Last week, Rishi Sunak, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain announced a historic budget, and I say this in the sense that it represents the biggest amount of spending by a British government in decades. In the budget, the chancellor pledged £12 billion to help fight the coronavirus, including a £5 billion emergency support fund for the NHS and other public services in England, with an extra £6 billion for the NHS over a five year period. He’s also promised that those asked to self-isolate will be given sick pay, and small businesses will be able to access an “interruption loan” of up to £1.2 million. The government also promised to build 40 new hospitals and employ 50,000 new nurses, but that’s just the beginning. The government also plans to spend £600 billion over the next five years on roads, rail, broadband and housing, £2.5 billion to fix potholes and resurfacing roads, £1 billion for de-cladding public and private housing, £640 million to protect natural habitats, £120 million to protect English communities stricken by floods, £650 million to tackle homelessness, £360 million for Wales, £640 million for Scotland, £210 million for Northern Ireland, just to name a handful of commitments. To pay for this new spending spree, the government intends to borrow more than any previous Tory government has done in decades, but they are confident that this will lead to greater economic growth.

So what is happening with the Tories as of late? Putting the state of emergency brought on by the coronavirus aside for a moment, this represents a tremendous departure from what has represented the orthodox of Tory policy. From 1979 onward the Tories were the champions of free-market fundamentalism, committed to slashing public spending, lowering taxes, privatisation and avoiding borrowing where possible. Indeed, over the past ten years the Tories have overseen a particularly cruel regime of austerity, and yet at the dawn of the new decade it seems as though the Tories are committing themselves to greater spending, particularly in the realm of healthcare, infrastructure and public services, and the budget contains too many grand spending promises to be dismissed as merely an opportunistic pivot. As I see it, what we are looking at is a broad, long-term realignment of the ideology of the Tory party towards economic interventionism.

This might sound impossible and unthinkable in the eyes of the lay Corbynite, but there was a time in which the Tories weren’t free market utopians. Following the victory of the Labour Party in 1945, the then-leader of the party Clement Attlee enacted a broad social democratic agenda which entailed nationalisation of industries, increased taxes, regulation of the markets, the expansion of the welfare state, and universal healthcare, as represented by the NHS. These policies proved popular enough that the Tories, then led by Winston Churchill, promised not to change them in their 1947 Industrial Charter, and thus the Tories became a party whose purpose was simply to maintain the new consensus and prevent further nationalisations, while emphasising social conservatism.

All differences and debate aside, this came to be known as the post-war consensus: in practice a Keynesian mixed economy. Often this was humorously referred to as “Butskellism” due to the remarkably similar philosophies of Tory and Labour Chancellors Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell respectively, both holding these positions during the early 1950s. The philosophy of the Conservative Party was invariably shaped by this consensus, and indeed this transformation can be summed up in the closing remarks of Tory Chancellor Rab Butler’s first budget in 1952.

Solvency, security, duty and incentive are our themes. Restriction and austerity are not enough. We want a system that offers us both more realism and more hope … We must now set forth, braced and resolute, to show the world that we shall regain our solvency and, with it, our national greatness.

In other words, there was once a time where the Tories were simply the guardians of a mixed economy model as opposed to the free market radicals they became in the late 1970s, after which we saw a reversal of that trend, in which the Tories set the new consensus and Labour, eventually, charged themselves with preserving it, this being the neoliberal consensus. Today, however, I think we seeing the emergence of a new political consensus, one which both the Tories and the Labour Party played a role in establishing. First there was the post-war consensus, then there was the neoliberal consensus, in the new decade, there will be the post-austerity consensus.

When I speak of a post-austerity consensus, I am quite simply referring to the agreement between both the two main parties that austerity and free market economics have ruined the country, depriving and shattering its communities. The opposition parties (not counting the Lib Dems who co-signed austerity) had been opposing austerity throughout the 2010s, but it was under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn that anti-austerity politics had become the life force of the Labour Party, with the momentum behind Jeremy Corbyn during the 2017 election forcing the Tories under Theresa May to move slightly to the left on economics in their manifesto. However, in November 2019, in the run-up to the election in December, the Tories under their current leader Boris Johnson went further, signalling support for state aid to struggling British industries, which was one of the key policies of the Lexit movement.

This leads me to another crucial piece of the puzzle. Given that a number of policy proposals made both by Boris Johnson in the election campaign and Rishi Sunak in the present budget would effectively be illegal under EU law (state aid being criminalised under the TFEU), this consensus could only come about following Britain’s exit of the EU, and this is because the EU exists to impose neoliberal free market economics on member states, as we have seen countless times in countries such as Greece, Portugal and Italy among other countries. This makes all the more ironic the zeal with which the supposedly anti-austerity Labour Party defended the EU and spent the last election fighting for a “people’s vote” to stay in it (the only reason a second referendum was ever advocated for in the first place is under the expectation that the people will change their mind and vote to reverse Brexit, which is the same reason the EU demanded a rerun of the vote on the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland) and could soon elect as leader a man who has not ruled out the possibility of rejoining the EU.

Another part of this consensus is that the Tories are now making gestures towards environmental policy in a bid to suck up the green vote. Sunak’s budget for instance proposes a tax on plastic packaging due to come into force in April 2022 and the imposition of a levy of £200 per tonne to manufacturers and importers whose products use less than 30% recyclable material, and the interesting thing about these policies in particular is that rather than feeding off the traditional environmentalist impulse to punish consumers for making environmentally unfriendly consumption choices, they instead target the companies that produce what is being consumed, which is unusual for a Conservative government.

