What do British Prime Ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Liz Truss have in common? The Labour leader defines himself as a complete contrast to his disastrous predecessor but one. But both made economic growth central to their political programmes. If that leads to a focus on economic efficiency, then this is doubtless a good thing. But the truth is that we are keen on growth as a way of avoiding hard choices.
Recently, writing in the Financial Times, the Oxford economist Daniel Susskind pointed out that economic growth has become the universal panacea for politicians, but that the political focus on it is comparatively recent. Indeed I think the political focus on growth statistics, including in the BBC news, is overdone. The voting public does not pay much attention to the statistical updates. The balance between income and expenses, the ability of governments to fund public services and welfare, and the state of the job market – these impact much more directly on peoples’ lives. All of these are supposed to be driven by growth, and yet the relationship is complicated. Nevertheless growth drives so much of the conversation amongst political elites that we need to ponder it.
But, as Mr Susskind points out, economic growth is poorly understood. Growth emerges from the actions of millions of individuals all working to their own priorities. Attempts to drive economic development (much the same thing, but with a longer history of political focus) by government fiat has led to some of the worst man-made disasters in history. Mao Zedong’s policy of collectivisation and the “Great Leap Forward” in China in the 1950s led to the biggest mass starvation event in history, followed by utter stagnation. Conversely Deng Xiaoping’s reversal of Mao’s policies in 1978 led to the most astonishing and important period of economic growth and development in world history. The simple act of letting farmers grow what they wanted and sell their produce on the open market boosted food production several times over.
Attempts to understand growth and develop policy have tended to focus on the supply side of the economy. That includes Mr Susskind – who homes in on innovation, which improves productivity. Sir Keir talks of investment doing much the same thing, and also the creation of more houses to allow people to move where the jobs are (or at least I think that’s a large part of why he includes housing in his growth agenda – although in truth he has shown little evidence of a grasp of economic policy). Ms Truss’s idea was to reduce taxes to provide businesses and workers with greater incentives to work harder.
But this misses something: the demand side matters too. There’s no point in producing more products or services if people don’t want to consume them. Mao’s strategy in the Great Leap Forward was to produce more iron in village smelters – but there was little use for the poor-quality metal that resulted. There is an underlying assumption that people will always consume more if they can – they are simply limited by the income they can earn from working. Of course economists know things aren’t as simple as this. People with higher incomes tend to spend a lower proportion of their income (leading to the rather more complicated question about saving, investment and growth). People may choose leisure, such as early retirement, which limits the supply of labour and often restrains demand.
And then, when you think about it, things get more complicated still. Once people have enough money to meet their basic needs, they often want to spend the surplus to signal social status. By and large this is done by buying things that are not made efficiently (hand-stitched bags, etc.) or services that require prodigious amounts of labour (personal trainers rather than fitness classes), reducing economic efficiency.
And then what about sustainability? Intensive farming delights economists because it maximises productivity. But it kills the soil, making it harder and harder to use it to produce anything of worth – and requiring ever more inputs of fertilisers, etc, which in turn create further environmental damage.
A further complicating factor is that the growth of the information economy means that the relationship between demand and supply is more complicated. Demand for information (including such things as music and video entertainment) can be met with little impact on production.
All of this raises two questions. The most obvious is whether growth is actually such a good thing. This is the basis of Green scepticism of growth. People’s basic needs must be met, of course, but beyond this we need to think about quality of life and sustainability. There are plenty of people whose basic needs aren’t being met, even in advanced economies like Britain’s – but dealing with poverty looks to be much more a problem of income distribution than the aggregate income across society. The United States has the largest income per head of any major economy – and yet strikingly high levels of poverty too. But economic efficiency is a good thing, provided proper account is taken of “externalities” (environmental damage, etc.). In principle it gives people more choices over their lives. Inasmuch as growth is simply our society becoming more economically efficient, then it is a good thing. If it destroys the planet or merely speeds up a treadmill of drudgery and pointless competition, then not so much.
The second question is more interesting. What if people, through the revealed preferences of their freely-made choices, don’t actually want growth? Growth is a popular idea, provided somebody else does all the work. But perhaps you would just like a nice place in the country and watch the world go by, rather than set your sights on ever more possessions or a frenetic succession of “experiences”. Growth, or the potential for it, emerges from the zeitgeist. In 1978 China, with so many people on the edge of starvation, it is easy to see why this zeitgeist was massively positive for growth. But in 2020s Britain?
Actually in 2024 Britain there are signs of a positive zeitgeist for growth – as many people complain about the cost of living. Sir Keir’s government may well be fortunate for a year or two. But the zeitgeist could turn – and we’d be back to swimming in treacle. And that would pose awkward questions for the sustainability of public services and the social safety net. Politicians and the public need to be focusing on these hard questions, and not just hoping that the growth genie will make them go away.
The changed electoral map. Source: the Liberal Democrats
It was a dull election campaign but an earthquake of a result – not less significant for it having been widely predicted. Above all it shows just how much the country’s electoral system dictates its politics. That is how Labour won, and that is how they will stay in power.
I resisted the temptation to update my electoral predictions last week, as I didn’t have much more to add. If I had I would have talked up the Greens a bit, and also predicted that Jeremy Corbyn would win his seat of Islington North – notwithstanding a very dodgy local poll saying that he was well behind. I sensed that as people became more assured of a substantial Labour victory, with even the Tories saying so, that left-leaning voters, unenthused by the party’s relentless centrism, would vote for alternatives. The Tory tack of talking up Labour, referred to as the “Queensland Strategy”, to try and persuade people to vote Conservative to provide an opposition to Labour, was laughable. The Tories showed much more interest in fighting each other than opposing Labour.
The results proved me broadly correct, including those late predictions I didn’t publish – though I was surprised about how well the pro-Gaza independents did, unseating the prominent Labour front-bencher Jonathan Ashworth, for example, and nearly doing so to Labour big-hitter Wes Streeting. There were two main surprises for me though. The first was just how low was the overall share of the vote that Labour eventually got (about 35%) – much lower than the polling predictions, and with a much lower lead over the Conservatives (10% compared to a consistent 20%, though this dropped a bit in the last polls). This did not have much impact on the result in seats, though; a lot of this dynamic was happening in safe Labour seats, with Labour supporters moving to Greens and Independents, or not showing up to vote. The other surprise was quite how many seats the Liberal Democrats won. My argument had been that weakness on the ground would place an upper limit on the party’s performance of about 50 seats; in the event they won 72 – and nearly won a slew of others. There is an upper bound to Lib Dem performance – but it’s quite a bit higher than I thought it was. In about half the seats the Lib Dems won, pre-election campaigning was weak – but there was enough local council strength for the party to make the case for tactical votes, and there must also have been a bit of help from the national campaign, which managed to increase support for the party overall, over the course of the campaign (though it ended up in vote share more or less where it was in 2019).
