Britain’s electoral kaleidoscope makes its politics very unpredictable

Kaleidoscope by Rudolf Altmann published under Creative Commons licence  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The kaleidoscope is an old-fashioned toy that I remember from my youth, which has long since been superseded by digital effects that don’t reproduce its magic. It was a cardboard tube that you looked down, with mirrors inside creating a symmetrical pattern. The magic came from small bits of coloured glass; as you twisted the end of the tube, gravity would force a realignment of these into an ever-changing series of patterns. I could not find an animation of this that did not involve an expensive subscription. You might be able to see this video (which is the real thing, not an animation) by Yuri Pomonev published by Adobe from this link. Digital kaleidoscope animations are plentiful, and they reproduce the mirror effect well enough, but they don’t attempt to replicate the effect of bits of coloured glass and gravity. And that is what my metaphor draws on.

Society is made up of a collection of individuals. We each have a point of view that is unique, shaped by our experiences and our own inner make-up. That applies to our politics, as it does to everything else. But we are social animals, and we like to line up with our fellow humans to feel a sense of togetherness and belonging. This creates political movements and collective alignments. But they are much more fragile than people suppose. As circumstances change, alignments break up and new ones are formed. Like the glass bits in a kaleidoscope.

Politicians often struggle with this. They try to simplify the complex world around them by investing in these temporary alignments, with themselves to at the centre, and imagining that they homogenous blocks that will endure. History is littered with examples. The British left thought this was happening in 2017, when Labour under Jeremy Corbyn did unexpectedly well in the general election, after tacking to the left, and raising turnout among younger voters, among others. They imagined themselves to be one step short winning outright – and many on the left retain this illusion. But instead there was a devastating realignment and in 2019 many of their former voters stayed at home, or voted for other parties, while other voters who had stayed at home in 2017 turned out in droves to vote Conservative. Labour crashed to a huge defeat. The kaleidoscope had turned.

We are now witnessing a similar delusion on the political right. The Conservative landslide in 2019 was interpreted as a popular, majority movement in favour of a suite of far-right policies, often referred to by people like me as “populism”. This was evidenced recently by the extraordinary launch of a new political faction called “Popular Conservativism”, who also want to be known “PopCons”. That this movement was led by Britain’s most unpopular leader of a major political party ever, Liz Truss, just goes to show that Ms Truss is a gift to political satire that just keeps on giving. The remarkable thing about this event was the attention it drew; the launch venue was packed, with many disappointed that there was no room for them. These Tory politicians feel that they are with touching distance of rebuilding a political movement which can give them a strong parliamentary majority.

What drives this view? The answer can be seen from the writings of Matt Godwin, the populist commentator who seems to provide the intellectual fuel for the modern political right. He produces plentiful polling evidence that disillusionment with politics is widespread, and especially evidenced by anger at high levels of immigration. His narrative is that these people are angry at a liberal minority that effectively controls state institutions, and is imposing its often delusional “luxury beliefs” on the rest of the nation. He suggests that support for anti-liberal policies is not just in the majority, but efficiently distributed in Britain’s electoral system, with liberal voters concentrated in a relatively small number of seats.

This narrative has weaknesses, but it is far from nonsense. Mr Goodwin is an academic and knows how to talk about evidence. That is one reason that he is required reading for the whole political spectrum. I have not yet mustered the courage to move beyond my free subscription to his Substack, he tends to talk of his paying subscribers as “supporters” of a political movement, and I think that, for all his useful insights, he is a malign force, acting to make the country’s difficult problems even harder to solve. His demonisation of the liberal elite is especially egregious, and is, in fact, another example of the kaleidoscope delusion. But my views count for little. The more important thing is that he has created a trap that Conservative politicians like Ms Truss have fallen into.

The trap is to think that the popular majority that Mr Goodwin identifies supports the full suite of nationalist-libertarian beliefs that these Tories espouse. These include not just lower migration and a rejection of multiculturalism, but the need for a low-tax, low-spending state, and a minimum of laws to restrain personal freedom. They were outraged by the application of a strict lockdown to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. They also espouse a powerful commercial sector, driving high levels of economic growth and the accumulation of wealth by a lucky minority. In fact the polling evidence points to strong support for regulation of behaviour deemed as antisocial (including the spreading of the covid virus); for strong state services, especially health and a relatively intrusive police force; and for welfare spending, as long as it for universal state pensions to people that have lived in the country most of their lives. Lower taxes are popular, but to the extent that there are trade-offs between taxes and critical public services, or inflation, this cannot be taken for granted. The majority are decidedly indifferent to such abstract ideas as economic growth, and have reservations about rampant commercialism, and the already wealthy getting wealthier still, especially if they are paying less taxes than poorer people. Green policies are ambiguous; Tory populist politicians tend to think that anti-carbon policies are the result of an alarmist conspiracy. A significant proportion of the public probably believe this too – but many more are worried about global warming; David Attenborough’s popularity goes well beyond the liberal 30% that Mr Goodwin demonises. But well-meaning regulations that impinge on people’s daily lives are a tough sell, and the populists may be onto something there.

The PopCons show little sign that they are really in touch with people at large, or that they are able to craft a programme that will allow them to recover their support anything like enough. Their competitors on the right, Reform UK, show even less sign they understand this, though that could change if their President, Nigel Farage, steps back into day-to-day control. But once the current government is consigned to history, there is certainly a chance that a populist coalition is reformed as the kaleidoscope turns again. Out of power, they will not be under such pressure to develop coherent policies, and in particular they will not need to choose between the holy trinity of low immigration, low taxes and low inflation – unless the public twigs that having all three is impossible. But they should give thought to how to appeal to younger voters without overly alienating older ones, as right-wing populists have managed to do in other countries. They might emphasise how high immigration is screwing up the housing market. They should probably talk less about Brexit. It might also help if they downplayed their nativism and criticism of multiculturalism – although these are themes that play well to younger voters in other countries.

But it is not just the political right that needs to worry about the kaleidoscope. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is polling very well but support is unenthusiastic. Once in power another twist could see its support collapse. If the political right fluff their opportunity, could a challenge emerge from the left? Mr Corbyn’s success in 2017 is perhaps a precedent – but his coalition included mainstream Labour, a lot of whom would stay loyal to a Labour government. Perhaps the rise of Syriza in Greece offers a better example; another case is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise movement, although this has failed to win power. Both left-wing movements were alliances of socialist and green parties, co-existing with significance far right populist movements. Both effectively destroyed the historical and centrist socialist parties.

This possibility should not be ruled out, led by a breakaway from Labour, if an appropriate and charismatic leader can be found. It faces two difficulties, however. One is that it probably needs to link up with the Green and perhaps even the Liberal Democratic parties – and these parties have recently being doing well by scooping up liberal-minded voters in the rural areas – to whom a far-left movement is anathema. However, both parties may sense an opportunity if Labour weakens once in power – as they did during the last Labour government. The second problem is that the core of such an electoral coalition is metropolitan voters, typically graduates and working in the public or third sectors – these voters are not distributed efficiently geographically, as conservative voters are: they are concentrated in the big cities (hence “metropolitan”), and the country’s electoral system punishes such concentration. The two issues are linked – as those new Green and Lib Dem voters are distributed in a complementary way. So the far left somehow needs to fuse with the liberal middle class. Perhaps that is not so fanciful – if a programme can be agreed with electoral reform at its heart.

A further possibility is for a liberal-led revival – although this is arguably a variation of the left-led one, as the potential electoral coalition has a strong overlap. The model for is Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche in France – a move which also grew out a lacklustre government of the centre-left. That would be one in the eye for Mr Goodwin – but a Labour government would have sink rapidly for that to be a possibility.

The bigger picture, though, is that Britain’s post-election politics is extremely unpredictable. Much will depend on whether and where capable political leaders emerge. They are lurking deep in the undergrowth at the moment. But the opportunities are palpable.

