Well, I’m not going to try to pretend the Conservative conference in Birmingham was a glorious success. Mired with U-turns, cabinet infighting, stories of plots, accusations of coups – it had just about everything you would want to avoid.
To be fair, conferences are always potentially febrile places. When parties get together to discuss policy and direction, differences of opinion always surface. And indeed they should. But it is worrying when members of the cabinet of a brand-new prime minster – in place for less than a month – are openly challenging ideas. Cabinet responsibility requires these arguments to take place in private.
The overall direction is, however, one that I think has widespread support. I agree that it is far better to build the economy at a faster rate than argue about how to share out a smaller pie. But as I have argued in these columns before, timing is crucial and now is not the time to undertake what is a policy experiment.
As a result of poor timing, millions of people across the country are now terrified by the prospect of their mortgage becoming unaffordable. Millions more are worried their benefits won’t keep pace with the cost-of-living increases. So, all the good stuff that has been delivered to tackle the skyrocketing energy bills – at significant expense to the wider taxpayer – has been lost. (But even then, energy bills will go up, just not as high as expected.)
I don’t understand why the new government has got it so wrong. Reversing the 12-year position to keep the 45p tax rate only to U-turn within a few days looks ridiculous (and, I suppose, makes it an O-turn) and was always avoidable.
But the row about benefits is just odd. I understand the argument that when public and private sector pay awards are below the inflation rate, it looks unfair to give inflation level benefit rises. But the point about unemployment benefits is they are designed to cover the basic cost of living and no more. There is no wriggle room for someone living on benefits (although I realise that there is very limited wriggle room for many, many households). That is why I strongly believe, as a One Nation Conservative, that we must look after the most vulnerable in our society. And if we get that right, we can, when the time is right, crack on with generating prosperity for all.