Why Prosper UK will never prosper

They cannot see that they are the reason they are out of power

“Making the Conservative Party electable was the mission I was given when I took on the leadership. When I became prime minister, my central task was to turn our economy around.” David Cameron, For The Record, 2019

This is a very difficult essay to write.

For my sins, I was a great believer in David Cameron and the ‘modernising’ project. Young and naïve as I was, I accepted many of the arguments that were made at that time. New Labour had overspent leaving us vulnerable to the financial crisis. Our welfare system and public services were wasteful and diminished personal responsibility. The Conservative Party had to accept that the country had changed for the better and that its job was simply to balance the books, back business, incentivise public services, cut welfare and get out of the way.

In my defence, David Cameron was a very good politician. I was privileged to hear him speak many times and he could command a room. He was also supported by a group of good politicians. They were not ‘Great Men’, as Carlyle would have defined them. They did not seek to shape their age or demonstrate great intellect or courage, but they were effective in the practicalities of politics and government.

And that last point, their effectiveness, brings us to Prosper UK.

Prosper UK’s supporters include 3 former Lord Chancellors, 2 former Chancellors of the Exchequer, a former Deputy Prime Minister, a former Home Secretary, a former Foreign Secretary and a former Chairman of the Conservative Party. It does not include David Cameron, Theresa May or Rishi Sunak, but I imagine that all three would be sympathetic to it.

The point is that these people were in charge. They were the establishment of the Conservative Party for twenty years. How have they ended up on the outside of not only their own party, but also government and politics more broadly?

Their argument, I imagine, would be one word. Brexit.

Brexit warped politics. The Cameroonian centrism that I subscribed to, that they argue won at least two elections (I’d argue it only really barely won one - 2015), was thrown off course by Brexit. The referendum unleashed forces within the right that saw people junk ‘what the country wanted’ to pursue their ideological obsession with leaving the European Union. People like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, even Danny Kruger (who had been DC’s Speech Writer) were radicalised. To win The Brexit Wars, these people put the party into the hands of the ‘Common Sense Group’, the ‘No Turning Back Group’, backbenchers and party members that Prosper UK would no doubt see as the unreformed dark underbelly of the Conservative Party. By a fluke, these people won the election in 2019 (another essay for another time). However, it was never sustainable and now the Conservative Party needs to go back to where it was in 2015 because we were on the right course.

For the sake of argument let’s agree that Brexit is the reason for their defenestration. The next question is obvious: why did Brexit happen?

Whole books have been written on this, but my view is simple. Brexit was a rejection of the political economy that the Conservatives had created in the 1980s, New Labour had maintained and the Conservatives tried to revive in the wake of the financial crisis.

The Conservatives were already unpopular before the Brexit referendum and had barely won a majority against a weak Labour Party in 2015 (it also nearly lost power to Corbyn in 2017).

On the eve of the Brexit Referendum, Ipsos Mori found that Cameron’s net satisfaction rating was already -30%, as was the government’s. David Cameron was actually tied with Jeremy Corbyn on public satisfaction. Nigel Farage had just overtaken Cameron. Beyond a brief period ahead of the 2015 general election, where voters had broken for Cameron over Miliband, satisfaction had been sliding down for some time. On the economy, Ipsos found that 47% of people thought the government was doing a bad job. The Conservatives had just a 2pt lead over Corbyn’s Labour! Tim Farron was leader of the Liberal Democrats! This was the weakest political opposition since the mid-1980s. YouGov had the Tory lead at 3pts at the end of May 2016. Opinium 6pts. Whatever way you cut it, a half-decent opposition would have been in the lead.

Brexit did not blow the Conservative Party off course. It did not destroy Cameroonian centrism. The Conservative Party itself had already done that.

How had it done that? Simple. Through effective implementation of the policies that it had advocated in opposition and then put into effect during the Coalition period. Prosper UK’s supporters were good at governing, they did what they wanted.

The Austerity Programme was a catastrophic mistake which accelerated a downward spiral that was already taking place. The books did need to be balanced but they certainly did not need to the dramatically balanced in a low-interest rate environment and the manner they were done was totally flawed. The Conservative Party had come to see the public spending of New Labour as pure waste, just a sop to voters. They could not accept that expanding public services and welfare was propping up a failed economic model that had deindustrialised and hollowed out communities. Replacing old industries with nothing. This was a model that the Conservatives had kicked off when they were last in government. Spending cuts, without a new economic model, worsened deep seated social and economic problems and was directly correlated to Brexit voting.

The Coalition was New Labour but without any populist public spending, it would survive and fall purely on the strength of its governing philosophy. It fell.

The Conservative Party could not seriously countenance a new economic model because its Panglossian philosophy was the market was always right - this is what backing business meant. If the economy was the way it was, it was because that is what was right. There is no alternative. If businesses wanted corporation tax slashed, they should have it. If they wanted red tape cut, they should have it. If they wanted devolution, they should have it. The immigration system should be as liberal as possible to help them, providing it did not prevent re-election. The only areas they resisted were on planning and environmental regulation. The former where the ‘establishment’ consensus, including business, was to be seen to be green and the latter because voters did not want to be disturbed by new housing. It was necessary to reduce house building to appease the coalition that sustained the ‘back business’ mantra. The Conservative Party’s view was that the British economy was the best of all possible worlds. It was wrong.

On public services, we were not getting good value for money from spending, but that’s because public services were focused on picking up the pieces for a broken society (as Cameron himself identified). Yet we did not seek to fix that social model because it would have required a different economic structure which would have mean admitting business and the market was wrong. So public services are in a doom loop of ever growing demand but with little being done to tackle the fundamental causes of poor levels of education, anti-social behaviour, family breakdown etc.

I do not honestly think that anyone can genuinely say that Britain was stronger and more unified in 2016. Events have shown the hollowness of the project. The Cameroonian’s two missions - electability and economic rejuvenation - both failed.

It is true that the Conservatives won in 2015, but that is because it was a choice between two options, one of which was damaged Labour Party that was still battered by its own long period in office. Brexit was the first opportunity that people had had since 1979 to simply reject the status quo, without picking an alternative. A chance to say “No”. They took it. Despite the vast majority of British politics, British business, the media and academia urging them not to do so.

The key point for the Cameroons is that it was, still, a close run thing. The choices made in office tipped the scales. People were persuaded to say no because they had come to see the system was not working. The financial crisis was not a blip. It exposed a political economy that never worked but which had been juiced with record exports in financial services and a strong pound that reduced the cost of imports. Take that away and what was left?

All this is water under the bridge, you might say. True. However, there is absolutely nothing to indicate that founders and supporters Prosper UK have learnt any lessons. Not simply that they made mistakes, but the whole governing project was doomed to failure and is the reason why they are out of power today. Reading their website and launch, bar some foot shuffling on migration, its very much back to the future.

I am sympathetic to one of the emotional drivers of the project. To heal the country after years of division. But their policies widening the divisions. The Coalition’s time in office was not the soothing balm it could have been, it was rubbing salt into the wounds.

There is a certain comedy in the fact that the supporters of Prosper UK do not seem to realise that they are the reason why Prosper UK needs to be created in the first place. Not Brexit. Not Boris. Not Truss. Not Kemi. They threw themselves out of power through their own actions. They were good, too good, at delivering their own project.

Amber Rudd once said about Boris Johnson that "[h]e’s the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.”

Prosper UK’s supporters are like a drunk driver who has just smashed their own car asking if they can use yours whilst still holding a bottle of Jack Daniels.

I used to think you were the life and soul of the party, but now, I just feel sorry for you.