The finesse of how to govern well can wait — for now, Reform can simply ride the wave, propelled by the euphoric high of political momentum. Realism and political temperance comes second to whether “The Establishment” is running scared. The old playbook is simple: identify ruling power structures that feel distant and aloof, be they parties or institutions, and campaign against them in an uncompromising, boisterous fashion — all washed down with an (imperial) pint of blokish bonhomie.

But Farage’s script, refined over a political career spanning more than a decade, is changing: “I’m not mucking about — I’ve got one goal, and that is that Reform wins the next general election,” Farage told assembled party members at the launch of Reform’s local election campaign in late March. That’s quite a shift in political aim: from outsider revolutionary to governor. Thursday’s local elections are being spoken of as a mere staging post, before the march onwards to No.10. If we are to take Farage’s stated ambition seriously — and we need to, with a recent gold-standard MRP poll putting reform ahead of Labour and the Tories in seats — then we need to ask what a detail-light party might look to actually implement in power. Policy is harder than it looks.

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One of most effective tools in Farage’s arsenal has been his tight, clear messaging. But, as recent history tells us, marrying rhetoric with reality is a challenging business. It wasn’t so long ago that “stop the boats” was launched as a short, simple and seductive slogan. Stopping the boats in practice? Well, just ask Rishi Sunak for just how challenging three short words can be to put into effect. Recognizing the challenge of governing actually requiring policy, senior Reform operatives are working to set up a politically aligned think tank to support policy development, modeled on the US think tanks that serve as ideological outriders to the Trump presidency, the FT has reported. It cited an internal document that declared the planned organization would “support Reform with policy development, briefing and rebuttal” and seek to “change opinion around key issues and provide technocratic competence”.

But the very act of defining a policy platform will reveal tensions simmering beneath the surface. The prevalence of foreign money in British think tanks is quite limited — especially when compared with equivalent American outfits and their vast endowments, payrolls and genuinely global influence. But the FT reported that Reform’s proposed think tank would seek funding from “US donors from MAGA, tech [and] religious conservatives”, in addition to more regular UK sources of funding. No wonder Farage is looking abroad — the sheer scale of US political money embarrasses our own campaign and political research spending. Looking for dollars from the United States, the new Right certainly fits the pattern of Farage’s regular cross-Atlantic visits — and his genuine star appeal at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a jamboree of American Right-wing politicians, broadcasters and influencers.

But Reform are seeking inspiration and funding from a country which has an entirely different political culture could become their undoing. Reform’s online activists too are steeped daily in the disputatious politics of the American Right. Emboldened and energized by a fresh Trump-MAGA victory, the American new Right might look like a winning template for populist-Right parties worldwide. But Reform should exercise caution in the lessons it draws from abroad. There is a discordance between a more pedestrian party of suburban, coastal England, and the radical libertarian-conservative ideology of Silicon Valley tech elites like Peter Thiel and Musk that leads the American new Right. They may align on attitudes to immigration and share the culture war skepticism of anything “woke”, but it doesn’t take long to find grit in the oyster between the two movements.

Reform’s existing voters, and those it is most likely to attract in the future, are predominantly older — just under two-thirds are over 50. The upside of donations from wealthy US Right benefactors is clear, but what about a wider ideological alignment — taking on the political approach and talking points of a foreign political movement? In the UK, voters look upon MAGA’s mercurial radicalism — typified by the tech elite’s “move fast and break things” approach in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — with bemusement. Whether you consider it a national fault or not, Brits are simply less culturally or ideologically invested than the average American in radical, sweeping changes in the scope of the state.

Unlike the United States’ robust recovery from the financial crisis, Britain remains stuck in nearly two decades of economic stagnation, meaning the headroom for change, as Rachel Reeves has found out, is limited. What little remains in most council budgets, which bore the brunt of the austerity period, is now overwhelmingly dedicated to adult social care — something Reform’s older voter base would certainly notice if fiddled with. But, taking the US Right as his inspiration, Farage said he is looking to bring DOGE to local government regardless.

At his local election campaign launch, Farage said Reform had submitted 3,000 Freedom of Information requests aimed at identifying and rooting out wasteful government spending. “When we win these county councils, we’ll send in the auditors, we’ll get rid of the fraudulent contracts, we’ll cut spending and we’ll do our utmost to fulfill all of our promises,” he added. It’s a glimpse behind the curtains at his personal Thatcherite past. But this is politics, not policy. Unless he’s proposing cutting adult social care, this is all talk. And while Farage and his followers may occasionally lean and speak libertarian, repeated history tells us that whatever pleases populist conservatives will come first in any party he leads.

A nod to this tendency — later denied by an insider to Politics Home — was the floating of an anti-housebuilding campaign in the launch documents for the proposed think tank — a caveat emptor for any young Reform activists with aspirations to own a home of their own. Farage, like many of his populist Right contemporaries, might be very good at courting a young audience on TikTok. But just as with the Conservative Party, the middle-to-late age, home-owning voter base will dictate the direction of Reform policy, not the well-intentioned frustrations of young activists.

Countering house building might make sense if you view housing as a subset of immigration policy, with each newcomer making the housing shortage even more acute — even if cutting net migration to zero tomorrow would still leave one of the most acute housing shortages in the world entirely unresolved. But the suggestion not immediately being thrown out demonstrates a real cultural difference between Reform, and the ideology behind any money sourced from the more libertarian and radical US Right.

The Siren call of American money will be welcome to a movement without established labor union or business funding routes, but Reform will have to watch itself, and avoid trying to push radical American libertarianism on its more staid, less provocative voters. Labour will be watching like a hawk for any more attackable comments in this space, having finally found an argument capable of taking the wind out of Reform’s sails. It’s not the only foreign policy risk of cosying up to the US New Right — the Trump team’s open disgust for Europe, and its politics and values, is becoming clearer by the day.

Trump’s economic policies, in the wake of the tariff announcements, are a stormcloud on the horizon too. “10% tariffs from the USA are bad news, but better than 20% for EU members,” Farage said — looking to play down his visceral, Thatcherite disapproval of the huge, sweeping changes to global trade policy of his political ally. He increasingly resembles a contortionist, stealthily adapting his message for a skeptical British audience, while desperately trying to appear loyal to Trump.

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The undeniable strength of the Reform and Farage brands can paper over a lot of these contradictions on the way up in the polls. When you don’t fill the policy space, voters imagine what they like, and project it onto parties they culturally identify with. But as Reform professionalizes, media scrutiny intensifies, and the general election draws nearer, policy positions, influenced by think tanks, will have to start crystallizing, exposing the ideological cracks in the party coalition. Farage will need to decide soon if he wants to continue to be the revolutionary leader and terrorizer of institutions, or start to work out a framework for actually steering them as a leader. If he doesn’t decide on the latter before long, experience will soon find him out in Downing Street.

Ideological tensions between the donors, membership, voters and leadership of parties are nothing new. But if Farage is serious about preparing for power, then British politics will have to come before American money and ideology. It’s the same question Farage needs to face as leader — making the choice between raging against the machine, or grasping the levers to control it. If these tensions aren’t addressed, expect a bumpier ride in the near future. The Rupert Lowe row and expulsion is evidence enough that ambitious senior Reform operatives will inevitably seek to push their vision into any available policy vacuum.

At their core, Reform–supporting Britons are voting against the radical, disorienting pace of social and economic change experienced in recent decades. Society has moved too fast for them, and they don’t understand it. But unlike their American equivalents, they want to ease off the accelerator, not stamp hard on the brakes. Farage the impressionist can paint feeling but a government needs blueprints, budgets and hard choices. With the local elections near and expectations set sky high, it’s Reform’s first big test to see if they can actually solve the litany of problems that face the British state, when given the opportunity to do so. It’s hard to resist the wealth of American money, but Reform should never forget that even if we share a language, we do not share a culture — and there has rarely been a time more in need of solutions over vibes.

