Copilot again. This is too optimistic for the current state of the SNP, but climbing a high mountain in shorts may be an apt metaphor
The last in my post-election survey of Britain’s main political parties concludes with the Scottish National Party. Alongside the Conservatives, it was a big loser in the general election, being reduced from 48 seats to just 9. But they still control the Scottish parliament, with no election until 2026. They are down but definitely not out. But they will need to do some should searching if they are not to sink back further.
Firstly, though, I must offer a health warning. I am not Scottish, and I have few political contacts north of the border. I am not plugged into politics there in the way that I am in England. So this is very much an outsider’s view. Still outsiders’ views can have value – and Scottish politics does impact English politics through our shared nation.
The SNP’s fall over the last two years has been dramatic. Until 2023, the party was sweeping all before it in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon, its leader, was one of the most experienced in British politics, and presented a calm, reasonable face to the party – she was a gifted political communicator. And yet behind this calm exterior, all was clearly not well. The performance of the Scottish government under SNP control was lacklustre, on such basic issues as health, education and law and order (Glasgow having an astonishingly bad record on drugs). Ms Sturgeon presented a much more credible public face during the covid pandemic than England’s Boris Johnson – but Scotland’s results were no better. The SNP seemed too interested in politics and not enough in administration. It preferred to stay close with interest groups, rather than undertake tough reforms – apart from a botched reform of Scotland’s police. The reforms that there were centralised power to the Edinburgh government. Its Green coalition partners proved highly ideological and spent little effort engaging with the public. The Scottish government then took on a reform of gender recognition laws that was aligned with the leftwing-liberal consensus, but poorly aligned with general public opinion. This was heavily promoted by the Greens, but actually drew support from across the political spectrum. Public protests and celebrity opposition (notably from Scottish author J.K. Rowling) seemed to take the Edinburgh elite by surprise. When the UK government (led by the very unpopular and chaotic conservatives) blocked the law, it won rare approval north of the border. Meanwhile the party’s goal of Scottish independence remained a long way off, as the UK government refused a second referendum.
And then the incestuous goings on in the SNP’s internal management were exposed in a police investigation into possible misuse of funds. Ms Sturgeon retired as leader just before the storm broke. The alleged abuse (using funds donated to support an independence referendum for general electioneering) was not necessarily all that serious – and its illegality has yet to be resolved. But the scandal exposed very unhealthy governance. The party’s reputation was in tatters, not helped by the selection of a hapless new leader, Hamza Youssef , who seemed to expose the party’s lack of depth in talent. Was this party really capable of running an independent country? And that led on to the collapse in SNP vote and representation in the UK parliament. Labour surged in Scotland.
But all is not lost. The goings on at the SNP have not had much impact on support for Scottish independence, which runs at about 40%. This is not enough to win a referendum, but it is weighted towards younger voters, promising a majority in future. And the SNP has no serious rival in its leadership of the independence movement. The attempt by former leader (the late) Alec Salmond to establish a rival party was a dismal failure. Meanwhile Labour’s hapless start in government has wounded its main rival for votes north of the border, while the Conservatives remain weak, and Reform UK lacks the punch it has in England or Wales.
But the party must pose deep questions to itself. Politics has changed. The Scottish political elite has converged around a social democratic consensus. A big inspiration seems to have been the social democratic governments in Scandinavia – countries which, after all, are comparable in size to Scotland. While social democrats have been in retreat in England (and Wales), they assumed Scotland was different. The country produced a Remain majority in the EU referendum after all. But the whole world is moving against the social democratic – liberal – left consensus, including in Scandinavia. Immigration has become a top political issue. Gender-critical views, rejecting the extremes represented by Scotland’s self-identification laws, are mainstream. People are becoming wary of minority identity politics. A rising dependency ratio means that people question state benefits. Tax rises are resisted. Scotland can no more escape these trends than Scandinavia, where populist parties have been doing well. And more conservative views within the SNP, represented by leadership challenger Kate Forbes, are becoming more visible. Indeed Ms Forbes is clearly the most dynamic of the party’s senior politicians.
