The UniParty Has Failed Us - Allegedly

There is a phrase doing the rounds now: people feel they have been failed by the UniParty. 

The term UniParty is a political descriptor used to suggest that two or more dominant political parties in a democracy function in practice as a single entity. It implies that despite outward disagreements, they share a core set of elite interests and operate as a unified establishment.

What they actually mean that the escalator has stopped.

The UniParty is largely a misunderstanding of what government is. It is not a secret club of politicians meeting in Westminster to agree that nothing can be improved. It is what politics looks like when it runs into facts, circumstances, arithmetic, demographics, international markets and commitments made years before the current lot arrived.

As any system matures, the number of available levers reduces. It develops around its existing pensions, housing market, tax base, public services, debt, trade relationships, infrastructure and labour force. Each part becomes tied to the others. Pull one lever sharply and something else moves, often expensively.

That is why parties begin to look more alike once they reach government. Not because they have all joined the same secret club, but because they are operating inside the same structural scaffolding. The more mature and interconnected the system becomes, the less room there is for radical exits without causing damage somewhere else.

Different parties can still decide who pays, who benefits and what gets protected. Those choices matter enormously. But they cannot simply step outside the framework they inherit, abolish the trade-offs, or restore an earlier version of Britain by force of personality and a few shouted slogans. Government is not a wish-fulfilment service with a Treasury card attached.

A government cannot abolish an ageing population, conjure skilled workers overnight, build houses without land or consent, provide Scandinavian public services on bargain-basement taxation, borrow indefinitely without consequences, or make trade barriers disappear by shouting at Brussels. Different parties can make different choices about who pays, who benefits and what gets protected. But they cannot repeal the basic constraints of the country they govern.

That is why the phrase is so useful to Reform. It turns every difficult trade-off into evidence of betrayal. It implies that there is an easy route back to security and prosperity, held back only by cowardly politicians and the wrong sort of people in Westminster. There are choices, but none of them allows the country to have more while contributing less.

Their parents got a better house, a better job, a better car, a better pension and a generally more comfortable life than their own parents had enjoyed. They assumed the escalator would continue upwards, with every generation stepping off on a higher floor.

For a while, that was a reasonable expectation. Britain did become markedly more prosperous in the post-war decades. Cheap energy, expanding trade, rapid productivity growth, a growing workforce, mass housebuilding and North Sea oil all helped. There were more decent jobs, more homes, more public investment and a greater sense that ordinary people might share in what the country produced.

But the gains were not simply left at the top and allowed to dribble down by some mysterious law of economics. Stronger unions ensured that some of the proceeds reached wages. Higher taxation on high incomes and profits ensured that part of what was created was recycled into homes, schools, hospitals, roads, transport, pensions and public services.

Higher taxes did not create the factories, the trade or the productivity growth. They helped turn economic growth into broader security and shared living standards, rather than allowing the gains to remain concentrated in private wealth. That is rather different from saying prosperity appeared because someone in Whitehall moved a tax lever.

Then Britain began to rely less on productive growth and more on a weaker model. Rising house prices made homeowners feel richer, while cheap credit let people spend future income now. Governments could promise more while postponing the bill. Councils sold assets, infrastructure was deferred, investment became expendable, and rising property values were increasingly treated as evidence of national success.

The house could be remortgaged, the kitchen financed, the newer car bought on credit and the holiday paid for later. Some of it was genuine improvement. Much of it was tomorrow's money being spent today, while the foundations of future prosperity were quietly neglected.

There is also an awkward generational point here. We have had a cohort which did substantially better than its parents. It bought homes when they were cheap relative to income, saw them become valuable, benefited from more secure employment and more generous pensions, and then understandably wanted to protect what it had acquired.

The difficulty came when protecting those gains made the same route harder for those following behind. Fewer homes were built because development threatened property values or views. Pension promises became politically untouchable, while the tax base needed to sustain them was narrowed. The general instinct was to preserve existing comfort, even where that made it harder for younger people to buy, save, rent securely or build any comparable stake in the country.

None of that requires malice. It is simply what happens when a generation treats its own success as an entitlement to be frozen in place.

The result is that younger people now face high rents, high house prices, weaker wage growth, insecure work, expensive childcare and far less chance of accumulating wealth in the way their parents did. They are expected to finance an ageing society while being told that any attempt to rebalance housing, wealth or taxation is an assault on common sense.

So the complaint that people have been failed becomes muddled. Some people have been badly let down, particularly younger people trying to establish a secure life. But some of the expectations now being voiced are unrealistic because of the choices made to get here.

You cannot vote for lower taxes, privatisation, selling council houses without replacing them, opposition to development, weaker unions, cuts to public investment and withdrawal from your largest trading market, then expect better services, cheaper homes, secure pensions, lower debt and no disruption to anything you already own.

Those choices were repeatedly popular. They were voted for, applauded and defended as common sense. But they were also promoted and amplified by wealthy interests with money, media access and a direct stake in the outcome. Lower taxes, weaker regulation, privatisation and a smaller state were not abstractions to them. They were very good business.

The public were sold the comforting idea that lower taxes, rising house prices, better services and fewer obligations could all coexist indefinitely.

Now people want the benefits of the old settlement while refusing the costs, trade-offs and collective obligations that made it possible. Better public services, secure pensions, cheaper housing, lower taxes, low debt and no threat to accumulated wealth. It is not a programme. It is a shopping list written without looking at the bank balance.

And this is where Reform comes in.

Reform offers an even sharper version of the same bargain: lower taxes for those who can afford them, weaker institutions, fewer protections at work, and the promise that the old security can somehow be restored without anyone wealthy contributing more. It asks people to believe that the answer to a country with insufficient public capacity is to reduce the means by which public capacity is paid for.

You do not need a PhD in economics to see where that leads.

If wealthy people pay less tax, public services have less money. If public services have less money, ordinary people either receive less or pay privately for what was once collectively provided. If assets are sold, someone will charge rent for using what used to belong to everyone. If workers have fewer rights, the risks move downwards while the gains move upwards.

That is not freedom. It is a transfer pump.

The people at the top get more. The people below are told to wait patiently for the proceeds to trickle down. And when they do not, they are told there was not enough deregulation, not enough tax cutting, not enough flexibility, and not enough faith in the very people who have been doing rather well all along.

Trickle-down economics is one of the great cons of the last fifty years. It did not work for most of human history, when wealth and land were concentrated in a small class while everyone else survived on what remained after rent, tithes and the landlord's share. There is no obvious reason why reviving the same arrangement with hedge funds and private equity should suddenly make it fairer.

People are angry because the ladder has been pulled up behind a generation that climbed it when the rungs were still there. Reform's answer is not to put the rungs back. It is to make the people already at the top even more secure, and tell everyone else that this time the proceeds really will trickle down.