“New Year should be a time of optimism and excitement,” he said. “Yet I know many of you look ahead to 2023 with apprehension.” Sunak cheerily called for a rejection of pessimism and fatalism, and refused to limit aspirations. Narrated like an adult reading a storybook to a child before bed, the speech’s sunny tone felt misjudged. And delivered with such cloying earnestness and saccharine enthusiasm, it had the subtlety and grace of a clown in a morgue.

Optimism is a powerful, unifying force, and Sunak is right to identify it as an important political goal. But there was something missing in his message — a reason to feel optimistic. Platitudes don’t pay for heating bills or get you seen by a GP faster — people need concrete, tangible reasons to believe that things are getting better, or at the very least, will do soon. The future of Sunak’s party depends on it.

When people are scared, they want realism — they to be levelled with. “I don’t expect you to like my message, but I hope you will understand and agree with my justifications for it,” he could have said. But the speech contained no comprehensive policy shift — no reason for people to buy-in to changes that might improve their lives with commitment and patience. It was just more of the same motherhood and apple pie that has been promised before, but delivered in an even more cheerful manner.

An ill mood grips the country, not just because of frustration at temporary factors like strike disruption or winter pressures on health services — our political economy is convulsing under chronic polycrisis. The annual NHS winter struggle began last summer, and continues to metastasise through record A&E delays, growing waiting lists and an overstretched ambulance service. Our sea border is, in practice, an open door with a criminal gang empire attached. Inflation stands at a 40-year high. Every train journey now requires strike planning. Nothing seems to be working. I sat with the foreign-born head of a large business recently who asked me, “Why do the British put up with so much? In France, Italy, or Spain, they would be rioting in the streets at half of this.” They are right to be perplexed by our passivity to mediocrity and relative national decline. Said to be one of our great and admirable national character strengths, the British stiff upper lip is proving our undoing.

But instead of introspection about economic growth and government competence — and where it isn’t coming from — ruling Conservative politicians are often wallowing in pessimism and giving up the fight: rising stars such as Dehenna Davison, and established parliamentarians such Sajid Javid and William Wragg have all announced their intention to stand down at the next election. And those who remain can be overheard moaning to journalists about how difficult being in charge is. Sympathy, as they say, is in the dictionary.

Tories, far from selling Sunak’s intended optimistic vision of betterment and progress to the electorate, are now shadowboxing an imagined liberal-Remain establishment that, after over a decade of holding the levers of power in No 10, prevents them from improving things. Far better to play fight with a pretend, ever-shifting and invisible enemy, than to properly look yourself in the mirror, and be haunted by the mundane reality of your own serial incompetence. It is no longer enough, or even credible in the eyes of voters, to say that Labour would be worse than this rabble.

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Government frontbenchers such as Andrew Griffith will not be taken seriously by voters if they actively celebrate the fact that the agencies they run work better under emergency army management, than they did under the previous staff of 12 years. Criticising the failure of national institutions is what oppositions do, not His Majesty’s ministers. Meanwhile, other senior Conservatives cosplay being poor in this season of squeezed incomes, as they spout tone-deaf frugality porn of ironing gift wrap from the comfort of their middle-class cottage, complete with wood-beam ceiling. At best this saves pennies, while offering the environmental benefit of perhaps a gram of sirloin steak. It is bread and circuses, without the bread, and without a circus.

Enough with this Stakhanovite Oympics of suffering in which the individuals engage in performative parsimony for the good of the nation. Instead of Tory MPs judging marginally above average-earning firefighters for using food banks, they should be asking themselves why food bank usage is surged under their watch, and why someone on an above-average income would turn to such a facility. They should be asking themselves if austerity actually achieved anything at all.

The Conservative Party has, recently, burned through as many ideologies as it has leaders, realising in turn that each are electoral dead-ends. First it gave up on Cameronite liberal conservatism. Then, under Theresa May, it gave up on austerity. Now, it has given up on optimistic Johnsonian boosterism. It’s all but given up on Brexit, electing to ignore the lack of delivery to date. And it’s in the process of giving up its one remaining ideology: power for its own sake.

It is not the leadership nor the senior parliamentarians of the party that are keeping the pilot light of conservatism lit. It is what remains of the scorched grassroots. Take the recently launched Next Gen Tories campaign group. Led by 27-year-old James Cowling, chair of the Greenwich Conservative constituency association, the group has a far more optimistic and comprehensive ideological vision for what the country needs to sail out of the economic and political doldrums than any government minister.

The group rightly identifies the modern Conservative curse — that by chasing its own electoral advantage by enfranchising and enriching elderly homeowners, it has yielded a highly unequal, low-growth society in which the young have no incentive to become conservatives themselves. This is not inevitable — as John Burn Murdoch recently put it, “Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics.” It could be a Greek tragedy: by mindlessly and greedily chasing power over policy outcomes, the vainglorious fool destroyed itself — and nobody cared.

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We should all be particularly worried by Sunak’s obsession with “innovation” — mentioned 11 times in his speech. Not because it isn’t a laudable aim, but because it is clearly his grand vision of where economic growth will come from. Certainly, we should increase capital investment tax breaks to incentivise businesses to invest in new technologies, as Sunak himself has acknowledged. But innovation in a modern economy requires not proximity to coal and iron ore and investment in new machinery; it requires great minds to meet in cities to discuss their ideas, and the larger the city the better.

This matters when the British planning system prevents the growth of cities and even the densification of already-urban areas. In a world where the basic tenets of 20th-century capitalism, such as homeownership, are not granted to the young as they mature into middle age, why bother moving to a city to better yourself? Sunak’s Tory electoral coalition of elderly homeowners have no interest in homebuilding to reduce the cost of living for their children and grandchildren. Nor do they care about innovation, now they have left the workforce.

Without growing cities, we can give up on productivity growth. And without productivity growth, we can give up on the money to solve our polycrisis society. “I pledge that I will be honest about the challenges we face. And I will take the tough but necessary decisions to ensure our great country achieves its enormous potential.” Sorry, Mr Sunak. You’ve fallen at the first hurdle.

Or perhaps it’s the danger of freedom. The thrill of becoming lost. The imperfections of nature that cannot offer complete, bubble-wrapped security and comfort. But wherever imperfection exists, there is someone out there to sell you the dream. Why submit to the chaotic, beautiful imperfections of nature, when you can have a “forever flawless” artificial lawn?

Advertised by their promoters as the perfect solution to gardens bronzed by the unrelenting warmth of climate change, time spent outside mowing and weeding, burn marks from pet urine, and dirty shoes, the artificial lawn market has expanded rapidly in the last decade. There is money to be made — with industry forecasters predicting that global demand for artificial lawn will reach $7 billion by 2025. They’re not cheap either — Which? magazine advises that a fake lawn is comparatively expensive, especially if landscapers or specialists are employed for its installation, which is important for preventing visible seams, wrinkles and having a properly fitted underlay: “The prices quoted for fitting a 50m² area ranged from £1,000 to £2,700 — double the price of the artificial grass alone.”

So what is the appeal of artificial grass, and why is this such a rapidly expanding industry? Clues are abundant in marketing pitches for the product, citing low maintenance burdens and year-round “flawless” green lawn. One advert for New Lawn promises to “give your family the perfect, safe and mud-free garden year round”.

