The last vestiges of Thatcherism have gone. The cult of the individual is over. Government is a good thing and will intervene to boost business if needed and punish it if it is naughty. Markets not working properly ‘will be repaired’. Monetary policy is not working for ordinary people. Interest rate policy is a fiasco, or words to that effect. Pumping assets has got to stop. She sees the vote for Brexit as a revolution and she is going to lead it. Wow. This blog has been saying these things for years and consequently, having been rather critical of her, thinks Theresa May is wonderful; well okay anyway. I don’t like her attitude to immigrants. And I want to see whether this speech becomes action by her government.
If it does, the impact of all this is potentially as seismic, perhaps more so, than Brexit itself. It is the biggest shift left for the Tory party since 1950, when Churchill decided to embrace officially the Welfare State, the nationalized utilities and everything he had previously opposed, because he saw that this was what people wanted and if he was going to be given another opportunity to lead them, he would have to do their bidding. Within a year he was back in Number 10. May has done her sums, she knows her government won the election with fewer votes than Churchill who lost in 1950, and to win again she has to attract support from those 5 million or so working class voters who currently stay at home. Corbyn is headed in the same direction.
The impact on the Tory Right will be like a cup of arsenic drunk at breakfast by mistake. But they are mostly old, nostalgic for the abandoned Thatcher, and shrinking in number. The impact on the the anti-Corbyn New Labour element of the PLP is calamitous. They are out in no man’s land on the wrong side of everything, somewhat to the right of the May government. They are all at risk of losing their seats as some of their voters, denied a Corbynite to vote for, move left to UKIP if it survives, the news from that quarter is not good, or the reinvigorated left-leaning Lib Dems. Ed Balls will explain what happens next. Their only salvation lies in eating humble pie and following their leader, or crossing the floor and joining May.
At last we are moving back to politics about people, where politicians have visionary powers rather than soundbite skills. Whatever it is people want to do, if it is not for the public good it will not happen. Whichever party is in power. The future suddenly might get brighter.