This is a sort of companion piece to my earlier post
about the centre-left in UK politics
I complain a lot about the UK media and its coverage of economic issues, so I should in fairness note the
occasions when it does its job well. Here
is Newsnight last night - look around 18 minutes in. The House of
Lords have just voted to delay Osborne’s cuts to tax credits. We
have a discussion chaired by Evan
Davis
between the Labour peer who helped achieve that vote, and two Conservative
politicians: Jacob
Rees-Mogg
from the right of the party and Tim
Montgomerie
from the left.
The first good point is when Rees-Mogg trots out the standard
government line that although these cuts to tax credits will hurt the
working poor (a lot), taken as a package with the increase in the
minimum wage and changes to tax thresholds they will not. Everyone,
including Evan Davis (who once worked at the IFS), turns on him to
tell him he is wrong. That is good journalism: when a government
tells lies they should be called out. Rees-Mogg’s response about
being naive in trusting his Chancellor is a delight.
In contrast Montgomerie acknowledges what the cuts do and how
contrary they are to the government’s rhetoric about helping people
into work and reducing poverty. The second, and even better point, is
when at the end Davis asks Montgomerie where on earth he thought the
pre-election welfare savings the Conservatives proposed were going to
come from if it was not cuts to tax credits. It was an excellent
question, and the response was I suspect quite honest (as Montgomerie
tends to be). The Conservatives never expected to win the election.
Instead their manifesto was an initial bargaining position, and
things like cuts in tax credits were expected to be traded away in
coalition negotiations.
This tells you how weak the centre-right is within the Conservative
party right now. If the Chancellor and the majority of Conservative
MPs thought the same way as Montgomerie, then their response to their
election victory would not be to carry out the elements in the
manifesto they expected to bargain away. It would be so easy for the
Chancellor after the election to find some pretext not to cut tax
credits. Instead Osborne went ahead, hoping that his control of so
much of the media (and what the Treasury publishes) would mean that
he could get away with the gulf between what he claims and what he
actually does.
The weakness of the centre-right in UK politics has been masked
for a long time by Cameron’s pre-2010 spin, a few progressive
social policies and the restraining hand of the Liberal Democrats
within the coalition. As I wrote in that earlier post,
I strongly suspect a strong political centre (left or right) is vital
for good governance, and that both the UK and Europe is suffering
from its absence.The big question people like Montgomerie have to
address is why, over the next five years, they will not suffer
the
same
fate
as the centre-right within the Republican party in the US.
