Hunger queues are no longer embarrassing. Before the doors of the Anglican parish of Emmanuel, on London’s multicultural avenue of Harrow Road, a group of people – most of them women – chatted among themselves this Friday, clinging to their shopping carts, while they waited for the doors to open. of the enclosure. Emmanuel Pantry (La Despensa Emmanuel) is a charity initiative that allows you to buy, for five pounds (about 5.70 euros), basic necessities worth about 20 (almost 23 euros). “He has been saving my family and me’s lives for years,” Aisha admits, her hair covered by the hijab Islamic. Zhade, of Afro-Caribbean origin, nods and smiles.
Fourteen years after David Cameron’s Conservative government imposed austerity policies in the United Kingdom, designed to reduce public debt and overcome the 2008 crisis, the former prime minister has returned to the front line of politics – as responsible of the Foreign Affairs portfolio in Rishi Sunak’s Executive – to find a country that has not yet recovered from the deterioration of public services and private pockets that that policy brought with it. And paradoxically, Cameron’s rescue is, furthermore, an attempt to redirect a Conservative Party completely transformed and radicalized by the Brexit that the former prime minister provoked in 2016 with a reckless referendum that was poorly conceived and poorly resolved, towards the center and moderation. .
“Austerity disappeared from the conservative ideology in 2019, with Boris Johnson’s electoral program in which the concept was renounced and an increase in public investment was promised, but we continue to bear the consequences of that,” Anand Menon explains to EL PAÍS , professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, and director of UK in a Changing Europe, the academic organization that continues to rigorously analyze the consequences of Brexit. “The basis on which we began to recover was very low, and we have not been able to make the necessary capital investment,” he adds.
It was the perfect storm. The pandemic arrived, and the British had healthcare services, especially public health, reduced to the bare bones due to the austerity measures of the Cameron years. For this reason, the figure of the former prime minister ended up becoming one of the most hated in the collective imagination of the British.
“Cameron oozes failure from every pore of his skin. Brexit, Libya, the economy… all the problems our public services were already facing were compounded by years of austerity. Cameron’s appointment as Foreign Secretary can only mean that Sunak is running out of steam,” says philosopher and analyst John Gray in the magazine The New Statesman. “Why the hell are they bringing back this loser, who is a remnant of the past?’, the bulk of conservative voters must be asking themselves,” Gray concludes.
Nostalgia for a conservative past
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Rishi Sunak has a year ahead of him to try to overcome some polls that today are devastating for the Tories. All of them give at least 20 percentage points of advantage to the Labor Party in a general election scheduled for the end of 2024. The prime minister, relatively new to politics and with a reputation as an effective technocrat, has played in recent months to cultivate a message of extreme right that, in theory, should please the ears of the party’s bases and voters.
Brexit and Boris Johnson’s electoral victory in 2019 completely transformed a Conservative Party already leaning completely towards populism, the anti-immigration and anti-Europe message, and an almost reactionary social authoritarianism totally opposed to what they define as woke up: any denunciation of a colonial past, latent institutional racism or an intolerant attitude towards gender policies.
It was not Sunak’s playing field, which in fact was increasingly overwhelmed by the “internal enemy”: the former Minister of the Interior, Suella Braverman, supported by the hardline wing of the toriesincreasingly brazenly championed a rebellion against the prime minister that, after being expelled from the Government this week, has escalated to a clear declaration of war.
Faced with these movements, Sunak has finally chosen his cards. Cameron’s incorporation is a nod to those center-right voters, economically liberal and open in social matters, who felt orphaned by a radicalized Conservative Party. Cameron arrived at Downing Street with a team of collaborators from cosmopolitan and modern urban elites. The Notting Hill Boys —in reference to London’s chic neighborhood of restaurants and bookstores—they sold “compassionate conservatism,” a defense of the environment and social advances such as gay marriage.
Cameron was able to forge a government coalition with the Liberal Democrats in his first term, and obtained a surprising absolute majority in his second election, in 2015. But his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, had already planted the seeds of discontent with the application to a strict austerity policy that withdrew tens of billions of pounds in necessary investment from public services.
“Austerity was never a necessity, but rather a very poor economic policy choice whose consequences have now been clearly exposed. Any return to new spending cuts, to overcome the pandemic crisis, would mean another dramatic cost to a country that has barely recovered from the last round of cuts,” warns Robert Calvert, professor at the Economic Policy Institute at the University of Greenwich and author of a devastating report on the traces of austerity carried out for the Progressive Economic Policy Forum.
Calvert refers to the restrictive fiscal measures imposed by Sunak and his Economy Minister, Jeremy Hunt, to overcome the collapse of the United Kingdom’s credibility caused by his predecessor, Liz Truss. After months of strikes by nurses, doctors, transport workers, railway personnel and teachers, the idea of regaining popularity with whom many point out as the main cause of some years of hardship has a very short flight.
It is true that Cameron has been appointed Foreign Secretary. He does not have to influence the national policy debate typical of an election year. But putting at the forefront of the international image of the United Kingdom the person who further isolated that island from its neighbors and partners, with the Brexit consultation of 2016, will not be liked by the core of conservative voters who support remaining in the EU.
Economically, a bad memory. As an attempt to resurrect a Conservative Party that no longer exists, a mirage. Second chances in politics are rarely good. The only success achieved this week by Sunak, with his decision, has been to cover to a certain extent, for a few hours, the sound and fury of the rebellion led by Braverman with the exoticism and surprise that seeing Cameron has meant for many Britons. enter Downing Street again.
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