You have to give David Cameron some credit. He's got what a training in PR gives you – breathtakingly barefaced cheek. "The Conservatives are today the radicals … We are now the party of progress," he wrote in yesterday's Guardian. You can imagine his team laughing at their own sheer effrontery as they penned, "To Guardian readers everywhere, I say: overcome any prejudices you may have. We want to change our country and we want to do it with your help." What a nerve.
Those prejudices are grounded in history, as Cameron and George Osborne reprise Margaret Thatcher's disaster economic policies: cut public services, cut taxes, cut benefits, cut borrowing faster, let unemployment rip. Last time the result was child poverty rising from one in seven to one in three children, social damage that is stubbornly hard to shift: tax credits, better benefits and Sure Start lifted 500,000 out of poverty but as soon as efforts cease, numbers will soar. Cameron taunts Labour that "inequality is rising", which it has slightly, but he knows his policies mean sky-rocketing inequality and poverty.
Look what the "party of progress" has done this week. Today it's a marriage bribe of £150 that leaves out the lowest paid married couples and deserted wives. In the wash-up Cameron stopped a referendum on the voting system and House of Lords reform. He blocked sex education and one-to-one tuition for slow readers. His shadow home secretary repudiated protection for gay people, while his MEPs voted for homophobia with their weird new party. Cameron told the Catholic Herald that he will vote to cut the time limit for abortions: a majority of incoming Tory MPs will make sure it happens, banning the rare desperate post 20-week abortions. Is that "progress"? He will also oppose assisted dying for the terminally ill.
A Financial Times survey of Tory candidates this week pointed to the scale of climate change denial in the party. Most resist a cap on bankers' bonuses and want less financial regulation: many come from the financial sector, others from PR and marketing, and they want the 50p top tax scrapped. Conservativehome.com finds them rabidly Eurosceptic. All that is radical, a fundamentalist return to Conservative roots. No change there, then.
Is it a surprise Cameron occupies such traditional Tory turf? Pickles and Hague, with their trusted Yorkshire backgrounds, are frequent frontmen for class purposes, but also represent the nasty old party. Cameron flits between "progressive" and the old story beneath. The party of business rolls out 68 captains of industry, most on astronomic pay. The national insurance rise they oppose costs £4 a week per employee – not, says James Caan of Dragons' Den, a sum that deters hiring. As Ruth Sutherland points out, it will cost M&S £10m – peanuts compared with its new boss's £15m golden hello.
Synthetic policy is a Cameron hallmark. It looks convincing, it catches a public mood, but it knows very well there is nothing in the tin. The 68 captains may not sway polls much because people don't warm to fat cats, now less than ever. Cameron is quick to catch that "fair pay" sentiment – but without touching the precious 68. Instead he will cap public officials' pay at 20 times their lowest paid staff. Reasonable enough, but Income Data Services says only some 100 people would be affected. Meanwhile in the private sector top pay has risen from 47 to 81 times average employees' pay – not lowest paid but average. It's the private sector that most needs a high pay commission – about which Cameron says nothing. Public sector top pay is only a symptom of a private sector disease. Voters know that the big market destroyed the economy, while the big state rescued it.
Jobs will be lost in the public sector whoever wins: all parties pretend, but "waste", "back office" or "contracts" are all people's livelihoods. The choice between parties is one of degree and priority. Cameron offers tax cuts that will require double the depth of spending cuts and probably mean double the job losses. Consider this: just as a whole new green industry is set to arrive in the north-east, with Clipper, Siemens, GE and Nissan about to manufacture wind turbines and other greenery, Cameron pledges to scrap "regional stuff" – the regional development agencies and their subsidies that made it happen – while Kenneth Clarke says he "shudders at a nightmare return to the 1970s" of industrial subsidy. The Tories voted down new planning rules, so their nimby councils can block wind turbines, scrapping the renewables obligation that forces energy companies to build them. GE warn they would think carefully about coming here if Cameron did abolish tax allowances for the upfront costs of new machinery. "A disaster for manufacturing" warns the Engineering Employers Federation. Why do it? To fund Cameron's 3p cut in corporation tax. That means money for manufacturing investment goes instead to banks or Tesco and those 68 captains' profits.
Here's another way Cameron would increase unemployment: the Small Business Federation says "the jewel in the crown" of Labour's Keynesian borrowing is the £5bn of tax postponed for 200,000 small businesses, saving many of them and their 1.4m jobs. But Cameron says all such borrowing "must stop instantly". Unemployment is much lower than expected, but Cameron would send it back to the 1980s.
Unemployment already risks creating a new cadre of the poor, even without Theresa May's ominous promise to "increase work incentives" for those on the dole. Most wicked would be Cameron's plan to cut Sure Start back to its origins, with maybe 500 of 3,500 centres surviving in skeleton: so much for his concern about "social mobility stalling". School budgets, not ringfenced, would get a £1.7bn cut, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons, before paying for new parent-run schools.
Cameron is a star performer – playing cuddly and progressive in the Guardian while issuing old Tory bribes on the family via the Daily Mail – but can the mixed messages (on tax cuts and deficit slashing especially) hold water to May 6? If so, he has set himself a trap – to be judged on poverty, inequality and a "broken Britain" that his polices can only worsen.
Dear Guardian readers, this is Cameron's radical and progressive party. Plausible phrases decorate policies with entirely predictable results. We know it because we have been there before.
Polly Toynbee moans for the Guardian [but we love her - Ed]
