Rishi Sunak looked relieved as he took the final press question from a local reporter after the launch of his Conservative manifesto yesterday. It came after a torrid previous week, which saw the prime minister accused of lying about Labour tax plans and having to apologise for unforgivably missing crucial D-day commemoration services. You might have thought the manifesto would include some surprising, eye-catching policies. But in many respects, it was a more traditional Conservative party manifesto than some had expected – it contained tax cuts, promises to pensioners and the customary pro-business language.
Yet one of the challenges that Sunak’s Conservative party faces is that for the first time in decades, it now finds itself with no clear political territory of its own. For the past several years it has travelled down a political cul-de-sac and is now at a political dead end. In pandering to Ukip, then the Brexit party, and now Reform, it has ceded the political centre ground to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, alienating millions of voters turned off by the constant culture warring.
At the same time, Sunak’s Conservative party has predictably failed to “out-Reform” Reform. Nigel Farage sells the electorate a new version of the politics of envy; a politics that can only succeed by feeding off disillusionment. It is one that thrives on creating rather than resolving problems – that finger-points and divides. It is a politics that can only take us in the wrong direction. Yet, by aping Farage’s rhetoric, the Conservative party leadership has elevated Reform in voters’ minds instead of marginalising it as a force.
In his manifesto, Sunak carefully dangled some political red meat for the right of his party to avoid the charge of his internal “Reform-lite” brigade – including a suggestion of potentially leaving the European court of human rights. Whether it will be enough to stop Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and other rightwingers from launching their own Reform-lite manifesto, only time will tell. It is hugely confusing for voters to see that their local Conservative candidates seem to clearly prefer a different party: Reform. Whatever the outcome of this election, whatever the scale of probable defeat, it is clear there is no possible recovery for the Conservative party without lancing the Reform-lite boil that lies within.
Winning elections is about winning the future, and being able to articulate and embody the change and values that people – especially younger people – want to see for their country. The party thus faces an existential challenge. Sunak launched a traditional Conservative manifesto in a country that doesn’t want to “conserve” the status quo but wants fundamental change.
There’s one ultimate British “tradition”, passed on from generation to generation, that people would like to see stone dead: inequality of opportunity. Repeated Tory mantras on reducing taxes will not suffice. Previous tax cuts by Sunak haven’t cut through because there is a sense from the electorate that they are the political equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, when there is a need for more fundamental change – a different direction entirely. People want to believe and have credible hope that they can change their circumstances for the better.
Worryingly, there are not enough people leading today’s Conservative party who understand what equality of opportunity means, let alone why it matters. In the manifesto, “equality of opportunity” was the title of a section that covered multiculturalism, disability and LGBT+ issues. But it utterly failed to mention socioeconomic disadvantage.
It’s hard to think a Conservative party manifesto could show a worse basic understanding of the biggest issue facing people in Britain. Tellingly, this ill-defined version of equality of opportunity was set out as distinct from the party’s efforts on levelling up. However, fixing equality of opportunity must be about people as well as places. Levelling up, in turn, has steadily become a rebadged regional and neighbourhood “regeneration” policy rather than the system fix it was meant to be. Staggeringly, just two pages out of 80 in the manifesto focused on education and skills, despite this being a crucial part of any equality of opportunity strategy.
It’s hard to see how such a crucial area did not merit more focus: Britain faces a skills crisis, which requires a long-term, cross-party effort to start working with businesses and civil society for long-term solutions.
For decades now, the electorate has been sending a clear message to all parties that it wants equality of opportunity. Whichever of the main parties has “owned” aspiration in voters’ minds and has been the most credible on extending opportunities to more people has won, from Thatcher to Blair, and to Johnson. They often won big, too. But Rishi Sunak’s manifesto doesn’t even properly define what equality of opportunity means.
Britain needs to provide a strong “opportunity guarantee” that, irrespective of background or privilege, people can be supported to have lives that start on track and stay on track. Lives on track mean public finances on track, and it’s public finances on track that can sustain lower taxes. Any future Conservative party and its leaders must now understand there is no low-tax agenda without equality of opportunity. But for this election at least, it all seems far too late.