The question for the SNP is how far it follows these trends, and adopts Ireland as its model rather than Denmark or Sweden. Low taxes and a weaker welfare state are core to politics there. So far it has managed to scoop up the anti-establishment vote, by virtue of its support for independence, alongside more mainstream supporters. This could easily fray, with the Conservatives and/or Reform picking up support.
The current leader, John Swinney, is one of the party’s elders, and looks like a stopgap before the party takes its next bold steps. He will doubtless try to pick up disillusioned Labour voters while ignoring the conservative threat. I don’t think this will work, although it could lead to a messy result at the next Scottish election, whereby no majority can be formed without either the SNP or the conservatives.
The SNP would surely be better off if Mr Swinney stepped back, and let Ms Forbes take the reins. The left is in retreat, and the SNP needs to recognise that.
Another clichéd but copyright free image from Copilot
My survey of the British political parties moves on to the Green Party. The Greens had their most successful general election by far in July, winning four seats – they have had only one since 2005. And given the fragile nature of British politics, where small percentage shifts can change election results dramatically, the party is at its most influential on political events. Let’s look at them through the traditional SWOT framework, much beloved of professional facilitators.
Strengths
The Greens’ biggest strength is that they have a strong political brand. Everybody thinks they know what the party in general stands for: protection of the environment, sustainability and action against greenhouse gases. As a Liberal Democrat activist, I know this well: my party’s brand is much weaker. In local elections where neither party did much work, the Greens would regularly beat us. The Greens could put out dense, unreadable literature and it didn’t matter. People got the message that the Greens were active locally: they already knew what they were for. The party now regularly beats the Lib Dems in London Assembly elections, fought on proportional representation, where brand is critical, as it is so hard to communicate directly with so many voters. Meanwhile, environmental threats, and especially climate change, are so palpable that the brand has the power to resonate with the public.
A second strength is that the party has built up a bit of a local base of activists in swathes of the country. This has allowed them to succeed in Brighton, win a council in Suffolk, and parliamentary seats in both these places and in Bristol and Herefordshire too. This base seems to have two main sources: rural environmental campaigners (Suffolk and Herefordshire), and metropolitan left-wingers (Brighton and Bristol). All successful political parties are coalitions, so the fact that these groups are quite different is not a bad sign of itself.
Weaknesses
Alas both these strengths have a flip side. The brand is strong, but it also has a negative aspect, which currently restricts the party’s strength. Not everybody is comfortable with their environmentalism, and they can get associated with ideological extremism – which puts a lot of people off.
Likewise, though the party has areas of geographical strength, these are quite localised. It is not a mass movement represented in all of the country. Four seats is a good result for them, but they are along way from dozens of seats – much further than their rival lesser parties – the Lib Dems (who are already there) and Reform UK.
A third weakness is that their culture militates against disciplined, effective organisation. They insist on having two co-leaders, for example. While their strong brand allows them to pick up a proportion of voters easily, organising themselves to run campaigns to do more than this has been a struggle for them – more so than for the Lib Dems who make this transition much more easily.
Opportunities
The party’s biggest opportunity is that the Labour Party lacks challengers to its left, while angering left-inclined supporters. This feels not unlike the Liberal Democrats during the last Labour government (1997 to 2010), a period when they had a high vote share and won over 50 seats in three successive elections. They had a similar mix of rural and metropolitan support. Nowadays the Lib Dems are more focused on challenging the Conservatives than Labour, as they are their rivals in all but a handful of their seats (and the SNP most of the rest).
There is a rural opportunity too. The government has shown it is happy to face down rural opposition to its plans. To be clear, Labour doesn’t dislike rural communities, but it is happy to see a degree of collateral damage in their pursuit housing targets, green infrastructure and rich tax avoiders. This is a more competitive market though: Conservatives, Lib Dems and Reform all have a case to make too. But where the Greens are already strong in rural areas, they have the opportunity to advance further.
