The new Conservative class war

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The Conservative party needs a new enemy. All oppositions must find a dragon that they alone can slay — a crisis for the country — a story around which they can build a new coalition of voters. Creating this narrative will not be easy, not least because at the last election voters identified the Tories themselves as the beast that needed vanquishing.

Not that you would know that from their delusionally upbeat party conference, a factor of Sir Keir Starmer’s faltering start, the galvanising effect of a leadership election and excitement at the prospect of philosophical rebirth.

The easy ideological space — one that many Tories are itching to fill — is to reclaim the mantle of the party of the smaller state. There are, however, two large problems with this approach.

The first is that the country, as yet, shows no signs of wanting it. There is no convincing explanation of July’s election result that leads you to believe voters want less generously funded public services or less government action. 

Second, while Conservatives may talk the small-state talk, they show no appetite for the hard decisions this requires. Even as they lament the scale of public spending, the party’s leaders lambast Labour for means-testing the pensioner winter fuel allowance. And in office, the Tories expanded the state to the point of even legislating to regulate football. 

So what to do? The answer may lie in a dense new pamphlet released by Kemi Badenoch’s leadership campaign, entitled Conservatism in Crisis. The former business secretary’s bid is facing its own dramas and allies worry she may struggle to make the final two contenders. But her arguments will outlast the contest and inform Conservative thinking whoever wins. 

The pamphlet identifies that new enemy, in a pleasingly unified — if also neat — economic and social critique. Crucially, it is focused on deregulation and reform rather than cuts to slash public services. This is the streamlined, rather than the smaller, state.

Badenoch’s new dragon is what she calls the bureaucratic class. This extends far beyond civil servants or regulators to an array of middle-class professionals in business and academia with left-leaning instincts and a vested interest in extending regulation. 

They range from HR staff, whose growth and status is bolstered by rafts of employment law and (most hated of all) the diversity, equality and inclusion agenda, to the internal risk managers and compliance officers stifling enterprise in business. It spans the planning officers and environmental lawyers frustrating housebuilding and business expansion and the growing university sector which she argues is central to entrenching left-thinking in society.

Her pamphlet cites Office for National Statistics data showing an 86 per cent rise in HR managers between 2001 and 2023, and a ratio of regulators and compliance staff to financial services workers up from 1:300 in 2011 to 1:75 now. “More and more jobs,” she states, “are related not to providing goods and services . . . but are . . . focused around administering government rules.” 

Badenoch focuses on the “twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves — and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals”. This “rise of safetyism” underpins not only identity politics, but demands ever more regulation of personal behaviour.

The attraction of this analysis for Tories is obvious. It speaks to their deepest instincts that an overweening state is stymieing growth and infantilising the public. It also gives them a modern analogue to the targets of the 1970s when Margaret Thatcher built the case against the overmighty trade unions and the corporatist state. The Tories will paint this bureaucratic class as the new enemy of growth and national renewal and tie it to an over-regulating Labour government.

One does not have to buy into the entire critique of progressive conspiracy and self-serving penpushers (Badenoch’s rhetorical dial routinely goes up to 11) to recognise she has at least a partial point. Another separate, much discussed essay highlighted the chilling effect of excessive planning regulation on growth.

The difficulty remains which regulations do you wish to surrender? Patently some are necessary. Is it to be building-safety rules in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy? Do voters want fewer employment rights or environmental protections? Badenoch even cited maternity pay and the minimum wage in her lists of job-destroying regulations. 

This is also a lot of people to demonise. Singling out civil servants is now commonplace, but this includes a large cohort of ordinary people doing what they think is good work in the private sector. It is the kind of attack that makes her colleagues nervous of Badenoch’s Manichean worldview and self-image as a relentless teller of truths.

Will the assault on the bureaucratic class — the enemy of the enterprising class — take root? It would certainly require less judgmental language. Not every HR professional can be an enemy of the people. The Tories have alienated enough of the working-age population already. (The best argument for James Cleverly as leader is that he doesn’t project dislike for half the country.)

But the concept of the left-leaning, regulatory, enfeebling state and its enablers offers a grand unifying thesis to a party looking to regain relevance. The Conservatives may have found a class war they can really get behind.

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