The 2024 election is over. The 2029 campaign has begun.

AI is already outcompeting humans in the production of bullshit. It’s clearly got a talent for the surreal too. The prompt for this Bing Image Creator gem was “Political parties campaigning in a British city in 2029”.

We will have to endure many more months of campaigning, but the result of the British general election due later this year is not in doubt. Political leaders, at least in the Labour and Conservative parties, are now turning to the election after that. That anyway is what their behaviour seems to reveal.

Of course some important things need to be resolved for 2024: will Labour have a small working majority, a landslide or be forced to work as a minority government (a coalition is most unlikely)? Will the SNP or the Liberal Democrats become the third-largest party in parliament? Who of the Conservative leaders in waiting will retain their seats? But there is no doubt that the Conservatives are shot and that Labour will win enough seats to form the next government. The harder the Tories try to change this outcome, the worse it gets for them.

This is an astonishing turn of events given the margin by which the Conservatives won the election in 2019. They had assembled an electoral coalition that harnessed the populist rage at liberal elites. Labour and the Lib Dems were on their knees, their electoral strategies in complete tatters; only the SNP were offering the Tories serious competition, and they were limited to the Scottish seats. What went wrong? First was incompetence. Boris Johnson the Conservative leader in 2019, was a brilliant campaigner for bringing desperate political constituencies together. But he was a useless prime minister, not least of whose failings was that he appointed mediocre or worse people to his cabinet (Nadine Dorris for heavens sake!), and kept changing them. The few points of light in his ministry (the rapid roll-out of covid vaccines; decisive support for Ukraine; ambitious commitment to climate change objectives, although with zero follow-through) required little actual political heft, and a bit of luck in the case of vaccines. Things didn’t get better after Mr Johnson’s departure, with the calamity of Liz Truss and hollowness of Rishi Sunak. Second was that the government had no answer to the populist policy trilemma: low migration, low taxes and low inflation. All three aren’t possible at the same time, and you need to decide which of them goes to the wall. Instead they pretended that the trilemma didn’t exist and failed on all three. And third, the electoral coalition had a weakness: it didn’t include younger people. This is not the case with similar movements in other countries (for example Donald Trump’s in America, or Marine Le Pen’s in France). This seems to be linked to two things, which are not so applicable to other countries: the way home prices have escalated out of reach for younger people, and the centrality of Brexit to the British populist narrative. Brexit never convinced many British younger voters, and events since have further tainted it. Remarkably, in Britain, the general rightward shift in people’s political alignment with aging isn’t happening. That means that the Tory coalition is weakening as older voters leave the electorate, and the coalition lacks strategic depth. See this analysis by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times.

These problems run so deep that it is impossible for the Conservatives to fix them while still in government. The party needs to be radically reshaped, to freshen up their message with more appeal to younger voters, and to replace their current leadership with something much stronger. Many consider that this is impossible – but they said that about Labour after the 2019 election. Labour will come under pressure in government quickly, and the fate of Olaf Sholz’s government in Germany shows how quickly things can get rough for a centre-left government. They, too, will be faced by the tax-immigration-inflation trilemma. They have more ideas about how to tackle it than the current government, but it probably won’t be enough. There will be an opening for a populist party of the right, and with their organisational depth and networks, there is a much better chance of the Conservatives being that party than anybody else. Reform, their main competitor currently, may be doing well for now, but it is too much the personal creature of its founder, Nigel Farage, who is an able communicator but lacks the skills hold together a serious political party.

Conservative leaders seem to understand this. Potential new leaders are jockeying for position within the party, so that they will be able to hit the ground running after the next election. It is notable how most Tories aren’t even trying to sing the praises of their record in government, but spend their time criticising it. That even applied to Mr Sunak’s conference speech last October – when he sought to contrast his leadership with the previous thirty years. This is self-evidently a pitch for the election after next. The party is not seriously trying to win this time, because its knows the task is hopeless. They are instead trying to build the narrative for afterwards. Government polices are designed either to make political statements, or to limit any future labour government’s room for manoeuvre. The idea of tax cuts is sheer lunacy, and yet the government is determined to make them before it leaves office, predicated on impossible spending plans for the next government. Labour dare not challenge this. The Rwanda policy for relocating illegal migrants is predestined to fail, but it helps build a narrative of liberal elites and what the populist commentator Matt Goodwin calls their “luxury beliefs”.

The Labour leadership are waking up to the 2029 challenge, while desperate to keep its activists motivated for 2024. This best explains their recent ditching of a commitment to spend £28 billion a year on green investments. This was always a number plucked out of the air, and never fully backed by serious investment proposals. It was consciously following President Joe Biden’s radical investment plans after he won the presidency in 2020. That was then – but now inflation stalks the land, and that limits the headroom for such ambitions. Mr Biden’s policies exacerbated America’s inflation problems, and helped trash his reputation for economic competence amongst US electors. It was a promise a Labour government could not keep. Abandoning it will have little impact on this year’s campaigning – the Tory attack lines need only minor adjustment – but in 2029 Labour will want as few broken promises as possible.

Back in 2019, nobody thought the 2024 election would look like this. 2029 will be equally unpredictable. But the best guess is that there will be a strong populist challenge from the right to a stumbling Labour government. It makes sense that politicians now are preparing themselves for that challenge.

This image from the same prompt for Bing Image Creator is less surreal but shows how backward looking AI creativity is

The Conservatives are unpopular because power has forced them to make hard choices

Bing Image Creator is much easier than trawling public domain photos, though it’s quite hard to realise your initial vision. This is supposed to represent the collapsing Conservative coalition – but it looks more robust than the reality

I have discovered Matt Goodwin. Of course I have long known about him, as he is frequently quoted in articles on British politics. He started as an objective-sounding commentator on the rise of British populism, and has been slowly morphing into an partisan advocate for it. But he still has a certain respect for evidence, unlike many of his fellow advocates. Which means that it is more useful to read and digest his output, and not dismiss it out of hand. Recently a friend quoted one of his Substack posts at length, and this was interesting enough for me to subscribe to his feed, though not enough to be a paid subscriber, which limits my access somewhat.

The post quoted talks about the death of the British Conservative Party. Most political commentators assume that the party will recover to some extent before the forthcoming General Election. This has been the pattern for pretty much for every governing party in Britain that had been lagging the opposition in the year before an election. Personally I am not so sure this time, and Mr Goodwin helps me to sustain that doubt – albeit that we have very different ideas about where this should lead. He thinks that nationalist populism will be reborn and triumphant in a new guise; I think that it will usher in a long period of mediocre Labour-led government.

Mr Goodwin’s argument is that the Conservatives won their substantial majority in December 2019 by “leaning in” to the populist trend evident elsewhere in the developed world, and mobilising a discontented group of voters angry at the level of immigration, the loss of national sovereignty and “woke” values infecting state institutions. These voters backed Brexit, and, he suggests, form a majority in 60-80% of parliamentary seats – evidenced, I suppose, by the referendum result in 2016 (whose parliamentary majority was much higher than its voting majority). This was main reason for the Tory victory, rather than the personality of the party leader at the time, Boris Johnson, or fear of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, he says. However, since that election, Mr Goodwin argues, the Conservative leadership have completely failed to live up to the expectations of these voters. Mr Johnson proved lazy and incompetent, filling his Cabinet with lacklustre loyalists. Subsequent leaders, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have been out of sympathy with the populist project, in their different ways. Instead they listened to business lobbyists “addicted to cheap labour”, and to the liberal SW1 elite. The current government has no coherent ideology, and continues to be liberal on immigration in practice, if not in rhetoric. Whether this is a matter of their own policy preferences or sheer incompetence doesn’t really matter. The newly motivated 2019 voters have been betrayed, and will not be brought back to vote for the party, but will either stay at home or vote for the Reform party. It gets worse. The oncoming electoral disaster awaiting the party will wipe out all those MPs with populist sympathies, leaving the more liberal part of the coalition in charge – who will then blame the populists, and fail to rebuild the winning coalition. Or so Mr Goodwin suggests.

