Conservative Party conference special: Fighting non-Brexit battles on multiple fronts

Afternoon all,

Labour conference and their Brexit bun fight* is done. Luckily nothing like that is going to happen when the Conservatives gather in Birmingham this weekend. They don’t call Boris Johnson a backstabber team player for nothing…

More interesting in Liverpool than Labour’s Brexit shuffle was the extra detail of and focus on the Party’s plan for economic renewal/revolution. And while Brexit/Boris may well take the headlines this weekend, there’s likely to be a similar battle of ideas behind the scenes in Birmingham for the Conservatives – and there are some big challenges for serious Tory thinkers to wrestle with, as this week’s reading selection sets out.

Have a good weekend,

Torsten
Director, Resolution Foundation

*Bun fight yes – but don’t get over excited by standing ovations or supposed olive branches. The Party leadership don’t want a referendum or to vote for the Government’s Brexit deal either. As Theresa May would say, “nothing has changed” when it comes to Labour’s real Brexit position: this is someone else’s problem.

Freedom fight or reform grittily? There’s a lot of Conservative angsting going around pre-Conference – here’s a selection: Sam Gyimah thinks the party isn’t pro-business enough, Robert Halfon thinks it isn’t pro-worker enough, and Jacob Rees-Mogg wants more done about family (actual not political) breakdown. None of them offer much by way solutions but, beyond Brexit rows, there are two tribes of emerging Tory thinkers that are worth paying attention to – the ‘Freedom Fighters’ and the ‘Gritty Reformers’. The former are swashbuckling free marketeers that want a renewed Thatcherism that puts freedom and liberty up in lights. Liz Truss is enjoying some Freedom Fighting – sometimes a bit too much (stay away from her Instagram…). The ‘Gritty Reformers’ are what happens when you take the Notting Hill set out of Notting Hill and include the likes of Neil O’Brien and Nick Boles. This group builds on the Cameron era recognition that the Conservative Party’s brand is a disaster that can’t be saved by more Thatcherism. But instead of Cameron’s husky hugging, they get that modernisation is aboutdelivering economic change for working people and reconnecting well beyond the M25. When Brexit is long gone, this is the real battle for the soul of the Conservative Party.

‘Rentquaking’: An example of where the Freedom Fighters and Gritty Reformers will have to fight it out is housing. Some new number crunching out today argues that the Tories face an existential threat from the lack of support amongst renters. In place of the claimed ‘youthquake’ interpretation of the 2017 election, it argues that a ‘rentquake’ was the real story. It finds that that three in ten renters who voted Tory in 2015 switched their vote last year, with three quarters of them shifting to Labour, and to add to Tory gloom adds that in key marginals people are more pessimistic about housing than any other issue. And remember, don’t mistake all renters as being young twenty-somethings – many of them have kids and are closer to 40. Tellingly, the Sun also turns on the government on this issue, saying they ‘hope the poll revealing voters in marginal seats deserting the Tories over sky-high rents is enough to stir the Government from its paralysis’. The Freedom Fighter answer to this is to remove any planning restrictions you can see, while the Gritty Reformers tend to also want stronger rights for tenants.

Townies: Our politics is very focused on Britain’s towns at present – with the claim being that this is a necessary backlash against an exclusive focus on big cities in the past. On the Labour side towns have got their own thinktank and even a new party political broadcast, which some Tories are reportedly impressed by. But Labour’s focus on towns is in part a reflection of the fact that the Conservatives did relatively well in 2017 in many poorer towns – including the likes of Mansfield. But the correct political insight that towns matter for who wins the next General Election is not the same as saying either party has an economic prescription for helping towns that have had a tough few decades. A new paper from Centre for Cities provides a useful guide to anyone thinking about that tough question. Its conclusion? This isn’t about a competition between towns and cities – in fact amongst the most important thing needed for a town to do well in 21st Century Britain is that it is able to benefit from having a thriving city nearby….

Millennial myth-busting: The big electoral takeaway of recent years is that political parties on all sides will need to find new ways to talk to different generations. For the Tories, as I discussed in a blog last week, this is very much a case of finding out how to appeal to under-40s once more. But how should this be done – more by appealing to generations’ identities or their economic interests? A recent article debunks many of the myths around millennials’ identities (on top of those about avocados skewered by our Intergenerational Commission), and finds that for the USA, at least, there’s been little change between millennials and their elders in terms of egotism, happiness, or loneliness. What is different however is their economic situation: millennials might not all have the same politics, but they are unified in facing equally grim prospects of ever owning homes…

In praise of May: Conservative Conference will be full of chat about who replaces Theresa May once the small matter of Brexit is out the way. But before just giving her the heave ho, Conservatives should give thought to what a rare thing she is – a female prime minister economist (the PM started her career at the Bank of England). A (depressing) new study from the Banque de France digs into the lack of women in economics today. There are challenges galore: fewer female economics students, fewer professors, less tweeting, less following of women economists on Twitter even when they’re on it. But given this is a paper from the French central bank they obviously can’t help but point out that France does a lot better than us or the US when it comes to women in economics. And fair enough – they’ve had Christine Lagarde as a finance minister and then head of the IMF in just the last few years. We still haven’t had our first female Chancellor of the Exchequer…

Chart of the week: When you’re looking for what’s behind a lot of the political economy debates today, sometimes it’s good to go back to basics. The big thing underpinning a lot of this is economic growth, or rather the lack of it, as our chart of the week shows. Plugging in the latest national accounts data from earlier today shows that we’ve just experienced the weakest decade of GDP per capita growth since the early 1950s. And back then they at least had the excuse of a second world war. Fix this problem, and maybe the rest will follow. Maybe…