How will the Tories attempt to sell their record next May? Hopi Sen analyses the substance beneath the spin

Reticence over your own achievements is a vanishingly rare quality in politics. It will be in even shorter supply in the coming months as the Conservatives desperately try to explain why their record justifies their re-election.

Here is George Osborne, this spring, writing posters and calling it a speech: ‘More jobs. Lower borrowing. Lower taxes. Less crime. Better school standards. Less welfare. Lower NHS waiting lists. More aid reaching the world’s poorest. Lower net migration. A growing economy.’ Contesting this panglossian staccato is essential. If this list of Tory achievements is rejected by voters, the government cannot run on their record. However, if the public perception of the last five years is one of significant, hard-won gains then Labour’s core argument for ‘change, not more of the same’, loses its power.

Expect the Conservatives to make four main claims for themselves between now and next May. But how potent is each one?

First, the platform on which all Tory arguments will be built is their claim to have led Britain to an economic recovery. Without this, all their other claims would be irrelevant. When Ed Miliband raised the Tory record in the last prime minister’s questions in July, David Cameron replied that the Labour leader, ‘talks about five years under this government. We have record numbers in work, the economy growing, record numbers of businesses’.

Clearly, there is an economic recovery. The increase in GDP and falling unemployment make that obvious. Whether this is something the government deserves credit for, however, is a different question. There are good economic reasons to say it does not. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University has written: ‘There is very little disagreement among serious economists that UK austerity in 2010 and 2011 reduced UK GDP.’ Austerity was not so much too far, too fast, but too soon, too cyclical.

What is more, prices are still rising faster than wages. The current earnings data shows average weekly earnings are up by less than just six tenths of one per cent a year. This means real wages are falling. This might change later this year, but it still adds up to four years of hard times for family finances. A falling deficit means little if living standards fall too.

So Labour’s charge that the government cuts hurt growth and family finances has real economic merit. Politically, though, Tory strategists believe this critique underestimates the achievement of recovery. Furthermore, will duelling hypotheticals really trump concrete positive signs of growth?

The Conservatives’ biggest argument will be that the recovery has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, a surge in employment that Labour said would never happen.

The drumbeat of two million extra private sector jobs will be loud and long – even if a tenth of this is due to the reclassification of colleges to the private sector – while the claimant count will soon drop below one million for the first time since the crash, more than a third below its peak.

Already, Conservative Campaign Headquarters is designing the posters to highlight this achievement, arguing that even if wages are not rising thousands of families are better off.

The Tories will also argue that if recovery is not broadly felt, then this is the fault of the last Labour government, not the result of Tory indifference. That is why the Conservative campaign slogan – the endlessly repeated ‘long-term economic plan’ – is designed to remind voters both of the depth of the crisis, and the need for the Tories to continue fixing it.

Second, the Conservatives will assert that they are building a state that ‘costs less and helps more’. The Labour charge that the Tories do not care for ordinary families stings because Conservative strategists know it is widely shared. One former adviser told me: ‘We can read those polls as well as you can.’ To counter this, the Tories will claim credit for making life easier for families, by cutting their taxes and helping them prosper.

The raft of personal tax cuts that have been introduced over the last couple of years will be the boast here: the increase in the personal allowance, freezing of petrol duty, the reintroduction of the married couple’s allowance, and tax-free childcare support. The increase in VAT is passed over in silence, naturally. It is likely that a signature tax cut will come next spring, or even this autumn, with a dare to Labour to match it.

At the same time the Tories will not want to leave the impression that all they stand for is tax cuts. One journalist with close links to the Treasury is confident the government will make a big push on rail-, road- and bridge-building this autumn, as well as making much of the boost the R&D and innovation budgets have received. All of this is designed to signal the Tories’ commitment to building, in the chancellor’s latest catchphrase, ‘northern powerhouses’. The impression sought is of a state that costs families less, while helping them more.

Third, the Conservatives will suggest that schools and hospitals are improving on their watch. They will claim that the reform programme has raised standards, so better services have been delivered despite tough choices on budgets. If the Tories can fight to a draw on waiting lists, they will consider it a victory. One former No 10 staffer told me that as long as public satisfaction with school standards and NHS performance was fairly strong, the claim would be that government reforms had done their job, largely because frontline staff have been trusted to do what they thought was best.

At the same time, ministers will be more conciliatory to those working in health and education. Instead of boasting about the radicalism of their health reforms or the number of free schools they have sanctioned, emphasis will be on uncontroversial positives like improved school standards, improved technical education, the cancer drugs fund, and the small increase in numbers of nurses and doctors. Will this be convincing? It is unlikely to win over many Labour voters, but it is not designed to, just to protect ministers against the charge that austerity has destroyed the NHS and schools.

Fourth, the Tories will maintain that they are bringing welfare and immigration ‘under control’. Compared with schools and hospitals, immigration and welfare are two areas where the government does hope to attract new voters, both by securing their right flank against the United Kingdom Independence party and peeling off swing voters from Labour.

Yet these are areas where the Tories privately fear their actual performance has been weak. You can tell this because while their boasts on the economy and public services are based on outcomes – jobs created, waiting lists down and school standards up – the boasts on immigration and welfare are all about inputs. On welfare, instead of claiming to have cut the overall bill, the Tories will have to talk about capping both individual welfare payments and the total bill. On immigration, instead of asserting that they have reduced net migration, the boast will be of limiting access to benefits and curtailing the advertising of vacancies abroad.

The ‘outcomes’ record in both these areas is unimpressive. The migration target is widely regarded to have been a mistake, one over which they had little control. So net migration is roughly the same as it was in 2010, while Declan Gaffney has demonstrated that the significant rise in housing benefit caseloads makes a mockery of claims to have ‘got welfare under control’.

But the Tories are gambling that, despite Rachel Reeves’ recent announcements on immigration and benefits, Labour will struggle to attack these Tory weak points, as doing so exposes vulnerabilities in the party’s own approach. Would a Labour government seek less immigration and less welfare spending, the Conservatives will counter, and, if so, what policies would deliver it?

Are the Tories convincing when they claim that five years of Cameron was a success story? The mere fact of recovery may trump a deep analysis of its cause and distribution, but if the Tories cannot persuade people the recovery has been in their interest it likely will not be enough. Absent credit for growth, stricter rules on immigration and welfare (but no better outcomes) and more or less stable public services is not much of a record to be proud of.

Will the measures to give a little extra to families through tax cuts outweigh the fact of low wages, rising prices and widespread insecurity? Right now, probably not. But there is still a conference, an autumn statement and a budget to come. These might give ministers more to boast of. It is a safe bet that Osborne’s little list of Tory achievements is not complete just yet.

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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress and a candidate for the Progress strategy board

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Photo: Conservatives