Mr Goodwin feels that the Tories have squandered an opportunity to drive forward a government true to the principles of low immigration and ultra-nationalism. It is worth developing that thought a little. The narrative prevalent in 2019 was that restricted immigration would boost wages for lower-skilled workers and enabled a redistribution towards many of the left-behind groups. This isn’t nonsense. A couple of years ago our local refuse collectors got a massive pay rise because restrictions to foreign lorry drivers had drastically increased pay for these workers. This was an example of this idea in action and working. So why has the government used the inflation crisis as an opportunity to squeeze public sector pay rather than try to draw in more local workers with more generous pay? It is not just businesses that are addicted to cheap immigrant labour, but public services are too. Generous public sector pay settlements in areas formerly reliant on immigrant labour would be a sign that the government believed their narrative. But, of course, it is in fact much harder than that.

I haven’t read much of Mr Goodwin’s work, but his narrative seems to be that a large majority of British voters are sympathetic to conservative values, especially over immigration and national sovereignty. These voters are being ignored or patronised by an “elite” of about 25% of the country, mainly university graduates, who have liberal values, and who control almost all the state institutions and big business. This dynamic is present across the Western world and is why populist movements of the right, from Donald Trump in the US to Marine Le Pen in France, and the AfD in Germany are gaining popularity. This narrative clearly touches on a grain of truth – but there are many problems with it.

Doubtless answers to polling questions and probing in focus groups can demonstrate majorities of the public supporting certain conservative views, and scepticism over immigration in particular. But turning these attitudes into both an election-winning coalition of voters, and keeping faith with them once in power, is a much more complicated business than Mr Goodwin allows. Those majorities can vanish very easily once the harder choices behind them are exposed. The 2016 Brexit referendum majority was a small one; populists have repeatedly fallen at the last hurdle in Europe – and their victories often aren’t what they seem. British media often report that the populist Geert Wilders “won” last year’s election in the Netherlands – but what they mean is that his party received more votes than any other. It was still less than 25% of the total vote, scarcely more than the serial British losers, the Liberal Democrats, get in a good year. Other winners, such as the populist coalition led by Giorgia Meloni in Italy only succeeded by making some major compromises to establishment politics – notably by dropping opposition to the Euro.

A particular part of the problem is that a critical part of the conservative coalition is formed by the mass affluent – people with a significant stake in financial assets such as property, pension schemes and other investments. Property investment are typically financed by mortgages. Shortly after the Brexit referendum I attended an event put on by an investment manager for the mass affluent (I too am part of this group, and I was one of their clients); I was taken aback that the overwhelming majority of people in the audience were pro-Brexit. These people were not the left-behind working classes of the Brexit legend. The mass affluent, and especially those with mortgages, have a huge stake in financial stability. Fulfilling the anti-immigration dream of rising wages for lower-skilled workers means letting inflation rip, at least in the short term. It is a wealth redistribution exercise, and inflation is one of the classic mechanisms by which such redistribution takes place. People imagine that a tiny mega-rich minority take the strain of wealth redistribution – in fact the pain goes much, much wider. Conservatives may be insouciant about the effect of conservative policies on economic growth – but that is largely because they assume that somebody else will face the pain. In particular high inflation leads to higher nominal interest rates, and that can cause the dreams of newer property owners to collapse, as their mortgage payments become unaffordable, and their property values plunge into negative equity. And those without mortgages will still see the real value of their assets sinking. High inflation is one of the reasons that Americans think their economy is in terrible shape, and blame President Biden for it – in spite of otherwise very good statistics. A conservative government can’t afford to let inflation get out of hand. Hence the tough line the present government is taking on public sector pay and the softer line on immigration.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Conservatives fell apart after 2019. They needed a strong dose of economic good luck to come anywhere close to fulfilling their promises. Instead they had the opposite – the Covid pandemic followed by the escalation in the costs of fossil fuels. Even a competent government would have found itself having to make impossible choices. It was Donald Trump’s good luck that he lost power in 2020, before the inflation surge took off. The main reason why Britain’s Conservatives are doing so badly while other conservative movements are doing so much better is that they are in power and the others aren’t, and therefore they cannot escape the blame for the economic mess. Their incompetence just compounds the problem.

The problem for all conservative populist movements is how to reconcile their hostility to immigration and free trade, and worship of national sovereignty, with maintaining a financially stable economy. This is not impossible – the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has succeeded in just such an accomplishment – but it requires the cooption of those hated elites, who bring with them the administrative competence required, and not hounding them out of government. The Conservatives after Brexit did have an opportunity, but by selecting Boris Johnson as their leader in 2019, they threw away that chance. One of his first moves was expel almost all his most experienced MPs who had demonstrated administrative competence. He demanded that loyalty was the only prerequisite for ministerial office.

This is yet another example of a wider political lesson. Electoral success is gained by stitching together coalitions of voters who can agree on some things, but who also have conflicting vested interests. The creation of these coalitions, and holding them together in power is where the skills of political leadership lie. Elements of a coalition will aways end up feeling let down or taken for granted. This has happened with unusual speed to the Conservatives after 2019.

What of the future? Mr Goodwin is wrong to suggest (as I think he does) that a stable electoral coalition can be built on a radical populist base, i.e. based on very strict limits to immigration. But what is surely true is that no stable governing coalition can be put together without the support of conservative voters. The current Labour leadership clearly understands this, though many of its activists do not.

What of the Conservative Party? The odds are surely that it will reform and survive after losing the next election. A radical rival, based on the Reform Party perhaps, would undermine it but not destroy it, unless a particularly skilled leader emerges from the shadows that understands that it must ultimately make compromises. That leader is not Nigel Farage, Reform’s most successful leader, who effectively owns Reform. And even if the party goes down to a heavy defeat, unseating its most radical MPs, I don’t see that the rump party will reject radicalism. Too many of its centrist denizens have left, and its activist base remains radical. A long period in the wilderness beckons. Probably.

That bodes well for Labour, in spite of its evident mediocrity. But it too could be ruined by economic bad luck. There may yet be an opportunity for the 2019 conservative coalition to come back quicker than anybody expects. Opposition is much easier than government, after all.

Britain’s politicians are in denial – are the voters?

From the Office of Budget Responsibility: Economic and fiscal outlook November 2023

This week’s Autumn Statement by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, was a miserable affair, full of political chicanery with little to effort to tackle the country’s deepening problems. Worse yet, the opposition parties (Labour and the Lib Dems anyway), for all their huffing and puffing, are also unable to face up to these problems.

The Conservatives billed the set of measures as the biggest set of tax cuts since the 1980s. And yet the overall tax burden is rising as the freezing of tax allowances and thresholds will bring ever more people into tax or higher rates of tax, and increase the proportion of income people pay as tax. An even bigger problem is that the government has been using inflation to squeeze public spending, while services across the board – health, education, the police, the courts, and the list goes on – are clearly overstretched and in many cases breaking down – with collapsing buildings and rising waiting lists. The Chancellor offered not a penny to alleviate this crisis, while planning a further squeeze in the years ahead. Labour and the Lib Dems gleefully pointed out the first problem, but failed to address the second. They will stand by the announced tax cuts, while offering only gestures (taxing non-domiciled residents, or private schools, for example) to help fund public services. These tax-raising wheezes are nowhere near enough to match the scale of the crisis. Meanwhile all parties suggest that a bonanza of economic growth is coming to the rescue, without acknowledging the severe headwinds that will limit the country’s long-term growth prospects.

