This week’s letter to my friend in Ohio looks at the forthcoming UK General Election. It’s far less on a knife-edge than the Biden-Trump race in November.
Dear Don,
In case you missed it, a General Election has been called for Thursday, 4th July. I make no attempt to hide where my sympathies lies: while you’re celebrating independence on the other side of the Atlantic, I’ll be hoping it’ll bring to an end 14 long years of Conservative rule. Truth be told, even with three weeks of the campaign yet to run, it’ll be one of the greatest shocks of political history if it doesn’t result in a Labour victory and a new Prime Minister in Sir Keir Starmer.
The trends since Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won the last election right at the end of 2019 are shown in the BBC graph above. It’s pretty clear that, in the space of five years, the Conservatives (blue) have gone from dominance to disaster. In 2019, the Conservatives won 386 of the available seats; this year, some polls have them down as low as 66.
I think most people – even many Conservative supporters – would say that the Tories deserve to lose this time. They’ve made so many blunders, got so many things badly wrong, that voters just feel it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start again. Five successive Prime Ministers have each written their names into politcal infamy:
- David Cameron (2010-16) was so sure he’d win the Brexit referendum that he foolishly gambled his future on it. When he lost, he had to resign.
- Theresa May (2016-19) never really supported Brexit, and her exit deal wasn’t trusted by the hardliners in her own party, who forced her to resign.
- Boris Johnson (2019-22) “got Brexit done” – his slogan – but turned out to have a poor grasp of following rules. The PM during COVID, he was convicted of holding parties in Downing Street when he himself had passed laws making it illegal. Later, he refused to sack ministers who had been found guilty of breaking rules – dismissal offences, all of them. Eventually, he defended a sex-offending minister; that was one too many, and he had to resign.
- Liz Truss (2022) managed to go into history as the shortest-serving Prime Minister in history at just 49 days. Determined to lower taxes to stimulate growth, fer first budget was a fiscal disaster. The markets didn’t believe the sums added up. The value of the pound went through the floor overnight, and cost the UK exchequer a staggering £30 billion in interest charges – money that’s lost for ever. The economy still hasn’t quite recovered, in fact.
- Rishi Sunak (2022-24) has always struggled amongst Conservatives who hold him in part responsible for ending the premiership of Boris Johnson, and he also has a couple of other things going against him: first, he’s staggeringly rich, and vulnerable to the accusation that he doesn’t understand real life; secondly, he comes across as wooden – he just doesn’t have that natural ‘man of the people’ ability to connect with voters. Bill Clinton this man is not.
Most of Britain’s problems in 2024 can be traced back to Brexit, however, which continues to divide the country in so many ways. There were huge disparities in the ways the UK voted in the referendum: Scotland voted massively to stay in the EU; Northern Ireland also did, by a lesser margin. London voted to stay in, but much of the north of England voted strongly to leave. Arguably, though, the biggest issues were never thought through: what would our relationship be henceforce with the EU; and, most significantly, what about Ireland? In its entire history, there have never been trade barriers between Northern Ireland and the Republic to the south, but Brexit requires it – it’s now a land border between EU and non-EU territory. Most people in Ireland, even those in favour of Brexit, don’t like that.
That said, the reality is that Brexit is done and dusted. It can’t be undone, and the EU wouldn’t have us back anyway. But a future UK government does need to sort out the
Sunak’s popularity has been ebbing away anyway, but the start of his campaign has been disastrous. First, during a TV debate, he claimed that Labour’s plans had been “independently calculated by civil servants to cost taxpayers £2000”, only fo the “independent civil servants” to immediately say that wasn’t true at all. Not only that, he continued to double down on the ‘lie’. (Even our ‘neutral’ media agree it’s a lie.) It’s opened him to the charge that voters can’t believe else anything he says, either.
The second disaster is in this photograph: look who’s missing? Four world leaders at the D-Day landing commemoration in Normandy… minus Rishi Sunak. David (Lord) Cameron, on the left, had to stand in instead as Foreign Secretary while Sunak went home to appear on an election programme. It was seen as putting party before country, and an insult to war veterans. Even his own party have had to disown him, and he’s been fored to apologise repeatedly.
There will be movement in the other parties. The Liberal-Democrats should increase the number of seats and once again become third-largest; meanwhile the Scottish Nationalists’ dominance in Scotland has declined which should mean that they’ll return to fourth. (They only stand in Scottish constituencies, of course.) The most interesting party will probably be Reform, the latest incarnation of the ultra-right, anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, instigator of Brexit. Farage is running for MP, and Reform nationally polls at 12%-13%, but it would still be a surprise if any MP is elected. Electorally, Farage is a serial loser, yet he’s arguably been Britain’s single most influential politician over the last decade. Brexit gave a veneer of respectability to racism and xenophobia in this country, just as Trump – his great friend – made it acceptable for many Americans to voice their baser thoughts.
As for Labour, the government-in-waiting, what do they promise? The answer is… almost nothing, other than ‘not being Conservatives’. Terrified that they’ll make a mistake, they’re content to let the Conservatives dig their own grave, which they seem to be doing very effectively. Keir Starmer finished his first TV debate with a devastatingly simple line: imagine waking up on the 5th July to another five years of Tory rule. That’ll hit home hard.
It’s commonly accepted that the country’s economy is so messed up that Labour will be unable to do anything very radical. Hopefully, there will be some attempt to alleviate poverty, or to tackle the massive hospital waiting lists, but there’s no silver bullet out there.
Till the next time,
Gordon
Tales from the Heart of the City 