The Tories will get serious with populism

By Janan Ganesh

There is no term for the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory – a defeat that profits the defeated – but Britain’s Labour party is enjoying one. As far as voters are concerned, it has lost the argument on austerity. Even as the economy spluttered, the governing Conservatives were favoured to run it. Now, as growth returns, that advantage stretches wide. Yet the recovery carries a perverse benefit for Labour: it moves the political debate from macroeconomics to living standards, from the management of the economy to the distribution of its proceeds.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, scored a bounce in the polls last week after promising a freeze in energy prices and threatening private developers who do not build houses. These ideas are pregnant with problems of legality and practicality. They test the outer limits of sound government. But for now, hard-pressed voters like them.

In his speech to the Tory conference tomorrow, David Cameron can either outbid Mr Miliband with populism of his own or stand on the high ground of moderation. The prime minister will do the latter. The speech, amended in the days after Mr Miliband’s own effort, will only acknowledge Labour’s ideas to rubbish them. The Tory strategy is to discredit the opposition’s policies to improve living standards as dangerous and anti-enterprise, and achieve the same ends through conservative means instead: tax cuts, low interest rates and more competitive markets. “Labour are trying to set up an election question – Who will make you better off? – that inherently favours the centre-right,” says one insider. 

That may be too sanguine but the Tories are correct in one regard: the most precious political commodity is credibility. To be taken seriously is a greater prize than any one spasm of popularity. Promises of free or cheap stuff leave voters happily curious for a while but suspicious thereafter. The party making the offer can come to seem like fools or, worse, hucksters. The Tories learnt this the hard way by promising unfunded tax cuts as an opposition party, but it is now a problem for Labour. 

One of the hardest things for politicians to accept is that a policy can be popular on its own terms and still wound them by confirming suspicions about their party. For years the Tories made crowd-pleasingly tough noises about Europe and immigration, only to solidify their reputation as wailing misanthropes. Mr Miliband is doing something similar. Yes, his recent announcements, including a pledge to undo some of the government’s cuts to housing benefit, command a following. But they also risk compounding Labour’s image as a party with a mighty heart and a lobotomised head. When George Osborne, the chancellor, spoke of his “serious plan for a grown-up country” yesterday, his double invocation of the idea of maturity was calculated. The Tories want this to be a faultline at the election in 2015: not so much right versus left as seriousness versus whimsy. 

It is also how they plan to deal with the UK Independence party, the pugnacious rightwingers gouging lumps out of the Conservative vote share. The Tories’ favoured method of counterinsurgency was to fight populism with populism, but Mr Cameron’s war on immigration and promise of a referendum on EU membership have made no difference. So their new gambit – encouraged by private polls that suggest seven in 10 Ukip supporters might vote Tory to prevent Mr Miliband becoming prime minister – is to give up trying to match Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, for tub-thumping inanity and simply say “Vote Nigel, get Ed”. Mr Cameron will skirt the issue of Ukip today, but bludgeon home that four-word message next year. 

Of course, there are problems with the Tories’ race to credibility that may stop it going very far. Their own policies, for one thing. When tax breaks are given to people for the mere fact of being married, austerity seems less like the most urgent political mission of our time and more like a baggy theme masking myriad choices about who to help and who to deprive. There is also a risk in shunning populism. The Conservatives gamble that households will view an energy price freeze as a guarantee of higher bills later on, that the British still regard the idea of subjecting business to ministerial caprice as something banana republics do and that corporatism is as electorally lethal as it used to be. 

These wagers may turn out to be wrong but the Tories are still prudent to make them, for two reasons. First, despite the global boom in populism, there remains a silent and colossal majority for sober practicality. In recent years, as Europeans were learning harshly that macroeconomic stability is the sine qua non of their own personal prosperity, Britons were looking on. The lesson was unlikely to have been lost on them.

More than that, though, the present generation of Conservatives are implausible populists. Privileged, approaching 50, slick of hair and silver of tongue, the prime minister makes for a rum kind of outsider. Dave the Demagogue is not a

serious political proposition. Cameron the Credible, for all that he bores, might be. 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.