But this vision of perfection is, frankly, chilling. Can you imagine any child delighting in the artificial crunch of plastic under their feet over the sensory stimulation of real, natural grass in its resplendent, fragrant verdancy? Artificial lawn gardens are fundamentally sterile. The removal of nature goes well beyond the blades of grass. To install outdoor carpet, plastic membranes must be laid down to ensure that plants are unable to take root and grow among the artificial fibres. This means no clover, no buttercups, no daisies. None of the invertebrates and other insects that feed on pollen and decomposing matter. No birds, either — what are they to feed upon in this barren wasteland?

Perfect Grass Ltd. offers this dystopian advice for preventing the simple pleasure of watching birds enjoy a source of food during a long, cold winter: “Keep bird feeders well away from your artificial grass. These will only encourage droppings to build up and rodents to dig at the grass below the feeder.” Grim. The desert conditions persist below ground too — without a source of grass cuttings and other organic matter breaking down into the soil, detritivores like earthworms are starved too. Instead of decomposing humic matter and aerating the soil, without food, they themselves decompose. And deprived of oxygen, the conditions underfoot offer forth the foul odours of the anaerobic rot of whatever organic matter remains, often amplified by pet urine, a known problem for artificial grass.

But worry not, the purveyors of perfection have another solution: chemicals. We’re not just talking about vinegar, washing up liquid and detergents, soaking into the groundwater. There are companies out there to sell you the smell of real grass for your fake grass. Perfect Grass offers this advice for brushing perfume into your plastic:

“If you want your artificial grass to smell like the real thing then add some artificial grass cleaner to it and brush it in… This compound is a colourless liquid that has an intense smell of freshly cut grass. Mixed with other ingredients and bingo – you are able to deliver that freshly cut grass smell.”

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But it’s not all heavenly in plastic paradise. The very same website advises against using lawn fragrance to mask odours that are inherent to artificial grass: “We don’t recommend using these products to cover up the smell of dog wee for example, as we have found it results in a “dog wee grass smell”. It is best used like a perfume; you wouldn’t apply perfume or aftershave without washing first!”

Avoiding maintenance is said to be one of the key advantages of artificial lawns. Yet here again the dream is a failed one. If they are to fulfil their promise of perfection, outdoor carpets require vacuuming to remove debris such as leaves, blossom and twigs. The fibres also require regular agitation to remain firm and upright. Many of the outdoor vacuum cleaners for this purpose (such as the “Lazybrush”) even bear a striking resemblance to… a lawnmower.

Even regular brushing and vacuuming in colder, wetter climates will not be enough to prevent the build-up of moss and moulds, which darken the lawn, break down the plastic fibres and end the fake perfection. Again, artificial lawn chemicals can come to the rescue — or, if all else fails, you can pressure wash your plastic grass clean again. In the summer, moss and mould give way to intense heat, because artificial lawns absorb and radiate much more heat than natural grass. Aura Landscapes tested this with an infrared thermometer, finding that artificial grass in the sun reached over 60ºC — enough to cause thermal burns to human skin.

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So, given how awful artificial lawn is, how easy is it to dispose of it? In fact, artificial lawns dispose of themselves, shedding mass as microplastics into the air and watercourse. Research on microplastic emissions from domestic artificial lawn is limited, but playing-field astroturf has been estimated to be the second-largest source of microplastics in the environment after road wear and tyre abrasion. The remainder, once it reaches the end of its useful life of potentially less than ten years, is very hard to recycle, owing to the sheer variety of polymers involved to achieve the “right” texture, ultraviolet light resistance, colour and general durability. Thus, it ends up in landfill.

Already, hundreds of fields that were installed in the mid-2000s in the US are at or beyond their estimated eight-to-10-year life spans. Now these fields are being torn up, en masse. In one 2017 report, the Synthetic Turf Council projected that by the end of the decade, at least 750 fields will be replaced annually. The average field contains approximately 18 tonnes of plastic carpet and 18 tonnes of infill, according to the report. This means that as much as 150,000 tonnes of waste could require disposal every year. The problem is not unique to North America — one Dutch report on how artificial turf is disposed of at the end of its useful life found that recycling facilities often do not follow through with their promises, either taking the money and storing the turf instead of recycling it in reasonable time, or even selling it abroad. Storing large volumes of flammable plastic and rubber is inherently risky, too. The very same facility featured in the Dutch report later suffered a large fire, which took days to put out, releasing toxic fumes into the air.

All of the above said, the most fundamental reason to despise artificial lawns, is that they look shit. Tacky, lifeless green carpets don’t look like a perfect lawn; they look like what they are — as fake, plasticky, and artificial as an American newsreader. Outdoor carpet follows the “uncanny valley” model of emotional response to likenesses. That is to say, it looks unnatural and dystopian precisely because it is so close to, and yet so far from, the natural thing it is trying to emulate. Artificial lawn installation companies often share before and after comparisons: before, the perfect imperfection of nature — a garden habitat for invertebrates, hedgehogs, insects and birds; after, a sterile, fake perfection — devoid of variation, devoid of life. Fake turf is the manifestation of a deep cultural weakness, expressed in short-termism and a distaste and disrespect for the wonder, variety, and temporality of the natural world. Artificial lawns are the “Live, Laugh, Lobotomy” of gardening.

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It’s time to go to war against plastic turf. Some municipalities already are: Boston has banned artificial lawn in its city parks. Professional societies are also weighing in — the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) recently declared: “We launched our sustainability strategy last year and fake grass is just not in line with our ethos and views on plastic. We recommend using real grass because of its environmental benefits, which include supporting wildlife, mitigating flooding and cooling the environment.” The RHS’s flagship event, the Chelsea Flower Show, introduced a ban for artificial grass in 2022.

Even if we can’t ban it nationwide, surely the civic minded among us can take the initiative in filling watering cans with acetone and paying a visit to our dear neighbours’ artificial lawns? And if that doesn’t take your fancy, do what you can. If you move somewhere with one, or if you have one already — rip it out, and restore the hum, buzz and chaotic beauty of nature to your surrounds. The planet will thank you, and so will your discerning neighbours.

***

An unabridged, illustrated version of this article first appeared on the writer’s Himbonomics substack.

“You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services. With the Conservatives, and only with the Conservatives, you get both,” Hunt told the Commons, with a straight face. As he well knows, public services are buckling under the strain of a decade of austerity. Meanwhile, the OBR expects our weak economic growth to facilitate the cratering of household disposable incomes by the largest amount since records began in the mid-Fifties, yanking them back to where they were nearly 10 years ago.

In another life, Hunt was the longest-serving Health Secretary in history, who hung on in post against Theresa May’s wishes until he received a £20 billion additional “birthday present” spending commitment for the NHS. Now that Hunt is on the other side of the negotiating table, holding the purse strings, there will be no such profligate gift-giving.

“This government has forced our economy into a doom loop where low growth leads to higher taxes, lower investment and squeezed wages, with a running down of public services — all of which hits economic growth again,” Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves replied. Her diagnosis is absolutely correct — atrophy of growth has led to necrosis of public services. Hunt may claim that the Tories offer both a strong economy and public services, but they self-evidently offer neither.

For a statement that mentioned the word “growth” 28 times, Hunt’s plan to achieve it was remarkably unambitious and involved little self-reflection, citing energy, infrastructure and innovation as his three priorities. This is a huge red flag. While these matter, they pale in comparison to the economic damage wrought by a planning system that prevents the building of homes in our most productive regions, thereby strangling the supply of ambitious, productive workers to productive jobs and businesses.

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Not that this should be a surprise; this outlook mirrors that of his boss, Rishi Sunak, who said earlier this year, in a lecture on growth, that growth required merely “a new culture of enterprise”, leaving supply-side reforms to planning and housing unmentioned. Those reforms might be worth upwards of 30% of GDP — but why trouble yourself with that? While Hunt paid lip service to the motivations of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous September mini-budget, if he is not prepared to take on what Truss rightly identified as the anti-growth coalition, he will surely fail in his mission to make Britain a better country. The supply-side baby must not be thrown out with the unfunded tax cuts bathwater.

