David Cameron’s big conference speech yesterday was depressing because it was completely brilliant. A man who has spent his term in government coming out with policies that repeatedly kick the poor, the young and the vulnerable, is now rubbing them on the head and going “just kidding mate”. And he did it really convincingly. But of course, there were plenty of instances of empty rhetoric and bullshit to get our heads around if we are to understand what he was really saying.
So, let’s go through it chunk by chunk.
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THE PRE-MATCH POMP
He walked into the hall after a motivational video with a “best hits” of Tory soundbites had played, soundtracked by The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done”. Then he crowed about winning the Scottish Independence Referendum and still ruling over a load of people who voted for only one of his MPs. Then he did a weird impression of William Hague’s Yorkshire accent and managed to kind of pull it off, before calling Hague, “the greatest living Yorkshireman”. And then he stopped clowning around and got to the point.
FOND MEMORIES OF THE COALITION
“We’ve delivered a lot these past four years but we’ve had to do it all in a coalition government. Believe me: coalition was not what I wanted to do; it’s what I had to do. And I know what I want next. To be back here in October 2015 delivering Conservative policies, based on Conservative values, leading a majority Conservative Government.”
Cameron alerted the nation to the depressing possibility that, with the Lib Dems’ free-falling in opinion polls, the next election could open the floodgates of unadulterated David Cameron; Cameron-plus; the kind of Cameron that can get on doing things his way without Nick Clegg making sad faces at him over piffling civil rights abuses. We could have George Osborne’s austerity without Vince Cable writing facetious op-eds in the Times about how his own government’s economic policy is shit. We will be looking back to the coalition as a golden era of compromise. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that things could be worse, though it’s less enjoyable to be warned of the likelihood that they soon will be.
DAVID CAMERON IS A COOL GUY WHO DOESN’T CARE ABOUT GRAPHS
He continued, “I love this country – and my goal is this: To make Britain a country that everyone is proud to call home. That doesn’t just mean having the fastest-growing economy, or climbing some international league table. I didn’t come into politics to make the lines on the graphs go in the right direction. I want to help you live a better life.” The humblebrag about the economy would be more impressive had the government not presided over the longest period of stagnation on record. More to the point, Cameron doesn’t care about climbing league tables because Britain is around the bottom of so many good ones – like using renewable energy – and top of so many bad ones – like children being depressed and dying young, that kind of thing.
HORRIBLE, DEPRESSING FULL EMPLOYMENT
“A Britain that everyone is proud to call home is a Britain where hard work is really rewarded,” he said, spelling out his vision. Unfortunately, hard work is rewarded less and less in Cameron’s Britain, as since 2010 real earnings have fallen for the longest period since records began 50 years ago.
“And by the way,” he said, “you never pull one person up by pulling another one down.” Unfortunately, this is exactly what George Osborne did yesterday in capping benefits, when he said, “The fairest way to reduce welfare bills is to make sure that benefits are not rising faster than the wages of the taxpayers who are paying for them.” In other words, Osborne was saying wages are stagnating, so we’re going to make people who can’t find a job even poorer to make up for that.
Cameron put flesh on the bones. “So here’s our commitment for the next five years. What the economists would call: the highest employment rate of any major economy. What I call: full employment in Britain. Just think of what that would mean. Those who can work, able to work standing on their own two feet, looking at their children and thinking ‘I am providing for you.’” If the last few years are anything to go by, the reality will be people who struggle to provide for their kids slogging through too many hours in their crappy, low-paid jobs to ever see them.
Trade unionists protesting against public sector cuts in July (Photo by Hannah Ewens)
WHO NEEDS BENEFITS WHEN EVERYONE HAS SEVERAL BADLY PAID JOBS?
Meanwhile, those who can’t find work will be forced into endless hoop jumping in job centres: “With us, if you’re out of work, you will get unemployment benefit but only if you go to the Job Centre, update your CV, attend interviews and accept the work you’re offered.”
If the unemployed are forced into work on pain of losing the dole, I guess there’s absolutely no incentive for employers to make jobs more bearable, or pay more. Don’t worry though, the minimum wage will soon rise to £7, he said – which is completely inadequate and those earning it will still be in poverty, but his speechwriters decided not to mention that.
Coupled with the removal of benefits for the under 21s, which will give them the choice of “earning or learning” – which really means poverty or student debt – Cameron is trying to turn Britain into a place where there is a badly paid job for everyone whether they want it or not. But don’t worry, zero-hour contracts that stop you taking other jobs will be scrapped, so people are “free to take on different jobs so they can get on”. Yes, if you want to go straight from your cleaning shift to an overnight security job, you can! Nobody will stop you taking multiple minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet. And that’s freedom.
