Amid the performative bumbling and constant hair ruffling, there is a message Boris Johnson has been repeating since he threw his name in the mix to become the next prime minister (or at least his latest attempt to be in charge): he wants to “get Brexit done” so he can get on with the job of sorting out the country. This, then, is what we can expect to hear on loop when the UK enters into a general election campaign, likely in the next week. As soundbites go, it might seem simple and effective – but like many others the Tories have relied on in elections gone by, it’s based on a lie.
The Tories have been in power for nine years. It doesn’t make sense for people like Johnson to say he needs to get on with the job of fixing the country when he helped create the problems we have now. From Chancellor Sajid Javid through to Health Minister Matt Hancock, Johnson’s cabinet is full of people who’ve either been ministers at some point since 2010 or who’ve supported the main tenets of the government’s agenda. They’ve brought in austerity, closed sure start centres, slashed local government funding, cut school budgets to the point that teachers are having to ask parents for donations, and overseen more than a doubling of the number of homelessness people in the UK. This record really shouldn’t be up for debate; it’s what the country looks like.
“Signing off on another five years of Tory rule would mean committing the country to an even more dangerous and destabilising path than we’ve been on for the best part of a decade, if not longer.”
Even the Conservatives, the architects of so much of this, know it to be the case. The Tory leadership contest this summer was an exercise in irony, albeit of the depressing kind. Each candidate was eager to show they understood how serious the country’s rising inequality and plummeting living standards were – as if they hadn’t been claiming everything was fine just the year before, using high employment as their barometer of success (with no concern the vast majority of people who were in poverty were in work). The state of the country is a real problem, they would say with a serious face, like poverty had come out of nowhere – an unfortunate accident that had nothing to do with government policy.
The “solutions” they’ve offered so far are merely the flimsiest of sticking plasters. Alongside their predictable posturing on law and order and using the police as backdrops to speeches, their plans to “invest” in schools really amounts to putting back in some of that they’ve taken out. They have no interest in fundamentally changing the way the country works; they admit they want to charge ahead with “free market economics”.
“You don’t trust the person who intentionally set you on fire to help you put it out. Especially not when they’re holding another match.”
From all the decades of discussion about people feeling disenfranchised and powerless, the Conservatives – who’ve repeatedly tried to undermine our, admittedly imperfect, democracy – are content with keeping things ticking along as they are. Or worse, heading further down the path we’re already on but further to the right. So it’s not only that things might stay the same in terms of policy and rhetoric but that they could get much, much worse. Why would we assume anything else when the person leading the Tory party has a history of Islamophobia, racism and decrying the end of Empire.
In a general election, there will be endless talk about Brexit – this will be do or die, yet again – and the future of the country. But if you’re concerned about what’s to come, you should be worried about climate change too. And if you are, voting Conservative is a wasted ballot. Just like with public services, the Tories have learned lessons from the last election. They will not go after the nations much-beloved animals and they will claim they care about the environment. But compare a prime minister who was given 0 in the Guardian’s climate score with the possibility of a Green New Deal.
This may be billed a “Brexit election”, but we’re not only electing a government to deal with the mess that is the UK leaving the EU, we’re voting for people who will represent and legislate on our behalf for the next five years. The Tories have been in charge nine years, and look where it got us: rising child poverty, schools without basic supplies and the highest rates of fossil fuel subsidy in the UK.
Signing off on another five years of Tory rule would mean committing the country to an even more dangerous and destabilising path than we’ve been on for the best part of a decade, if not longer.
You don’t trust the person who intentionally set you on fire to help you put it out. Especially not when they’re holding another match. The key now is for the electorate to see the Tory plans during this election as exactly what they are: momentary damage limitation.
Maya Goodfellow is an author and academic.