Interestingly, the MRP polls, a big feature of this campaign, did not come off as badly as the ordinary ones, though they made similar mistakes with the overall vote shares for Labour and the Conservatives. The Labour victory was at the lower end of the range of these projections, but at least it was within it. They picked up more of a sense of how efficient the Labour and Lib Dem polling was in electoral terms, and inefficient was that for Reform UK and the Greens. They didn’t see the rise of the independents, and the projections for individual seats were often wayward, especially for the distribution of votes between the parties. As I suggested in my comments during the campaign, they exaggerated Labour strength in Lib Dem targets – allowing many a Labour leaflet to suggest that the party was in contention when it was in fact a distant third.
So the Labour victory was big but shallow, with many close results. Indeed, supporters of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, noted that the party won fewer votes than when their man was leading – making the narrative of why Sir Keir Starmer’s stewardship proved so successful much more complicated than the mainstream explanation suggests. Labour did not win, so much as the Tories lost. Sir Keir Starmer did not win over many people to his party (and he lost a good few), but he did not scare as many Tory voters as his predecessor – allowing them to stay at home or vote for Reform.
To be fair on Sir Keir, he seems to understand the thinness of his mandate. He is not using the scale of his victory to suggest that he has public support for radical policies. He is trying to establish a reputation for competence – something the Conservatives lost in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Labour will, of course, relentlessly blame the country’s “14 years of Tory chaos” – never mind that these followed three years of Labour chaos, and that the first six years were not especially chaotic. But whether it was 8 years of chaos or 14 makes no real difference to voters. This is a sensible strategy. The populist right plan a relentless attack on Labour for being “woke” – attending to the “luxury beliefs” of liberals and the identity politics of some ethnic minority politicians. Sir Keir’s best hope of winning the next election is to contrast the wildness of these attacks with the unfussy competence of reality. Good luck with that. He has the discouraging examples of Francois Hollande in France, and Gerhard Schroder in Germany. Two uncharismatic but competent left-of-centre politicians who were/are unable to manage the stresses of modern politics. Still, those leaders were operating in a very different political systems. So long as Labour can keep the right divided, its chances are good.
On the question of the right, I continue to follow the writings of populist promoter Matt Goodwin. I like him because he is reasonably factual, unlike many of his fellow travellers, who trade in conspiracy theories and lies. He did not have a particularly good election. He was elated by the Reform surge after its leader, Nigel Farage, started to seriously engage in the campaign. He went on to breathlessly call an inflection point, with Reform surpassing the Conservatives, backed up his own polling organisation, which proved by some margin to be the least accurate of all those publishing polls. But then Reform flatlined, and Mr Goodwin started to talk about the French elections instead. Looking back on the election, he is now calling the Reform glass half full. It has indeed peeled off the working class/lower middle class part of the Tory 2019 coalition, but it is making little progress beyond that. The Conservatives outpolled them by 10% – and its much stronger ground organisation showed. A pile of second places is no use in the British electoral system – and you need a strong ground operation to turn those second places into wins – just ask the Liberal Democrats. Complaining about the electoral system doesn’t cut it. The chances of Reform doing that on their own in more than a handful of places looks thin.
That leaves a stalemate on the right. Clearly it needs to rebuild the 2019 coalition, across working class and middle class voters, and in the north, south, east and west of England and Wales. Reform can’t do that. The Conservatives have two strategies open to them: the first is to displace Reform from the ground they now hold, and then rope in the middle classes and professionals later. But that will be hard: they have lost trust, and now that Mr Farage is in parliament he is in a strong position to fight them off – unless they can find a way of bringing him on board. The other strategy is to regain the middle ground, and then attack and squeeze Reform nearer to the next election, rather as David Cameron successfully did in 2015 to Ukip, a Reform forerunner. But Tory grassroots seem to have little patience for such a strategy, and they need somebody to lead it who is untainted by the Johnson, Truss and Sunak regimes – their own Keir Starmer. The likelihood is that the party will tear itself apart while trying to decide. This is Labour’s best hope, as they inevitably get bogged down in the mid-term.
What of the Lib Dems? Their large slew of MPs will give them more money, and more clout in parliament. It is a very different party from the ill-disciplined and eclectic group of local activists of the early 2000s, who often opposed Labour from the left. The centre is much stronger – this year’s campaign was notable for the strength of its central campaign, and consistency of its message across the country. They will seek to consolidate their gains, and build up new prospects. Their campaigning will continue with the same voter-led messages (health, care and the environment). But there is a hunger within the party for something more idealistic, defining what the party is all about. There will also be pressure to ramp up messaging around Europe. Perhaps they are shaping up to be part of a coalition with Labour in 2028/29.
But the big message of this campaign, demonstrated by both Labour and the Lib Dems, and in reverse by Reform and the Greens, is that elections are won by constituency-led targeting. The electoral system is shaping politics as completely as ever. Will electoral reform come back onto the political agenda? There are three broad options. The first is the Alternative Vote, which is not much more than a tweak to the existing system, but one which would allow those disenfranchised Reform and Green voters (to say nothing of third-placed Conservatives and Labour ones) more of a say. This would suit the Conservatives best – the Australian experience is that such a system ultimately reinforces the power to the two main established parties. And yet they united in opposing exactly this system when it was put to a referendum in 2011. The more radical alternative is proportional representation, which would suit Reform and the Greens best. This would have Lib Dem support too, though it is unclear that the party would benefit much, and it also has the support of many Labour grassroots.
But such chatter is irrelevant. The Labour leadership is focused on its core “missions”, which do not include political reform – and turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Until there is a public groundswell to change the system, as there was in New Zealand in the 1990s, there will be no serious move to change things. The British electorate is very conservative, as that 2011 referendum showed. And if such a groundswell was going to happen, I think it would have happened already. Reform and the Greens need to learn from the Lib Dems and embrace local politics.
Electoral efficiency in British elections. From The Economist
Credit MS Image Creator again. Not exactly Ice Cold in Alex, I know, but no problems with copyright
It’s my favourite scene from British cinema, in IceCold in Alex, the classic war film released in the year of my birth, 1958. The film tracks the fortunes a four British soldiers (including a female nurse played by Sylvia Sims) as they escape the German capture of Tobruk in 1942 in an ambulance, heading for Alexandria across the Qattarra depression. Not far from journey’s end, when they are exhausted, they are confronted by a sand slope that the vehicle can’t climb under power. They are able to get it up the hill in using the hand-crank – an incredibly laborious process. Near the top they pause for a rest. The Sylvia Sims character is left to ensure that the crank is held in place. But in a lapse of concentration she lets go, and the vehicle rolls all the way back to the bottom. The Sims character is distraught. “My fault,” says the commander, played by John Mills, “I should have set the hand-brake.” With this he rallies the team and they try again, this time successfully. Disaster is turned to triumph.
