The free market has broken. Can the Tories fix it?

We’re reaching that time of year when opening the curtains in the morning feels no different to when we close them again at night. The light is the same dull wash of grey under the blanket of November skies, and opening the newspapers on the politics page gets you the same drizzle of cold opprobrium. Scandal. Betrayal. Dodgy deals. Resignations.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll recognise the signs. You can smell the approach of winter. You feel it in your bones. Politics certainly has its seasons, and wiser Tory heads must already know they can no more delay the onset of political defeat than they can the delay the onset of winter. Political parties are organisms that need periods of hibernation in order to awake refreshed in the spring. Theresa May’s government is weak, and some would say perilous, but that’s to overlook a greater truth that has little to do with the current Prime Minister. The Conservative Party has been seeking a new message for at least a decade, and the tiredness of this government isn’t the short term physical tiredness that’s easily recovered over a recess. It’s an intellectual tiredness that’s felt deep in a party that needs a new grand plan, a single Great Idea that will sustain it through another half century or more.

If the Conservatives desperately need to sleep, they believe that to do so now would be tantamount to a dereliction. Brexit means that times are momentous, yet neither party looks suited to the tasks ahead of them. Labour are untested, but offer a glitzy display of populist sentiment, wrapped around old shop floor mannequins that suddenly appear fashionable again. The Tories, with a tiny mandate for such big decisions, are left to carry on, limping and now crawling. Just one more inch… The government begins to resemble Rutger Hauer at the dénouement of Blade Runner. So many things left to do and too little time… Cue the flapping of doves in the rain.

The Party’s underlying problem is that their last Great Idea, the single concept that won it repeated election success, lies at the root of many people’s dissatisfaction with the country. It used to be the case that the British could complain about only three things: the weather, the BBC, and the late running of the buses. These days we are spoilt for choice, and it was the free market that gave us that choice.

The Ideal of the Free Market, so beloved in its time, might not be dead, but it is in desperate need of retooling to the demands of the 21st century. The free market was a novel thing back when it became a byword for Conservative victories. A much-used and reliable weapon in Margaret Thatcher’s arsenal was her reminder to voters of how bad things had become under previous Labour governments. We hear much less talk of Jim Callaghan these days but it doesn’t deny the reality of Britain in the late 1970s. Before the opening up of the market, public transport was under government control, and was the stuff of a real Orwellian nightmare. There was no such thing as choice or even “customer service”. Despondent, mean-spirited staff could barely tolerate your presence. Buses were dark, cramped, and often stank. Trains usually comprised two overcrowded smoke-filled carriages which, if they arrived at all, would arrive half an hour late.

Life was grim.

And then the free market came along.

Overnight the municipal bus services disappeared, replaced by various fly-by-night companies run out of garages by shady individuals, using coaches that had seen better days. If the seats were neither clean nor comfortable and if you wondered if the floor might fall out before your destination, there was always the consolation that deregulation meant that the fares were cheap. The economy of the 1980s initially benefited the grafters and chancers, but cheapness sustained us whilst we waited for the wisdom of the free market to assert itself. Slowly those shabby operators were forced out of business by companies providing a better service for the same price. A few iterations later and we had a service far superior than any we’d enjoyed in the past. The system had stabilised to a new equilibrium. Ten rivals were reduced to two or three who ran efficient services. On the railways, improvements saw better trains and improved stations. Suddenly we were no longer the “public” but “customers” and we seemed to matter in this new economy. Security came along. Then we got almost punctual timetables backed up by visible performance statistics. Then came even more technology: automated ticket machines, online services, wifi on trains…

And lo! The free market was wonderful and the people liked what they saw…

At least for a while.

There then followed the overextension of the free market, the results of which are now all too familiar. The more that government let slip the reigns of the big companies, the big companies saw greater opportunities to make more money. What emerged is what Stuart Sim has called a “profitocracy”, a society “ruthlessly dedicated to the production of profit at the expense of the public good”.

