Tories ditched the austerity

The argument

The Conservatives adeptly recognised that voters no longer care about austerity. They want a big state willing to spend on issues that matter like the NHS and the police, particularly the working class, whose support the Conservative's would need to wrestle control of the North from Labour. The electoral logic is what makes this more than a change of emphasis: the seats the party needed were ones where a decade of restraint had been felt most directly, and they could not be won by a party still defending it. For the first time in more than a decade, their messaging steered clear of excoriating Labour for its reckless spending under Blair and Brown and pushing the national credit to the limit. Dropping that line mattered because it had been the party's central argument for the whole period. Abandoning it removed the frame in which Labour's spending plans could be attacked as reckless, and with it the main line of contrast the opposition could draw. This time, the Conservative messaging was more willing to talk about spending money than saving, and the shift was backed with figures rather than tone alone. Sajid Javid revealed that the government would increase spending by 4.1%, the largest expenditure increase in 15 years. There are also to be no spending cuts. A commitment of that size and specificity is what made the change credible to voters who had heard a decade of the opposite. The Conservative's victory in the 2019 general election stems from their exceptional ability to read the electorate and reinvent themselves as the party of post-austerity. On this account Labour lost partly because the ground it expected to fight on had been vacated: the party that had imposed austerity no longer defended it, and the strong Tory showing followed.

Context

Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative party ditched the deeply unpopular austerity program of the Cameron and May years. This meant that they could pick up working-class votes who would never have voted for an austerity program, but wanted a Leave party in power.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Attributing the 2019 result chiefly to the Conservatives abandoning austerity gives too much weight to one factor and understates the driver most analysts place first: Brexit. The election is very widely read as a 'Brexit election', won on the promise to 'Get Brexit Done', which peeled the Leave-voting working-class seats of the North and Midlands away from a Labour Party seen as ambiguous on leaving the European Union and led by a notably unpopular leader in Jeremy Corbyn. Post-election polling and analyses consistently rank Brexit and leadership ahead of fiscal repositioning as the decisive influences on how people voted. The Conservatives' new willingness to talk about spending may well have helped by neutralising a line of attack and reassuring wavering voters that austerity was over, but that is a supporting role, not the primary cause the argument makes it. There is also a framing issue: the argument casts the outcome as a triumph of Conservative strategy, when a large part of the swing is more naturally attributed to Labour's own weaknesses — its Brexit position and its leadership — rather than to the governing party's post-austerity reinvention. A single-cause story omits the factors that did most of the work.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The 2019 result is more widely attributed to Brexit — the 'Get Brexit Done' message and Labour's ambiguous stance — and to Corbyn's unpopularity than to a fiscal repositioning; the spending pledges at most neutralised a line of attack. [Rejecting P2] A single-cause 'post-austerity reinvention' reading omits the leadership and Brexit factors analysts weight most heavily, and frames as Conservative strength a swing much of which is attributed to Labour's weaknesses.