It is a classic picture of leadership: pulling a team together by shouldering the blame, even when there is an obvious alternative culprit. The Mills character is a flawed one, with a drink problem, but at the moment of crisis he knows how to lead. What a dismal contrast with modern political leadership. As the Conservatives contemplate turning triumph in 2019 into disaster in 2024, we might reflect on that. Three successive party leaders have been unable to shoulder responsibility for things that have gone wrong. Sometimes, like Boris Johnson, they mouth the words, but they are self-evidently empty, as the excuses come out in practically the same sentence (“it was my responsibility but I made no mistake,” is the line), and there no hint of accepting a personal cost. Liz Truss remains utterly brazen. Rishi Sunak glides over problems as if they were happening to somebody else. I think this is critical to understanding the Tory predicament.
Of course there are big differences between the fictional scene in Ice Cold in Alex, and the rigours of political leadership. The position of the John Mills character is not in doubt: his job is to rally his small team. In political leadership, taking responsibility often means sacrificing your own position, or at least offering to. But somebody acknowledging mistake of their own to take the blame away from others has huge power in any context. It is a dangerous thing for a politician to do, which is why so few do. And yet there is a cost to not doing it. Each time something goes wrong and the leader dodges the blame, his or her authority is diminished. This is what did for Mr Johnson. Each time he seemed to get away with it, but his authority ebbed until his position became untenable.
This is why the current betting scandal (the prime minister’s aides betting on the election date based on inside information) is so damaging. This is a different sort of leadership failure. You cannot point to a particular mistake that Mr Sunak made, though I suppose he could have warned his staff explicitly against betting – he really shouldn’t have needed to. It is, though, reflective of weak ethical standards, which to some extent reflects wider leadership. The bigger problem is what Mr Sunak did, or did not, do when the scandal broke. He immediately fell back on the line that because there is an independent investigation, he shouldn’t comment further – and he would not suspend the election candidates involved, though the staffers do appear to have been put on leave. The problem here is that a lot of the critical facts are directly known by Mr Sunak – the decision to go for a July election was his. He knows what people knew and when they knew it. This is the basis for a much stronger response – such as an immediate suspension (“they were part of my inner team and I feel very let down”), or else a public explanation along the lines of “I did not tell them about the decision, and this is best left to the Gambling Commission”. This may breach the guidelines made by the Gambling Commission about not commenting, but one of the attributes of leadership is knowing when to break the rules. As it is, the episode makes him look like a passenger rather than the driver.
This is especially damaging because it reinforces the apparent refusal of the party to take responsibility for anything that happened in the last 14 years of Conservative-led rule – as pointed out by The Economist‘s Bagehot column. This weakness is obvious to the electorate. At a hustings at the weekend, our local Tory candidate (Mims Davies, a government minister) struggled valiantly with this – on the one hand taking the official line “this is terrible and we will do something about it” when confronted by an awkward issue (sewage, immigration, housing, etc.), and on the other trying to establish a stronger narrative that the government has been in the case throughout (she actually defended the increased levels of immigration) – for which she will have had no help from the central campaign. Tory infighting over that 14 years, and especially since the end of coalition in 2015, has been so deep that the leadership can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether their government was a good thing or not.
To date I have been predicting disaster for the Conservatives, but have said that conditions on the ground will limit the damage, while putting an upper limit on the smaller parties, notably the Liberal Democrats, but also the Greens and Reform. I am seriously starting to have my doubts about this, such is the failure of Mr Sunak’s campaign. The Conservatives are now resorting what the professionals call the “Queensland strategy” (the country’s political tacticians seem to be heavily influenced by Australia), of saying there is a danger in Labour winning big, and the party is needed to form a decent opposition. That is desperate: it still leaves the question of whether voters really want to be represented by the party. Former Tory voters drawn in by Mr Johnson’s pro-Brexit appeal to former Labour voters feel betrayed by the party, especially under its current leadership. Home Counties voters, such as those I live among, many of them anti-Brexit, if only in hindsight, are utterly appalled at the party’s tilt to win these voters back. Tory candidates like Ms Davies seem to think their best hope is to appeal as sturdy local champions, be as polite as possible, and hope that the anti-Tory vote is split. This is by no means hopeless in East Grinstead and Uckfield – where there is no Reform candidate, and a strong independent. At the hustings the Lib Dem, Benedict Dempsey, performed impressively, but so did the Green, Christina Coleman, and that independent, Ian Gibson. But even without a strong ground campaign I am starting wonder whether the competent Lib Dem national campaign is cutting through in areas like this where the Labour ground campaign is weak, and there is little tradition of support for that party. The Tory Queensland Strategy might work to the favour of the Lib Dems. If the hustings reflected the local electorate, I think that would be the case. But although it was well attended, such meetings are notoriously unrepresentative.
What is clear is that that the country is about to experience an electoral earthquake that will be talked about for generations. And all because the party of government forgot how to lead. As the Conservatives survey the wreckage on 5th July, there will be no John Mills there to rally them to climb back up the hill.
More from MS Image Creator. I’m getting bored of the “realistic” style so tried a cartoon instead
So just how wrong have I been about the UK general election? My first prediction was that there would be a limit to the Conservative decline (at about 100 seats), and that there was no chance that the Liberal Democrats would overtake them. The Reform UK insurgents would be unable to replace the Tories. In my second post I suggested that the Conservatives would narrow the gap on Labour by squeezing Reform, limiting the overall size of their loss.
The second prediction is not faring well. I was wrong-footed by Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, changing his mind about standing himself, and being the formal party leader. His initial declaration got Reform off to a bad start, and offered the Tories an opportunity. But the Tories made a weak start, and Mr Farage is back, attracting media like bees to a honeypot, including the supposedly establishment-biased BBC. The Conservative attempt to squeeze Reform supporters has stalled, at least at the national level, and even gone into reverse. More than one MRP poll now suggests that Reform might even pick up a handful of seats.
But I’m holding fast to my first prediction. There is quite a lot of breathless talk about the Tories being crushed, with well under 100 seats retained. One or two MRP polls suggest that they will indeed by eclipsed by the Lib Dems. Reform cheerleader Matt Goodwin, whose Substack is one of my main sources of information on the populist right, is talking of an inflection point, with Reform overtaking and crushing the Conservatives. Even the Financial Times‘s Stephen Bush finds himself dealing with the speculation that the Lib Dems might overtake the Conservatives in terms of seats won – though he still considers this unlikely.