I am also highly sceptical of the one measure that seems to be getting widespread support – the full expensing of investment in machinery and systems against corporate profits. It is said that this will boost business investment, which is sorely lacking. It is in a fact the revival of a policy that failed in the 1980s, and was abolished by Nigel Lawson, the Tory tax-cutting Chancellor, who has been about the only holder of that post in memory that had a grasp of how the tax system as a whole worked and could be reformed. Back then it created a tax-avoidance industry and encouraged wasteful investment with fancy kit, rather than the thinking through of business processes which is the real key to improved productivity. That fiasco occurred at the beginning of my professional career as a Chartered Accountant, where I could see the nonsense it was creating up close. Alas the current crop of politicians and their advisers are too young to remember this. And it is of little use to new businesses, where the need is most acute, as these typically do not generate enough profit for this to be of use. What a silly waste!

Meanwhile the fiscal climate is getting a lot worse. Interest rates are rising at time that the size of the national debt is historically very high. If interest rates are higher than the overall rate of growth, and there is a budget deficit, then a debt spiral threatens, which, if it leads to an international loss of confidence in the public finances, could usher in a severe financial crisis. At the moment it is actually quite hard to understand how much of a problem this is. You should be comparing real interest rates to real growth rates – i.e. after inflation. But there are mixed signals on real interest rates. If you compare the nominal rate on government lending, it is if anything less than reported inflation – indicating a negative rate. But yields of index-lined bonds are positive and have risen sharply. Meanwhile the budget deficit is quite high – at 4% of GDP. It wasn’t so long a go when none of this seemed to matter. Interest rates were low, and the Bank of England’s Quantative Easing (QE) programme made large government debt look manageable. But conditions have changed. Inflation has made money much tighter – with interest rates rising, and QE going into reverse. I am starting to suspect a deeper change is afoot in the world’s capital markets. Earlier this century a number of countries ran large trade surpluses – notably China, Japan and Germany. This made trade and budget deficits more stable in countries like the UK and US, as the surplus countries had plenty of spare currency to provide funding. As the world’s trading environment is getting more difficult, this may changing – though it is not yet evident in public statistics. After over-reacting to fiscal risks in 2010, and moving into austerity too quickly, the opposite risk beckons. But the Autumn statement proposes tackling the budget deficit only slowly, leaving the very high level of net debt virtually unchanged. Politicians seem to assume that as inflation comes down things will simply go back to the easy financial environment that pertained before. This is complacent.

More from the OBR report – government plans make little impact on public debt

If that is complacency, the politician’s attitude to economic growth is outright denial, though some economists who should know better seem to be in the same place. It is assumed that the UK’s poor performance has an easily fixable cause. More investment perhaps, or encouraging more people into work, or perhaps lower taxes. Rachel Reeves, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, blithely talks about sorting out public services through economic growth – even applying the first-person to the process, as if growth was the gift one individual, and not the collective result of many millions of decisions. International comparisons seem to show that Britain’s productivity lags against peers. All that we need to do is fix this, the argument goes, and we will unlock growth. Well it may be that a burst of catch-up growth that is obtainable – but I suspect that these comparisons reflect an irreversible de-industrialisation, when a swathe of high-productivity industries left the country in the 1980s and 1990s and will not return. But stepping back, most or all of the developed world faces a number of headwinds that reduce growth potential, and in some case send it into reverse:

  • Demographics: more people are retiring as lower birth rates take their toll. Immigration can make up some of the difference, but is politically fraught, and stresses housing resources.
  • Trade: as globalisation runs into reverse, gains from trade are turned into losses. The UK is spared the American obsession with “near-shoring” or the reversal of the off-shoring of industries – but we have our own demons unleashed by Brexit.
  • Overdevelopment. The increasing consumption of goods, a critical driver of past growth, is simply a phase in economic evolution that has clearly ended. People move on to improve their quality of life in other ways. Meanwhile massive increases to the productivity of manufacturing industry mean that its impact on the total economy is much reduced. All this means that lower productivity parts of the economy, including many public services, loom larger. Productivity gains are harder to get, and where they happen the result is not so much increased production, but a transfer of resources to low-productivity sectors.
  • The energy transition. The country needs to make big investments to sources and distribution of energy, and its more efficient consumption. While the end result is desirable, in the meantime this will push down consumption. This, in fact, applies to pretty much all forms of investment. The country has become used to high consumption and low savings – reversing this won’t necessarily reduce growth as it usually measured, but to many people it will feel that way.
  • Housing. One way of achieving growth, or at least burst of catching up, is to allow people to move to places where the most productive jobs are. But these areas lack enough housing to accommodate this. Britain’s house builders have growth rich on the skilful management of land portfolios, rather than the actual building of houses, which many are actually very bad at. They have no incentive to increase the pace of building. And if the pace is increased, skill shortages quickly become evident. And I haven’t even mentioned slow and restrictive planning processes. Politicians at least show some awareness of this issue, but action never matches the promises.

The days of steady economic growth over the medium to long term are over, whether we like it or not. The best we can hope for is a short-term spurt. There is plenty of potential for human wellbeing to improve, but this will manifest itself in other ways.

The central problem is the funding of public services and maintenance of social safety-nets. A combination of two things are required here. The first is higher levels of taxation – and mainstream taxes which directly affect demand, and not gimmicks around capital and wealth (the latter may help make debt more manageable, but won’t suppress demand and prevent inflation). The second is a radical reform of public services so that demand for them is reduced – reducing the level of social problems, so that we require fewer police, courts, hospital beds, etc – and managing those problems so that they are solved early rather than passed from agency to agency. Alas we have very little idea how to bring such a change about – though we can see that some countries do this better than us (Japan, Switzerland, Denmark perhaps). A radical reform of government is clearly a part of this, with less centralised control – but it needs much more than this: decentralisation by itself could actually make things worse. With the possible exception of education (which has become more effective rather than cheaper) the reform efforts made by our governments in the last twenty years have taken us in the wrong direction – from Labour’s over-centralisation, to the de-skilling and outsourcing of the Conservative and coalition years. Unfortunately the choice between the two approaches of higher taxes or radical reform is not a binary one. Reform will require substantial investment, and that is likely to mean higher taxes in the short term at least.

If our politicians are in denial about all of this, how about the public? They surely understand that public services are in a dire state – and that fixing this will not come cheap. But they are too wrapped up in their own personal struggles to spend any energy on demands for change. Politicians are in denial for a reason: they don’t just a lack imagination and perception, but they also know a voter-loser when they see it. Still, Labour are clearly presenting a more realistic prospectus than the Conservatives, even if it is based on wishful thinking. Their poll lead at least seems to show some wider awareness by the public at large. And we must grasp at that straw.

Sunak remembers Tunbridge Wells

The Pantiles, Royal Tunbridge Wells – photo Paul Collins

Media commentary on British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle largely misses the point – the exception being the FT’s Stephen Bush, whose newsletter came out after I started drafting this – and who is absolutely on point here. Most reflect on the ironies of the shock appointment ex-prime minister David Cameron to be Foreign Secretary, and the impact this may have on various groups of voters. Many cast it as the desperate act of a failing administration. I would rather see it as a rather brilliant move to the front foot.

First things first. The most important move yesterday was the removal of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. She was never qualified for the job and, predictably, proved a loose cannon. But she is a darling of the Tory populist wing, who gave her a rapturous reception at the party conference – and her appointment was widely regarded as necessary for Mr Sunak to secure his uncontested nomination to the top job. Last week her attention-seeking criticism of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and criticism of the police helped take the heat off Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s typically leaden response the Gaza crisis. This was an excellent opportunity for the Conservatives to cast doubt on Sir Keir’s ability to take on the job of prime minister. Instead the story was Ms Braverman’s extraordinary conduct – which included direct defiance of Mr Sunak in an article published in The Times. That undermined Mr Sunak’s authority. This exasperated respectable Tory-leaning voters in places like Tunbridge Wells, without doing much to rally disaffected voters in places like the West Midlands, site of a recent spectacular by election loss, which had been critical to the party’s success in 2019.