It’s easy to blame our economic and fiscal headwinds on the mini-budget. But the seeds of this crisis were sown long before Truss and Kwarteng drove a truckload of fertiliser to the farm to encourage growth, only to accidentally blow it up before it reached the fields.

Reputation for economic competence is built over decades, but can be lost in minutes. And the Conservative Party is now finding out how it feels to have an economic narrative set up by their opponents. Much as Labour was blamed for the financial crisis by the Tories, despite its global nature, the Conservatives are being painted by their opponents as being responsible for rising interest rates, the increase in the cost of living ,and the impact of the recession we’ve just entered.

“At the very least, he could have offered an apology but, no, instead he says his predecessor was correct in his analysis at the mini-Budget that put our economy into free fall,” Reeves taunted from the Opposition despatch box. But none of the pain we are going through has its origin in Kwarteng’s mini-budget. While it certainly didn’t help things, as soaring government gilt yields showed, most of Kwarteng’s economic, if not political, impact was essentially wiped clean by Hunt’s scrapping of almost all the mini-budget measures. The cost of government borrowing is back to where it was before that touchpaper was lit.

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Rather, the war in Ukraine and the resultant sanctions and European diversification from Russian gas are a far larger source of inflation than those now-reversed spending commitments. We are also still wading through the backwash of the inflationary monetary and fiscal stimuli introduced to combat Covid-19, which unleashed unintended inflation. Supply chains are also still being disrupted by the pandemic, increasing the cost of services and manufactured goods — goods which are even harder to source given the ongoing lockdowns in China that are holding back the Chinese economy.

Sailors famously do not choose the weather, but they can choose not to sail straight into the storm. And this is precisely what the Conservative Party has done. By building a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners, it finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public servicesit finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public services — public services that same coalition of elderly voters is becoming increasingly reliant on as health and social care needs rise with age, leaving them ever more disgruntled.

These increasingly bitter choices, worsening living standards and dilapidated public services are the price we pay for actively choosing to reject economic growth. “Anyone who says there are easy answers is not being straight with the British people,” Hunt said yesterday. Economically, the answer is very easy — take your foot off the brake by building. But politically, Hunt is right: the challenge is totemic.

William Hague said of the euro that it represented a “burning building with no exit”. Well, our burning building has exits. We could choose to build more, and stop placating the anti-growth coalition — but we would have to walk through the fire to do so. Does the Conservative party have the stomach for it? Of course not. If you needed an indication of how likely the party is to face down its elderly voters, the triple lock on pensions was maintained in this Autumn Statement. Pensions will grow with inflation, while workers suffer real-terms pay cuts. And we wonder why there’s no growth. ‘Twas ever thus.

“I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth,” Truss said, pressing her foot on the accelerator. “Our community wants this rapid growth to slow down,” said Miller, stamping on the brake. “We will make it easier to build homes,” Truss said, bearing down on the great furnace bellows of British growth. “The next local plan must cut new house-building levels in half,” Miller countered, pouring cold water on the few weak, fading embers that remain. Truss might as well have slapped on the rouge, minced onto the conference hall stage as a pantomime dame and invited the audience to proclaim “It’s behind you!” to identify members of the anti-growth coalition.

In her speech, Truss listed opposition parties, militant unions, think tanks with vested interests, talking heads, “Brexit deniers” and environmental activists as constituent parts of the anti-growth coalition. If that’s what makes up the anti-growth coalition, all of these interests are certainly very powerful; our economic growth rate has been woeful for the last decade and a half. But one might note these groups — also the stock bogeymen of the Tory faithful — haven’t held the keys to Downing Street for the last 12 years. They certainly play a role, but it’s easy to paint a target on your political enemies. It’s far harder to paint a target on your friends and allies.

The awkward truth left unsaid is that the anti-growth coalition contains more than just members from the “the other side”. Truss failed to mention that some of its most powerful members were in that very conference hall: the Conservative activist base, voter coalition and, yes, even Tory MPs. Miller is just a timely and particularly diametric example, but a quick search will find example, after example, after example, after example, after example, after example of Tory MPs opposing growth — from houses to solar panel installations to new supermarkets — in the face of local opposition from prospective Conservative voters.

They pose in front of derelict industrial wastelands saved from “inappropriate development” with elderly, homeowning activists holding Conservative campaign signs, all grinning like Alsatians. And the Tory councillors are no better. If anything, it’s even easier to find councillor, after councillor, after councillor, after councillor proudly claiming ownership of blocking developments. The so-called talking heads from think tanks that Truss identified often ponder on panels why Britain’s growth rate has been anaemic for so long, all pensively stating “it’s a complex, multifaceted issue” relating to obscure legislative frameworks or some other skills policy minutiae.

But there’s no great mystery. We haven’t grown because we refuse to build infrastructure and housing in our most productive regions and cities, strangling the supply of workers to well-paying, productive jobs, and increasing operational costs. The nation that once produced great Victorian engineers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s calibre has lost its nerve and taste for economic progress.

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By James Sean Dickson

It’s easy to assume that big, dark, and powerful forces are behind our economic malaise. It’s far harder to imagine that the cause is perfectly normal, average and decent fellow countrymen and women — motivated by only good intentions — objecting to planning proposals just because they want to stop some construction dust for a few months, or prevent something as nebulous as the “character” of their local area changing. These small-c conservatives represent millions of grains of sand in the national gears of growth — and they’re courted by politicians of all flavours seeking votes at the intersection of our political incentive structures. But courted most successfully, if Truss were to look in the mirror, by the Conservative Party.

One of the great unsolved problems in politics is the natural conflict between wealth, political power and economic dynamism. Wealth building is a fundamentally good thing for society, for it provides security, stability and facilitates increases in living standards. But with growth in wealth inevitably comes political power, which is then invariably used to moat and defend the ownership of wealth, even if that means strangling off economic growth through barriers to entry, oligopolistic profits and economic rents.

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These will all be quietly introduced under the well-meaning guise of protecting consumers and the environment, or ensuring product quality (protecting the “unique character of the local area”). In the housebuilding sector, only large players with an army of planning system navigators and the capital to weather cost of operation can survive. A 2016 House of Lords report concluded that the sector “has all the characteristics of an oligopoly”, because of the barriers to entry erected by the wealth and power structures of middle Britain. “It is rational for private enterprise to optimise profits rather than volume, limiting their uncertainty in a market characterised by constant Government intervention and cyclical risk,” the report added. There’s your anti-growth coalition right there, Prime Minister.

It’s not that Truss has no allies. Save for the party leader’s speech, the main stage is never where the best ideas are found at party conferences. Scrubbed of interesting content and commentary that might accidentally “commit news”, cabinet minister speeches are best avoided. The few conference events that did have a “buzz” were all on the subject of planning reform — for everything from housing to new reservoirs. Veterans of many failed campaigns, the movement for change is becoming much wiser and more targeted. It doesn’t matter how big your porcelain hammer is when you hit it against the concrete wall of reform, the thinkers now realise — the hammer will always shatter.

Key to reform — and the defeat of the real anti-growth coalition — is a complete rewiring of incentive structures. A crusade against the largest, most influential voter block in the country will never win. So instead of playing tug-of-war with them, tug the rope sideways. Buy them into reform with beautifully designed buildings, and include their often legitimate concerns from day one in consultations. And — just as Nye Bevan joked was necessary when pushing through the creation of the NHS against stiff opposition from doctors — stuff their mouths with gold.