Threats
One threat to the Greens is the Lib Dems. The overlap between the parties is striking – in the priority given to the environment, and in generally socially liberal attitudes. Prior to this year’s election, though, they conspired to largely keep out of each other’s way – though there were no formal deals. There was just a mutual understanding that if they fought each other too hard, then the benefit would be to the Tories. But the Lib Dems parliamentary success has given them renewed confidence to challenge the Greens, especially in rural areas (like where I live in Sussex). Where the Lib Dems have established themselves they are generally better organised and better disciplined, and the momentum given to their party by success in July will also give them public credibility. The Greens should be able to handle this easily enough where they are already strong, but expanding this base will be harder. The Greens are probably less threatened in metropolitan areas, though, even where the Lib Dems used to be strong.
Perhaps a bigger threat is the party’s attachment to far-left politics. This is great for picking off disillusioned Labour supporters, but it runs against the political zeitgeist, where younger, ethnic minority and working class voters are increasingly put off by leftwing identity politics. These voters are starting to feel that the left doesn’t really care about the mundane issues of jobs and cost of living. Three areas stand out. The first is leftwing protests over Gaza, which the Greens have been strongly supportive of – actively seeking votes from Muslim communities. A second is the Just Stop Oil protests, which have periodically disrupted traffic or damaged works of art. These are separate from the Green Party, but that might not be so clear to voters. A third is the clash between “gender critical” activists and supporters of trans rights.
This last may not bother ordinary voters so much, but it poses a threat of a different sort. Under an employment tribunal case in 2021 it was established that gender critical views (i.e. people who say that birth is fixed from birth and cannot be re-assigned) are protected under the Equality Act. This is a very dangerous ruling for parties where the prevailing attitude that is gender critical views are not far off in kind to white supremicist ones. The Greens, along with Labour the Lib Dems and the SNP are struggling with this. But the pragmatic streak in each of the other parties makes it easier for them to make adjustments. Not making adjustments exposes parties to legal cases and substantial costs as both the Greens (being fined £90,000 in September) and the Lib Dems (who recently conceded a court case and may attract a similar fine, never mind legal costs) have already found. I don’t know how close the Greens are to making the necessary adjustments, but Trans supporters can be very militant, so this will be a struggle.
Conclusion
Green parties elsewhere in Europe have seen a struggle between “realists” and “fundamentalists”. It is the latter that give these parties so much of their energy and drive, but political advancement, and especially participation in government, requires a more pragmatic approach. Indeed environmental action will only succeed when it becomes quotidian – so widely accepted that people automatically assume that it is in their self-interest. Greens must either become more quotidian themselves or be left on the political margins. Such is the choice facing the Green parties in Britain.
Another AI image from Copilot. Rather pleased with this one
My survey of the British political parties reaches Reform UK, the third most important party in terms of vote share. It is hard to understate the influence of this party, the creature of veteran British politician Nigel Farage. In the recent election it made more inroads into the Conservative vote than any other, allowing Labour to win by a landslide on a modest share of the vote; it also helped the rise of the Liberal Democrats, though to a smaller extent. It won only five seats itself, but even this was a bit of a breakthrough in Britain’s electoral system. One of the biggest questions in British politics is whether it can sustain its influence, or whether it will wither, as most third party challenges do in Britain.
Reform’s strategy is to channel the populist backlash that can be seen across most of the western world, from Donald Trump in America to the AfD in Germany. It rages against liberal “elites” and their woke policies, and most of all it rages against high levels of immigration. By and large the established parties handle this criticism badly, accusing it of being racist, amongst other things – even as more and more people from ethnic minorities subscribe to populist politics. The Conservatives are less inclined to do this, but they are badly split between those that want to hop onto the populist bandwagon, and the more establishment types who think that populist politics lead to bad policies. This strand of politics allows Reform to win 15-20% of the national vote, with an effective ceiling of probably about 30%. This invites three questions. What happens if the party reaches this ceiling? Can that ceiling be extended? And does the party have the leadership and organisational capacity to do this?