My logic is rather different from that of other commentators, though. It is that the actual results in many constituencies are determined by the activity of local activists on the ground – canvassing, leaflet delivery, posters and such, often referred to as “the ground war”, as opposed to the “air war” of media. The ground war helps voters decide who is really in contention in their seat, and then to decide on the least-worst option. This is more likely to change minds than anything that happens in the air war, that attracts most of the attention. I am a case in point. I have voted for the Lib Dems or their predecessors in every general election from 1983 (my first vote, in 1979, was for the Conservatives). The only thing that could possibly persuade me otherwise this time is if I thought my local Green candidate was in serious contention in my constituency of East Grinstead and Uckfield – she is my local councillor, and the only one of the candidates I know – and whom I’m quite impressed with. She claims that this is the case based on local election results; but the Lib Dem candidate makes the same claim based on 2019 election results (complicated by the fact it is a new seat); meanwhile the tactical voting recommendation from Best for Britain is for Labour, based on an MRP poll. It’s as clear as mud, though I think the Labour claim to be ridiculous. The Tory candidate (Mims Davies, the MP for the now-defunct Mid-Sussex constituency) has not given up, and has been canvassing in our village, in the extreme south of the constituency. She will surely have quite an easy ride back into parliament, even if she fails to get 40% of the vote, which is likely.
The Conservatives lack opponents with a proper ground-war capability in so many of their well-off rural strongholds. Labour have never been strong in these seats; the Lib Dem infrastructure is only there for some seats (locally to me in Lewes and Tunbridge Wells, for example), and the Greens in even fewer (the non-rural Brighton Pavilion in my area). Reform is not constructed as a grassroots organisation, and will struggle without a charismatic candidate and an experienced local organiser – which applies in a maximum of three or four seats, I suspect. The MRP poll methodology only picks up the ground war factor indirectly and underplays it. This makes its constituency predictions unreliable in each individual case, though more plausible in aggregate, which is how their success is usually judged. My guess is that the unique conditions of this campaign mean that their aggregate conclusions are out too in most cases – and that the Conservatives will do better than forecast. Though to be fair, there is quite a bit of variation in the MRP seat projections. The ground war factor mean that it is unlikely for the Lib Dems to pass the 50 seat mark, or the Greens 3.
Furthermore, I think Mr Goodwin is running well ahead of the evidence in his claims about Reform. So far I think only one poll, by YouGov, has placed them ahead of the Tories, and that was a week ago. Aggregated poll trackers tend to put them several points behind. Mr Farage’s volte-face gave the party a boost but it doesn’t look like sustained momentum. They may pick up a lot votes in areas where the ground war is weak, such as in safe Labour seats, which might lead them to widespread second places, but little impact on the overall result (a bit like the SDP-Liberal Alliance in 1983 and 1987, and the Lib Dems in 1992 – though in their case it was mainly safe Conservative seats where they did well).
Having criticised recent MRP polls, though, the overall result predicted by Ipsos-Mori (Labour 453, Conservatives 115, Lib Dem 38) is not far from where I think things will end up – though the individual constituency projections are wayward – giving Labour far too big a share in Lib Dem target seats, for example). MRPs are a poor way to guide for tactical voting decisions. The Tories may do a bit better than this, and Labour worse. I hope the Lib Dems will do a bit better too, but then my hopes have run ahead of the actuality for every election since 1983, apart from 1997.
So, to answer the question posed by my blog title, I expect the Tory rot to stop soon, with their ground war strengths serving to limit the damage. What happens next is the big question – but let’s wait until after the election to consider that.
Postscript
Just after I posted this, three new MRPs came out – and Matt Goodwin breathlessly reported a new poll showing a spectacular surge in Reform support to 24%, with the Conservatives languishing on 15%. This poll was conducted by Mr Goodwin’s own organisation, People Polling, for GB News, another Reform promoter. This is curious. Mr Goodwin is an academic and I have no reason to doubt his professionalism in conducting polls. But it is an outlier. It is clearly becoming harder to conduct opinion polls, and a lot of the result depends on how adjustments to the raw results are made. There is always a lot of soul-searching after elections amongst pollsters, which then leaves the impression that they are refighting the last war rather trying the win the current one. Mr Goodwin says that the key change is that a lot of the previous “don’t knows” are making up their minds, and that Reform are doing very well here and the Tories very badly. There is other evidence for the second of these contentions (though that suggested Labour doing well) – a disaster for Rishi Sunak, whose whole campaign was based on the idea that he could rally “don’t knows” who had previously voted Tory.
I don’t think the new MRPs add anything to my analysis, though I haven’t looked at them closely. They show the Tories coming in at roughly 50, 100 and 150 seats. My opinion is that the higher end of the range is the most realistic forecast. I think generally that the MRPs are over-reporting Labour strength in seats that the party isn’t targeting – probably to the benefit of the Tories, but maybe the Lib Dems too.
I asked MS Copilot’s image creator to give me 10 Downing Street, London in the pouring rain. This was the most appealing of the results, none of which were anything close to the real No 10. AI is reported to be close to superseding human intelligence.
Rishi Sunak’s calling of a general election for 4 July in the UK was a surprise – mostly for his own party. Labour and the Lib Dems had taken seriously the stories that he might go for 2 May, so although they were surprised, they were also ready. From the moment of its launch by Mr Sunak in the Downing Street rain, his campaign has not gone well. But things should get better.
The election that comes to mind as a comparison is 2017. Then Theresa May had a poll lead over Labour that was as massive, at the over 20 points, as Labour’s lead is now. But this was so narrowed by election day that Mrs May lost her parliamentary majority, ushering in over two years of parliamentary chaos. This was also a surprise election, and an even greater one, as no election was required before 2020. All parties were poorly prepared. Two main things went wrong for Mrs May. The first was overconfidence by her and her advisors, notably Nick Timothy. They took risks with the manifesto (aligning with the popular opinion that Tony Blair had been too cautious with his commanding lead in 1997), notably on the funding of social care. They also decided that they did not need to risk exposing Mrs May to televised leadership debates – which went down badly with the public. The second big thing to go wrong was that Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, did an astonishingly good job of rallying anti-government feeling to his party. Because nobody thought he could win, voters were prepared to risk voting Labour in protest.
Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is not going to make the first mistake. His party’s commitments are cautious to a fault – this is yet another “the same, only different” pitch. Mr Sunak’s attack lines on the party look very ill-judged. He says that he has a plan for the country, and that Labour are just waffling. All the appearances are the exact opposite – and Labour are doing their best to make it look that way. The Lib Dems are being similarly cautious, targeting their message to floating voters in 40 or so parliamentary seats where the party has an established base. It doesn’t look as if the Conservatives are seriously trying to dent the commanding 40% or so that Labour is polling, or the Lib Dem 10% for that matter.
But the Tories are still narrowing the gap. They are looking to bring on board former voters who are currently saying they are undecided, and 10% or more of the electorate that say they will vote for Reform UK. It is a convenient belief for party activists that all they have to do to win is to enthuse potential supporters in their part of the political spectrum, and not to compromise their values by chasing voters undecided between the two parties. Many on the Labour left believe something similar – citing that remarkable 2017 campaign as evidence. There is some evidence for the Tory version, though. A lot of voters distrust Labour – and that is especially the case for those who say they will vote for Reform.
