The Tories rediscover the moral economy
The Truss Government may be about naked hard right class war, and after all the Tories have largely got away with it since 2010, but looking at the polls, some Tories have started to ponder whether just bashing the poor is enough to sustain them in Office.
The idea of Trussonomics based on Thatcherite economist Patrick Minford’s perspectives is of a trickle down market economy where the Government has a hands off approach. It’s a system that gained dominance in the early nineteenth century replacing what some historians including E P Thompson have called a moral economy.
The moral economy of the eighteenth century focused on the point that there was a relation between Government and people that meant, for example, that the price of a basic foodstuff like bread must be affordable and of an acceptable quality. Where the market failed to do this the Government intervened. The wider interest was in obtaining a degree of social stability. A recognition that if people could not afford to eat disorder might well follow.
Interestingly Michael Gove (lunch with the Financial Times 8th October) has started to echo the point. At a Tory Conference fringe event he talked of a ‘social capitalism’ and he told the FT: ‘you don’t try to defy economic gravity, but you recognise there is a role for Government and for values other than those of the market and that is proper Conservatism.
How genuine Gove is we can’t be sure, but the signs of popular revolt against Trussonomics may have influenced his thinking, just as revolt underwrote the moral economy of the eighteenth century.
Gove had seared calves liver and treacle bacon for lunch by the way
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