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By James Sean Dickson

Let them enrich themselves by voting for densification with policies such as Street Votes, giving them the value of planning uplift to their own properties. Simplify the structure of Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy — initiatives that try to get funding for schools, hospitals, roads and local amenities from new developments, but that fail through their complexity and lack of scale and ambition. Make people believe that by backing a development, they will benefit personally. And for heaven’s sake, follow through with that promise. Yes, it’s offensive to offer these privileged, wealthy people even more carrots — but it will be worth it for the transformative benefits of structural reform.

Finally, realise that some incentive structures are already there for you to exploit. The Secretary of State could get building started in Labour-dominated cities tomorrow. There would be no primary or secondary legislation requirements. All the powers to do this exist today. If the Conservative Party is worried about losing the city suburbs — and it should be — one way to slow the tide of Labour-inclined, priced-out city-dwelling families into the suburbs is to enable them to live in Labour-held, city constituencies by building more.

Going up against the anti-growth coalition will be “difficult, but it is necessary”, Truss said. “We cannot give in to the voices of decline. We cannot give in to those who say Britain can’t grow faster. We cannot give in to those who say we can’t do better.” The only problem is, she was saying it to everyone else, not her own party.

“The tax cuts and reforms I’ve announced today — the biggest package in generations — send a clear signal that growth is our priority,” Kwarteng said, shining a bright light on Britain’s anaemic economic record. It would appear, however, that investors do not hold the same breezy confidence in their plans to achieve 2.5% growth per annum. The market has made its mind up: this is Liz Truss’s equivalent of Theresa May’s 2017 election gamble.

And it certainly is a gamble. Should the roulette ball fall on black, Liz Truss will go down in the history books as the swashbuckling, visionary prime minister who broke Britain free from its post-financial crash shackles. Should it fall on red, Britain’s youth will be lumped with yet more debt, and Kwarteng will see his name added to the inauspicious list of chancellors who engineered huge booms, only to later be stung by the bust that followed.

Kwarteng will be only too aware of the fate of fellow Tory chancellor Anthony Barber, who, under weak growth and, with an election only a few years away and Labour breathing down his neck, engineered the “dash for growth” with his hugely expansionary 1972 budget. After Barber turned on all the taps, inflation ran riot, peaking at 24.5%, which ultimately precipitated the February 1974 election loss for the Conservatives. Barber chose not to stand in the subsequent election and retired from frontline politics.

But scary as the Barber comparison and the financial market grumblings are, don’t take them as evidence Kwarteng’s approach is certain to fail. If we were to follow the advice of the markets and the technocrats, we wouldn’t change course from nearly two decades of abject failure. And if market prices were always right, there would be no such thing as a hedge fund — fair value would always be known and exploited, closing any arbitrage gap.

Likewise, economists, for all their preening certainty, are a fickle, quarrelsome bunch. Geoffrey Howe famously had his anti-inflationary 1981 budget excoriated by 346 economists in a letter to The Times. Each was then forced to dine on a healthy portion of humble pie as the reforms of the Thatcher government began to bear fruit, stabilising inflation and building a firm foundation for sustained economic growth.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

More importantly, despite its nervous reception, there is much to be praised in this budget. Even stating that economic growth should be the top priority of government is a welcome change from the status quo — where the deficit, Brexit, and then Covid-19 took centre stage, distracting the country from its slow-motion growth crisis. With the next election looming, growth is finally being given the attention it duly deserves.

Among the measures intended to boost growth is a doubling of the stamp duty threshold from £125,000 to £250,000. First time buyers, meanwhile, will pay no stamp duty until £425,000, up from £300,000. Plenty will write this off as yet another distraction from the desperate need to actually build some houses. But in a housing supply crisis, with a limited stock of homes, the distribution of existing stock becomes even more important. As a transaction tax, stamp duty is an active impediment to older people in large family homes downsizing, and passing on a larger house with spare bedrooms to young couples with children that need them.

Other positive measures include permanently setting the rate of Annual Investment Allowance for businesses at £1 million, rather than reverting it back to £200,000 in April 2023 as had been planned. Britain’s total investment as a percentage of GDP lags well behind comparable rich nations, and encouraging growth-spurring research and development through the tax system — including suspending the planned hike in corporation tax — should be welcomed.

But perhaps the biggest danger of all with this budget is that the country simply spins its wheels in the mud. Howe’s controversial 1981 programme was not a “Thatcherite” tax-cutting budget — in fact, it substantially increased taxation to counter inflation. The economic reforms that defined the Thatcher governments and led to a stable footing for expansion were not yet complete. You cannot have your dessert until you have finished your vegetables. And yet here we are, teeth sticky with sugary tax cuts.

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By John Oxley

If growth were easy and it isn’t we would have already solved the problem. The good news is that we are not at the “growth frontier”, where more productivity can only come from cutting edge technological, medical or scientific innovation. We can steal productivity and technological improvements and catch up with economies host to greater productivity than our own. Taking best practice from abroad and implementing it at home is a tried-and-tested method for easy, cheap growth, for everything from tax structure to pedagogy.

The bad news is that much of Britain is perfectly prepared not to borrow these productivity gains and to make choices that run counter to economic growth and resultant improvements in living standards, and Truss will have to do battle with this instinct. For example, the country voted to leave the EU in 2016, leading to us departing the single market and customs union, increasing the costs of trade with our neighbours — and yet Britain now chooses to suppress net migration, running counter to the needs of sectors with worker shortages.

Happily settled baby boomers in their fully paid-off detached houses still vote in great numbers against anyone in favour of local “overdevelopment”. National infrastructure projects like new water reservoirs, airport expansions and new train lines are delayed, cut back and cancelled. It might not matter if the burden of these choices was shared equally by all, but the impact is highly unequally distributed — in favour of baby boomers. Those self-same boomers’ sons, daughters and grandchildren pay the price of these decisions in higher living costs, and lower growth.

But so does the country — high housing costs in our most productive regions and cities prevent people from moving to more productive jobs, and shovels good money into stationary and unproductive bricks and mortar. Too often this turns into an attack on the idea of London: why do you feel entitled to have affordable housing in the most productive city in the country? The only thing such pettiness leads to is lower productivity in Britain’s growth engine and therefore less tax income to spend on the regions. In effect, the government is not proud of its international financial, legal, technology and consultancy services capital. It finds its crown jewels oversized, vulgar and embarrassing.

You can’t do Thatcherism twice, we’re often told. There is nothing left to deregulate. Labour markets are reformed. Public utilities and businesses are fully privatised. Unproductive industries were shuttered for good. But planning was the one big area of state regulation Thatcher never touched.

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“Later this autumn, the government will set out its vision to unlock homeownership for a new generation by building more homes in the places people want to live and work and by getting our housing market moving,” the government’s growth plan, published alongside the budget, said. “This will boost growth across the UK helping more people afford to live near good jobs.”

Yes, this is a positive sign; these are the bitter vegetables that need to be eaten for growth to flourish. But forgive a millennial who has seen it all before: under a Tory party allergic to planning reform, will these reforms actually happen? I’m not holding my breath; already there are signs of disquiet from former ministers over the high-stakes approach being taken.

And yet, Truss and Kwarteng have shown they are prepared to be deeply ideological and challenge the fragile status quo. Their economic plan may have taken a battering by the markets, but they defiantly stand by it, daring the markets to back down before they do. All they need to do is match words with deeds, and make this clear at Party Conference next week. It all seems so wonderfully straightforward — until you remember that we’ve been here before.

I first joined the party around 2011, 18-years-old and full of belief in the values that I think have delivered so much for my family, and the country at large. The right of individuals to choose how to spend their own money. The power of liberalised markets to deliver improvements in living standards. The importance of our national institutions. Empowering individuals to live their life on their terms. My belief in these values has not changed.