Take, again, the transport infrastructure. Shininess came at a constantly rising cost, but fare rises didn’t always have to do with reinvestment. In order to improve profits, many bus companies began to save themselves the trouble of having to calculate the prices between stops. Some introduced flat fares. Here in the North West, it now costs the same to travel between any two stops in Merseyside. That’s great if you’re travelling from Southport to Speke or from Prescot to Birkenhead. But £2.20 is not so good a good deal if you need a bus to get you to the end of the road and back in heavy rain.

The effect is that the free market that once aimed to serve the public started to serve itself. Local buses and trains now run half empty in the day — free concessions to pensioners still counts for something — but very few people use them for local travel. This was not how the free market was meant to operate. Logic dictated that alternatives should have appeared to fill this gap in the market, yet no alternatives were forthcoming. The margins are too small to warrant the huge investment needed to compete against these new monopolies. Competition comes, instead, from taxis, which are expensive but still cheaper than buses for short journeys. Then there’s Uber, which is a further extension of the free market ideal but… Well, you know the rest…

So it used to be the case that the British could complain about only three things — the weather, the BBC, and the late running of the buses — but now we complain that we’ll soon be charged for the air we breathe, and that’s not entirely implausible. We live in a subscription culture, but at the cost of ever more division and increased separation. The psychology of the market is that the individual pays for what the individual wants and will pay no more. The result is a culture of the self; resenting alternative views as well as alternative demands. You want X, then you pay for X because I don’t need it. We are living lives that are the material extension of the online echo chambers by which each keep to their own. Gated communities are now appearing in places where there were once open communities. Our culture is fracturing along economic lines, between those that choose to pay and those that choose not to pay or simply have no choice. It used to be said that only death and taxes were inevitable, but the Panama and now Paradise Papers suggest that even taxes have become a lifestyle choice.

These divisions are not going to get any less and will become profoundly deeper and more unsettling. We watch with wonder at the technological advances being worked on by Google and Amazon to automate our lives. Self-driving cars and delivery drones seem fantastic and even fanciful but the usual way of technology is that what seems novel today becomes ubiquitous tomorrow. This is the future that a modern political party should now be anticipating. With no Great Idea to take them forward, the Conservatives are retreating into ideology. Where the Free Market used to be the Tories’ proudest boast, it’s now their strategic weakness. The rise of the “Moggster” is an indicator of a party that can look no further than itself for affirmation. Gone are the days of a leader who might appeal to the country. If the market of the Conservative grassroots wants Mogg, it will get Mogg, and produce the political equivalent of a gated community.

The sad irony for moderate conservatives is that there’s nothing that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party offers that they couldn’t have taken upon themselves. It’s easy to demonise Corbyn but it does not discount his mass appeal or alter the fact that the Conservatives are being pulled to the right. When Tories boast — as they routinely do — that the UK is seen across the globe as the best place for companies to do business, they are missing the point that boast means different things to different audiences. Deregulation means one thing to James Dyson and another to the people that work for James Dyson. This is the double bind of the Trumpian promise of the regulation-free utopia: a place great for business but not so great for the family living downstream from the chemical plant.

The way forward for conservatives has always been to look pragmatically at the world they live in and the world that’s emerging. They need an answer to what is being termed “post-capitalism” by those that wish for the entire collapse of capitalism. They need to cherish the virtues of the free market — the advantages of competition producing true innovation — but temper their enthusiasm with an understanding that these markets are only meaningful if they improve people’s lives. They need to find that sweet spot at which the free market exists comfortably with concepts such as compassion, community, and care. It looked at first that Theresa May had grasped this point, staked her claim to the middle ground of politics, but nothing she has subsequently done has come anywhere close. Instead she offered a brutal manifesto and a cold-hearted campaign. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, smiled and looked affable, relaxed and purred about compassion. It was never his election to win and always hers to lose, which she did in all but name.

It’s why none of the troubles that now affect the Tories come as any surprise. It’s often said that financial cock ups eventually bring Labour governments down but it’s cock ups of a different kind that put pay to the Tories. It might be true given the sex scandals of the past few weeks. When the Great Ideas are gone, all that’s left is the decadence borne of old glories. Yet if the thinkers and think tanks behind the Tory Party could answer modern riddles such as what happens when automated bots replace delivery drivers, they would gift the party the keys to election success for generations to come. Sadly, for them, it won’t be an answer that will come quickly and certainly not before the onset of winter.