Everyone calm down. Theresa May is fine
I was never a fan of Theresa May. But she’s okay, in that less-than-perfect-but-what-is way that most Conservative Prime Ministers have been okay. On the political left and right commentators and think-tankers (me included) often criticise Conservatives as dully unimaginative and uninspiring. The correct Conservative response is, almost always, to replay, Spock-style, “Why, thank you.”
Imagination and the radical reforms that go with it are risky. They also involve the costs of change. Keeping stuff the same, resisting the urge to tinker, resisting the pull of the glory attached to a successful reform, ignoring all the clever folk who tell you that this or that this will work – that’s all a lot braver and harder than it’s usually credited as being.
“Stuff’s ok. Let’s not fiddle too much.” That isn’t a cry to stir the blood. But it does allow society to go about its business. It does (when things really are ok) mean we have jobs and we’re kept safe and we can live out our lives in fun in our sports and literature and video games, enjoying our property innocently earned, courting, arguing and divorcing, raising children with sleepless infant nights, unjustified teenage insults and eventual tense adult Christmas and Easter family gatherings, worshipping our gods or healing crystals or humanist philosophies. That all sounds terribly mundane but it is, in fact, almost everything of any true value in this world and it is the greatest gift any government can offer its citizens.
Theresa May doesn’t have the option of not fiddling at all. With Brexit, the status quo will be gone. That will at some point mean some imagination, some boldness, some risk-taking. She may well not be the person best-equipped for that and maybe by 2022-ish we’ll need someone else, but for now we have to realistic about the alternatives. It’s her or…Jeremy Corbyn?
If we’d wanted a more embracing strategy for dealing with the EU – instantly guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens; lauding the virtues of the EU and offering to help it in the future; explaining gently but firmly that we’ll be negotiating our own new post-Brexit trade deals now, thanks – we needed to be pursuing that from last June. That die is cast now. The tactics aren’t what I’d have chosen, but her stated goals are clearly the right ones and are manifestly in tune with the British public’s preferences. She may not get us the best deal possible from the EU or with the US or the rest of the world. But it’ll be…ok.
The Conservatives could well have tried some more imaginative economic path over the past seven years, instead of the dull grind of their slow-and-steady long-drawn-out deficit reduction programme. But what they’ve done has been ok. Philip Hammond should arguably be showing more imagination with his plans for the next few years. But it’s…not bad.
We’re ticking along at 2 per cent or so growth, we’ve had fairly low unemployment throughout and unemployment is now very low. Things could have been a lot worse. Just consider France or Spain or the US. I’d propose various changes to the economic programme, but it’s not crazy as it is – e.g. it’s not as though she favours bonkers things like a maximum wage, mass nationalisation, a huge extension of union power, and wild rises in public spending funded by printing money.
Folk tell me the Conservatives need to be more positive in their messaging. Well, there it is: Theresa May’s largely dull and lacks the imagination or appetite to try anything clever. Things have been going okay on the economy and society at large and she won’t change that. On Brexit, the one big driver of change, where she’s trying to get to is the right place and she’ll avoid any clever or risky way to try to get there. She’s not perfect. She’s not a saint. She’s just Theresa. And that should be plenty.