General Election 2017 - Tory Manifesto: Demanding unity, making no promises

Theresa May has called for unity and social harmony, but she offers little to ordinary people in return.

This manifesto is Theresa May's belated opportunity to stamp her identity of the Conservative Party. In what became her very short campaign for the role of Conservative leader, she chose to emphasise the Unionist element of the fully titled Conservative and Unionist Party.

At the 2017 manifesto launch, "Forward Together" was written on the front of May's podium as she strained to come across as a 'compassionate conservative' and the word "Unionist" was restored to the party's name on the front of the manifesto.

Inside the document, there was an effort to rewrite what it means to be conservative. It called for "commitment to country and community", "belief in national institutions", and obligations to one another stronger than individual rights as community and nation demand.

That definition is unionist to its core. In her first major speech as leader, she listed her hero as the Unionist Joseph Chamberlain. As Mayor of Birmingham, he led the modernisation of the city through public-private initiatives and the establishment of public utilities, in decisive acts of intervention.

There are some among the Tories who are perturbed by what they see as a similar interventionist streak. May's first manifesto and her launch speech seem to have been shaped to confirm that impression. But there is a real contrast between the tone and the content.

The headlines that the Conservatives drip fed to the media over night, before the launch, were all focused on what the party would do to address the dire state of social care - which critics say has seen a funding cut of over £4 billion on their watch.

Theresa May pitched a long term plan. The first step appears to be to launch a raid on the middle class: from their assets on one hand - those with holdings over £100,000 will pay more - to their winter fuel allowance, which will be means-tested to raise £1 billion.

The belt-tightening Tory plan extends down the income brackets. Pensions will again see cuts. With £8 billion already shaved across the Parliament (2015-2020) with the flat-rate pension, ending the triple-lock will be further hurt for the low paid on just the state pension.

While an argument might justifiably be made that the triple-lock has proven very expensive - pensioner incomes have risen 10% above inflation - not enough is being done to lower the cost of living, particularly in old age, to ease such a 'rebalancing'.

It is perhaps this that has motivated an intervention in the energy sector with an unspecified "safeguard tariff cap" on prices and a commission and independent review into how to ensure energy costs stay low, with a promise to ensure fair markets.

But let's be clear: social care changes brought in by raising the means-tested level to £100,000 does nothing to change the conditions for the poorest. These measures raise maybe £2 billion per year, at best, in additional funding to aid an ailing system.

That means the poorest will continue to rely on strained and underfunded care services, while the homeowning middle class will be paying far more for privatised care - and still won't be able to pass on their family homes to their children.

In fact, when you take into account hinted Tory plans to give workers the right to unpaid carers leave, it paints a picture of Conservatives intending to wean people off of state care.

Perhaps learning from the Cameron years, hard targets seem to have been replaced by lots of vague promises: to simplify tax laws, to stop tax evasion, to protect gig economy workers and to put more money in the NHS (despite having yet to meet their previous targets) - though the promises to control immigration continue to be more clearly specified.

But what does not seem to have changed is their attitude to the fiscal role of the government.

Current spending stands this year at around £720 billion to £740 billion in revenue, while Capital spending sits at around £80 billion. As the Tories combine Current and Capital spending to calculate the deficit, it stands at about £59 billion.

With further commitments to eliminate the deficit, across both Current and Capital spending, a National Productivity Investment Fund of £23 billion - even if it turns out to be rebranded rather than new money - heralds more austerity cuts to come, either from other infrastructure spending or from departmental budgets.

And that matters. Britain has already been hard hit by austerity. Yet despite in her manifesto disavowing the liberal conservative legacy of Cameron and Osborne and claiming that the state has a role, May is continuing their squeeze on public services.

Note here, that what can be interpreted about how the Tories will manage the economy has no help from the manifesto, which has no costings whatsoever. Just vague promises and vague numbers with no explanation of where money will be found, or taken.

The reality is that easing the social care strain by having the middle class pay more and by restraining the pensions of the least well off does nothing to increase the stake of ordinary people in their country. May is preaching a new Union, but it's still the same old unredeemed and hard to believe Tory slogan: "We're all in this together".

This is not an inclusive manifesto. It is not progressive. It is social harmony Unionism, putting the vague notion of a 'country' before the needs of the actual people. Theresa May demands unity, but doesn't offer ordinary people a real stake in the country.

Progressives and reformers will also be particularly unhappy to see Theresa May doubling-down on retaining power, with specific commitments to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, preserve First Past the Post and to require voter ID - all measures empowering the government of the day to stay there.

