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The kaleidoscope is an old-fashioned toy that I remember from my youth, which has long since been superseded by digital effects that don’t reproduce its magic.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

Value for money starts with effectiveness

Bing Image Creator’s take on a value for money audit in progress. Mid-2020s technology serves us with 20th Century images…

Inflation stalks the modern economy, and the public really doesn’t like it. Meanwhile public services are under stress, demand for welfare rises, and taxes are as unpopular as ever. Increasing public spending when the economy’s supply side is stretched either leads to more inflation or more taxes. How to square the circle? More immigration? That isn’t very popular either, and puts housing under stress. Economic growth? But that means facing severe headwinds, from the popular demand for more leisure (aka retirement), to NIMBYism, and resistance to globalisation. Public policy is a tough gig these days if you want to solve problems rather than just stir up resentment. But one thing pretty much everybody can agree on is that it’s a good idea to get better value for public spending. But how?

Back in the 1980s when I was in accountancy training I read up about value for money auditing, which was coming into fashion then, as accountants sought to expand their remit. The textbook said that value for money should be viewed at three levels: the three Es. First, Effectiveness: is the spending achieving the results it was meant to? Second, Efficiency: could the outputs be achieved with fewer inputs? And third, Economy: could those inputs be bought at a lower cost? This remains an excellent framework for looking at value for money. As you progress along this chain, though, the scope of questioning gets narrower, and the questions become easier to answer. Which means that too often the analysis gravitates towards Economy before the question of Effectiveness has been properly dealt with. In his recent speech on value for money, the Head of the National Audit Office, Gareth Davies, picked five themes for the achievement of better value for money, focused on Efficiency and Economy – Effectiveness hardly got a look in. The five themes were: large infrastructure projects, asset management, procurement, digital transformation and reducing fraud, error and tax evasion.

At the Economy level, lets’s look at two issues in particular to get a feel for the difficulties of focus on the third E – pay and procurement. Pretty much every time some senior executive is asked for ideas on value for money, they come up with the idea of more centralised procurement, so that government can drive a hard bargain with suppliers. This is a common idea amongst leaders of big organisations, who need to keep promoting the idea that size brings benefits, and that their massive salaries are just a rounding adjustment in the great scheme of things. And it makes sense in the right context. When buying drugs from massive pharmaceutical companies, it is best to do this a big centralised way, as the NHS does, or otherwise the suppliers will take advantage. But there is a dark side. When I worked for a big multinational bank as a unit finance director, I remember being hauled into a meeting at head office alongside my counterparts in other parts of the organisation, in which we were instructed to refer all significant purchasing decisions to the centralised purchasing department. The message was delivered by the head of that department, who showed no evident expertise beyond bullying, and it was received in a silence that bespoke passive resistance. This was yet more bureaucracy that was going make getting things done even harder. I applied for voluntary redundancy not long after. One story in particular always comes to my mind to illustrate the problems of centralised procurement. A hospital bought surgical gloves in packs of 50 as part of its procurement deal, but the hospital had no system for dealing with partially used packs. It was commonplace for staff to take a pack from stores, extract what they needed and discard the rest.

Things aren’t any better at the level of public sector pay. The government, in cahoots with unions, likes to negotiate pay levels centrally. The Treasury is in control of the government side, and clearly feels that its monopoly buying power can be used to keep pay rates down. It is generally right, which is one reason that public services are wading through a series of disruptive strikes as employees try to improve their pay without leaving and getting a better paid job elsewhere (perhaps in a another part of public service…). The particular needs of particular services in particular places is lost. With high staff turnover generating lots of additional cost, as well as staff shortages affecting performance, the actual value for money of this approach is very much open to question, never mind the strikes. Economy defeats Efficiency and Effectiveness.

To make real progress on value for money, you really have to get to grips with that first E. But there are a number of problems. One of the bigger ones is that we have divided public services up into so many fiefdoms that the issues aren’t being seen in the round. Mental health, physical health, housing, benefits and criminal justice are very clearly bound up with each other – but they are usually the responsibility of separate agencies and strategic cooperation between them is beyond anybody’s pay grade. The further up the chain of need you can define effectiveness, the more impact you are likely to have. The best way to secure value for money in many services is to find ways of preventing people getting into trouble, and so keeping them out of hospitals, police stations, courts and so on. But that’s nobody’s job, and so the question doesn’t get asked. It’s easier to try to keep pay down and order surgical gloves in packs of 50.

