TV cameras were let into No. 10 Downing Street for the first meeting of Theresa May’s cabinet, and allowed to stay long enough to record her saying this: “We will also be a government defined by social reform.”

Her “also” comprises a multitude of things. There is above all Brexit, the prime purpose of this government but a destination towards which the route remains fogbound.

And there is always the economy, something that suddenly nobody seems to be talking about, even though, as a result of Brexit, it is heading straight downhill. This means a bigger budget deficit, neatly nullifying six years of hard labour on austerity by David Cameron and George Osborne. Just as well really, since they weren’t getting anywhere. The new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, has abandoned the old targets but not said what, if anything, he will put in their place.

At the same time Scotland, or any broader questions of the British constitution, have been brushed from the Tory agenda, after taking up more of Cameron’s and Osborne’s time than they would have liked. “You’ll have had your referendum,” retorted May, in effect, on being greeted by Nicola Sturgeon at the front door of Bute House. But the idea Scotland will just have to put up with whatever London decides about the UK’s future shows how soon the lessons unwillingly learned by Cameron and Osborne are being forgotten.


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Deprived therefore of a clear view on what are, by any objective standards, three huge problems facing her government, May understandably pads out her programme with “social reform”.

But it is an odd concept coming from her. She arrived in No 10 after six years as Home Secretary, by tradition an office where politicians of a liberal bent have been able to leave their mark, from Herbert Morrison to Rab Butler to Roy Jenkins to Ken Clarke. May was on the whole not of this company.

What she concentrated on during her term were three things, mainly. She got tough with the police and with abuses that had crept into their operational practice in England (she was, of course, not responsible for the police in Scotland).

She cracked down on drugs, and at the same time rejected the rising tide of libertarian argument even in her own party that abuse of drugs should be treated as a medical problem rather than a matter of law and order – which is already how we deal with people who drink too much alcohol, the most common drug of all and worse than most others. Decriminalisation could open the way to the suppression of trafficking, but she showed no interest in that.

Above all, she was a hawk on immigration. In the 19th century Home Secretaries felt happy to offer asylum to anybody from Karl Marx to French royals fleeing a rendezvous with the guillotine. But for May no refugee was too obscure to escape harrying by her officials, whether the Nigerian hunger-striker Isa Muazu or the Brain family of Dingwall.

For all this huffing and puffing and individual injustice, she could not in any single year of her stint at the Home Office hold immigration down below her target of 100,000. In 2015, it still ran at more than three times that level. The liberal argument in favour of immigration as a product of economic forces, which might be resisted but cannot in the end be suppressed by any democratic government, was lost on her.

Despite this highly illiberal record, we see May in her first public pronouncements as Prime Minister presenting herself as what we used to call a “one nation” Conservative. It is an outlook supposed to transcend differences of class and of identities other than the British one as defined at the centre of power in London. This sort of Tory is often, for all his or her faults, quite cuddly: think Willie Whitelaw or Lord James Douglas-Hamilton. In comparison to them, May is hard-faced.

The substance of her “social reform” – which can be glimpsed by trawling a few of her old speeches – seems to lie at a microeconomic level: raising productivity, tackling inequality, reducing insecurity, promoting social mobility, reforming corporate governance, protecting consumer interests, introducing safeguards in takeovers and competition among utilities.

Doubtless motherhood and apple pie are somewhere in May’s mix too. There is really no limit on what might be poured into it by her or by any modern politician who, in order to stay in power, seeks votes by making promises that other people will have to pay for through their taxes.

The UK’s present problems are mainly macroeconomic; in particular, the problem of releasing the idle money locked up in the banks’ balance sheets and used for nothing much more than bankers’ bonuses. Nearly a decade on from the great financial crisis we still have not restored a viable private banking sector, yet May has had nothing to say on this.

She does call for an industrial strategy, and has appointed a member of her cabinet, Greg Clark, to dream one up, as a counterpoise to the UK’s overweight in finance. But can an industrial strategy successfully be put in place by an official bureaucracy? It never has been in the past. We see from experience in Scotland that it tends to favour corporate clients who learn to play the system as much as any genuinely talented entrepreneurs. It could just be the way to corporatist stagnation.

Not all problems can be solved by governments, however good their intentions. Some things need to be done by the citizens of the country, and this includes most things at the microeconomic level, above all discovering new products and services that can be sold to their fellow citizens, and to foreigners, at a profit.

At least we have May’s big idea. This is not going to be a government of the “privileged few”, she said when she returned from Buckingham Palace to enter Downing Street as Prime Minister. Older readers will recall the words of the last woman to do so, in 1979, “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.” The actual result then was somewhat different, and I think that will hold true this time round as well. If, at her outset, May cannot even bring herself to mention two of the biggest problems, the macroeconomy and the constitution, I doubt if she will leave the UK better than she found it.