What has changed is the Conservative Party. While its leadership candidates would happily agree with these aspirational principles, to be a young Conservative today feels like being a Judas goat, leading its own generation towards destitution. It’s not just me — my circle of young party members didn’t have a positive word to say when we found out the choice was between the two continuity Johnson cabinet candidates.

I want to light a fire under the arse of the party. I want to grab it by the lapels and shout with the moral fury of a cri de cœur: “You cannot continue like this”. A country must build for its future, not relentlessly indulge its present. To continue as we are, offering crumbs to the young while ceaselessly gifting jam to the Baby Boomer generation, simply because it wins elections in the short term, is not just bad for our party’s electoral prospects in the coming decades. It is fundamentally unpatriotic and unconservative.

Acting against conservative principles has consequences. Thank goodness, the leadership debate has finally noticed Britain’s appalling growth record over the past decade and a half — a period that awkwardly coincides with 12 years of Tory rule. The leadership candidates even openly admitted in the BBC leadership debate that the party’s economic management has failed to make Britain any better off. We are no richer than we were before the financial crisis. The march of economic progress — the increases in real earnings and upgrades in living standards that defined postwar Britain — has stalled.

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“We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times, with other outlets, peddling a particular type of economic policy for 20 years. It hasn’t delivered growth,” said Liz Truss. She’s right. If we don’t change course, we could well see the United Kingdom fall behind the per capita GDP of Poland in little more than a decade. The former Soviet satellite state had to play catch up after it was forced to run an uncompetitive and sclerotic command economy for the best part of five decades. What excuse does Britain — the birthplace of free trade, and of the industrial revolution — have for its lacklustre economic performance?

“What people in Britain desperately need now is change,” Truss added. She is, at least, challenging the orthodoxy that has led us to this juncture. But, like a plague doctor from 1769, while her diagnosis might be right, her cure is the equivalent of stripping at midnight during a full moon and standing in a barrel of eels. I lean heavily to the Right on economics — I should be delighted by Truss’s promises of immediate tax cuts to the tune of £30bn per annum. She’s proposed a reversal of the manifesto-breaching National Insurance hike, cancelling the planned 6p rise in corporation tax, and a two-year suspension of the green levy — a particularly eye-catching and juicy policy with energy bills soaring. Sunak, meanwhile, has pledged to cut the basic rate of income tax to 16% by 2029.

In one sense, less taxation is exactly what I want to see from a Conservative government, not least with my own marginal rate reaching beyond an eye-watering 60%. Cutting taxes is the fillet steak of red meat Thatcherism, is it not? While Truss may be claiming the mantle of Margaret Thatcher as her own with her tax cuts proposals, what the proposals forget is that Thatcher was cautious on tax cuts until the hard work — of eliminating the economy’s structural weaknesses — was done. In fact, taxation as a share of GDP continued rising into the early Thatcher years, only consistently falling after 1985, six years into the Conservative government.

In the Seventies, the structural weaknesses were all-powerful unions obstructing industry reform and undead, state-owned businesses kept going only through public subsidy. Modern Britain has its own equivalent of this economic drag anchor: the cost of housing and its root cause — the utterly dysfunctional planning system.

That planning system is designed not around growth, progress or even necessity. Rather, it is almost exclusively geared towards securing the lifestyle and preferences of those who already own — and who overwhelmingly oppose development. The result is laughably predictable: a severe supply shortage of homes and rocketing prices that far outstrip languid growth in earnings. Astonishingly, property listing website Zoopla found last year that one in five homes “earned” more in a year than the average UK salary. So much for the dignity of work.

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We cannot expect anything other than a sclerotic economy if we throttle the supply of workers in our most productive regions through high housing costs. One study found that by restricting access to workers through planning regulation, aggregate economic growth in the United States was a third lower than it could have been between 1964 and 2009. The cost may even be higher for the United Kingdom. Choking off all development is not small-c conservative protection of the “local character” of our neighbourhoods. It is nation-wrecking.

London, host to some of the most productive financial and legal services in the world, is now home to house prices 14 times greater than median incomes. Between the war and 2000, this multiple never rose above six. In Oxford and Cambridge, home to countless high-productivity businesses associated with the crown jewels of British higher education, the multiple exceeds 12. There is a clear economic incentive for young people to steer well clear of the country’s most productive jobs. That means lower growth, lower living standards, higher taxes, and worse public services.

And here lies the national practical joke: who supports this incredibly restrictive, nationalised and closed planning market? The party that liberally peppers its speeches with saccharine praise for privatised, lightly-regulated, liberalised markets. And what is the closed, state-regulated planning market that benefits existing players? A huge government subsidy. Again, anathema to Tory orthodoxy.

“The best way to achieve economic growth is cutting taxes and bureaucracy, and boosting private sector investment and innovation,” said Rishi Sunak, also at the BBC television debate. Yes! Reforming the planning bureaucracy fits hand in glove with the rhetoric. Yet neither candidate will touch the planning system with a barge pole, let alone seek a mandate from the membership to reform it, because it is an electoral livewire. Any attempt at change swiftly results in enormous electoral backlash, as proven by the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, followed immediately by dilution, if not abandonment of reform.

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Without seeking a mandate for change from the party, attempts at change will always fall flat. David Cameron’s leadership campaign back in 2005 featured an open, public insistence that the party had to transform to ever win power again. “When I say change, I’m not talking about some slick rebranding exercise: what I’m talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election… we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we’re comfortable with modern Britain,” Cameron said at his 2005 conference speech, widely seen as the turning point that put him on the path to victory.

Cameron challenged his party to accept the social liberalism of modern Britain or face electoral oblivion. By making this a core theme of his campaign, and by winning, he was able to move forward and drag the party with him. I see no equivalent pitch coming from either candidate on what should be the most salient issue of the day. Sunak is actually proudly stating he’ll give residents even more power to block housing near them. How is someone in their early thirties, in a rented flat, with no prospect of owning their own home, whose wages haven’t risen in more than a decade, to interpret that, other than as utter contempt for how the country works against them?

It cannot even be claimed that this inequity is in the party’s long-term interests. If multiple generations are locked out of homeownership, they will not vote Conservative. Why should they?

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By JAMES SEAN DICKSON

My message to the party leadership is very simple: you are not discharging the duty of society to care for and improve the lives of its young. How am I, as a young Conservative, meant to defend our party’s record? How can I, when it is directly lowering my standard of living in order to subsidise already well-off, retired and home-owning Baby Boomers — whose incomes, for the first time in history, exceed working age incomes?

And while housing is the worst part of a sorry national picture, the intergenerational war on the young doesn’t stop there. Working age benefits fall while pensioners enjoy the comfort of the triple lock policy. Usurious rates of interest are applied to student debt. Taxes are at their highest level since the war, paying for increased NHS spending that primarily benefits the elderly. To be young today is to be relentlessly milked for extractive, gerontocratic tastes.

It has become a common trope: the young, imperious politico announces their resignation on social media with an image of a cut-up party membership card. Why don’t I do the same, given my contemptuous descriptions of the party’s record in government? I’m clinging on by my fingertips, still believing in “our” values. Truss or Sunak need to actually implement these values, instead of just paying lip service to them, to get my vote.

Right now, I’m planning to simply scrawl “build more bloody houses” on my ballot paper in a thick marker pen. The young, renting staffer opening the envelope to record the vote, whose wages haven’t risen in a decade, is unlikely to disagree with the proposition.

