Esther McVey and the Working Class

Who would be the next Tory leader? Consider the scene just for a moment. The Brexit Party has taken a bite out of the Conservative Party's electoral coalition which, recently constituted, was in long-term decline anyway. And as last week's local elections established, there are some vulnerabilities where centrist-ish Tory voters are concerned. As if it can't get any worse, most polls are posting good leads for Labour even if, for the moment, the showing for the main parties is depressed by the fragmentary dynamic of imminent EU elections. They're in a pickle then, a very sticky, treacly pickle, and any new leader is going to have their work cut out freeing the party from the morass. Yet there are no shortage of vultures circling the carrion of Theresa May's career willing to try. With one hopeful knocked out of the running, let's focus on someone else who has used her leadership posturing to stake out territory of her own. I am talking about Esther McVey.

Formerly of the GMTV sofa, McVey acquired the sort of bastardy reputation only an association with the DWP brief can confer, both as a bag carrier for Iain Duncan Smith while he was there and again last January when she was made social security supremo, until Brexit pricked at her conscience in ways a bogus work capability assessment never could. Nevertheless, as far as her chances with the Tory membership goes these are both positives. Then again, rivals like Boris Johnson, Sajid Javid, and Dominic Raab possess these shoddy qualities in spades. What then is McVey's shtick, her U to the S to the P?

At the weekend, 'We Tories are the natural party of the working classes' appeared in the Express. The theme of her piece is abandonment. Tory failures on Brexit have detached the party from its base, she says. But not to worry because Labour's abandonment of "traditional working class" voters presents the Tories an opportunity. Leaving aside the Labour's difficulties with "traditional" voters, she argues the Tories could do a job appealing to workers, even low paid workers, because they work hard and "do the right thing". This, apparently, is something Labour does not understand.

Repeating the lazy cliches about a metropolitan elite (has she not seen the people she hangs out with at Westminster), McVey argues that her brand of Toryism, 'Blue Collar Conservatism', really has something to offer. And what might these tasty morsels be? More police on the street to stop criminals thumbing their nose at the law, raiding the overseas aid budget to rectify the issue. She attacks High Speed Rail 2, calling for money to be invested instead in local transport (no objections there), but her main pitch centres on "freedom, responsibility, and choice" - words Labour activists often find cropping up on the doorstep. For McVey, these words are talismans warding off the evils of Corbynist statism with its levelling downwards and removal of incentives for self-improvement. This isn't where most working class voters are, they want social mobility and the Tories are the ones to give it to them!

Even by the standards of May's 2017 pitch to workers, this is pretty abysmal. Unlike McVey, May's then policy brain, Nick Timothy, actually came from a working class background and understood the Tories would have to offer something relatively substantial to catch their notice. This didn't get beyond the philosophical and rhetorical, and the election proved you have to do better than nice words. Where really existing working class people were concerned they went for Labour in droves because it spoke their language. The Tory prospectus for working class voters was zilch.

McVey makes the common Westminster mistake of assuming retirees are typical of workers in general when, in fact, they're not. Pinching Johnny Foreigner to pay for a handful of beat coppers suggests McVey has read too much UKIP material instead of talking to actual wage earners locked out of the property market, and held back by crap wages and, to be truthful, crap jobs. The daily experience of working class life is a better education in Tory rule than any number of Labour Party leaflets. Rhetoric of this kind then might fly with the diminishing electorate of her threadbare party, but like all other Tory offerings McVey's pitch is not about to excite anyone but the Tory faithful, let alone getting anywhere near winning a general election.