UNDER Boris Johnson the Tories have taken a sharp rightward turn on housing, junking Theresa May’s tentative step towards policies for renters and social housing.

A lot of Morning Star readers’ first reaction might well be “Of course they have, they’re Tories.” Or perhaps “So what? Theresa May never meant what she said and never did anything on housing anyway.”

They wouldn’t be wrong. But I still think their return to a kind of headbanger Thatcherism says something about where the Tories are and how they will try and fight the next election.

May made faltering attempts to deal with what she called the “burning injustices” in society. This included May arguing this year that “too many governments — including, I am not afraid to say, the one in which I served as home secretary — have concentrated solely on boosting home ownership.” May said this ignored the “18 million people from every walk of life who woke up this morning in a rental property.”

May also argued that in “recent decades and under successive governments, social housing became another victim of the single-minded drive for home ownership,” and this had grim results in the Grenfell fire. May’s own plans to protect private tenants and offer money for more social housing were very weak — but they did exist.

But when it comes to millions of renters, or social housing, or the lessons of Grenfell, Boris Johnson’s housing ministers seem to be saying “screw them both.”

In 2018 Theresa May declared that “Whether you’re renting by choice or necessity, you’re not any less of a person for doing so and you should not be treated as such.” The new housing ministers do seem to be looking at renters as un-persons.

Given May made little actual progress on increasing council housing or protecting renters, why does this matter?

At the 2017 and 2018 Tory conferences, you could feel a sense that the Tories were shocked by Labour under Corbyn: they were genuinely perplexed that Labour had turned much harder to the left, but were recovering, electorally.

They responded by lots of crude “he’s a commie” type bile, but also by wondering if the deregulated economy was failing to deliver, if they needed to develop some social policy, some spending and regulation.

In the 2019 conference, this feeling was much weaker, superseded by an excitement about using Brexit to bash through some neo-Thatcherite policies.

Despite this, the Tory leadership are still thinking they will go into the election with what the Spectator called “a pitch for the Labour Leave constituencies” combining pro-Brexit stands “with emphasis placed on health spending, school spending and controlling crime.”

They say a Tory party attempting this manoeuvre will be “more northern, more working-class, more concerned with ordinary people. And its political economy will be different too. It won’t be laissez-faire or libertarian, but a believer in the idea that state intervention through big infrastructure projects can spread growth.”

Which is rhetorically very clever. But if ministers are then tearing up even Theresa May’s attempts to appeal to renters — social and private — that’s many million “blue collar” voters they’ve just given up on. This is particularly pointed because Esther McVey, the housing minister who sneers at renters is also the figurehead of “Blue Collar Conservatism,” a Tory group designed to appeal to working-class voters.

I think what is happening is that the Tories are making Brexit the spearhead of their policies, and Johnson has brought a lot of the “Britannia Unchained” wing of the party into ministerial position, because they are firmly pro-Brexit. However, Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid would like to combine this with a degree of “one nation” postures and public spending. It’s potentially a strong move, but it’s a complex one.

Another Tory thinker, James Kanagasooriam, who is on the board of Tory think tank Onward, argued this would be a “clear cut-through of doing Brexit” and “a pivot to the left on economics will be an Exocet missile at Labour’s Midlands and Northern voters.”

The belief in Tory circles that the Conservatives do need to “pivot left on economics” while “doing Brexit” shows the fundamental challenges of Corbynism are still on their mind. But Johnson hasn’t really got the sophisticated ministerial team that can — or want to — do this well.

Instead he has a bunch of headbangers who want to cosplay Thatcherism. The “Exocet missile” could easily misfire because a load of very right-wing ministers peppering their speeches with random announcements of spending on police, hospitals and schools before reverting to type and attacking renters, low earners, the disabled and so on will be too unstable.