What will be the new course of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives?
Extract from the book “Boris Johnson. The rise of the conservative leader and the post-Brexit United Kingdom ”(Historica) by Daniele Meloni
The new course of British conservatism cannot therefore help but take into account the social and political development that partly generated Brexit and the earthquake of the December 2019 elections. market after decades of privatization and pro-market policies. We are starting to talk about welfare and investments in health care, even more so after the COVID-19 crisis, which showed all the flaws in the National Health Service, NHS.
The Thatcherian economic legacy is being deconstructed, but some cornerstones of its achievements remain, and are not linked only to the financialization of the economy. This is the case of the concessions to the tenants of public housing to be able to provide for their purchase (Right to Buy), then transformed by Cameron into the Help to Buy. Johnson put a lot of emphasis on it during the election campaign. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, housing and housing policies have penalized the younger generation: only 36% of those born after 1980 own a home. A figure that contrasts with the 62% of the 1950s and 60% of the 1960s. More and more young people are renting apartments, the cost of which has increased by an average of 20% in the last twenty years. Since the 2007 crisis, house prices have risen on average seven times more than the average increase in wages. During their conference in 2019, the Tories announced a social housing program to make tenants immediately owners of part of their housing, and then later obtain funding to become home-owners: the idea of a Tory democracy of homeowners it is an ideal that the party has never abandoned, also because Johnson and his people know very well that property owners are more likely to vote Tory than those who live in rent or in public housing.
The party's slide towards issues that are most dear to the working class has not escaped even the Labor Party and its affiliated think tanks. Thus Compass, a pressure group close to Labor on the issues of equality, democracy and sustainability, analyzed the success of the chameleon Tories in the last elections:
The latest shape change of the Conservatives is the most astounding in their evolution over the past twenty years. The first change occurred with Cameron and Osborne and their neoliberal modernization which sought to make the party more socially acceptable. This shift has vanished due to the impact of austerity and the return of nationalism. The second evolution took place with Theresa May and her "soft nationalism", which sought to balance the various tendencies of the Tory Party, following the 2016 referendum.
In retrospect, the Mayist period appears to have the connotations of an interregnum from one political form to another more in line with the right-wing realignment of British politics. Everyone in the British political landscape has shown a tendency to underestimate Boris Johnson's political abilities. […] Given the character's chameleonism, is there something that can be defined as “Johnsonism”?
At this point it might be useful to make some distinctions between Johnson's individual politics and the new mix of ideologies that reshaped the Conservative Party. These include Brexiteer British Nationalism, Anglo-Saxon liberalism, moderate Keynesianism, and a communication strategy that looks to the populist right .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/nuovo-corso-conservatori-regno-unito/ on Sun, 26 Dec 2021 07:06:26 +0000.