And Reform’s campaign has got off to a weak start. Their main media star, Nigel Farage, has said that he will not stand this time. Immediately the party lost momentum – coming on top of a weak showing in local elections, which the party disdains. I think the Conservatives will successfully squeeze these voters – and their campaigning seems calculated to be towards that end.
It will be harder to rally the don’t knows without an effective scare message against Labour. Former supporters staying at home is always a large part of the poor performance of weak parties. Mr Corbyn succeeded as he was a fresh face, able to command a body of enthusiastic younger activists, motivated by the perceived outrages of seven years of Tory-led government (notably “Austerity”, but also Brexit). The cautious Sir Keir is in opposition, not government, and is not going to offer such a tempting target. Besides the Conservatives have spent decades putting off younger voters in their bid for the grey vote, and have no body of enthusiastic activists to carry their case to the country’s doorsteps. The failure of housing policy, leading to sky-high property rents and inaccessible home ownership, is a notable aspect of this. Besides the completely justified sense of betrayal felt by newer Conservative supporters, rallied to the party for the first time in 2019, is deep. There is hardly a promise that the party has kept; even “Getting Brexit Done” has lost its lustre.
But it is not inconceivable that the Conservatives will be able to raise their support from the lower 20s to about 30%, and narrow the Labour lead to the lower 10s. That will not be enough to stop a comfortable Labour majority. But it will be a lot better than the total meltdown being forecast by some.
How the Tory party looks to some… More from MicroSoft Image Creator
In the local elections this month the Conservatives did very badly. Their leader’s attempt to suggest that they pointed to a hung parliament is delusional. I have heard the suggestion that they may do so badly at the next election that the Liberal Democrats will form the official opposition. The example of the Conservatives’ Canadian sister party in 1993 is quoted – they slumped from being governing party to just two parliamentary seats. The vultures are starting to circle, with at least two people (Matt Goodwin and Dominic Cummings) suggesting that a replacement party be built to cater for conservative voters, alongside the rising ambitions of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But that is folly.
First of all, I think the Conservatives are heading for a rout in the next general election – and probably their worst ever result. Some people simply can’t believe that such a reversal of the 2019 landslide is feasible; others suggest that the polls always narrow as an election approaches. Party managers at the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats are both (rightly) anxious to suppress complacency amongst their campaigners, and are happy to promote such talk. But this is driving through the rear view mirror, and reminds me of the sort of things some Lib Dems were saying before their polling disaster in 2015. History does help us judge the future, but you should never be slave to it. The Conservatives are in a unique predicament, and show now signs of understanding a way out.
But we can dismiss talk of the Lib Dems getting more seats than the Conservatives. They did manage to win more council seats at the local elections, which was quite a feat when the councils in contention weren’t particularly advantageous to the party (unlike last year). But that’s council seats: as you go higher up the election size, the Lib Dems rapidly disappear. The Conservatives won 19 out of 33 Police and Crime Commissioners in England; Labour won the other 14, and three more in Wales, where Plaid Cymru won one. The Lib Dems were nowhere in sight. Neither was the party in contention in any of the 11 regional mayoral elections (10 to Labour, one to the Tories). This shows that there remains a massive bedrock of Tory support in rural areas, which the Lib Dems (and Greens for that matter) can only tackle in a very localised way; the Labour vote is also very patchy here. Even when the Tories are doing very badly, the anti-Tory vote is very fragmented. In order to win one of the other parties has to convince the voters that the other potential challengers aren’t in serious contention; not only is that a hard case to make in many places, but they don’t have the campaigning strength to get that message across in these often massive constituencies. There will be no electoral pacts involving Labour – and if there is one between Greens and Lib Dems (there is no such talk that I’m aware of – although this did happen in 2019) it will be very limited in scope. The Lib Dems are focusing their campaigning efforts on a relatively small number of constituencies, although exactly how many is always under review. This number is not likely to be more than 40 seats; when they targeted much more than this in 2019, the result was disaster. The polls, and the local results, show that the party has no general groundswell of support, and it will only succeed in places where it has campaigning strength. The Greens may have more of a general groundswell of support, but their campaigning strength is much weaker. If they spread their efforts over more than half a dozen seats they will be seriously wasting resources; they are in serious contention in about three at the most – one of which (Brighton Pavilion – their only existing seat) they might well lose to Labour, after the retirement of the popular Jean Lucas. The insurgent right is at this stage only represented by Reform UK, which has little grassroots organisation, and is unlikely to present a serious threat in the Conservatives’ rural strongholds either – though their presence seems to terrify many Tories. The party should secure at least 100 seats even on a very bad night – and easily enough to surpass the Lib Dems’ practical maximum of 50.
The more interesting question is what happens after the election, and whether one of the right-wing insurgents can supplant the Conservatives, now much reduced in parliament. The obvious challenger is Reform UK, which is regularly polling third in national polls, and can even surpass the Tories in some demographics. But it is hard to take this party seriously as more than a nuisance. It is constituted as a limited company, under the legal control of a tight clique, led by Mr Farage. Unlike other political parties, there is no attempt to give grassroots supporters any kind of serious say. This limits any development of a serious grassroots organisation. This might work if Mr Farage could muster the sort of charisma and wealth that Donald Trump does in America. But he is not in that class, even if he is quite successful in drawing attention so himself: at one point it was hard to keep him off the BBC. And he isn’t a team player – indeed right-wing insurgency is not a team sport.
It is also hard to take Mr Cummings seriously. He masterminded the successful Vote Leave campaign in the EU referendum, one of the outstanding political achievements in recent British political history; one feature of this campaign, incidentally, was the sidelining of Mr Farage. He actually cares about making things work and designing coherent policy, rather than just grandstanding on the latest political fad. But he is tarnished by his association with Boris Johnson, for whom he was a senior adviser, though eventually falling victim to the chaos that afflicted the Johnson regime. His lack of political skill was evident – and especially his combative style of doing business. It is hard to imagine that he could put together a successful political party.
Matt Goodwin, whose name repeatedly comes up on these pages, is altogether more interesting. He is not the damaged goods that both Mr Farage and Mr Cummings are. He also applies an academic’s discipline to his thought and research. He runs regular polls and focus groups to give him a good understanding of potential supporters and resonant messages. This, apparently, has enabled him to find financial backers, and he is increasingly open over his plans to build a new political movement. His organising theme is his anger at political elites, whom he accuses of trying to impose their liberal values onto a majority of people, who don’t share them. In policy terms his main focus is on excessive immigration, but he also turns his ire onto multiculturalism, wokism and Islamic minorities. As an academic, he lives and works amongst these liberal types, and is very familiar with their complacency and limited vision (“luxury beliefs”) – and his academic research shows how much this is at odds with what the public at large thinks. He further points out that support for liberal policies tends to be in metropolitan areas, and concentrated in an electorally inefficient way. He thinks that this adds up to a political opportunity for a new conservative movement – citing Mr Johnson’s landslide in 2019 as proof that conservative voters form a substantial electoral majority. But that government, he says, was taken over by the liberal elites, and betrayed its voters, for example by opening the floodgates to immigration.