But by appointing Lord Cameron, as we must now call him, to the cabinet Mr Sunak relegated the Braverman story to the back pages. Instead of outrage by her supporters bringing attention to the fractured state of the Conservative Party, all anybody wanted to talk about was Lord Cameron and Mr Sunak stamping his mark on on the cabinet. Ms Braverman’s sacking was passed off with a shrug as a rather obvious move. She will try to regain the initiative – she is clearly politically ambitious – but it will be hard for her to recover. Her moment has passed. The Tory populists will seek out other standard bearers.

This will do much to reassure those voters of Tunbridge Wells, a short drive from where I live. Here a traditionally safe Tory seat is under attack from the energetic Lib Dem candidate, Mike Martin. These voters, to generalise, never rejected the Cameron brand of politics, as the West Midlands voters had. To them the problem with Ms Braverman wasn’t really her politics, it was the fact that she wasn’t a team player, and showed no particular signs of administrative competency. To people who are professionals themselves, as so many of these voters are, this is a cardinal sin. It is a point that the Brexit-supporting populists simply cannot understand. The professionals have warmed to Mr Sunak, who is well to the right of their normal politics, because he displays this professionalism – unlike his two immediate predecessors – Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. They abhorred former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with a passion, as he was the diametrical opposite of professional.

But, alas for Mr Sunak, Sir Keir is a consummate professional too. As is Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader – and indeed this group of voters rather liked the Lib Dem – Conservative coalition that Lord Cameron led, and probably like the idea of a Lib Dem-Labour one (anathema as that is to Sir Keir). Mr Sunak may have stopped a rout, but he will need to do more to secure a win.

To do that Mr Sunak will need to show that he is getting to grips with the crisis in public services, and the chaotic illegal immigration in small boats across the Channel. Pretty much all public services are in a sorry state, but the most important politically for now are the NHS, the courts and water and sewage (where problems are close to home in Tunbridge Wells). But to seize the initiative here Mr Sunak will need to unlock public spending, to invest in facilities and to restore lagging pay – otherwise he will not be seen as serious. This matters more than the tax cuts beloved of the Tory right. There is talk of cutting Inheritance Tax, as this is a wedge issue with Labour. Inheritance Tax does weigh heavily in the minds of the wealthier people of Tunbridge Wells, with its high property prices – but my guess is these voters would be unimpressed with such shameless politicking. The forthcoming Autumn Statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be a critical test for this government.

But as Stephen Bush says, just as Mr Sunak was unable to capitalise on gestures to the populists because of his lack of follow-through, he will not capitalise on his gesture to voters of Tunbridge Wells for the same reason.

Starmer triumphant

Photo: Petr Kratochvil PubicDomainPictures.net

Recognition of Sir Keir Starmer’s achievement as Labour leader has been grudging. Even as Labour dominates the opinion polls with leads of over 10%, and local elections and by elections confirm it, the response has been “Yes, but…”. Any straw in the wind that might throw doubt on Labour’s dominance is leapt on and magnified. Labour’s victory in two by elections last week, in two ultra-safe Conservative seats, should end that, following as these do a spectacular victory over the SNP in Scotland in a another by election. The party can win almost anywhere it chooses to fight. 

The three October by elections each throw a different light on the stranglehold Sir Keir now has on British politics. The first, in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, on the outskirts of Glasgow, shows that Labour is at last breaking the SNP stranglehold north of the border, which resulted in Labour winning just one seat in Scotland the 2019 general election. The constituency was marginal but the swing was huge. This follows the implosion of both the SNP and the Conservatives, which had been the second party in Scotland. This is important, as Labour failure here under both Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn was a critical aspect of the failure of both of these leaders. This makes winning an overall majority in the country as a whole much easier, both directly and indirectly, as the prospect of the SNP holding the balance of power has been used to scare English voters into voting Conservative.

The second by election was in Tamworth, in the West Midlands. This seat shared characteristics with the “red wall” seats that used to be Labour, but which have been swinging to the Conservatives since 2010, and especially in 2019 – and which voted heavily for Brexit. In this case the Conservatives first won it in 2010 and improved their margin in each of the elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019 (even in 2017 when the national swing was against them). Labour’s success here is a sign that Labour is at last reversing this trend; even if it can’t back to 2010 in a general election, pre-2019 will bring in plenty of seats.

The third seat was Mid-Bedfordshire which is altogether more middle-class, and a classic, largely-rural safe Conservative seat that they have always held. What was particularly interesting this time was that the Liberal Democrats fancied their chances here, after their four spectacular by election victories this parliament, including two from third behind Labour, as in this seat. The argument was that many voters might contemplate voting Lib Dem but would never consider Labour. The Lib Dems put in a massive effort on the ground. But Labour’s success in the safe Tory seat of Selby suggested to them that they could win here, putting the Lib Dems in their place. And so it proved. Apart from the battle with the Tories, this was a trial of strength against the vaunted Lib Dem by election machine. Labour won.

Labour can’t win just by reinstating their red wall losses, even back to 2010, or recovering the seats lost in Scotland in 2015 – they lost in 2010 after all. But progress in Mid-Bedforshire and Selby show that they are making ground everywhere except, perhaps, in a few areas where the Lib Dems are already well-established, and London which they already dominate. By contrast their failure in Uxbridge, on the same day as Selby, and which the Conservatives and their supporting commentariat took to be a sign of hope, is an outlier. It is a London seat and London is the one area where the party had progressed since 2010.

All this brings to mind the build-up to the 1997 general election, and Mr Blair’s landslide victory for Labour, when Labour was similarly winning across a broad front. Then too, the Conservatives clutched at every available straw; they talked of creating “clear blue water” between themselves and Labour, much as they do now, without using those words. The Conservative prime minister was John Major, and his advisers kept saying that “the darkest hour is just before the dawn,” oblivious to actual cycle of light (the darkest hour is midnight). Meanwhile Labour shadowed Conservative fiscal plans in order to head off fears about extra taxes – and generally tempered its radicalism. I recently heard a claim that Labour promoted radical policies before 1997, and so should not fear doing so again. This is nonsense: any radicalism was confined to constitutional policies that were popular amongst key minorities, and few others cared much about. There were no promises on country-wide electoral reform or English devolution, and radical increases in spending on the NHS, for example, did not come until Labour’s next term.

But there are differences between now and 1996, and they are interesting. Then Mr Blair was putting most of his energy into winning over liberals. He had an unwritten pact with the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, but it was a scary time to be a Lib Dem – what was the point when Labour seemed so interested in liberal ideas – promoting education, Scottish devolution, freedom of information – and even some signs of flexibility on electoral reform? Sir Keir is not interested in any of this – except with the adoption of a green agenda, though he is hedging even on that. The Tories have alienated liberals so thoroughly that he doesn’t have to try to win them over. Instead, he is focusing on Brexit-supporting working class and lower middle-class voters, which Mr Blair did not completely neglect (his law-and-order policies were designed to appeal to them), but treated secondary. Sir Keir dead-bats the endless culture war provocations that the Tories throw at him and drives home his message on chaotic state of public services, important to this group. Sir Keir’s uncharismatic style seems calculated to reassure, compared to Mr Blair’s slippery charisma. 

Of course, Labour’s strength largely reflects the Conservatives’ weakness. And yet there is little they can do to correct that. Their attempts to imitate the US Republicans with nativist and culturally conservative causes, and rowing back on green policies, seem to have little traction with their key audience, while alienating middle-class liberals, who have been a key part of their electoral coalition. Perhaps their best hope is to stoke up fears of tax rises under a Labour government. But the dire state of public services has probably reconciled most people to higher taxes, and the Conservatives have shredded their reputation for competent management. Even those who think the prime minister Rishi Sunak is competent, will not think the same of most of his colleagues, and will have noted how often the party ditches its leaders.

