Theresa May has made a bold pledge to bring a decade of austerity to a close, as she appealed to the public over the heads of her squabbling party to back her to deliver a Brexit deal.
Speaking in Birmingham on Wednesday at the end of the Conservatives’ annual conference, which was marred by repeated clashes over Europe, May cast aside the chancellor’s concerns about the health of the country’s finances and signalled Brexit would mark an end to public spending cuts.
Despite widespread speculation about her future, May also made several domestic policy announcements in an attempt to show she has not been blown off course by Brexit or noisy critics led by Boris Johnson.
They include:
Lifting the cap on local authorities borrowing to build new council homes.
Setting new targets for early cancer detection as part of a new “cancer strategy”.
Freezing fuel duty for the ninth consecutive year.
But her most eye-catching pledge was the promise to bring to an end the decade-long programme of spending cuts imposed after the banking bailouts.
“When we’ve secured a good Brexit deal for Britain, at the spending review next year we will set out our approach for the future,” she said. “A decade after the financial crash, people need to know that the austerity it led to is over and that their hard work has paid off.
“There must be no return to the uncontrolled borrowing of the past. No undoing all the progress of the last eight years. No taking Britain back to square one. But the British people need to know that the end is in sight. And our message to them must be this: we get it.”
Experts were sceptical about the idea of drawing a line under austerity in 2019. Torsten Bell, the director of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, said: “The public and most politicians are tired of austerity, but we’re a long way off from actually ending it.”
Current government plans involve continuing to reduce the deficit until the second half of the 2020s, with significant cuts to many departments’ budgets pencilled in. May’s speech marks a significant change in rhetoric but actually ending the current era of public spending restraint will involve not words but significant tax rises and higher borrowing.
The prime minister’s remarks were an effort to convince the public that “our future is full of promise”; but they also appeared to signal Conservative anxieties that Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity narrative has become “the new political mainstream”, as the Labour leader claimed in his own well-received conference speech last week.
In a self-deprecating move aides later insisted was unplanned, May appeared on stage dancing to Abba’s Dancing Queen – and made a series of pointed calls for her party to unite.
“It is no surprise that we have had a range of different views expressed this week. But my job as prime minister is to do what I believe to be in the national interest,” she said.
The Treasury has been keen to stress that future public spending plans will depend on the exact nature of the Brexit deal Britain secures, with the chancellor and the business secretary suggesting a Canada-style approach would lead to slower economic growth.
Hammond is also closely watching the financial markets, amid fears that the next few weeks could see sharp movements in sterling and share prices as the government battles to secure a deal.
But No 10 sources said after the speech that May’s promise to end austerity in next year’s spending review, due next spring, was unconditional.
The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell said: “Theresa May’s claim that austerity is over is a con. If the prime minister wants to back up her words with action, Philip Hammond should announce immediately that the cuts scheduled for the next four years will be cancelled.
“If he cannot, or will not, then Theresa May’s announcement today was not just empty – it was clearly a deceitful attempt to trick the public.”
A day after Boris Johnson told a rapt audience in Birmingham that her Brexit plans represented a “betrayal”, May told her colleagues that if they failed to back her, Brexit could unravel altogether. “If we all go off in different directions in pursuit of our own visions of the perfect Brexit, we risk ending up with no Brexit at all,” she said.
She hit back at Johnson without mentioning the former foreign secretary by name, saying: “Leadership is doing what you believe to be right, and having the courage and determination to see it through, and that’s what I’ve been doing on Brexit.”
Speaking about Brexit voters, she said: “We put our faith in their judgment. They have put their faith in us to deliver. I will not let them down.”
May did not mention her Chequers plan, which rebel Tories have been urging her to “chuck”, speaking instead about “a free-trade deal that provides for frictionless trade in goods”, which would “protect our precious union”.
Throughout the hour-long speech, May repeatedly returned to attacking the opposition. She sought to exploit divisions in the Labour party, claiming she could see “the heirs of Hugh Gaitskell and Barbara Castle, Denis Healey and John Smith”, in today’s Labour party but not on the frontbench.
“Instead, their faces stare blankly out from the rows behind, while another party occupies prime position: the Jeremy Corbyn party,” she said, claiming the Labour frontbench “rejects the common values that once bridged our political divide”.
Corbyn has been criticised repeatedly from the platform by cabinet ministers this week, underlining the fact that senior Conservatives regard Labour as a serious electoral threat.
May said that in contrast to Labour, the Conservatives should appeal to voters as “a party that is decent, moderate, and patriotic. One that puts the national interest first. Delivers on the issues they care about. And is comfortable with modern Britain in all its diversity.”
May also bemoaned the toxic nature of public debate, citing the murdered MP Jo Cox’s argument that political opponents have “more in common than divides us”.
“Rigorous debate between political opponents is becoming more like a confrontation between enemies,” she said. “You don’t have to believe in a word Diane Abbott says to believe in her right to say it, free of abuse.”