But life is hard for insurgent parties in British politics. It is commonplace to condemn the complacency and out-of-touchness of the existing political parties, and to say that there is an opportunity for a new movement – only for the whole thing to fizzle. None has succeeded since the rise of Labour more than a century ago – and that took a world war. There are three big challenges in particular: first is assembling a winning coalition of support; second is campaigning infrastructure; and third is developing a coherent policy programme.
I have talked about electoral coalitions before – with my image of a kaleidoscope. It’s all very well finding majorities to agree to particular polling questions on immigration, say, but political success means holding together disparate groups. It is not nearly enough to find disaffected voters with lower educational qualifications in the ex-industrial heartlands of North England, the Midlands and Wales. Mr Johnson succeeded because he managed to add these to more liberal metropolitan types wanting to end the Brexit chaos and assuaged by his greenery, and to the retired mass-affluent traditional Tories in the wealthier areas, and so on. This required a combination of political skill and charisma. I don’t see any of the putative Tory rivals providing this.
Then there is campaigning infrastructure. It is just about possible for a small but focused organisation to find 600 parliamentary candidates and get them nominated at election time. Rightwing insurgents have an advantage in that there are likely to be plenty of volunteers, but less so in that they are likely to be a fissiparous and ill-disciplined bunch – one reason for reform UK’s highly centralised power structure (which followed the chaos of Ukip, Mr Farage’s previous vehicle). Creating an organisation able to carry out campaigning – such as door-knocking and leafleting – in a wide enough number of seats is daunting. Campaigners imagine that they can make up for grassroots weakness with canny social media and publicity strategies, but that is an uphill fight against established parties who have the local organisation. The nearest any new movement that has come to succeeding here was the SDP in 1981 (which I was part of) – but this allied with an existing party (the Liberals), used many experienced politicians, and attracted higher-skilled liberal types with strong organisational competence. Current conservative insurgents lack these advantages, unless they can secure mass defections from the Tories, and then ally with it. And the SDP ultimately failed in its aim of replacing the Labour Party in spite of impressive polling numbers in its early days.
And then there is a coherent policy programme. In a political culture that seems to value winning elections (or referendums) more than governing or implementing viable political programmes, this might seem superfluous. Mr Johnson did not have it in 2019, and neither did Donald Trump in 2016 – and he still doesn’t. But you can’t succeed in government without it, unless you resort to repression and corruption. If electoral success depends on building a disparate coalition, unless they unite around a viable programme, this coalition cannot hold – and such a programme offers credibility. Mr Goodwin talks of the Tory government of 2019 betraying its voters – but that was always going to happen as it promised so many incompatible things. A central theme was cutting immigration to move towards an economy where lower skilled wages weren’t being undermined, and so creating a more equal society. But higher wages for less skilled people (and this did start to happen in the early days of the government) leads to inflation and puts pressure on public services, major employers of lower-paid people. That puts pressure on interest rates (and hence mortgage costs), and taxes and public services. The government was simply not ready for this dilemma, which meant betraying other parts of the coalition, and quickly buckled on immigration policy. I don’t actually think that Mr Johnson’s idea on low immigration was necessarily a bad one – but it needed to have coherent planning behind it, and answers to the resulting dilemmas. Mr Goodwin’s policy ideas seem to be similarly based on focus groups and polls, and not on any serious understanding of the practical trade-offs.
Even a charismatic and well-funded person such as Donald Trump, with considerable, if unconventional political skills, chose to co-opt the established Republican Party rather than set up in parallel with it. The conservative insurgents have no such leader, and even if a new party has strong initial success, it surely cannot succeed in the longer run in competition with the existing Conservative Party. They would only serve to offer a lifeline to a new Labour government, who might well find themselves struggling rather quickly.
It is much more viable for conservatives to bend the Conservative Party to their liking, and to promote a comeback as spectacular as Labour’s. Mr Goodwin suggests that the rump Tory party left after an electoral rout will be too dominated by Oxbridge types from the old elite. But the grassroots are more radical, and a strong conservative agenda offers a pathway back to power. The next election may over bar the voting – but the election after that is very much in play.
Back in the 1970s there was a persistent story about lightbulbs (then incandescent tungsten ones) that was trotted forth to demonstrate the madness of capitalism. It was that the life of a bulb was kept deliberately short so as to create demand for replacement bulbs. Apparently it was true – but nobody cared. Whinge as we might at the fringes, politicians and the public were happy to keep the economic treadmill going. Longer-lasting lightbulbs would mean fewer jobs. Those days are long gone. Our lightbulbs now are immeasurably more efficient, and they aren’t built to self-destruct. Few jobs are at stake, and even fewer jobs in countries that use the bulbs. This leaves the world materially much better off. But politicians and economists alike hanker after the those old days – hence their obsession with economic growth.
Even serious economic commentators like the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf can’t break this: Mr Wolf started a recent column with the words: “If the UK’s real gross domestic product per head had continued on its 1955-2008 path, it would now be 39 per cent higher.” This implies that the lack of economic growth in the last 15 years is a failure of economic policy, and not due to a change in the way the modern economy works. This is wrong: instead we should think of the second half of the 20th Century as a unique period in economic history – and recognise that we have long since entered a new era, one in which sustained growth of gross domestic product per head is not a feature – nor even really desirable. Life can get better, but not through consuming ever more stuff.
Economists don’t like to look behind their beloved aggregated economic statistics, which they like to treat as classical physicists once did the measurements of pressure, temperature and volume of gases. What the gas molecules were made of didn’t matter. Some economists try to construct historical time series of centuries and more in an attempt to build a narrative of economic policy, as if to say that there are common economic principles that are everlasting. To them the post-war era in the developed world, and parts of the developing one, featuring consistent growth is a model of wise policy. Firstly through good macro-economic management, with Keynesian demand management, and then inflation targeting monetary policy: these smoothed out the dips and troughs that were a feature of previous eras. Then there was a consistent advance of productivity through the use of new technologies and more advanced management. “Productivity is not everything,” said the economist Paul Krugman, “but in the long run it is almost everything.”
