Burning injustices! As she said that, to the casual listener the prime minister’s “shared society” could have come from a Labour or Liberal Democrat leader, embracing those bonds of family, community and citizenship that all politicians yearn to reach. In her language of healing divisions, of common obligations, of understanding the struggles of those whose pay has stagnated, injustices are easy to list with burning sincerity, but without cashable remedies.
All leaders seek to brand their term in office, but often their language plants entirely false signposts. Not altogether cynical, Tory leaders may imagine they can be caring and compassionate, before they confront the hard budget choices that will define them. No one forgets Margaret Thatcher’s sugary recital of St Francis’s prayer from the Downing Street steps.
A lazily sycophantic Tory commentariat will usually swallow most of what their leaders say, regardless of what they do. David Cameron’s early social-justice, hoodie-hugging, greenest-ever, socially liberal scene-stealers clung to him, even as he led the country into a dark tunnel of extreme austerity. One minor totemic act – gay marriage, insignificant after Tony Blair’s civil partnerships – clothed him as a laid-back liberal, despite everything else he did.
Cut the “green crap”, he said, as he stripped out green energy subsidies and caused an overnight loss of thousands of jobs in a crashing solar industry. Yet a vaguely green aura still hung around him to the end, with his fuzzy green oak tree logo and that windmill he tried to fix on his roof. Nothing suggested by his “big society” actually happened: on the contrary, charities took the full force of cuts to contracts and grants, and public society shrivelled measurably on his watch.
Theresa May’s new year message was designed to be startling for a Tory. She will heal the divisions “between a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation; between the wealth of London and the rest of the country; between the rich, the successful and the powerful, and their fellow citizens”. What leader says they will divide and rule? What perplexed listeners was her view of the state, as she promised “a government rooted not in the laissez-faire liberalism that leaves people to get by on their own, but rather in a new philosophy that means government stepping up”.
Will she really roll out the red carpet of the state instead of rolling it up? This sounds good: “People who are just managing, just getting by, don’t need a government that will get out of the way. They need a government that will make the system work for them. An active government.” What a world away that is from her state-shrinking predecessors, as in Cameron’s remark: “There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state.”
Is Mayism a radical departure? The more you study her text, the more the meaning slips between your fingers, leaving nothing tangible, absolutely nothing. Don’t ask which government agencies will step up to help whom, and how, because there is no hint of a suggestion. Will that matter? What matters in the airy politics of self-definition is the idea of herself as a sharing, communitarian, pro-state activist. If she’s lucky, that’s what will stick with enough of her well-wishers, heralding her new brand of Conservatism.
But in the harsh world of deeds not words, her chancellor’s autumn statement tells the all-too-familiar story of a Conservative government like all others. There, laid out, is her continuity austerity, with the state set on a trajectory that steps down not up. Year by year she is set to travel down the same anti-state path that shed 1m public jobs, that cut local authority budgets by 40% with more to come, where school budgets will lose £477 per secondary pupil per year, while police, post offices, courts, careers services, Border Force and children’s centres are stripped and shrunken.
She talks of “social reform” but steams ahead with £13bn in benefit cuts while cutting tax for the better-off half. With nearly 4 million poor children, most in working families, her pleas for the plight of the just about managing above that working tax credit level is unpleasantly divisive, though politically cunning. She will see that “those just above the threshold that attracts the government’s focus today – yet who are by no means rich or well-off – are also given the help they need”. What help and why them first? They are ripe for political plucking, those who begrudge an imaginary generosity to the poor and rightly perceive extreme affluence at the top. They are where votes may be snatched from erstwhile Labour or Ukip demographics. Far from healing divisions, this deliberately drives a wedge, rubbing salt into a social grudge.
If May’s government is stepping up, will it grow in size? She ducked that because Treasury figures don’t lie, showing her state continues on George Osborne’s downward trajectory, towards some 36% of GDP, well below any comparable EU country. There is no more money: instead her state will be “strong”, “strategic” and “effective”.
Mental health was her focus for the day – a richly deserving cause. It’s a political safe zone where everyone agrees about the shameful stigma and that it should get “parity of esteem”: David Cameron proclaimed “a mental health revolution” with equal sincerity and an equal lack of funds – a £600m cut. But she ignored the diplodocus in the room – an NHS falling apart before our eyes. No one knows if she has been misled into believing this is just a winter blip, nor if they told her the “£10bn extra” she quotes is a fiction, but a full-blown NHS crisis risks engulfing her. Deaths on trolleys in A&E corridors are political dynamite, the crunch where rhetoric meets reality.
Follow the money. Ideas, theories, “big societies” and sharing societies are talking points for political obsessives. But ahead lie monstrous tasks for May to solve, with Brexit trampling over everything else, while social care, climate change, energy and housing all urgently require her state to “step up”.
At its most dismally reductionist, the political history of recent decades can be written in graphs. They show Labour years of rising spending matched with a renewal of public services, while recent decades show austere spending and a thinned-out, weakened public realm. Nothing in May’s spending plans suggests a more “sharing society” between either rich and poor, or public squalor and private affluence.
