THE MEDICINE at the party conference in Manchester is very much old-style Tory. Workers will lose rights to appeal unfair dismissals, those on welfare will face tougher tests to ensure they are looking for work, and the pill is to be sugared with money to allow the freezing of council tax for a year and some measures to ease credit to small business. Oh, and there was the de rigueur blast at the courts for laxity on immigrants, prime minister David Cameron pledging to make judges “see sense” on foreign criminals who use human rights arguments to escape deportation.
Over a year in to the coalition between Mr Cameron’s “modernising” Tory party and the Liberal Democrats, the prime minister is personally popular but the public perception is that the party is sliding back to the right, away from key swing voters in the centre. It’s a perception reinforced by a more assertive coalition partner determined to show its base that it is being successful in resisting Tory excess.
Chancellor George Osborne has given himself little room for manoeuvre – the mantra of eliminating the deficit by the end of the parliament is repeated like a Thatcher “there is no alternative”. The brutal cuts have helped to win him friends in the markets where bond yields are at their lowest in 60 years, but growth is elusive and there is no plan B to stimulate demand.
A sideshow at the conference is the gleeful campaign by Eurosceptics for a referendum on leaving the EU. Delighted by the euro zone crisis, seen as vindication of their abhorrence of the whole single currency project, they argue that now is the time to pull out. Never mind that the weakness of growth in European markets, at a time when their own chancellor has taken demand out of the domestic economy, is hurting British economic prospects – in truth, schadenfreude notwithstanding, the euro’s survival and prospering are key to British interests, whether or not she is part of it.
The instinctively Eurosceptic Cameron understands as much, and that an anti-EU campaign would both result in an unnecessary breach with his coalition partner and damage his carefully cultivated centrist image. Nor would the public be that enamoured – polls say voters are willing to consider leaving the EU but that it is not top of their list of priorities. Their real concerns are public services, taxes, and crime. Yesterday he insisted he is governing for the “whole country”, and would not back a “false choice” between staying in the EU or leaving. For which we say Amen.