This supposedly clever barb – you can actually buy Kier Starmer flip-flops from the Conservative Party Shop – is, to say the least, ironic. Flip-flop? I mean, look at the post coalition years since 2015, when the Conservatives have been in office.
It’s been a torrid time, what with Brexit, the Grenfell disaster, the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve had five prime ministers, seven chancellors (that’s almost one per year), six environment secretaries and 12 (count them) housing ministers – some of them barely having time to take their coat off before they were heading for the door.
The Conservatives sweated the small stuff. They also sweated the big stuff. We started off with fiscally prudent posh boys, Dave and George, in number 10 and number 11 (it’s got a bit confusing who lives were). This was familiar territory – privilege in a polo shirt. But there was something different about them. Not only did they acknowledge that ‘the north’ (of England) existed – they launched and appeared to believe in a ‘northern renaissance’ and even a ‘midlands engine’. Good God.
The Brexit vote happened – an under-whelming endorsement for an idiotic policy that has benefited no-one, apart from hedge fund managers who sought lower taxes and patriotically ‘shorted’ their own currency. Dave left in a huff. Things got really strange then. The new incumbent of number 10 was Home Counties Theresa, with her pointy leopard skin footwear hinting at a personality that she did not possess. Theresa badged herself as a ‘nice Conservative’ while blowing on a dog whistle and making the UK hostile to its Afro Caribbean citizens. There was a touch of Abigail’s party about the ‘dancing queen’. But she wasn’t comfortable in her own skin. How could she be as a ‘nice Conservative’.
It had dawned on the people of these four nations long before her botched election of 2017 and her car crash conference speech that October, when a letter F dropped off the wall behind her out of sheer embarrassment, that it had made a dreadful mistake. Prime minister? She could host a dinner party, but the guests would leave early. Hammond her money guy at number 11 raised cautious pessimism to an art form. He made Gordon Brown look reckless. And then? OMG. Bullingdon Club Bojo – Churchill in clown shoes.
The man’s delusional self-belief and knockabout antics, matched with a willingness to lie at all times made us smile – at first. He stormed the 2019 election like caustic soda unblocking a drain – admittedly against an ineffective opponent. And then. The mould of doubt crept acros the ceiling. We had messed up again! Shouldn’t there be an HR policy for appointing prime ministers, some people wonderered – psychometric testing, a lie detector? Lend this man your car and he would lose the keys. You wouldn’t let him anywhere near the sherrry bottle.
Disjointed narrative
The national narrative has never been more disjointed. It’s not just the flip-flopping of the personalities of our anointed leaders – from almost normal seeming and competent (Dave and Theresa), to recklessly flamboyant (Boris), to mad (that women who gate-crashed the number 10 party with poppers and bondage gear) then back to dull – head boy Rishi, with his shiny prefect’s badge and his carefully polished shoes.
It's also a policy thing. Johnson laid waste to the economic theories of Hayek, Thatcher’s free-market god, and a hero to Dave and Theresa. He was a fiscally incontinent turbo-charged Keynesian who threw money around like a drunken sailor. He knew that there was life in the north of England, like Cameron and Osborne did, but he actually went there (avoiding Liverpool of course) and flashed the cash.
The David Blaine of politics, he hypnotized and bribed people north of Watford into voting for him! That’s simply not Conservative. One can go shooting in the north or even represent a constituency there (Baldwin had Bewdley, MacMillan had Stockton-on-Tees) – but, for a true Conservative, the job of the north is to embody a plucky form of failure, not to be an electoral base or an economic powerhouse.
In some ways, Conservative policies are reverting to type after the hallucinatory madness of Johnson and Truss (that was her name – did that really happen?). The brief revival of the north that Dave and George laid the groundwork for and Boris nurtured is being killed off by neglect and indifference. Rishi, the man who tried to buy groceries with a Blockbuster card, is not really that bothered about the north and he doesn’t get net zero.
Flip-flopping? Aside from macroeconomic policy yawing around like a crippled oil tanker and Boris’s flirtation with fascism, there haven’t really been coherent policies as one would recognise them in the past eight years. One of the main reasons for this, in my submission, is the mercurial figure of Michael Gove. He is a politician with a brain and a work ethic, who leaves unfulfilled projects and a trail of disaster behind him, rather like John Prescott did, but for different reasons.