But looking back on it, that golden age was the result of the convergence of four factors, each of which has reached its limit: the post-war baby boom, bringing women into the workforce, the expansion of world trade, and the rising consumption of manufactured goods. The baby boom expanded the proportion of the workforce that was of working age, but by the 1980s the babies were now all of working age while the birth rate had fallen; and as the boomers reached retirement age in the 2000s, the proportion of people of working age shrank. The economist Dietrich Vollrath did the maths and found that this accounted for most of the tail-off of economic growth per head in the 2000s in America – and in Britain the effect would have been greater, if anything. This led to my comment that “Demographics is not everything, but it is almost everything.” The war brought many women into the workforce, but in the 1950s the convention that married women should stay at home remained powerful. But as families wanted to spend more on consumer goods and property (and technology made housework easier), women were steadily brought into the workforce, increasing the overall rate of employment, and thus driving growth. This trend has been slow but steady – the proportion of women at work was still growing through the 2000s – but now there is not a big difference between male and female employment, and in most economies, including Britain’s, the limit has surely been reached.
Freedom of trade has also been an important driver of economic growth, as the laws of comparative advantage and economies of scale came into play – in notable contrast to the pre-war years. First came GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, part of the great post-war settlement. Then, for Britain, there was membership of the European Economic Community – which in turn was given a major lift when this morphed into the European Union with its Single Market. But perhaps even more significant was the steady rise in Asian economies, and the huge increase in trade in manufactured goods – a succession starting with Japan, moving through to the Asian “Tigers” (Taiwan, South Korea and so on) onto China, with India in a supporting role. The rise of this trade, referred to as “globalisation” was transformative. The cost of manufactured consumer goods in the early 2000s tumbled as a result, and was one of the critical underpinnings of economic growth. But this trade is no longer growing – and is probably shrinking, while Britain has left the EU and Single Market. Gains from trade are unravelling. This is partly a product of the rise of protectionist politics, but it is also because economic convergence has reduced the potential gains from comparative advantage. Funnily enough the reversal of globalisation is often celebrated by politicians, almost in the same breath as they call for stronger economic growth.
These three factors are well-known amongst economists, even if they don’t talk about them enough when considering the slowdown of economic growth – compared to familiar targets such as lack of public and private investment, NIMBYism, muddled political policy and so on. In contrast my fourth factor seems to be less well understood. In the post war era there was a massive expansion of consumer goods, from cars to cosmetics. This was made possible by advances in technology during the war, with the development of plastics, for example. Keynesian economic policy helped to pump-prime a virtuous circle of increased supply and demand – the expansion of manufacturing and distribution jobs helping to fuel demand. This cycle became central to the growth of advanced economies, copied by many less developed economies, though, interestingly enough, not so much by China, which is another story (they channeled much more of the extra demand into investment, relying on exports much more for growth). Along the way absurdities like the built-in obsolescence of light bulbs were tolerated. Many view this era, up to the late 1970s in Britain, as something of a golden age: one with a largely stable working-class culture, geographically well-spread, and quite a bit of upward mobility into an expanding middle class – before the destruction of the industrial heartlands that started in the 1980s. This view requires rose-tinted spectacles. Some things were clearly better then: access to social housing, for example; and this, combined with high taxes on the rich meant lower inequality and better social cohesion (so long as you weren’t brown or black skinned). Public services were more generously staffed, though usually terribly managed. But was an era of massive environmental degradation and plenty of social strife; film and television dramas of the era depict people shouting at each other but failing to communicate – which is largely how I remember it as I was growing up.
But this age of expanding consumerism could not be sustained. There are only a certain number of cars, fridges and so on the people can own. There was a limit to the amount of electric light that people could constructively use. And besides, advancing productivity meant that fewer jobs were required to sustain demand, and expanding trade kept up fierce pressure on efficiency. The final blow came when when, for reasons of comparative advantage rather than efficiency, the developing economies of Asia took over a huge share of the production of consumer goods. The 1980s onwards saw massive closures of factories and other infrastructure, such as coal mines.
But the standard rejoinder to this from economists is that these developments shouldn’t really matter. Cheaper consumer goods mean that people have more to spend on other things, and these require people to provide them – and these people can be made more productive. Lightbulbs may have been replaced by cheap LEDs made in China, but the new technology can be arranged into much more complicated and creative arrays, which need people to design and install them. But there have proved to be a number of problems with this idea. Economists will admit that manufactured consumer goods have largely been replaced in the modern economy by services, where productivity is a much trickier thing. They call it “Baumol’s Cost Disease”, teach it in Economics Batchelor degrees, and then forget about it.
Unfortunately, a Batchelor Economics degree is as far as my formal economics training went. The theoretical complexities of an economy where increasing productivity comes about through higher quality rather than quantity, and were an increasing amount of consumption goes into access to land, rapidly takes me out of my depth. But the outcome of these complexities is surely that developed economies do not behave as they once did. One problem is that the modern economy is more unequal. Large numbers of people are now extremely well off by past standards, and we have the phenomenon of “mass affluence”. Millionaires are commonplace. But at the other end of the scale many working class jobs are much less secure than the factory and office jobs of the past. The better-off, meanwhile, spend a lot of their money is on status goods and services, rather than basics. (They also save more, which complicates things more – though overall savings rates have gone down rather than up). One of the key ingredients is human content. In olden times this might be the number of servants you employed; nowadays it is the consumption of personal services and use of products whose whole point is that their production processes are inefficient (hand-stitched handbags, etc.). These often require low-paid people to provide. There is surely a danger that this inequality gets entrenched, and that this is a drag on economic development. This is surely one reason that minimum wage policies have not caused the damage that a consensus of economists predicted in the 1990s.
Then you have the problem of leisure. One way for people to exploit the benefits of higher productivity is to work less. This might be more holidays, or (as in my own case) retiring early. Then there is the hobby economy – where people produce things deliberately on a non-commercial basis for the sheer enjoyment of it. All this is perfectly rational economically, but it makes a mess of classical economic assumptions. And here’s the thing: a society were people don’t have to work as hard to achieve a comfortable and fulfilling life is not a failure. But listening to conventional economists you might think it was. Such a society is taking shape through the freely made decisions of economic agents: it is not a failure of policy. We need to understand how much slow growth is the result humanity realising the benefits of greater economic efficiency, and how much is through dysfunction – and I will admit there still quite a bit of dysfunction about.
So what are my conclusions? Firstly it is that most economists are suffering from a fallacy of composition when talking about productivity and growth. They have a mental model of the supply side of an economy being a single business scaled up (“UK plc”) when the reality is much more complicated. Advances in productivity in one place can simply lead to a reduction somewhere else. Secondly we are often confusing the creation of wealth with its realisation. Many people rationally choose to realise wealth by earning less – and the number is growing. Thirdly, the inequalities in our economy aren’t just a bit of untidiness that will resolve itself, but need to be a central focus of economic thought and policy development – as this is likely to do more to advance economic wellbeing that overall economic growth.