Big swings can happen in a short space of time. A notable case was in 2017 when Theresa May lost a commanding lead over Labour in weeks. But that was a snap election when neither side was prepared, and Mrs May compounded it by trying to capitalise on her lead by putting risky policies in the party manifesto. Most people expect the Conservatives to close the gap a little, leaving Labour with a small majority or just short. But a complete Tory meltdown is also on the cards, such is the party’s weak credibility and penchant for self-destruction.

There are legitimate questions over Sir Keir’s policies. His talk of making public services work better through reform, and not by radically increasing funding, is just not credible. Furthermore, the public finances are looking weak. High inflation means a tight monetary policy. The country still depends on funding from foreigners, and yet the funding environment is getting much more difficult. Promising to fill this gap by growing the economy lacks credibility too, given the headwinds of demography, the retreat on open trade, and the rise of low-productivity services.

But whatever the doubts, Sir Keir Starmer is offering a much more convincing alternative government to the Conservatives, and there seems to be nothing the latter can do about it.

The Tories don’t need more humanity: they need competence

Last weekend The Observer reported that a senior Conservative had suggested that the Tories were in danger of being the “nasty party” again. They needed to show more humanity, he said. This followed some provocative language on the subject of asylum seekers from the Home Secretary and the party’s deputy chairman. The nasty party epithet resonates because it was attributed to the party during the long period of its doldrums while Tony Blair was prime minister, and and the party suffered three crushing defeats to Labour in general elections. It took a conscious rebranding effort by David Cameron to break free of the tainted Tory brand.

The Tory brand is undoubtedly deeply tainted once more. Their poll ratings are dire. Even in traditional heartlands, like where I live in rural Sussex, the party is being rejected in local elections by spectacular margins. Nice middle class people treat the party with disdain. The party’s main electoral strategy, though, is not to woo these voters but lower middle class and older working class voters who were part of the anti-establishment coalition that supported Brexit, and flocked to the party in 2019 in the “Get Brexit Done” election. It now seems that appealing to these voters is one of the driving principles of government policy, casting aside all considerations of national or wider interest. These voters are thought to like the “nasty party” image.

The problem of small boat crossings across the Channel illustrates the government predicament well. It is this flow of illegal immigrants that provoked those nasty comments. The government promotes a series of “tough” but token policies – such as trying to transport migrants to Rwanda, and housing them on a barge that looks distinctly like a prison ship. Ministers then attack “leftie lawyers” for slowing down (or even stymieing) these ideas, in the hope that mud will stick to Labour, led by lawyer Sir Keir Starmer. Certainly the flow of migrants across the Channel irritates Brexit-supporting voters, who are no sticklers for the rule of law.

But the flow of boats goes on. There is apparently a slight dip in numbers in 2023 compared to 2022, but this may just reflect weather conditions. The people traffickers are getting better organised, and are easily able to outwit government efforts to impede them. For some rather puzzling reason government ministers have been claiming that their policies are designed to “break the business model” of the traffickers. Perhaps they think this form of words sounds clever. But their policies are not directed at this goal at all. The business model depends on the absence of legal routes of migration, or even alternative illegal means – this forces migrants into the traffickers’ arms, allowing them to extract high prices and therefore invest significant money and effort in beating the government efforts efforts to make their lives difficult. Of course the government does not feel it can offer alternative routes, because that means letting more in legally, and their whole aim is to reduce flows overall.

And the longer the flows persist, the more the government has to confront difficult questions. The first of these is why all this is blowing up now, after Brexit, when Brexit was meant to enable Britain to “control its borders”. The business of managing borders is clearly a lot harder than most Brexit advocates had said. Then there is the the rather pathetic scale of the Rwanda and barge policies compared to the volume of incoming people: hundreds compared to tens of thousands. Worst of all is the effect of painfully slow processing of asylum claims, which has left tens of thousands in limbo, many having to be put up at state expense. What the government has not quite admitted was that this backlog arises from deliberate incompetence, as the former Home Secretary Priti Patel seems to have though that processing claims more slowly would reduce the incentives for people to come over and make claims. That hasn’t worked: instead state agencies and their political masters are made to look chronically ineffective.

Polls now show that few people think that the government will fail to stem the flow of boats. In the short term it might work for the Conservatives to deflect the anger towards the liberal “elites”, personified by leftie lawyers. But we probably have more than a year to wait before the next election. It is hardly worth suggesting that the opposition would do no better, when it doesn’t look as if things could get much worse.

If it is to turn the tide of opinion, the Conservatives needs to demonstrate competence above all else. Those nice middle class voters will forgive a lot of nastiness for that. Angry Brexiteers are not so dissimilar. And as for international standing, foreigners have their nasty side too – it is competence that inspires their respect. The problem for the party is that it has turned incompetence into something of a feature since they chose Boris Johnson as their leader. Both he and his successor, Liz Truss, openly selected cabinet ministers on the basis of loyalty rather than ability. Political posturing mattered above all.

Since then there have been an endless succession of ministers evidently not up to the job. Mr Sunak seemed to break from that idea. His stock (and the government’s) was never higher than when he reached a deal with the European Union over Northern Ireland – allowing competence to trump political posturing. But then again, his appointment of the inexperienced but ideological Suella Braverman as Home Secretary always pointed in a different way. Now political messaging is once again the priority, as the government stumbles from one mishap to another.

This recalls the government of John Major in the 1990s, with the party exhausted and fractious after the Thatcher years. It is true that this government managed to pull off an election win against the odds in 1992 – but at that point the government was being given the benefit of the doubt on its economic strategy, while doubts over Labour leader Neil Kinnock persisted. By 1997 the government’s haplessness was exposed to all, while his Labour opponent, Tony Blair, was the very picture of slick competence. Sir Keir can’t aspire to Mr Blair’s heights, but he looks competent enough. Mr Sunak’s supporters may keep clutching at straws (as did Mr Major’s “the darkest hour is just before the dawn”, they said, inaccurately) but it is heading for humiliation all the same.

Anti-Tory pacts – lessons from Wealden

Analysis: Matthew Green thinkingliberal.co.uk

Such is the paradox of the information age. Massive amounts of information from across the globe is at our fingertips, and we can now use AI tools to retrieve it with startling efficiency. But news reporting, especially local news reporting, has collapsed – so many, many interesting things are liable to escape our attention because they will never get into to the accessible database. There has been a wealth of reporting on last week’s local election results in England. But many interesting, and important, local stories remain unremarked. Such is the case in my local area, with the district council elections of Wealden in East Sussex – and arbitrary bureaucratic agglomeration of villages and small towns, whose main centres are Uckfield, Hailsham and Crowborough, each of roughly equal size.

The first point to make about this is that I wasn’t involved in these elections, in spite of being a party member. I haven’t talked to any of the actors since long before the campaign started. My reporting is based simply on the results published by the council. I hope to find out more later – but I’m not minded to harass exhausted newly-elected councillors who have important decisions to make about running the council. I’m a blogger, not a journalist.

It was the first British public election since 1979 in which I did not vote for the Liberal Democrats, or one its predecessor parties. That was because they did not field a candidate in my ward. There were only three candidates: a Conservative, a Green and an independent who did not put up much of a visible campaign. I voted for the Green candidate, Christina Coleman, who won with 64% of the vote against the Conservative incumbent councillor, Roy Galley, who had won in 2019 with 59% of the vote, against just a Green candidate. Ms Coleman increased the Green vote from 523 to 1,107, while Mr Galley’s vote sunk to 545 from 749. As I searched through the results, I found that this outcome was not untypical. The Conservatives contested wards opposed by typically only one other party. And they lost badly, sinking from 34 councillors (out of 45) to just 9, behind both the Lib Dems (13) and Greens (11). This was a shocking result in a part of the Blue Wall that is so blue that most people don’t regard it as politically competitive. This bespeaks serious trouble for the Conservatives. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of disgust with the party amongst most of my neighbours, whom I would describe mostly liberal conservatives. One Conservative inclined neighbour is even more unforgiving of the Liz Truss episode than I am.