As environment secretary, between 2017 and 2019, he shepherded a surprisingly not terrible Environment Act into life, which set a credible template for a post EU Britain, respectful of the environment and net zero. And he laid the basis for a waste and resources strategy designed to increase recycling rates and make the UK economy more circular. Since he left the job, no-one has been in charge. The waste and resources strategy is a shambles – it’s not happening – and the government is backing away from its net zero commitments as fast as it can, even though half of Europe is spontaneously combusting.
At the moment Thérèse Coffey, is nominally running things as Defra secretary, but she convinces no-one in her defence of privatised water companies, which are clearly more interested in shareholders receiving dividends than stopping sewage flowing into rivers and the sea. And she has done nothing to demonstrate that the UK’s commitment to achieve net zero by 2030 carries any conviction.
Gove was also the main architect of levelling up – the name of a well-intentioned policy aspiration, inherited from Cameron, Osborne and Johnson, a department and a piece of legislation. When he left that portfolio, in July 2022, the levelling up policy was dumped in a skip, like your mum and dad’s CD collection. Confusingly, he is now back in the role – a job that he is quite good at. But he won’t be around for long. The name ‘levelling up’ is becoming embarrassing. It won’t survive the next departmental re-organisation.
Consistent inconsistency
Which brings us to other areas of policy discontinuity. Cameron and Osborne built quite a lot of houses – although they didn’t like social housing – why would they? They were too posh to understand it. They began to re-organise planning in a sensible and logical way and set up some solid and credible skills and employment strategies across the economy, including an industrial one – Rishi doesn’t like industrial strategies so he dumped that idea. Whoops. Shame. May and Hammond carried on the housing baton from their predecessors and they were kinder to councils.
Two years ago, planning returned to year zero, when Robert Jenrick decided to scrap the local authority-run system that we have had since the 1940s and start again. But his grand plan was unceremoniously scrapped last year, when it transpired that this would have led to building more houses in the Tory-dominated green belt and risk an electoral meltdown. Not many people noticed, apart from a few technical specialists and policy nerds (like me). But that was the mother of flip-flops.
In December, as the 12th housing minister since 2010 was taking his coat off, the ‘top-down housing targets’ that had been rigorously imposed for councils under Cameron, May and even Johnson – in a rare example of policy continuity – were got rid of. Completely. First there were housing targets, then there weren’t and now, with Gove dipping his finger back in the saucepan, there might be targets again, in a modified form. To say, the least it's confusing. Isn't it somewhat disingenuous to say that there is crisis and that we need to build more houses and then to dismantle the policy infrastructure needed to create them?
The Conservatives, true to type, have demonstrated that they don’t want to build anything anywhere that would threaten their votes. So, development in cities, not the countryside, is Gove's new mantra. The new houses, or, rather, boxy flats with miniature balconies, will be squashed into overcrowded urban spaces, where poor people live, alongside city workers who are willing to trade living space for gym membership. It's a crap idea, straight from the blue heartlands.
Politics has had more twists and turns than a Netflix series in the past eight years. We’ve been gifted with Theresa’s May’s ‘kind’ Conservatism, Boris Johnson goose-stepping through Whitehall, Liz Truss’s mad interregnum and now, Rishi Sunak, a dull bean counter. Sunak is the UK’s chief finance officer, not its CEO. He will implement a policy if you instruct him too. But he won't team-build or make a rousing speech, or lose any sleep over it. All he really cares about is trying to balance the books. That's his job.
For the Conservatives, flip flopping is interpreted as pragmatism, for the Labour party, its portrayed as weakness. And, since 2015, we’ve had more flip flops than a beachwear shop, which is probably why the Conservative party, punch drunk from thirteen bruising rounds, is still clinging to power.
Footwear should be appropriate to the time and place in which it is worn. When you are in opposition, you obviously need to be quick on your feet and not to tie yourself up with pledges which a ruthless right-wing press will taunt you with as unfulillable, if you get too close to office.
If I were Keir Starmer, I would certainly wear flip-flops. I know where he could buy some from – the Conservative Party Shop. But they are rather expensive. They cost £16.99. He would be far better going to a pound shop – a sector of the economy that has flourished under the Conservatives. Maybe not for long. Now even Wetherspoons is in trouble.
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