One of the difficulties with trying to make sense of what has happened to this country since 2010, when the Tories took office, is the absence of acknowledgment from the right about how much has gone wrong. So tribal, almost Trumpian, has most of the rightwing press become that it prefers to make excuses for the Conservatives or vague complaints about the spread of wokeness rather than seriously investigate and analyse the state of our economy and society.
In some ways, this incuriosity is no surprise. The rightwing papers have always had a propaganda function, not just campaigning for the Tories but also distorting or suppressing inconvenient facts about the distribution of power and resources. Through the emotiveness of their coverage as well, they imply that their readers’ feelings about, say, immigration, matter more than lived experience or statistics. Facts are for wimps.
Yet there is one rightwing publication that has usually stood apart from this partisan frenzy. This September, the Economist magazine will be 180 years old. Like the rest of the rightwing press, the weekly reveres the free market and is suspicious of the state. But unlike its peers, it loves data. Graphs, tables and bar charts punctuate its dense pages, and rather than just being illustrations they are often the foundation for its reporting and editorialising. This emphasis on facts helps the Economist appeal to an elite international readership – business people, senior bureaucrats, politicians – who like to think that their worldview is evidence-based.
For months now, the evidence the Economist has been presenting about the condition of Britain, and indeed about the country’s whole trajectory under the Tories, has been damning. “Britain has been poorly governed for 13 years,” said a typical article last week. “Each chart in British public policy looks roughly the same … There is gradual improvement from the early 1990s until 2010, and then things become worse … from rough sleeping to real wages to waiting lists at hospitals.”
According to the 8 July issue, Britons are “unaware” of “how poor” their housing and healthcare are compared with other European countries. On 24 June, the magazine described our inflation rate as “an outlier, and not in a good way”. On 3 June, it said that “the Conservatives are passing on a rotten inheritance” to Labour. And most startlingly, on 11 March, the Economist published its own research about life expectancy, which showed that between 2010 and 2022 the long modern improvement had stalled “much more dramatically” in Britain than in comparable countries. “Around 250,000” people had died “sooner than expected”.
On the left, and increasingly among neutral observers, the idea that Britain is in crisis has been accepted for years, ever since the social consequences of David Cameron’s austerity policies became obvious. But for such an establishment publication, which initially praised Cameron as an anti-state “radical”, to now effectively write off all five Tory governments since 2010 feels like a significant step. In the Economist’s always mercantile eyes, the market value of contemporary Conservatism, as well as of Britain itself, has been downgraded.
The magazine’s opinions matter, despite its relatively low profile in British media circles, because of the influence of some of its readers: people wondering whether to invest in Britain; political donors monitoring the state of our political parties; financial traders assessing the stability of the government or the value of British companies. And these readers also influence the magazine. Its criticism of the Tories reflects a contempt that is now global.
The Economist’s unusual internal culture means it may not take them seriously again as a governing party for quite a while. Unlike most of the rightwing press, and unexpectedly for a magazine that praises individualism, the Economist partly operates as a collective, with almost all its articles published anonymously, and written in the same immensely confident tone, as if they are the products of a brilliant group mind. That mind can be slow to change. I was an intern at the magazine in the early 90s, three years after Margaret Thatcher’s fall. There were argumentative editorial meetings that all could attend, with people crammed into the editor’s office and some sitting on the floor. But most of the views expressed were still Thatcherite.
The fact that, this time, the magazine appears to have turned against the Tories may be a sign that, even in our polarised media, a consensus is beginning to form about their performance in office. It’s well overdue. Few, if any, British governments have gone on so long while being so incompetent, lacking direction for extended periods and doing so much damage.
Paradoxically, the sheer scale of their misrule has probably protected the Tories. To accept that the usually dominant English party, deeply entwined with the establishment, and with many other cultural and electoral advantages, has been so out of its depth in office is frightening in some ways, even for non-Tories. The supposed realists of our politics have been exposed as fantasists, not much more responsible than the Republicans under Trump. Yet our supposedly shrewd old democracy has re-elected them three times.
Unless you believe that Labour is going to be in power for a long while, or that the Tories are going to rethink how they govern – and there is little sign of that – then it’s quite possible that the next period of chaotic Conservative government is only a few years away. And it may well come when the climate emergency, international tensions and the social consequences of capitalism are even worse than they are now.
One way to reduce the chances of such a disastrous repeat would be to have a proper reckoning about the Tory governments since 2010, and about who enabled them. Not just at the Economist but at the Financial Times, in the City of London and all the other supposedly canny institutions that gave the party the benefit of the doubt, despite its recent record in office and all the risky pledges in its manifestos.
In truth, it’s hard to see such a reckoning happening. While Labour is rarely allowed to forget the mistakes it has made in government, the Tories are usually quickly forgiven because so many powerful interests depend on them. We should enjoy the Economist’s displeasure with them while it lasts.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist