Yahoo Finance The Tories need to turn on the spending taps in the north now
Fifteen years ago the idea of the prime minister paying a weekend visit to Sedgefield would have attracted little or no media interest. That, though was when Tony Blair was in Downing Street and represented the County Durham seat as its MP.
When Boris Johnson turned up on Blair’s old patch on Saturday it was very big news indeed because Sedgefield is now coloured blue on the political map of Britain. In large parts of the country, from Blyth Valley to Bolsover, working-class communities have abandoned Labour and turned to the Conservatives. The Tories are the party of the working classes.
There will be plenty of time to trawl through what went wrong for Labour as the party conducts its post-mortem examination into the result over the coming weeks and months. The reason there’s no great hurry is because defeat by such a thumping margin last Thursday means the Conservatives are going to be in power for at least the next five years, perhaps longer.
As Torsten Bell, the director of the Resolution Foundation, put it: “This result is so bad for Labour because it’s happening when the economic and political cycle should mean Labour romping home. Official oppositions don’t often lose 59 seats – they’re generally in the business of whittling down a government’s majority or seizing power themselves.”
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That’s all true. What it means is that, for now at least, what Labour says or thinks about anything is neither here nor there. What matters is what the Conservatives do with their new-found power.
Remainers who have been tin-eared to the anger among Leave voters that the result of the referendum had not been honoured now have to reconcile themselves to the fact that Brexit is going to happen at the end of next month. The strategy of trying to keep Britain in the EU has proved to be a catastrophic failure on many levels. It has eroded the public’s faith in democracy; it has guaranteed that the UK has a harder Brexit than would otherwise have been the case: and it has shattered the blue-collar, white-collar coalition Labour has always relied on to win elections. This is a spectacular hat-trick of own goals that provides Johnson with the opportunity to build on the Tory advances in what what were previously Labour fiefdoms.
Which is what he is now planning to do. The Tory manifesto made only modest tax and spending pledges but the need for the new Government to deliver on the prime minister’s one-nation rhetoric means the budget planned for February will be expansionary and targeted specifically at the less prosperous parts of Britain.
An ambitious post-election budget runs counter to the received political wisdom that new administrations should take the earliest opportunity in any parliament to take tough decisions, on the grounds that it gets bad news out of the way early. But in this case, it is justified on both economic and political grounds.
A fiscal boost would be appropriate for an economy that is flat on its back after three months in which activity has either declined or stayed the same. Politically, Johnson needs to show voters in seats the Tories gained that he wants a long-term relationship and not just a one-night stand. There will be modest cuts in national insurance contributions but the chancellor, Sajid Javid, has the leeway under his borrowing rules to invest more in public infrastructure than was promised in the manifesto. Expect him to use it, because it takes time for capital spending to have an impact. If Johnson wants voters to notice the difference at the next election there is little time to delay.
That said, the Conservatives need to think carefully about how they spend the money. Weekend reports have suggested that NHS budget increases will be enshrined in law and an extra £78bn of transport spending for the north of England.
But the common factor linking the seats Johnson won last week is how cut off they are. The trend has been for local hospitals to be closed in towns and small cities, with services concentrated in the metropolitan centres. Patients that have seen their hospital closed often face long and expensive journeys on a transport system that has prioritised road and rail projects that help big cities the most.
So, it won’t be enough for the government to announce plans to spend more on teaching hospitals in Leeds and Manchester, or to continue finding more money to pay for HS2. There needs to be investment at a local level: in community health budgets and in local transport links.
Related: Today’s weak economy shouldn’t aid the Tories: but that was true in 1992 too | Larry Elliott
There’s one final piece to the jigsaw. Some of the most savage cuts in the past decade have been to budgets for further education. Universities have not had it easier either, but by comparison they have got off lightly. The towns and small cities that don’t have universities have – as with health and transport spending – come off worse. Spending more money – a lot more money – on vocational training is key to regeneration.
Will this happen? It might, because the lesson the Tories have learnt from Scotland is that once Labour supporters stop voting out of tribal loyalty there is no guarantee they will come back. Johnson is not going to make it easier for Labour to win back seats it lost last Thursday by opting for an economic policy based on free-market ideology. Instead, the plan is to offer an interventionist economic policy – more public spending and a higher minimum wage – with a tougher approach to crime and immigration.
Ignored for so long, people living in what was once Labour’s “red wall” are going to be in the unfamiliar position of finding both main parties bidding for their support.
