Can’t-do Britain is paralysed by political cakeism

Everyone wants stronger growth, but nobody wants to accept the hard choices necessary to achieving it

This Tory party conference has woken up with a terrible hangover (though not me, since you ask, because I opted for an unaccustomed early night). But rarely have I seen so much drinking in one place. Glasses of tepid Chardonnay, necked in despair at the Hyatt hotel bar. Pint after pint sloshed down the hatch into the slough of despond. A period in opposition might be just what the party needs, mutter some Conservative MPS. Was the Roman Empire putting it away like this when the Visigoths breached the Salarian Gate?

Last year’s conference had an oddly jubilant air about it – eerily so, I wrote at the time, given the spiralling petrol prices and chaos outside the conference hall. This one feels closer to a mass therapy session, with alcohol as the preferred medication. But perhaps the biggest hangover is yet to come.

We will study last month’s minibudget for years as a masterclass in appalling communication and strategy.

Conservatives forfeit their reputation for sound money at their peril but now any spare fiscal capacity has been swallowed up by the gargantuan energy bailout. Interest rates were already rising before the “fiscal event”; now the Government will shoulder the blame. The Cabinet has splintered into different warring factions – each of which is, like Tolstoy’s unhappy family, unhappy in its own way.

But Liz Truss’s central analysis of the problem afflicting Britain remains accurate: it has become almost impossible to do, or build, anything. This is true on a practical level; but the past week has also shown just how fiendish it is politically. Almost everyone insists they want more growth; that more young people should be able to buy a home, that people should be in work rather than on benefits. But when a solution is presented, especially a potentially difficult one, nobody wants to listen. Tory MPS may have ousted Boris Johnson, but the “cakeism” which defined his administration lives on.

Tory rebels seem to want faster growth, but not if the tax cuts Truss deems necessary to boost the economy are paid for by borrowing (fair enough). Yet they also won’t countenance spending reductions that would, in turn, pay for falling taxation. Many want benefits and pensions to rise in line with inflation. A growing number of departments, such as health, are, in practice, politically untouchable. Slashing taxes isn’t the only route to growth, but other solutions, including planning liberalisation, seem equally far off – and no doubt will be less popular with disgruntled backbenchers after the past week. The whole system, sluggish and debt-addled, seems unsustainable, yet it is also impossible to do anything about it.

Some MPS have even reached a point where they’re rebelling against their own core beliefs; so paralysed are they by the pursuit of positive reinforcement, Twitter likes, focus group vibes and polls instead of long-term results. In some ways, I don’t blame them. Taking part in one TV programme recently, I encountered a wall of Schadenfreude at the Tories’ woes; presenters, guests and producers made little attempt to conceal their overwhelming glee at the “enemy’s” discomfiture.

A feverish political climate – driven by social media and the 24-hour media cycle – means that hard choices are rarely interrogated and outrage often overwhelms the truth. Few have analysed the knee-jerk assumption that the nation’s mortgage pain was entirely the result of the mini-budget, or the overblown claim that the Bank of England spent “£65billion” propping up the gilts market (so far, it has spent less than £4billion, and may yet claw that money back). The result? It’s become increasingly difficult for policies that are unpopular in the short term to be pushed through, destroying long-term decision-making in the process.

But it’s not just the Tories who have grown accustomed to having their cake and eating it. Before the Kwarteng minibudget, the Economist commissioned Ipsos Mori to assess public opinion on the economy. The results showed a remarkably similar attitude. Respondents liked the idea of growth, while rejecting the trade-offs that would actually boost it. In addition, voters tend to underplay our reliance on the taxes of the wealthy to fund public services, and the fact that once the well-heeled start deserting Britain, ordinary taxpayers must make up the shortfall.

Politics has been moving steadily Left-wards ever since the financial crisis, but the pandemic crossed a Rubicon in the public’s relationship with the state. We grew so accustomed to being “bailed out” by an all-protective government that now we barely blink when hundreds of billions are dropped – nay, we expect it, and with no thought as to how it will ever be paid for.

The same cakeism will no doubt afflict the next government in its quest for painless solutions to our problems. Labour, born-again inflation hawks, talk a good game, but their spending plans are essentially the Tory approach plus some extra billions on green projects and a few more question-marks over how it is all to be funded. Sooner rather than later, I expect, we’ll give socialism or social democracy a whirl. Surprise surprise, that won’t deliver the goods either. Another period of denial and disillusionment will surely follow. How long will it take us to realise that there are no easy escape routes or simple solutions – only hard choices?