The path ahead, under the Conservatives, will continue to see the burdens fall on the poorest. Nothing in this document changes that. It is imperative that there be a progressive alliance to resist and oppose, because we need a strong opposition.

Words Matter: When far-right groups hide behind masks, it's more important than ever for progressives to be clear what we mean

The rise of neo-Nazi white nationalism in the United States behind its mask, the self-ascribed label 'Alt-Right', exposes a problem that needs to be addressed. When the words we use to describe and define things in politics are obscured or blurred it leaves us vulnerable.

Words matter. They are the medium for communication and even our own thoughts and ideas. When we lose clarity in the definitions of words, we lose the medium for expressing these ideas in the ways that can bring us together in shared understanding, or defining for ourselves what something is and how it might be championed, improved or opposed.

The words people use in politics, to name their parties or their belief systems, can inform or deceive. And it is the norm in politics that these words are heard mostly in an adversarial context, as opponents seek to label and discredit one another. But the words of politics describe discrete positions and it is important that people know what each of them represents.

There-in lies the danger of the rise of the self-proclaimed 'Alt-Right'. When white nationalism tries to hide behind the term 'Alt', it is both a deception and an attack upon the language of progress and reform. It allows them to obscure their true nature while attempting to co-opt the language, and therefore identity and perhaps support, of well-meaning reformers and anti-establishment movements.

This game is not newly invented by them. It has been the primary avenue of conservatism for centuries. As political movements reform themselves, the adherents who stick to the old unreformed tenets find themselves caught in the gravity of conservatism.

For instance, the term liberalism has undergone a long series of changes. As its adherents' understanding of how best to achieve individual liberty has evolved, so to has liberalism undergone changes. But the old ideas don't go away.

And conservatism never misses an opportunity. It consumes these ideas and assimilates them, finding ways to fit parts of these ideologies into its own thinking to convey its own purposes - to protect its system of tradition, hierarchy and moral order.

From the elitist constitutional order of the old bourgeois liberalism, to the free markets of classical liberalism, conservatism has found a home in the liberal parties that didn't reform themselves or conservative parties have taken up the ideas as they have been abandoned by the liberals who did reform.

While the determined consumption and repackaging of liberalism has been much commented on, the same process, happening to democratic movements, has been given much less attention. But it is just as real and just as disconcerting.

Amongst the revolutionaries of 1848, there were democrats as well as liberals. In that broad opposition movement, the failure of the liberal part of was clearly pointed out by Marx and Engels. The bourgeois order was the liberal folly that allowed their movement to be absorbed by the conservative establishment.

The democrats were not immune from folly. Their own folly was nationalism. Their leaders, like Giuseppe Mazzini, looked to nationalism as a medium to unite the people around their common heritage and arose them to protect their interests.

But efforts to achieve popular liberation and sovereignty ended up taking a back seat to petty rivalries over 'national' claims to lands and borders - driving rifts between the Germans and Czechs and Polish; saw the Hungarians, who were fighting to end domination by the Austrians, themselves fought by Romanians and Croatians.

The sectarian ideologies reared their menacing heads. Militarism embedded within the conservative establishment, particularly in Germany, wielded nationalism in the forging of nation-states with grand armies as the martial power in a great game - a competition between nations for self-interested domination.

For conservatism, the bourgeois order provided the administrative tools and nationalism provided the means to shape the popular identity. The follies of liberals and democrats, in quests for power and order, had in the end simply fed the conservative establishment with palatable ideas for assimilation.

This pattern on the part of conservatism has not ceased. Their offshoots in national populism and liberal conservatism, and those movements containing both - like the co-opted Republican Party in the United States - continue to play these language games with an eye for opportunity.

Progressives of all stripes, liberal or democrat, need to be wary of this. They need to take great care over their words and ideas, and never be willing to simply give up our words - and everything that comes with them - to conservatism.

American conservatism has co-opted the centrist concept of the republic. European conservatism has co-opted the liberal concept of individual liberty. The far-right everywhere co-opted the democratic-socialist concept of social justice. Now, white nationalist sectarianism wants to present itself as 'the alternative'.

But, as with parties like UKIP and Front National, these parties of the far-right pitching themselves as 'liberators' are really the ultra-establishment forces, disguising themselves in the garments of the anti-establishment movements of the turn of the millennium. They claim words like 'Alt' and pitch themselves as the conservative rebel to the liberal-socialist tyrant because it suits them in this moment.

Progressives cannot keep giving ground. They cannot lightly allow words to be taken as new disguises or fresh ammunition for conservative movements - movements that promise liberation but will deliver only the conservative triumph: tradition over reason, moral order over sound ethics, hierarchy over equality.