Another break from Tory orthodoxy that I predict is coming at some point down the line, probably the starkest of all, is that the party will at some point consider universal basic income as a way of mitigating the job losses brought on by automation. As strange as that sounds, it’s not impossible. For one, the Trump administration in America is already considering rolling out a temporary UBI instalment as an emergency measure in response to the coronavirus. Here in Britain as well, the government has a similar policy in mind, with Boris Johnson considering a temporary UBI instalment being considered to protect workers who would be unable to do their jobs due to the coronavirus. Of course this comes much sooner than I thought it would, but there is a plausible explanation for why the Tories would eventually have considered UBI anyway. If the whole purpose of the party is to defend, protect and preserve capitalism, then logically it follows that they would be attracted to the idea of UBI because it allows the bourgeoisie to keep capitalism going in the face of automation, and as automation robs our society of labour, UBI will not only rob labour of its purpose, but will also potentially deprive the left of its political purpose as well. If everyone gets an income floor through which nobody falls through, and that income floor is cushy enough to sustain people paying their bills, then why would they vote for the left? Why would they want to overthrow a system that is making their lives comfortable?

The immediate temptation of Labourites (especially Corbynites) is to assume that the Sunak Budget is proof that Labour ultimately won the argument, and to be fair there is some validity to this assumption. Already the Tories are implementing some policies that Jeremy Corbyn might have done sooner if he won the election, and they are even implementing suggestions from Jeremy Corbyn himself. A few days ago Corbyn called on the government to suspend rents and ban evictions, and a day later the government does pretty much exactly that. What is also true is that the Tories would not be pivoting to the left at all were it not for the need to neutralise the threat of a left-wing Labour government entering power. However, the fact that Labour lost to the extent that it did should tell you that the Tories aren’t afraid of losing to Labour. The fact that they are pursuing interventionism anyway is proof that the Tories are responding to objective conditions (namely the global pandemic) rather than the nonexistent threat of Labour taking power.

In fact, I think that Labour are woefully unprepared for the prospect of a post-austerity consensus, namely because they are missing what the Tories have already figured out. Essential to the realisation of this consensus is the fact that the Tories have stumbled upon the secret formula for winning over the working class: economic interventionism + social conservatism. At the moment, Labour still looks like the party of Trotksyist university students, and that’s a fitting description considering (a) many of the safe seats that didn’t turn blue happen to also have a university in the area, and (b) because if they continue their current trajectory their only constituents are going to be students and academics. To make matters worse, the left appears to be botching their response to the coronavirus even worse than the government, a feat that you might not think is possible but somehow they managed it. For one, Jeremy Corbyn thought it was a good idea to come out against self-isolation on the grounds that it will somehow, based on no evidence, produce an epidemic of domestic abuse (only for him to eventually self-isolate). Frankly, whoever told him that this sort of response would be anything other than tone deaf in a national emergency should be fired. Furthermore, there are a bevy of hot takes on Twitter suggesting that the pandemic is an excellent opportunity for a general strike (as vocally suggested in a recent article by NonCompete), despite the notable handicap of the government ordering everyone to stay inside on the grounds that this minimises the spread of the virus. Whoever’s telling you it’s a good idea to do a general strike at this point in time is conning you into risking infection for not just yourself, but other comrades and family members, all for a project that is doomed to fail, and is already unnecessary in the UK considering the government is already giving out sick pay, suspending evictions and dedicating the resources of the healthcare system to the virus.

That the left is so incompetent in the face of a global crisis that all it can do is entertain feverish fantasies of bringing down the system in a time where such fantasies are even less practical than ever before is telling of their future efficacy. Some of them actually believe that the economic crash that has come a result of the coronavirus is the opportune time for the left to take power, either by vote or by revolution. Such assumptions conveniently ignore that the masses hate us, as was brutally demonstrated in the last election. You need the masses for any plan to take power to work, and the left has done such a good job at alienating them that the working class is just going to vote for Boris Johnson again, and again, and again, and when the left lashes out in fits of violence, the masses will cheer when they are put down by the police. If they think they are going to come out the winners after the pandemic is over, then they are being very delusional. If Boris Johnson’s response is successful, it will cement his dominance over British politics, and Labour will be helpless so long as it continues defending the notion of open borders and globalisation even after it has been demonstrated that open borders cannot work in the event of a global pandemic and that globalisation had made the entire world vulnerable to this and future catastrophes. It will be a vindication for an already rising far-right across Europe, and for example the True Finns are already at the top of the polls amidst the grievous incompetence of the Corbyn-like social democrats in charge.

If the left wishes to attain power in these changing times, then it must learn to adapt to the new consensus, and most crucially it must accept that we do not live in the previous era anymore. For the moment the left is having trouble accepting this fact, with Jeremy Corbyn dismissing the budget as “smoke and mirrors” even as a lot of the policies mentioned are what Corbyn might have done anyway. Throughout the election the left assumed that the Tory plan is to go further with austerity and use Brexit to turn the country into a “Singapore on Thames”, a fantasy that the new chancellor’s budget has brazenly contradicted. They blinded themselves to the possibility that the Tories, and indeed the bourgeoisie, may in fact commit themselves to economic interventionism as a means of self-preservation, which is essentially what they are doing. The Tories know that the old way of free market fundamentalism cannot continue if capitalism is to survive, and if they are to hold on to the former Labour voters who have flocked to the Tories in the last election, and thus hold on to power. As long as the left assumes that they will be dealing with the same old Tories in perpetuity, they will go nowhere, and so long as they remained married to the old-fashioned metropolitan liberalism of the neoliberal consensus, they are destined to lose out in the new era of the post-austerity consensus. We are at a point where a new era is about to emerge, how well we do in this new era depends on our ability to adapt to the death of the old paradigm and the birth of the new one.