Good morning. Westminster heads off for recess later today worn and confused. Let me know any questions or topics you want covered over the next two weeks by hitting reply.
Today, some thoughts on the growing number of Tory MPs who can’t find much to celebrate after 14 years in office.
Then, Michael Lind investigates the farmers’ revolt that is spreading from country to country, and Ben looks at which Conservatives their 2019 voter base still believe in.
Subscribe to Morning Call for the full second article, Ben’s take and Mailshot here:
Some Tory MPs grimace when you mention austerity. “We went too far,” they will admit in private. Boris Johnson’s election in 2019 was a recognition that the programme had to be reversed. His promise to hire 20,000 police officers was a commitment to replace those that had been laid off since 2010. Levelling up chimed with the sense that cutting local government budgets by 40 per cent had been a bad idea. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, told Anoosh in 2022 that social care cuts “went too far” and had proved to be a “silent killer”.
Sam Knight has written a long report in the New Yorker which is worth quoting. He tells a story of a country whose decline was quickened by austerity and Brexit – both decisions made by a governing party that the public continued to re-elect. “Austerity has contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism,” he writes, “an aversion to thinking about the future. ‘It is a mood,’ Johnna Montgomerie, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. ‘A depression, a chronic case of financial melancholia.’”
David Willetts, a minister under David Cameron, told Knight: “The burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less affluent half of the British population.” Giles Wilkes, who was a Lib Dem staffer at the time, said: “It was very obvious in real time… there wasn’t a central function going, ‘Hold on a mo. Have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent sort of police system?’”
Alongside the self-recrimination, a ruthless picture emerges of George Osborne creating the political cover to squeeze the state without losing office:
“The word ‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and David Cameron,” Osborne said. “Austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after the Second World War. “The word didn’t have the connotations then that it does now,” Osborne recalled. “It was, you know, a bit like prudence.”
And austerity was, according to Osborne, “devastatingly politically effective”. The former chancellor tries to cast the policy as an inevitability, even when most other countries went in a different direction after the 2008 financial crash. But other Tories baulk at the devastation that austerity wrought. Why the shift in attitudes? There is mounting evidence, such as the Marmot report, that public-sector decay is a consequence of austerity. Some note the programme’s contribution to the vote for Brexit. Others sense that the Overton window – the range of acceptable opinion – has shifted against austerity and are stretching to ensure that the light from that window shines in their faces.
Freddie’s picks
A necessary corrective from Sohrab Ahmari on whether Donald Trump actually meant there would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win.
“Swathes of privately educated men have infested London’s bars, clubs, DJ sets and workforces with the deranged notion that they should speak with an entirely affected accent. Why? Because they don’t know how to be themselves.”
Nick Timothy, who is standing to become a Tory MP, sets out the grim, pinched, impoverished future that awaits us all (Telegraph).
And, not or – that’s our approach. While today we’re mostly in oil and gas, we increased the proportion of our global annual investment that went into our lower carbon & other transition businesses from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023. bp.com/AndNotOr
The farmers’ revolt against green politics by Michael Lind
Throughout Europe, rural rebels are mobilising in protest by honking horns and wielding tractors rather than pitchforks. The current wave of farmer protests began last year in Poland, then spread to Germany and France, inspiring uprisings in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania and, recently, Wales.
In 2018, the streets of central Paris were barricaded by the gilets jaunes or yellow vests movement. This began, like many of the recent protests, as a demonstration against fuel price rises justified by environmental concerns and whose costs fell chiefly on the inhabitants and businesses of the non-metropolitan periphery. In the Netherlands in March last year, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), symbolised by tractor convoys, gained enough support from opponents of the Dutch establishment to become the biggest party in the upper house of its parliament. The movement was started in 2019 by critics of government plans to reduce nitrogen emissions by eliminating thousands of farms and reducing livestock numbers. Likewise, Welsh farmers are protesting against a proposed sustainable farming scheme that includes strict controls on fertilisers and which could cut both livestock and labour on Welsh farms by 11 per cent.
Some have dismissed such protests as far-right conspiracies against liberal democracy, and indeed right-wing extremists have sometimes sought to exploit them for political gain. Other critics dismiss the farmers as members of a pampered special interest group, whining about withdrawals of unjustified subsidies or objecting to reasonable regulations. But right-wing extremists and fuel and agriculture subsidies have existed for generations. Only factors unique to the present conjuncture can explain these similar, near-simultaneous uprisings.
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