But that is unremarkable. It has been picked up by the main media commentary. What is remarkable was the degree of cooperation amongst the Conservatives’ opponents, and how well this worked. To put a bit of substance behind this story I have analysed the detailed results in the table above. This is all my own work and it’s possible the odd error has crept in. First, some basics to help understand the figures. There are 41 wards, four of which elected two councillors, and the rest just one. One was uncontested – the Conservatives were elected unopposed. The Conservatives contested all the wards except one (where an independent stood, and lost, against a Green). In the analysis I have tried to exclude candidates without serious backing or a campaign. I judged these to be independents who did not manage to gain 100 votes, and minor parties (though in one ward there was a Reform UK candidate, and in a another a pair of Ukippers, all of whom received over 100 votes); I have left in all of the Labour candidates, although one failed to reach 100.

The Lib Dems put up 23 candidates, doubtless so that they could claim that they could theoretically win a majority on their own. But they were opposed by the Greens in only three cases, and Labour in one, with “serious” independents in four. Eleven of the Lib Dem candidates faced no other serious opponent than the Conservatives; they were all elected – but only two others were. The Greens put up only 14 candidates – nine of these faced only one serious opponent (well, 10 if you exclude a weakly supported Labour candidate) – all (ten) of these were elected, along with one other. Three Labour candidates out of 11 were given a clear run against Conservative candidates; none were elected. Two Labour candidates were elected in three-cornered battles with Conservatives and independents (including a split result in a two member ward) – their first councillors in the district. The independents are by their nature not a coherent party, so the analysis means less – but their 18 serious candidates were involved in only four straight fights – three against the Conservatives (which they all won) and the lost fight with a Green. There were 13 three or four cornered contests: the Conservatives won six of their councillors here. These six, the two straight fights with Labour and the one uncontested ward were all the councillors they won. They won no contest in a straight fight with Lib Dems, Green or Independents. In two case of the more complex contests, the Conservatives prevailed with under 40% of the vote. In only three cases Greens and Lib Dems ran candidates against each other – the Conservatives won in two of them (with under half the vote), with the Greens winning the third comfortably with the worst Lib Dem performance of the day.

So far as I know there were no formal pacts – if there had been, the picture would have been a bit tidier. But cooperation is evident, and, as a device for winning against Conservatives, it proved highly effective – but less effective where Labour were putting up the candidate. How far can we extend the conclusions to a general election? Local and national elections are different – but the main problem for the Tories in Wealden was their unpopularity at national level. Their Wealden administration is not particularly unpopular, though no especially popular either. This suggests to me that an electoral pact between the Greens and the Lib Dems could turn some seats in the Blue Wall unless the government can seriously scare voters about the prospect of a Labour-led government. Wealden borough closely corresponds to a parliamentary seat, also called Wealden, which is very safely for the Conservatives (the Lib Dems edging ahead of Labour into a distant second) – but this all changes when new parliamentary boundaries come in. Such a pact would follow one made in 2019, but could be much more effective if voters are less scared of Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader than Jeremy Corbyn.

But it would be very hard to bring Labour into such a pact. Many former Conservative voters will vote for the Lib Dems or Greens (somewhat ironically since the Greens are closer to Corbyn’s Labour than Starmer’s), but draw the line at voting Labour. So there is much less in such a deal for Labour than the other parties, and it would be a major distraction from Labour’s main campaigning focus. Also Sir Keir is setting his face against electoral reform (which would be another distraction for him), which reduces the attraction of Labour to Lib Dems and Greens.

In the right circumstances electoral pacts work. Given the severe distortions imposed by the current electoral system I would have no qualms about my party entering into such a pact.

Dominic Raab and Diane Abbott shine light into some dark spaces

Politicians have to navigate two worlds: that of politically correct official policy and the respectable disagreements with it, and the world of their committed supporters where more extreme views are common currency. This happens in all parties. Liberal politicians have to restrain and suppress views on such topics as Brexit and immigration, for example. This does not stop politically incorrect views being widely disseminated in mainstream media, of course, but politicians must be very wary of publicly supporting any such views. Two episodes which broke over the weekend illustrate this.

The first was that of Dominic Raab, who resigned as deputy prime minister and Justice Secretary, after a report into accusations of inappropriate behaviour – bullying – in the management of civil servants, which upheld some of them. Mr Raab came out swinging: he suggested that the threshold set for bullying was set too low, and would make the task of ministers implementing their promises to electors impossible. He also suggested that some civil servants were undermining the government because they disagreed with its policies. These complaints were taken up by parts of the press, notably The Telegraph. It was soon being suggested that the complaints were orchestrated in order to remove a politically contentious but hard-working minister – and that others would receive the same treatment.

The prime minister has remained silent on the issue; opposition parties have piled in to condemn Mr Raab, with the Liberal Democrats even suggesting that he resign as an MP. On the face of it, Mr Raab’s arguments are hard to sustain. Most of the specific complaints made by civil servants (six out of eight) were not upheld – but there were two examples that the report’s author, employment lawyer Adam Tolley, viewed as too extreme. It would be easier to accept Mr Raab’s assertion if all the complaints had been upheld. The bar Mr Raab seems to want is high indeed – physical intimidation. Others point out that Mr Raab’s record of achievement in office is weak, compared to others with similar politics. I have spent many years in a professional management environment and have no sympathy with what Mr Raab is suggesting. There are good and bad ways of getting the people you work with to do what you want; Mr Raab clearly opted for the bad far too often. I am pretty obsessive about fonts and formatting (apparently one of the issues that Mr Raab complained about) – but as a manager I just had to let go, as the topic didn’t matter all that much in the end.

Still, Mr Raab is getting a sympathetic hearing in many places, and not just The Telegraph. But this is not politically mainstream. One survey suggests that most people claim to have experienced bullying by their superiors at work. I have worried that bullying behaviour by managers is so commonly portrayed in television and film dramas that people think it is how management is done – but this is doubtless trumped by direct personal experience, where people meet good management technique as well as bad. The FT’s Stephen Bush suggests that political careers tend not to provide such exposure to good management practice, though, and perhaps that is why politicians so often fall into Mr Raab’s trap. It is easier to see how the idea of the civil service undermining government policy has currency, though. The idea of a civil service “blob” is popular amongst conservatives; doubtless socialists who have made it as far as government office feel similarly. Passive-aggressive behaviours are common in all organisations, though, and the more radical your ideas are, the more of it you will get – as I know full well from direct experience. It is something competent managers develop techniques to manage, and less competent ones get paranoid about. But such conspiracy theories are the currency of activists and not the political mainstream.

Diane Abbott’s case is perhaps a bit more interesting. Ms Abbott is a long-standing Labour MP, elected in 1987, as the first black woman elected to parliament. While she can be a bit eccentric, she is clearly an intelligent person, and one who has suffered mountains of misogynistic and racial abuse. Her problems arose from a letter to The Observer newspaper, in response to this article by Tomiwa Owolade. It is worth getting the context of this episode right. Mr Owolade led off with this anecdote:

I was a sixth-form student and talking to a girl who told me with utter confidence that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege. White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of colour.