Politically this means that both the left and the right are barking up the wrong tree – at least as represented in Britain by the Labour and Conservative parties. Conservatives hanker after a low-tax high-growth society, powered by free-wheeling entrepreneurs. Those days are long gone. Lower taxes simply increase inequality and have nothing to do with growth. Labour assume that better direction from government towards constructive investment will unleash growth that will generate taxes that will fund improvements to public services. This is a lot less wrong-headed than the Conservative narrative. After the years of chaotic Conservative government, it is surely true that a bit of grown up government will unleash a some catch-up growth, enough to generate a bit more tax revenue – and maybe even to lift growth to the top of the G7, as Labour predicts (doubtless thinking that the other six economies are due for a bit of a stall…). But it can’t last – and the party is not ready for the hard choices that lie when it all fizzles out and they are forced to confront various combinations of austerity and higher taxes.
What we need to do is to take a fresh look at society and its dysfunctions and address that dysfunction through slimmer but more effective public services, and intelligent redistribution. Technological advance continues to offer the opportunity to advance human wellbeing – but we will get there faster if break the growth mindset.
The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is taking a lot of criticism. A minority view, promoted by Matt Goodwin, is that he is about to unleash a wave of woke nonsense on the British public, after Labour win the next election. A more widely publicised view is that he is so desperate to win the election that he has completely hollowed out a potentially radical Labour programme, and so stands for little or nothing. Both critiques miss the mark.
Mr Goodwin is showing how complete is his transition from a sympathetic but objective observer to the rise of the populist right, to being an active s**t stirrer, mixing in populist nonsense with his often trenchant analysis. This particular line of argument has been lifted from the American right but sits awkwardly with the facts of British public life. The American left, with its adoption of identity politics and much other nonsense, can be pretty scary. And they have their admirers in Britain, and these doubtless include many people who would be put in positions of influence by a Labour government. But the political mood is clearly against it, and Mr Starmer will be very sensitive to this once in power. Expect some nonsense around the fringes, hyped up like mad by right-wing media, but little that affects most people’s daily lives.
But what of the idea that Mr Starmer has so hollowed-out Labour’s policy platform that there is little worthwhile left? It is true that he is trying to steer clear of radicalism – but radicalism is something favoured by political activists and not the public at large. Lack of radicalism is a feature, not a fault. Rather what Mr Starmer wants to stand for is calm confidence – something the Conservatives have failed to achieve since Brexit, with some half-hearted resistance from two of their leaders, Rishi Sunak and Theresa May. But is there a deeper policy programme too? The place to start looking is Labour’s five missions – something Mr Starmer pushes relentlessly, but which is largely ignored by journalists.
What are the five missions? This is from the party’s website (though since withdrawn, doubtless because of its reference to the taxing of non-doms):
It is tempting to dismiss this as political guff. Firstly, it is more than five areas of policy focus – because the five missions come on top of the three “foundations” of economic stability, secure borders and strong defence – though to be fair these three areas are points of consensus between them and the Conservatives, at least in theory. Missions 3, 4 and 5 are underwhelming. They are limited by having to tie them to new taxes or waste reduction, where opportunities are limited and gimmicky; the non-dom tax has also been pre-empted by the Conservatives. The headline promises don’t begin to tackle the deep-seated problems with the NHS, law enforcement and education. The second mission is mysterious; a new energy company doesn’t do anything of itself – it’s what that company does that will make a difference. This isn’t much clearer when clicking through to the detail behind it. This promises an ambitious overhaul of the country’s infrastructure towards renewables, but with few specifics and no talk of costs. This makes somewhat more sense when tied to the much publicised £28bn a year investment programme, which was live when the Five Missions were first announced, but which has been scaled back since. Still, this mission does have one of the most senior members of the shadow cabinet behind it – Ed Miliband, the former party leader, who was energy minister in the last Labour government. As an organising principle of the next government this clearly represents progress from the half-hearted approach of the current government – who want to rest on the laurels of their achievements when pushed by the Lib Dems in the coalition years. Still, this is a difference of emphasis rather than overall strategy.
It is the first mission that is the most telling – and especially the promise to change planning rules. It is one of the very few areas where Sir Keir is happy to challenge floating voters – in contrast to the Conservatives, and even the Lib Dems, who seem in thrall to local NIMBYs. This makes a degree of sense, since Labour draws most of its strength from urban areas and people who rent their homes – who generally aren’t NIMBYs. It still looks quite brave, as strategically Labour need to keep pressure up on the “Blue Wall” of commuter seats. Alas there is almost no detail on the Labour website about how the party plans to approach this. If you click through, it is mostly whinging about Tory failure and wittering on about economic growth – pretty much political boilerplate. They talk of building 1.5 million homes (presumably 300,000 a year – the same as the Conservatives promised at the last election), and first time buyers “getting first dibs”. But it looks as if Labour in government could be quite brave here – and if they are, it could make a real difference. But it will only work if they break away from the developer-led model of house building that has dominated the last forty years or so of housing policy. Developers are too interested in realising profits on their land banks to do anything at pace. Labour will also have to work out how to expand the capacity of Britain’s construction industry. The Conservatives have failed in spite of much talk because these things are politically challenging. But if Labour frame their policy in terms of meeting the housing needs of working people and families then I suspect that the political costs will be manageable. I live in an area where NIMBYism is deeply embedded – but even here people admit that more houses need to be built. But it remains very easy to criticise current plans as being the wrong sort of houses in the wrong places – Labour needs to tackle this criticism head-on.
So Sir Keir is clearly signalling that tackling the housing shortage and transforming the country’s energy infrastructure will be points of focus. He is a managerial sort of person – so if he defines these objectives clearly he will follow them. This is in stark contrast to Boris Johnson, the prime minister in 2019, who was all bluff and not a serious programme manager. He set targets but wasted little thought on how they might be achieved. If Sir Keir’s government makes headway on overhauling the country’s energy infrastructure and addressing housing shortages, then it will be very consequential.
But the real problem for any objective assessment of Labour’s programme is that we have little idea about how it will tackle the quad of challenges of taxes, inflation, public services and immigration. These four issues will surely dominate the next government’s agenda, as they have for this one. Progress on each one of these four will undermine the other three. For example, if the government takes a strict line on immigration, in line with public opinion, and to help ease the housing crisis (provided that workers can be found in construction), then inflationary pressure will rise as lower skilled workers are paid more – after all that is one of the reasons given for lower immigration levels. Inflation leads to cost of living pressures and higher nominal interest rates – which raises the cost of mortgages which are already stretching people. To damp this down would require higher taxes and/or reduced spending on public services. Of course these dilemmas would ease if productivity-led economic growth increased the economy’s capacity – but productivity gains are liable to be lost in the headwinds of demographic change, the de-globalisation of trade and the increasing weight of the service economy.
But the Conservatives don’t have any answers to this quad either – so they will not place Labour under any serious pressure until they are in opposition, when magical thinking becomes a possibility again. The political parties are not being held to account. M
Meanwhile Sir Keir’s five missions give us a hint about the other priorities of a Labour government.
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.
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
