the lack of effective opposition, to run what he called a “one-party state” and drive the UK out of the EU in a way that much of the business community regards as hugely risky and without regard to the concerns of the almost half of voters who backed Remain on 23 June.
The Conservatives had two objectives last week and the more they tried to deliver on both, the more the tensions and contradictions that Labour failed adequately to expose became evident. The first was to convince their own party – and as much as possible the country – that they would deliver the will of the people and make a success of getting out of the European Union. Having concluded that immigration was the main factor behind the narrow Leave win, they felt they had to be crystal clear that Brexit would be both hard and clean, and that they would be ready to leave the EU single market, which the Conservative party has championed for decades, if that was what was needed to control immigration. The “liberal elite” who tried to soften Brexit and spoke up for the benefits of immigration and working with our partners were dismissed as sour, bad losers flouting democracy.
The second aim was to showcase the personal vision of prime minister May, allowing her to explain how she intended to create “a country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few”. May’s first conference speech as prime minister shunned the individualism of Margaret Thatcher and the shrinking-state Conservatism of her successors, including David Cameron, replacing all that with a commitment to an active state that would intervene wherever and whenever it could to help people “across the line”. “We succeed or fail together,” said May, recalling one Brownlee brother dragging the other across the finishing line in their recent triathlon success. “We achieve or fall short together. When one of us falters, our human instinct is to reach out our hand and help them over the line. There is more to life than individualism and self-interest,” she declared, in what was intended to be a defining section of her speech.
But just as budgets can unravel fast, so can conferences that play too much to the party gallery and then crash into reality. The hard Brexit lines looked like a pitch for Ukip votes. Ukip’s main donor, Arron Banks, said the Tories had morphed into Ukip itself. Business was alarmed. The anti-immigrant dog whistling certainly did not sit easily with May’s softer themes, her appeals to the centre ground, her talk of a global Britain, her pledges to help everyone succeed.
On several occasions May and her ministers went too far and had to backtrack. No sooner had she suggested that foreign doctors would have to return home from 2025 once enough extra home-grown ones had been trained than she retracted it, saying this would not in fact be the case. The morning after Rudd had intimated that ministers would “name and shame” companies that employed too many foreign workers, she went on BBC radio to say this was “not something we’re definitely going to do”. The Tories were pulling to the right then to the left then back.
Within Conservative ranks, fissures were exposed. Former minister Nick Herbert warned of the dangers of “Brexit fundamentalism” while former education secretary Nicky Morgan said that hard Brexit would encourage people “to say things about their fellow citizens that promote intolerance and bigotry”.
Some Tories, and even the Daily Telegraph, worried that the party might lose the support of business. The day after the conference, as the pound plummeted in reaction to all the Brexit noise and May’s conference speech, in which she spoke of the “bad side” of low interest rates and quantitative easing, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, gave an interview in New York to row back a bit on the nationalist tone of his colleagues. Clearly worried, he made it clear that the UK was not shutting the door completely to the single market or free movement of labour. The British people had certainly voted, he told the Bloomberg news agency, not to have full “free movement” of people. “[But] that is not the same as ‘we will not allow any people from the EU to come into the UK. It’s about controls and processes,’” he said.
Hammond also went out of his way to counter the delusion among many Tories that the economy was enjoying some sort of post-referendum boom, questioning the wisdom of papers such as the Daily Mail that had claimed day after day that all was wonderful in Brexit land. “Sadly, there is a part of the British press saying precisely that. The answer, of course, is that the data that the media is mostly focused on is backward-looking data, which tells us a very good news story, that the UK economy was more robust than we thought in the first half of this year.”
On Friday the pound suffered more dramatic and alarming fluctuations, including a short-term “flash crash” with analysts blaming concern over the UK government’s approach to Brexit. Hammond appealed again for calm.
The party conference season south of the border is over (the pro-EU SNP will meet in Glasgow this week). Tories have been sent back to their constituencies with simple hard Brexit messages. Some see through them to difficult times ahead. On Sunday former chancellor Kenneth Clarke will appear on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show and make clear his worries about leaving the single market. Other Tories are anxious about May’s promotion of an active state and her new “borrow to build” approach. MPs in all parties want a vote in parliament on any decision to leave the single market. The CBI is on the warpath. But with Labour divided and incoherent on Europe, Jeremy Corbyn a lukewarm defender of the single market, and the Lib Dems struggling to be heard, the forgotten 48% lack a champion they can trust to hold back the Tory charge to the exit.
Polling released on Sunday by the New Economics Foundation (Nef) shows that among Remain voters, 68% say they are likely to vote at the next general election according to how political parties deal with Brexit. Some 77% agreed that issues such as tax avoidance, climate change, international security and global poverty can only be tackled by working with other countries and that it would be bad for Britain if its government retreated from these global relationships. Marc Stears, Nef’s chief executive, said the conferences had concentrated inevitably on the interests of those who wanted to leave. “No one has been very interested in the views of Remain voters. But the findings of this poll show that any political leader who turns their back on the 48%, seeking to diminish and jettison values like tolerance and internationalism, does so at their peril,” he said.
At the end of her speech on Wednesday, May appealed to the entire country to back her. “To everyone here this morning – and the millions beyond, whether Leavers or Remain – I say: come with me and we’ll write that brighter future.” She may have done enough to unite most if not all in her own party last week, but to many others outside it, including much of the business community, the future she spoke of looks darker than it did a week ago.
