The Rage of Middle England

 

The Bone of Contention
George Armfield (1810-1893)
Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain]

... But the rage triggered by the mini-budget is of a different order. It is felt not just by the usual suspects; it has spread to the moderately well-off, the Waitrose shoppers, the red-trouser wearers. It is firing up those who don't normally care that much about politics, sowing anger in the hearts of the previously sanguine.

We, the enervated of Middle England, are raging that millions of lives are to be made poorer and more uncertain by a handful of people without an electoral mandate elevated to office by a tiny minority of the population. We rage at the arrogance of those who ignore expert advice because they read Hayek 30 years ago. We rage for all the people who feel rib-tightening anxiety about how on earth they can afford the vast predicted hikes in their mortgage payments, whose homes, bought through years of hard work, now have the sword of Damocles hanging over them. And here is the thing that Truss and Co do not seem to have factored in: middle-income long-time Tory voters like me also rage, rage, rage at their callous treatment of those on the lowest incomes, cutting the taxes of the richest while letting some very desperate people stew in the expectation that their benefits will be cut in real terms.

The lack of compassion alone would be enough to make you seethe; what sharpens the rage to something spiky is the accompanying stupidity. For when those millionaires enjoying a tax cut find themselves £50,000 better off each year, are they likely to spend it on their local high street? ..

This rage is the culmination of years of exasperation. The mini-budget was not the beginning and end of the problem but the straw that broke the camel's back ... and those old accusations about the Tory party - callous, uncaring, reckless with ordinary lives - are pretty difficult to refute... Today's scrapping of the bankers' bonus cap while countenancing real-terms cuts to benefits returns the Tories to the Alan B'Stard parody that my friends suspected 20 years ago...

Truss, her allies and all those who put her in No 10 should make no mistake that the quiet rage of Middle England is real - and that it will last not only to polling day, but many years beyond.

(Clare Foges, The Times, 2022)

Interesting to read a columnist in The Times, not normally known for its trenchant criticism of government policy, rage about the mini-budget being a culmination rather than a beginning of exasperation with the Conservative party.

Simon Clarke's airy conviction in Saturday's Times that we live in a fool's paradise of welfare (the levelling-up secretary forgets which fools have been running it for 12 years) implies that public services will suffer. So will the pay of public servants, transport and utility workers. The prime minister's distaste for the "lens of redistribution" confirms that the lives of the poorest will be made worse and more humiliating, however hard they try (one in five universal benefit claimants are actually in work; food banks report a similar proportion)...

The point is that even featherbedded boomers and triple-locked pensioners are uneasy about inequality and the degradation of the shared realm. When public services, social mobility and care for the weak are downgraded, life becomes worse even on the safer slopes...

(Libby Purves, The Times, 2022)

Sir, Clare Foge's lamentation at the dire state of the Conservative government is well made as is her analysis of its causes that go straight back to Brexit being "fool's gold" promoted by politicians who ought to have appreciated the high risks of the economic and political damage it entailed. Since then both Boris Johnson's mendacity and boosterism and Trussonomics are just increasingly desperate attempts at masking the unpalatable origins of our problems and at finding some miraculous short-cut exit from them, tainting Conservatism in the process...

(Dominic Grieve KC, Attorney General, 2010-2014, The Times, 2022)

Sir, Angry and embarrassed: Clare Foges and Libby Purves together neatly sum up the feelings of my friends and me on this disturbingly right-wing budget. The chancellor's U-turn on the 45p rate of tax changes those feelings not a jot.

(Sheena Mackay, London SW14, The Times, 2022)