Tomiwa Owolade, The Observer 15 April 2023

He describes how at first he accepted this point of view, but that he came to reject it: life is much more complicated than that (‘not black and white” as the title to the article has it). In evidence he discussed a recent survey of people’s experiences of racist abuse. This found that both Jews and Irish Travellers, people often defined by black people as “white”, were more likely to experience such abuse than black or Asian people. The survey even found that white Irish people suffered more racial abuse than black Africans or Asians. He also pondered the fact that in the survey most black and Asian people did not claim to have experienced racial abuse at all. Of course a survey such as this is not conclusive evidence by itself, and actual experience of abuse is only one explanation of the way people answer such questions: but it is clear that Jewish people, and especially Irish Travellers, experience a lot of abuse.

This was, apparently, too much for Ms Abbott, who clearly agreed with the girl in Mr Owolade’s anecdote, and defines Jews, Travellers and Irish as white. She has since withdrawn the letter (and apologised for its content which she described as an early draft sent by accident), and I haven’t found a version of the full text to link to. These are the sentences that have been most widely quoted:

It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

I hope I don’t need to point out that highly selective nature of Ms Abbott’s historical examples (Jews and Gypsies sent to death camps in Europe; British ruling classes shrugging off mass starvation during the Irish famine, and so on): her words clearly reflect common talking points amongst certain groups of political activists – and I do understand why black people in particular are reluctant to accept terms of reference set by a white-dominated establishment. But in the wider political context such ideas are incendiary – and much more politically incorrect that Mr Raab’s views on what constitutes bullying. The Labour Party is just emerging from a very damaging row about antisemitism – which the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn was accused of not doing enough to combat. Mr Corbyn’s line was different to this one though – he suggested that antisemitism was just another form of racism, and didn’t merit special treatment. But Ms Abbott’s letter suggests that antisemitism is on a par with prejudice against redheads. She was immediately suspended pending investigation. It is hard to understand how such an experienced politician allowed such a letter to go out under their name – and very hard to see how she can come back from it.

Alas a sensible debate on racism and antisemitism is impossible to have in the current political climate. Pretty much any view is going to create offence somewhere – and spark accusations of some form of racism or denial. Nuance is crushed as every scrap of evidence is mobilised to support one or other fixed view. It is clearly is a complicated issue, but no respectable politician can afford to challenge the conventional wisdom. I rarely discuss it on my blog, since the risk of my remarks being misinterpreted and misused is so high.

Still some writers, such as Mr Owolade (who writes for the New Statesman) do try to explore the nuance. Perhaps one day we can move on. At least with workplace bullying and the role of the civil service we can have a bit more of an open debate.

The moral high ground is not good politics

An earlier example of low political advertising from the 2016 referendum campaign (c) Vote Leave

Labour’s national campaign HQ must be beside themselves with glee. They put out an online advert claiming that the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, wants sex offenders to roam free rather than spend time in prison. This dominated the news agenda over the whole four-day bank holiday weekend, with the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer doubling down with an article in the Daily Mail on Monday. Many (probably most) of their party’s loyal supporters were unimpressed with this descent into gutter politics. The Guardian‘s Marina Hyde was vicious in her criticism. But that only served to stir the pot some more. This has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated campaign, and in its own terms it was an outstanding success.

I’m not repeating the ad here, as it has benefited enough from extra exposure by critics and neutrals. Instead I give an earlier example of this type of campaign advertising – this time from Vote Leave in the 2016 referendum campaign. Turkey was, and still is, a candidate country to join the European Union, so Vote Leave could claim some tangential factual accuracy. But there was no actual prospect of its application succeeding, and Britain could have vetoed its accession anyway (though, to be fair, the British government wasn’t inclined to, unlike the government of France and several others). But the ad played to fears of a new wave of immigrants under the EU’s freedom of movement rules – and olive-skinned Muslims at that. The Labour ad’s facts are just as tangential, and it is even more fundamentally untrue. But the Vote Leave ad was regarded as a big success, for all the furore (in fact partly because of it), and so the political professionals seek to emulate it. These professionals have Sir Keir’s ear and they are doubtless very pleased with themselves.

The aim of the ad isn’t to persuade people that Mr Sunak actually thinks that child sex offenders shouldn’t go to prison, or even to persuade people that Labour would be much different. It is to neutralise Conservative attempts to paint Labour as soft on crime. It draws attention to the government’s generally dismal record on public services, which certainly includes the police and the courts, to point out that Tory claims on law and order don’t add up to much. If readers cynically shrug and say “They’re all the same”, then the ad will have done its work. Complaints by liberal types only go to show that the Labour leadership is made of different stuff. Indeed to be complained about by Guardian readers is a badge of honour that the leadership of both main parties seek as free and welcome publicity. This is utterly depressing for people on the left of politics.

Some are suggesting that this tack by Labour might backfire, though. The New Statesman reports one Labour adviser as saying “…it won’t work because we won’t win from the gutter – our biggest problem is not failing to attack Rishi, it’s lacking a positive alternative vision – and because dredging up past records won’t end well for Keir. The Tories will go to town with his DPP record.” But that is to misunderstand the strategy. Labour is defending a very healthy poll lead; all it needs to do is prevent the Tories from changing people’s minds, and either staying at home or voting for Labour as the lesser evil. The party will doubtless throw in abundant positive stuff about green growth and so on later in the campaign. But for now they are more worried about Tory negative campaigning and feel that the best way of neutralising this is in negative campaigns of their own. The Tories are going to go to town on Sir Keir’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions anyway.

Another worry for some is that Labour ranks are divided about these tactics, right up to shadow cabinet level. Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary, is being briefed against, and is keeping her head down. Instead Labour fielded Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, for media interviews as she evidently wants Ms Cooper’s job. I’m not sure this matters too much if Sir Keir is clearly in charge. Ms Cooper will go quietly out of loyalty – a pity because she probably has more of the sort of administrative competence that Labour will need badly once in power.

And, of course, Labour have no convincing solution to Britain’s law and order crisis without promising more public spending, which they won’t do for fear of Tory attacks on tax rises. Ms Thornberry collapsed spectacularly when pressed on this by her BBC interviewer on the World at One radio programme on Monday; “We’re optimists,” was the best she could do. No marks to the BBC for tamely following Labour’s manipulation of the news agenda, but full marks for its challenging Ms Thornberry robustly. But Labour seem to have got away with it.

Taking the moral high ground is not a successful political strategy. Nothing attracts sneering political and media criticism more. The Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg tried it in the 2010 general election; it generated a brief spurt of popularity, but ultimately turned him into the most hated person in British politics. Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir’s predecessor as Labour leader also tried it. This brought him some success in the 2017 general election, against Theresa May, a slightly more scrupulous Conservative leader. But against the entirely unscrupulous Boris Johnson Mr Cornbyn fared hardly better than Mr Clegg. Sir Keir seems to have flirted with the high ground (as Ms Hyde pointed out in her Guardian article), but has wisely decided against it.

It is possible to overdo the negative. The Conservatives are widely thought to have done this with their attacks on Tony Blair in 1997, though these were particularly inept. But this seems hard to do. Britain’s electoral system makes this worse: it encourages a focus on small groups of swing voters, where persuading the other side’s supporters to stay at home is part of the game. Loyal supporters provide campaigners and foot soldiers, but are ignored otherwise. Labour’s grassroots are repeatedly being trodden underfoot by their leadership, and may be unwilling to put much effort into the political ground campaign. Doubtless Labour’s strategists feel they are dispensable – and that enough of them will seek the tribal reward for beating the Tories (and Lib Dems) to do what is needed.

Are we condemned to this sort of politics forever? The public may hate high-minded politicians even more than the regular low-life, but they don’t like politicians generally. If Labour flounders in government, this could generate a backlash against politics generally. If this could be channelled into political reform (with the country’s flirtation with populism evidently exhausted by the Brexit saga), and electoral reform in particular, this might lead somewhere. This did happen in New Zealand in the 1990s. But I wouldn’t bet on it.