I can think of two attempts to break this deadlock. In the last years of the last Labour government it was decided that multiple agencies should get to together to focus on the needs of individual children who were at risk. It was called “Team Around a Child”. Alas it wasn’t clear who was accountable, and it often meant lots of unproductive meetings – though I suspect this was still worth doing. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that replaced Labour swept the system away as part of their austerity policies. But the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, was struck by a particular insight that a small number of individuals (a few hundred, I think) were driving an utterly disproportionate amount of work as they kept circling the various agencies. What if somebody was to focus on their individual cases and try to resolve the issues instead of passing the parcel? He managed to get an initiative going on this, but it soon collapsed amid wrangles over accountability and measuring performance.

The Coalition, in fact, was chasing up a blind alley in its attempt to radically improve value for money. What it tried to do was redefine what needed to be done, split it into digestible chunks and put these out to tender to social enterprises and private businesses, linked to clear performance measures, with, in some cases, incentives to improve measured efficiency. This led to a big drive towards the third E, with rapid de-skilling in many areas, such as probation services and social work. The first E quickly collapsed. The system could not deal with complexity, and multi-agency coordination (which was a lot of what those sacked highly-skilled workers had been doing) went out of the window. Only the consultants won out.

There is a very important lesson to be drawn from this. Public sector work is very different from that of the private sector, and often needs to be approached in a very different way. The private sector can walk away from the hard cases, and often that is a critical business strategy. If the costs of dealing with a particular customer are too high, you tell them to go somewhere else. It is the other way round with public services. For them, if you deal with the difficult cases well, the rest falls into place. Walking away might solve a problem in the short term, but it creates a bigger one later. This requires a completely different way of looking at the problem.

I have had the opportunity of seeing this first hand as a school governor in primary schools – and English primary schools are one of the most effective and efficient public sector institutions around. There is a growing issue of dealing with children with special needs – arising from autism or dyslexia, for example. This does attract additional funding – after succeeding in an arduous hurdle race to document the needs and interventions required. Some schools (and it’s been a big issue here in rural East Sussex) deal with this by trying to avoid special needs children. Head teachers develop skills in identifying such children and encouraging them to go elsewhere. Sometimes the schools that took a stronger ethical line were overwhelmed with pupils discouraged elsewhere, suffered a deterioration in their reputation and were eventually forced to close, as parents took their children elsewhere. But the three headteachers it has been my privilege to work with (two of them in Lambeth, not here) have taken an entirely different attitude. They see it as their duty to help all the children that come to them, if they can, whatever their needs. It is very hard, but they get a huge amount of satisfaction from it. Indeed they feel that it helps all the children if multiple needs can be dealt with in the same class. These headteachers and the teams they lead could do so much more if they had more resources to play with.

The reason why state primary schools do so well is because they operate with the right balance of focus on effectiveness, accountability and high professional and ethical standards. This was not always so, and it has been a long journey over the last thirty years or so. It helps enormously that they are relatively small and self-contained. It also helps that it is self-evident that the service needs to focus on the needs of particular children, rather than the ever-changing cast of characters that pass through hospitals, law courts and so on. There is plenty more work to do, but the progress has been huge.

How to progress? I think you have to start with accountability. The problem currently is that people are often not accountable for the right things. I think it would help greatly if accountability was more focused on smaller geographical units, with political leaders in these smaller units being empowered to set the agendas of the various agencies in their areas. Of itself this does not guarantee progress: indeed the record of Britain’s devolved institutions is patchy at best. But it is hard to see how things can improve without it. We need to get used to the idea that effectiveness is about solving problems for people – rather than simply improving the throughput of particular services.

But the public service ethos is there, waiting to be tapped and directed constructively. New technological tools are available to help. I detect a lot of pessimism amongst political commentators that public services are doomed to gradually fail. That need not be the case – we just need to encourage and empower the right sort of leadership.