Hunger lines are no longer embarrassing. Outside the doors of Emmanuel Anglican Parish on the multicultural Avenue Harrow Road in London this Friday, a group of people – most of them women – chatted, holding onto their shopping trolleys as they waited for the doors to open into the enclosure. Emmanuel Pantry (La Despensa Emmanuel) is a charity initiative that allows you to buy about 20 (almost 23 euros) worth of basic necessities for five pounds (about 5.70 euros). “He has been saving my and my family’s lives for years,” admits Aisha, covering her hair with her Islamic hijab. Zhade, of Afro-Caribbean descent, nods and smiles.
Fourteen years after David Cameron’s Conservative government introduced austerity policies in the United Kingdom aimed at reducing national debt and overcoming the 2008 crisis, the former prime minister has returned to the forefront of politics as head of the Foreign Office in Rishi Sunak’s Executive – to find a country that has not yet recovered from the deterioration in public services and private pockets that these policies brought with them. And paradoxically, Cameron’s rescue is, moreover, an attempt to redirect towards the center and moderation a Conservative party that has been completely transformed and radicalized by Brexit, which the former prime minister provoked in 2016 with a reckless, ill-conceived and poorly resolved referendum.
“Austerity disappeared from conservative ideology in 2019 with Boris Johnson’s election manifesto, which abandoned the concept and promised increased public investment, but we continue to suffer the consequences,” explains Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Policy at King’s College London and Director of UK in a Changing Europe, the academic organization that continues to rigorously analyze the consequences of Brexit. “The base from which we started the recovery was very low and we were unable to make the necessary capital investments,” he adds.
It was the perfect storm. The pandemic arrived and British healthcare, particularly public healthcare, was reduced to the bare minimum due to the austerity measures of the Cameron years. Because of this, the figure of the former prime minister became one of the most hated figures in the collective imagination of the British people.
“Cameron radiates failure from every pore of his skin. Brexit, Libya, the economy… all the problems our public services were already facing have been exacerbated by years of austerity. “Cameron’s appointment as foreign secretary can only mean that Sunak is running out of steam,” says philosopher and analyst John Gray in The New Statesman. “Why the hell are they bringing back this loser who is a relic of the past?” is what the majority of Conservative voters have to ask themselves,” concludes Gray.
Nostalgia for a conservative past
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Rishi Sunak has a year ahead of him in which he must try to overcome some poll numbers that are now devastating for the Tories. They all give the Labor Party a lead of at least 20 percentage points in the general election scheduled for the end of 2024. The prime minister, relatively new to politics and with a reputation as an effective technocrat, has in recent months sought to cultivate a far-right message that should, in theory, please the ears of the party’s base and voters.
Brexit and Boris Johnson’s election victory in 2019 have completely transformed a Conservative party that was already completely leaning towards populism, anti-immigration and anti-Europe messaging and an almost reactionary social authoritarianism that is completely contrary to that stands for what they define: any denunciation of a colonial past, latent institutional racism or an intolerant attitude towards gender politics.
It was not Sunak’s playing field that was actually increasingly overwhelmed by the “enemy within”: the already former home secretary Suella Braverman, supported by the hard wing of the Tories, increasingly openly advocated rebellion against the prime minister, following his expulsion from government this week a clear declaration of war has escalated.
Given these moves, Sunak has finally chosen his cards. Cameron’s inclusion is a nod to those centre-right voters, economically liberal and open-minded on social issues, who felt orphaned by a radicalized Conservative Party. Cameron arrived at Downing Street with a team of staff from cosmopolitan and modern urban elites. The Notting Hill Boys – a reference to London’s chic neighborhood of restaurants and bookstores – sold “compassionate conservatism,” a defense of the environment and social advances like gay marriage.
Cameron was able to forge a governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats in his first term in office and surprisingly achieved an absolute majority in his second election in 2015. But his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, had already laid the groundwork for dissatisfaction with the Liberal Democrats’ implementation of strict austerity policies that have deprived public services of tens of billions of pounds of necessary investment.
“Austerity was never a necessity, but rather a very bad economic policy decision, the consequences of which are now clearly visible. “Any return to new spending cuts to overcome the pandemic crisis would mean further dramatic costs for a country that has barely recovered from the last round of cuts,” warns Robert Calvert, a professor at the University of Greenwich’s Economic Policy Institute and author of a damning report on the Traces of Austerity, prepared for the Progressive Economic Policy Forum.
Calvert points to the restrictive fiscal measures imposed by Sunak and his business secretary Jeremy Hunt to overcome the loss of credibility in the United Kingdom caused by his predecessor Liz Truss. After months of strikes by nurses, doctors, transport workers, railway staff and teachers, the idea of regaining popularity, seen by many as the main cause of several years of hardship, has had a very short period of flowering.
It is true that Cameron was appointed Foreign Secretary. It need not impact the national political debate typical of an election year. But the core of Conservative voters who support remaining in the EU will not like putting the person at the center of the UK’s international picture, who with the 2016 Brexit consultation further alienated that island from its neighbors and partners has isolated.
Economically speaking, a bad memory. As an attempt to revive a conservative party that no longer exists, a mirage. Second chances in politics are rarely good. The only success Sunak achieved with his decision this week was to mask, for a few hours, the noise and fury of the rebellion led by Braverman with the exoticism and surprise that the sight of Cameron meant for many Britons. Enter Downing Street again.
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