THE POOR CAN KEEP EVERY PENNY OF THEIR POVERTY WAGES
Then Cameron gave Britain’s impoverished workers a break. Specifically, you’ll get to earn £12,000 before you pay any tax, rather that £10,500. Cameron was pleased to announce that this will take a million poor people out of paying taxes altogether. Meanwhile, people earning twice the average salary also get a tax break. Right now if you earn £41,900, you qualify for the 40p tax rate. That threshold will rise to £50,000. “We want to cut more of your taxes. But we can only do that if we keep on cutting the deficit,” he said.
This gives the game away. He could, in fact, partly cut the deficit by raising taxes – say, on the rich, and corporations – so that the government has more money coming in. Instead he’s pretending he can only manage to cut tax if he cuts the deficit. So here, “deficit” is kind of a byword for public sector spending. He also promised to cut taxes for those poor defenceless corporations.
This will presumably mean he’s paying for tax cuts through even bigger public service cuts – and he promised £25 billion more austerity in this speech. Who’s going to feel those cuts the worst? Yup, the guys at the bottom who are supposed to be celebrating not paying tax any more. The conceit was summed up in the big rhetorical moment that he was hoping to see replayed as a highlight on the evening news: “So with us, if you work 30 hours a week on minimum wage, you will pay no income tax at all. Nothing. Zero. Zilch.” If you work 30 hours a week on £7 an hour, that amounts to £210. “Nothing. Zero. Zilch,” is also the amount of fun you’ll have with that much money in a world where the welfare state has been stripped away to almost nothing.
SCHOOLBOY INSULTS
Then he moved onto education and decided to call Labour hypocritical. “Tristram Hunt, their Shadow Education Secretary – like me – had one of the best educations money can buy, he said. “But guess what? He won’t allow it for your children.” It would be great if Labour was planning to ban private schools, if only to diversify the backgrounds of politicians shouting at each other in party speeches, but it’s not. Basically he used this section to bash Labour for “taking its cue from the unions”, which in this case means not totally ignoring teachers’ opinions about how they do their jobs.
Anti-NHS-privatisation protesters last year in Manchester last year (Photo by Chris Bethell)
THE NHS
He continued ragging on Labour, calling out their “complete and utter lies” that the NHS is not safe under the Tories. “I just think: how dare you,” he said, with some fairly believable outrage from a man who genuinely has relied on the NHS to help his disabled son. I just hope he got equally pissy at his own Health Minister, after VICE’s Solomon Hughes revealed that George Freeman held a behind closed doors meeting funded by Bupa to chat about starting to make people pay to go to the doctors. Meanwhile, the Green Party pointed out that the pledge to raise NHS spending doesn’t really mean anything, since its budget has increased every single year since 1951.
LET’S BUILD LESS THAN HALF THE NUMBER OF HOUSES WE NEED
“Young people watched Location, Location, Location not as a reality show – but as fantasy,” said Cameron. “We’re going to build 100,000 new homes,” he said, “and they’ll be twenty percent cheaper than normal. But here’s the crucial part. Buy-to-let landlords won’t be able to snap them up. Wealthy foreigners won’t be able to buy them. Just first-time buyers under the age of 40.”
If it happens, this is undoubtedly a policy that will bring about some touching scenes of people sitting proudly in their first homes in a BBC retrospective about the late 2010s by whoever’s filling Andrew Marr’s shoes in the 2050s. 100,000 does sound like a lot of houses, but it’s half as many as Labour have pledged to build every year by 2020. Both pledges fall massively short of the target housing charity Shelter have said is needed, which is 250,000 every year. David Cameron said, “Homes built for you, homes made for you – the Conservative Party, once again, the party of home ownership in our country.” But it looks like both Labour and the Conservatives will in fact still be the parties of not nearly enough homes.
THE DEPRESSING CONCLUSION
After some anti-immigrant nods to UKIP, it was time to wrap up. “It doesn’t matter whether Parliament is hung, drawn or quartered, there is only one real choice,” he said.“The Conservatives or Labour. Me in Downing Street, or Ed Miliband in Downing Street.” That was probably the most truthful part of the speech, and easily the most depressing.
Thanks to John Weeks, Professor Emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London for his assistance with this article.
More from the party conferences:
Irving Welsh Isn’t Happy with George Osborne Ripping Off Trainspotting
Private Health Lobbyists Are Funding a Meeting with a Tory Minister
The Labour Party Conference Was a Playground for Corporate Lobbyists
Ed Miliband’s Big Minimum Wage Pay Rise Is Actually Pretty Small
