A good idea at the time….
Six short months ago, this column applauded Prime Minister Theresa May for having wrong-footed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party with a bold and brilliant piece of strategic outmanoeuvring. You remember that one? No? Thank goodness for that.
By announcing a snap election in June, we said, Mrs May had caught Corbyn with his manifesto down. We said she had illustrated the ancient wisdom of the military strategist Sun Tzu, whose advice had been to attack your enemy at all the most unexpected moments. What’s more, we said, she had shown how to transmogrify a narrow cross-party referendum vote for Brexit into a broad-based vote for a harder-line Tory party that had never really meant to be identified with leaving the EU in the first place. (But that’s another story.)
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night,” the Chinese sage had said. “And when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” Well, we have to hand it to Mrs May, she got the first part right. Her plans were so dark and impenetrable that, four months after the disaster, we’re still trying to work out exactly what they were. As for falling, it turned out that thunderbolts didn’t have very much to teach the Premier either.
So, having turned a narrow parliamentary majority into a narrow minority that left her desperate for Facebook Friends of any persuasion, the self-proclaimed Bloody Difficult Woman has had a Bloody Difficult Conference season. A ghastly speech, an on-stage ambush from a practical joker, and a stage set that was quite literally falling to pieces before our very eyes. And then, when former adversaries like Boris Johnson or Michael Gove urged the party to get behind the Premier, one could hardly fail to remember what happened to Julius Caesar after his Senate had done exactly that?
And so to the Autumn Budget
But November is here at last, and the Prime Minister is still with us (I hope – at the time of writing you couldn’t be sure of anything.) And Britain leaves the European Union in just 16 months (count ‘em….), and Spreadsheet Phil Hammond is due to stand up on the 22nd to deliver the most important Budget of his life.
And that’s the bit that worries me. With an electoral breathing space (of sorts) behind him, and with Labour’s Momentum group frothing on about land seizures and forced nationalisation and generally eating the rich, Mr Hammond has got both an opportunity and a threat in front of him.
Accept my unpleasant medicine, he can afford to say, or let the sweeping hordes of the left wash you away like Hurricanes Irma and Maria combined. Yes, I might need to chop basic pension rights that you thought were secured a hundred years ago, and I will probably need to increase the tax take. And my budget might well impact negatively on property prices. Meanwhile I will reintroduce public floggings for anyone caught misusing tax-efficient vehicles for anything that isn’t properly counterbalanced by an appropriate level of entrepreneurial risk. Yes, I realise that all this is uncomfortable. But honestly, would you rather have the socialist alternative?
To which 25 million under-30s who can’t afford to get on the property ladder would probably shout yes, go Corbyn, bring it on. And a Conservative Party whose average age for members is nudging 75 years will have its work cut out if it wants to present itself as the continuing voice of progress.
Or, what was that phrase? Strong and stable?
Michael Wilson, Editor –in-Chief, IFA Magazine.