Later that evening, he tells her: “I’ve done some maths — we can just about afford to buy a gardenless 1.5 bed flat in Catford and have a baby, if we reduce our food budget.” And they’re the lucky ones. And yet, is that all his country has to offer them? Britain’s answer to anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner today is, unfortunately, yes. The formerly normal aspiration to settle and start a family is out of reach for swathes of young people. A fundamental compact between conservative principles, and the party that is supposed to represent them, has been broken.

The next leader of the Conservative Party faces an economic emergency with few obvious solutions. Public finances remain in a dire state following an almost continuous stream of crises. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that the government has already spent as much as it did during the Financial Crash to support households through the current squeeze on living standards. House prices are a national disgrace, far exceeding historical trends on affordability and requiring decades of saving for average couples to even afford a deposit for a first home. Homeownership among the young has dwindled.

Britain tends to think of itself as an equal partner to countries such as France, the Netherlands and Germany in terms of incomes and living standards. This is a collective fantasy, which hasn’t been true for well over a decade. The reality shouldn’t be shocking, yet it remains so: Britain’s incomes and living standards have fallen far behind what were its peer nations only 15 years ago. “Across European countries, only households in Greece and Cyprus saw a worse performance between 2007 and 2018 than the UK,” found the Resolution Foundation. On its third consecutive Tory prime minister, and about to select its fourth, Britain isn’t working.

Does this seem like the time for a middle of the road party leadership candidate offering more of the same, a contest in which candidates simply take turns to outbid each other with Boomer-pleasing tax cuts? Or does a radical programme with a fresh-faced advocate need to step forward? The Tory party no longer has the theatrics of Brexit or a disruptive global pandemic to distract from these systemic, structural failings. The tide has gone out, the party isn’t wearing any knickers, and nobody is impressed by what there is to see.

Because the reality is that Britain’s national religion is no longer Anglican Christianity. It isn’t even the NHS. It is Pensionerism. Britain is a care home with a navy. And as the Baby Boomer cohort of voters ages, it is vital for the party’s long-term survival, not to mention morally just, for the party to begin mending the structural underpinnings of society that enable people to establish themselves and build families.

Brexit aside, if British conservatism is defined by anything, it is its reverence for community and continuity over radicalism and state interventionism. Asset ownership is vital for the maintenance of these values — increasing the country’s housing stock is a means to a conservative end. People who own houses invest in them for the long run and want them protected. These values express themselves in everything from taking care of a front garden, seeing it as a community as much as a personal asset, to favouring low levels of asset taxation on something “earned”.

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By James Sean Dickson

Graduates face a marginal tax rate of at least 50%. They are expected by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to exercise restraint when looking for pay rises, even in the face of nearly two decades of pay stagnation. Family homes are completely out of their reach. Ask yourself, how does this look compared to the comfort of homeownership and the 10% growth in the state pension, under the triple-lock policy, that shields pensioners from the same fate? Are we really all in this together?

Yet all attempts to reform this growth-killing inequity end in failure, such is the strength of the homeowner-pensioner lobby. Despite free enterprise fitting hand-in-glove with Conservative ideological orthodoxy, housing remains a market throttled by the state, with severe supply restriction enforced via irreformable planning forcing prices up. This has deleterious effects across swathes of public policy, from living standards, to fertility, to climate change.

Is it any surprise that productivity and post-housing cost income growth doesn’t exist in a market where any wage rises go straight to existing landowners in higher rents and prices, rather than resulting in an increased supply of houses? If increases in productivity don’t raise living standards, where is the incentive to increase productivity? Scaling this huge challenge must be the immediate, urgent priority of the next Conservative leader.

It’s been done before — look back to Margaret Thatcher’s reforming governments. But while Thatcher wielded the sword and cut through the Gordian knot of Britain’s public sector businesses and unions in the Eighties, she did this with the tailwinds of North Sea oil and gas revenues and entering government afresh, not 12 years into Conservative rule.

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Thatcher could even be said to have redistributed — a word we associate solely with the Left of politics — housing towards council housing tenants. She recognised that without homeownership, the facts of life ceased to be conservative. Nobody could imagine a Conservative government today redistributing housing wealth towards the young, regardless that much of it was ‘earned’ through planning restriction and loose monetary policy. It seems unlikely that any of today’s leadership candidates would — or could — wield such a sword as she did.

There is an obvious solution to all these structural problems: growth.

It is encouraging to see Sajid Javid identify growth as one of the key planks of his campaign for leader and for him to state that housing is a supply side issue, but less so to see Jeremy Hunt reflexively spouting a ludicrous unfunded promise to “cut all taxes”. Yet another demand-side reform. But Hunt’s reasoning is tragically logical: the next leader will not win the votes of members by attacking the party’s own base — which has become substantially older in recent years — over the lack of planning reform, the biggest cause of Britain’s anaemic growth record. What is required therefore is a dose of the dryly titled ‘policy entrepreneurialism’.

To win — and win properly, not just squeak into office just to prepare for election defeat in two years’ time — the next leader must shout from the rooftops about growth, while investing in clever innovative policy solutions. Seek softer community buy-in with policies that could encourage development while benefiting residents like Street Votes. Be radical. Call for the permanent abolition of Stamp Duty. The Treasury will fight you, but a universally-hated tax that increases market friction by preventing the elderly moving out of large family homes is a politically feasible housing policy reform. There’s £3.31bn in annual economic growth up for grabs!

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Build more houses, but be smart about it. Building is impossible in Chesham and Amersham? You’re a Conservative government with sky high prices in Labour-dominated, youthful cities! Ignore Chesham and Amersham. Build in the cities with the strongest price signals and if current residents don’t like it, let them vote even more Labour, or move away. Enabling growth in the productive cities will give you tax revenues to spend on public services, or enable you to cut taxes responsibly from their current postwar high.

The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe according to the OECD. The cost of subsidising childcare to a level closer to the European average could bring more women into the labour force, thereby increasing economic growth while solving sex-based social inequality. Isn’t this win-win?

But already in this contest we see Suella Braverman open her candidacy with cheap promises to leave the European Court of Human Rights. This kind of policymaking would neatly follow on from the return of voluntary imperial measurements, and the probably unworkable Rwanda refugee policy. Meanwhile Sajid Javid, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss have all pledged to lower fuel taxes, an astonishingly regressive proposal that benefits the richest first while ignoring the pressing need for climate action. The party must learn: throwing red meat to the crowd doesn’t put red meat on the table.

Without Brexit to focus on, the Government has lost its sense of purpose. The next leader must be a strategist, cerebral, and yet still a salesman. Someone who recognises that there’s more to winning than winning itself, and declinist managerialism — that a far greater prize is changing peoples’ lives and your country, for the better.

Think back to the early Eighties. We face many of the same pains, again under a Conservative-majority government: Moscow is in the news for all the wrong reasons; high inflation; low growth; widespread industrial action. Britain is a country ill-at-ease, uncertain of its next destination.

The surgeon back then had no uncertainty over what medicine needed to be administered, what operation was required. The 1979 election was a referendum over the direction of the country: more of the same pain, or an operation that, despite its risks, might just jolt the country back to life?

And while you could describe both Conservative prime ministers by their characterful hair alone — Margaret Thatcher: powerful, unyielding, strong; Boris Johnson: chaotic, untidy, silly — there the similarities quickly come to an end. This hasn’t stopped the Johnson cabinet claiming the Thatcher legacy as its own. Hear Rishi Sunak’s speeches and you would assume the Government was on a Lawsonian crusade against high taxes.

The reality is precisely the opposite: taxes are about to reach their highest level since the Second World War, 12 years after the tax-cutting Tories re-entered Number 10. In 1979, the party swept into government with a clear diagnosis and a comprehensive treatment plan, defined by its ambition to bring down inflation, get Britain back on track, and consign the “sick man of Europe” label to the dustbin.

