David Willetts: Slowly, Britain’s populists are learning that the grown-ups had a point

David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a member of the House of Lords.

The Conservative Party is ambivalent about populism because populism itself is such a frustrating mix of common-sense and impractical nonsense. Both have been on display as illegal migrants flow in across the Channel.

On the one hand, the protests at Epping and elsewhere at the asylum hotels are entirely understandable. The arrival of large groups of often young male asylum seekers in a local hotel causes great anxiety. It is hard for them to be absorbed and accepted. These young men may have trekked across North Africa and Europe in search of a better life, but we are under no obligation to accept them and it is shocking that there is no effective means of stopping them before they arrive on our coast.

There is one politician above all who knows how to capture public anger about this: Nigel Farage; and he skilfully stays just some distance away for the far-Right protest groups who make a bad situation worse.

The populist narrative is that these problems arise because the political elite is out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of real people; so insulated from the consequences of their policy failures that they just tolerate the intolerable.

This is also a strand of Conservatism which was lost from sight as Conservatives merged with Liberal Unionists and became the natural party of government for much of the Twentieth Century. Before that, Tories were the Country opposition to the Whig elite at court. The Whigs had their great estates and grand houses in London. The Tories were more likely to be local squires and justices of the peace, rooted in local communities which they helped to administer, closer to local issues… and without the resource and sophistication of the governing Whigs.

It was Benjamin Disraeli who understood the opportunity for the Conservatives to be the opposition to the “Venetian politics, Dutch finance, and French Wars” of the Whig elite (a modern version is the Westminster bubble, Government borrowing and overseas entanglements). Conservatives by contrast are the common-sense party.

But this only gets you so far in politics. A modern political community and economy is a complex system. Common sense is often right – but it is also common sense that the world is flat and that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Indeed many of Britain’s problems today are caused by populism promoting silly policies and obstructing sensible ones.

Immigration is a vivid example.

There were no small boat crossings bringing in migrants until Brexit. They began in 2018. In the words of a study by Professor Thom Brooks of the trends “There are no records of any individuals travelling by small boat to claim asylum in 2017 or before.” Before Brexit illegal migrants could be and some were returned to other member states of the EU. That was how the migrant camp at Calais was closed. But the returns policy was abandoned as part of the hard Brexit deal.

Brexit also meant we lost access to data in other EU member states about criminal records of migrants coming to the UK. We have also lost access to the EU fingerprint data-based of migrants so tracking their history is more difficult.

Brexit was based on a promise to bring back control. Instead it has weakened our control of our own borders by ending the collaboration with our neighbours. The populists brought us Brexit with promises of taking back control, but it has had the opposite effect. So Farage helped create the conditions in which small boats come here, and now blames the out-of-touch political class for the consequences of a populist cause he promoted.

Last week the Reform UK leader of Kent County Council wrote to the Home Office opposing the abolition of health and social care visas for migrants from abroad. The Reform-run council argues this is the only way to ensure the affordable delivery of social care in Kent.

It is another case study in the perils of populism. We must pay for social care somehow; Theresa May’s election manifesto of 2017 proposed that, amongst other options, it should be a charge on the estate of people after death. There was a populist campaign against this Tory version of a death tax.

Boris Johnson then tried to tackle the problem by public funding with a health and social care levy, which was on its way through Parliament when Liz Truss became leader and abandoned the plan in her budget. But if populist opposition means we can’t have a charge to pay for social care and we won’t accept taxes to pay for it, we have to deliver social care in the cheapest possible way – and that means bringing in foreign workers who will do it for low pay.

Reform-led Kent Council are now facing the consequences of the elimination of any policy options proposed by the so-called out-of-touch policy elite.

Farage calls for us to “build up our own manufacturing base”. Again, it is a very attractive pitch. But Brexit and Reform ended Margaret Thatcher’s brilliant strategy of attracting global motor companies to operate in the UK and sell across the European Single Market; British car production has just fallen to its lowest level for 70 years.

Instead, the only significant growth of British export sales since Brexit has been unregulated services – such as PR and advertising. Jobs in those London-based service industries are the best trade performers since Brexit: there has been no gain for workers in manufacturing who were promised Brexit would help them.

The populists attack the so-called elite for wanting to stay in the EU, or share data with it, or impose a social care levy, or put a charge on property to pay for it. But those were serious policies that actually work for real people worried about boat crossings or large scale migration or manufacturing industry.

It is the application of populist slogans which end up doing the damage to real people. It is just a pity neither Conservatives nor Labour have the confidence to make the case for grown-up policy as one of the most powerful tools for serving the British people.

One of the smartest appointments in Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle was Neil O’Brien to lead on policy development. I hope he can grasp this nettle.

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