The nasty party with a nice veneer

It has been a good week for Ms Davidson’s profile. Besides her HIGNFY appearance, she was named politician of the year by PinkNews, the gay news service. Alex Salmond won “ally of the year” for ushering in equal marriage in Scotland.

Up here, of course, we already knew from her Twitter account that Ms Davidson had a fine sense of humour. The tweets of most politicians are so dull one suspects they are manufactured in some industrial unit by a team of chimps. Ms Davidson’s tweets sound like the real, human, deal. She will let rip on anything from her love of rhubarb to the Scotland rugby team’s cruel defeat at the hands of a South African referee. She is fond of an asterisk or two, and she eats trolls between two slices of bread for breakfast. In short, she comes across as a likeable cove, one who would pass the “would you go for a beer with this politician?” test.

Another politician who might pass that test is Heidi Allen, the Tory MP for South Cambridgeshire. Ms Allen joined the ranks of the unusual suspects when she used her maiden speech in the Commons to attack her own government over its cuts to tax credits. One independent think tank reckons some three million families, 350,000 in Scotland, will lose up to £1,300 a year when the changes kick in next April.

Ms Allen was duly concerned. “It is right that people are encouraged to strive for self-reliance and find work that pays for their independence from the state,” she said, “but I worry that our single-minded determination to reach a budget surplus is betraying who we are.”

And who would that be, one might ask. According to Ms Allen, true Conservatives have “compassion running through their veins”. As several more Tory MPs rose to join in the criticism of the Chancellor’s claw back of £4.5 billion in tax credits a strange mood was abroad in the chamber. Was the Nasty Party (copyright Theresa May) becoming the Nice Party? Were these MPs reflective of a new breed of Tory, one for whom Margaret Thatcher is but a figure from history instead of a contemporary guide?

Speaking of the Iron Lady, her former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, has also urged his successor to think again. “You cannot remove these tax credits without people being worse off,” he told the Today programme yesterday. Strange days indeed, but then the past couple of years in UK politics have been a Twilight zone in which the Tories have been keen to set up camp on the ground vacated by Labour. As Labour has gone further to the left, so the Tories have claimed the territory that Tony Blair fought so long to occupy. In Scotland, Labour’s dithering cleared the way for the SNP to take up the leftist slack. Thus far in Scotland it has been impossible for the Tories to get in on the land-grab action, but the party is hopeful this could change come next year’s Holyrood elections. Could it?

That depends on how sincere one believes the Tories are when it comes to this newly discovered penchant for social justice. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has been brazenly lifting leftist policies like a shoplifter hitting the High Street on Christmas Eve. National Living Wage: up the jumper it goes. A crackdown on non-doms: shove that where the sun don’t shine. Bank tax: lovely jubbly. Up the workers not the shirkers, says George. If the cloth cap fits, this son of a baronet will try to wear it.

Given the general uselessness of Labour in opposing the Tories at a UK level, the Chancellor and his boss can do, say, and adopt pretty much any policy they like from the mainstream. But the electorate, equally, has every right to question how sincere they are, and wonder about their ultimate aim. So far, the Chancellor has had lots of friendly coverage, particularly after the last Budget when the National Living Wage was announced. How clever said the commentariat. How deliciously political. Trouble is, Mr Osborne has made the classic mistake of believing his own press and assuming he can do no wrong. With the tax-credit cuts, however, he is committing a blunder that makes his pasty tax fiasco look like a heap of greasy crumbs.

While not quite in the poll tax league, if only because the move affects far fewer people, the tax credit cuts are a direct shot to the Tory foot. They will hurt the very people the Tories said they wanted to help. Three years ago, Mr Osborne was waxing lyrical, Dylan Thomas-style, about the shift worker who leaves home in the dark hours of the early morning and looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour “sleeping off” a life on benefits. Where is the fairness in that, he demanded. But where is the fairness in penalising workers on low incomes who depend on tax credits to bring their income up to a level on which they can live?

The Treasury’s response to such criticisms is that it will all come good in the end. Increases in the minimum wage, tax cuts, and other reforms will make up the losses. But when? Families on low incomes and tight budgets cannot afford to wait around to see if the Treasury’s sums eventually add up. In many cases those families will have little or no savings to dip into while the new regime sorts itself out. All of this amounts to one thing – misery for those who can least afford it. This is hardly compassionate Conservatism in action. Rather, it is the action of a party that will never understand what it is like to live on a low income. The Tories can talk the talk when it comes to positioning themselves as “workers’ champions” but, with the odd exception, they have never walked the walk and that matters.

Thus far, Mr Osborne has paid no heed to backbench critics or the more high-profile ones such as Boris Johnson. He may yet listen to Lord Lawson, a man not exactly known for being a dangerous leftie. Or he might pay heed to the Lords on Monday if they vote against the plans. The alternative, ploughing on, packing the Lords with stooges to get the bill through, would be a dumb move indeed on the part of this too-clever-by-half Chancellor.