Today, however, after three consecutive Tory prime ministers, the party seems tired and unsure of what the whole point of being in government is, beyond holding power for its own sake. The by-election results from Wakefield and Tiverton will all but confirm this, covering two completely different demographics and geographies. The likely defeats will be a symptom of the lack of a narrative that holds the Government together — unlike Thatcher’s crusade against inflation, excessive union power, and unfree markets delivering poor outcomes to consumers.

Ostensibly, Levelling Up is the Government’s mission. But with limited cash or ideological rigour underpinning the policy, claims of ambition, drive and determination ring hollow. It didn’t seem this way two-and-a-half years ago, when the party jettisoned austerity and set sail for new ideological waters. What was remarkable, and remarked upon heavily after the 2019 landslide win, was how far the Tories had reached into former Labour heartlands. Wakefield itself is a prime example of one of these “Red Wall” constituencies. For the first time in generations, it bought into a Tory aspirational narrative. These areas were going to get better, and the Conservatives were going to be the party to make that happen.

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But what wasn’t sufficiently remarked upon at the time was the extent to which this victory was achieved without the youth of Britain’s cities. Instead, it was achieved with a deep dependence on older voters, with over two-thirds of people in their seventies and over voting Tory.

It is easy to imagine that the cities, London in particular, have always been bastions of falafel-eating, Birkenstock-wearing liberals — impregnable Red fortresses owned by the Labour Party since time immemorial. Yet that is to forget that Thatcher’s majorities were achieved with the enthusiastic support of the cities. In London, a full two-thirds of the seats were won by the Conservative party in 1983, compared with only 29% in 2019. By contrast, the 2019 victory was underpinned not by a vision of growth and ambition, but by home-owning pensioners in ex-industrial and ex-mining regions who didn’t usually vote Conservative for cultural reasons, but finally snapped and voted for their own interests.

The traditional diagnosis for the cities turning against the Conservatives is that this split has happened over social and cultural values. Cities are predominantly young, and the young reject the current social and cultural values of the Conservative Party: values typified by the placement of Nadine Dorries as culture secretary, initiatives such as the Rwanda refugee resettlement policy led by home secretary, Priti Patel, and, of course, Brexit.

While this is certainly a significant part of the picture, what is rarely accounted for is the wholesale fiscal and monetary contempt the modern Tory Party has for anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner. Faced with the highest tax burden since the war, the highest inflation in decades, and ever-shifting student loan repayment terms — faced with plummeting rates of homeownership and sky-high house prices that have more than sextupled the time it takes for someone in their late-twenties to save a deposit — why should anyone under-40 vote for the Conservative Party?

And for retirees? As much jam as they want. Pensioner incomes now even exceed working incomes, after tax and housing costs, for the first time in history. The United Kingdom is choosing not to reward those who are building for the future. Instead, the spoils of the Treasury are being diverted to the mediocrity of the already satisfied, whose biggest ambition is driving their Honda Jazz to the local garden centre to buy a plastic lawn they won’t have to bother mowing.

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, at an archetypal and electoral level, the urban yuppie seemed the core demographic of the Conservative Party: young chaps with floppy hair in pinstripe suits striding confidently through the City with ears glued to a mobile telephone the size of a small dog, shouting “Buy buy buy!” These aspirational workers could not have been more enthusiastic for the Thatcherite deregulation of the financial markets and the Lawson tax-cutting budgets.

What changed? Simply put, the core value of the Conservative Party is not deregulation, low taxation or free markets. The core value is power.

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Inside Wakefield's corrupt election

By Jacob Furedi

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Being in government means weilding the ability to shape the country in your image and, just as important, prevent the opposition from shaping it in theirs. But what happens if access to power is shaped not by the distribution of “winners and losers” in society, where pressure builds up over time in living conditions to shift voting behaviour, but by the sheer size of a demographic cohort?

The clue is in the name — baby boomers. The huge increase in post-war births resulted in a great demographic bulge. There are millions more baby boomers than in the following and preceding population cohorts. This has granted baby boomers the advantage of a vast, unified voting bloc. This bloc of voters, owing to their similar age, wealth and health needs, are all likely to have comparable public spending and policy priorities.

With this voting power comes responsibility. But like a Labrador with access to an unlimited supply of sausages, the boomer cohort has not been able to help itself — and has gorged itself until it can barely walk. The triple lock on pensions; ring-fenced NHS and social care spending; low taxation on asset wealth owned by the old, combined with high taxation on income, predominantly earned by the young; avoidance of housing reform. And austerity? That was for the young only.

“The facts of life are Conservative,” said Thatcher. And broadly, it holds true. People like to limit the rate of change in their communities. And once people have built assets, they want to see them protected, and taxed lightly, if at all. But what if people can’t even build an asset base in the first place, because of a combination of planning gridlock and loose monetary policy shooting house prices into the stratosphere? What if they remain vagabonds, moving from rental flat to rental flat, not gaining a sense of community to care about, enrich and protect?

Think back to the ambition of the Right to Buy policy. The politics of enabling homeownership to a generation of striving workers wasn’t lost on the party then. It was a central policy of the government: an opportunity for the aspirant individual to buy into the national project. The party has since betrayed its own orthodoxies for political convenience and power. But through this it has set a potentially terminal trap for itself. If the facts of life are no longer conservative, how can the party build a winning coalition? As the boomer demographic declines, all the party will be left with is a generation of resentful, asset-poor millennials who haven’t seen income growth in decades.

The next election is already looming over this parliament, and the need for a radical policy agenda to challenge this inequality is glaring. Young people already overwhelmingly vote against the Conservative Party, which barely mustered a fifth of the 18-29 vote share in 2019, a year in which it won a landslide victory. Labour already can already rely on this demographic. All that’s left for Labour to go after — which means favourable policies, subsidy and controversy avoidance — is the predominantly Conservative boomer vote. Politics by traffic jam. Pork barrel politics divided by age, not by constituency.

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Did Boris kill conservatism?

By Robert Saunders

Despite this grim outlook, green shoots of ideological rebellion are emerging within Conservative circles. Innovative policy solutions such as Policy Exchange’s Street Votes proposal are being laid down. The party may also seek to focus on building in the cities over the more politically controversial areas with housing shortages in more rural areas. The political risk here is much diminished. What will the heavily Labour city constituencies do if they hate development — vote more heavily against the party that doesn’t hold their seat?

Others in the party are also questioning treasury orthodoxy on investment spending. Abandoned to the Brownites in the 2010s, a perfectly reasonable conservative case can be made for state-spending on infrastructure to lower taxes in the long run because of higher economic growth. The party of business cannot be blind to the fact that businesses require investment to grow and become profitable. If this idea was good enough for Ronald Reagan’s Right-leaning government, it can be good enough for the Tories today.

For now, however, these remain fringe ideas within the party. The discontent is there, and it’s growing, driven by high prices, a decade of stagnant growth and limited policy innovation. If it’s to move forward, the party needs to admit to itself the scale of the ideological tangle it’s got itself into. The national pallor of the late Seventies forced a brave, ideological character to emerge in the form of Thatcher.

Today, after 12 long, tiring years in power, no such figure has emerged. And that doesn’t look like changing. Whether the Wakefield and Tiverton by-elections will serve as a second trigger for leadership challenges is unclear, even with the year-long immunity from a confidence vote that is assured by the 1922 Committee rules. It would only take a rule change from the committee to see Johnson fall. Either way, today’s polls surely mark the beginning of the end of the Johnson era.

Who will follow is anyone’s guess, though it seems likely they will disappoint. After all, which Tory will be brave enough to challenge, let alone destroy, the boomer-led satisfaction with national mediocrity?