Russell Lynch: May needs to remember who pays the bills around here

Barely three weeks until polling day, and the Conservatives are on the march into Labour’s former blue-collar strongholds, sniffing the chance to wipe out a hapless opposition for a generation.

The buzz phrase for this election, coined by May’s all-powerful joint chief of staff, Nick Timothy, is the “Erdington modernisation”, named after the working-class area of Birmingham where the Tories are hoping to capitalise on Jeremy Corbyn’s deep unpopularity and pull off a barely conceivable win.

Hence the goodies on offer today in their pitch for the working-class vote with the “greatest extension of rights and protections for employees by any Conservative government”, such as a statutory right to leave and guaranteed rises in the national living wage over the next five years. And for those working in the precarious “gig economy”, there’ll be more protection after high-profile cases involving the likes of Uber and Deliveroo.

Not all of these are bad ideas. Reflecting the changing nature of employment is sensible for governments of any colour. But some are shameless electioneering; take the “Philip Green clause” to protect workers’ pensions from “irresponsible behaviour” after the BHS scandal, when what May should be doing is tackling the barmy pensions accounting regime that generates big deficits in the first place. And smaller firms will shudder at the extra burden of a statutory right to unpaid care leave for up to a year (assuming, of course, workers can afford to take it).

Meanwhile, those pay rises May is pencilling in for workers will have to be paid for. And so far I’ve heard precious little from her on the bigger picture; namely raising productivity to help firms cough up, on the cusp of arguably the biggest challenge for this country’s economy since the Second World War. One of the few things that we have heard from her so far is an energy price cap which threatens to do quite the opposite, by putting a damper on investment.

But the electoral calculus for May is cynical and simple; the business vote has nowhere to go, so it’s price caps with her or renationalisation with the other guy. Maybe she needs to listen more to her apparently out-of-favour Chancellor, Philip Hammond, who actually knows what it’s like to set up and run something.

The trouble with the Prime Minister’s campaign is that she isn’t engendering goodwill among the companies around the country which will be making big decisions over Brexit in the years ahead, and maybe moving abroad.

To think the Conservatives used to be the party of business; when she’s got this election won, she needs to start sounding like it — and fast.