Supporters of Reform UK, including Matt Goodwin, often cited here, think they represent a forgotten majority. But polling consistently shows that support for their agenda is in the 20-30% region. The rest of the electorate diverges sharply in their views on most issues, and the party has very negative favourability ratings in the population at large. But 20-30% is still an awful lot of people, and if the party could find a way into winning the bulk of them, that would have a big impact. For a start, the Conservatives would be unlikely to survive. Reform’s achievement of about 14% vote share in July proved disastrous for the Tories. No credible route back to power exists for them without pushing Reform back to substantially less than this. Such a Tory collapse would then put Reform in contention to win many seats from Labour, especially in the old “Red Wall”, a swathe of constituencies from Wales to the Midlands to Northern England, based on towns with people who feel left out and left behind. These seats turned to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson in 2019. But how many could they win? I haven’t tried any psephological modelling – but it is surely unlikely that they could even challenge the Liberal Democrats for third place in parliament. They are stuck in the same place as the Lib dems used be in their years of relative success in 1997 to 2010. Lots of votes, but hard to turn these into seats – the Lib Dem vote is now a lot more concentrated, hence its substantial parliamentary presence. Labour would continue to do well in this environment, unless the Lib Dems started to find ways to break out their current geographical containment.
To move into true contention as a challenger to Labour requires Reform to seek an extra 10-15% of the vote, from people who currently disapprove of the party. This is what Donald Trump has successfully done in America, but which European parties in the same space are finding much harder. But our electoral system more closely resembles America’s than it does even France’s, still less those of German and Italy (although there the populists have found a path to power through alliances). Unlike America, Britain does not have a substantial body of active Christians who are appalled by the liberal values prevailing in the governing class. Neither are the liberal left quite as out of control as they have been in America, to stir up those resentments. But what America does show is that economic grievances, and the unsettling effects of mass immigration, can be stoked up among groups, such as younger voters and ethnic minorities, that used be reliable supporters of the left. Wokery played a role in the American realignment in supporting a “there’s madness on both sides” narrative – but it was economic grievance that clinched it for Mr Trump. It is possible for a winning coalition of voters to be built by Reform, or, indeed, by the Conservatives.
But can Reform pull it off? They first have to destroy the Tory challenge, in local elections, and the Welsh Senedd could play a role here. They then need to carry out the second part of the two-step I described in my previous post about the Conservatives. This means drawing support from a number of formerly Conservative politicians and businessmen to give the party some sort of aura of respectability. Reform starts with two advantages. Its leader, Nigel Farage, is an immensely experienced politician and a gifted communicator (the BBC can’t get enough of him). He (unlike the former academic Mr Goodwin) would understand the analysis I have just written, and clearly knows what he has to do. The second advantage is that the Conservatives have a toxic legacy from their years in government after 2019, when they showed themselves to be chaotic and incompetent. The party’s new leadership is clearly struggling to put distance between them and this legacy.
But the Tories have a huge advantage: they have political infrastructure – organisation, networks, administrative competencies. Here Reform are weak: they are way behind the Lib Dems, never mind the Tories. Uniquely amongst Britain’s main political parties, the party has a corporate structure, which makes it easy for the leadership to control, but much harder to build the networks the party needs to sustain a successful political movement. Mr Farage clearly recognises this, and building this infrastructure was a central theme at the party’s recent conference. But it doesn’t help that populist politics tends to attract event more cranks and argumentative types than other forms of politics, and fewer of the steady organisational types. Rapid expansion risks collapse into chaos.
But the potential remains. Reform’s poll share is holding up well after the election. There looks to be plenty of scope for stirring up economic grievance and resentment. Reform UK is very much the party to watch at the moment.
Copilot’s idea of a two-step. Copilot has become very chatty all of a sudden, but much slower at generating images. Is this a portent for the development of AI?
I’m not a dancer. I have no idea whether the two-step really is the appropriate metaphor for what I want to describe – and a quick online search doesn’t really help. But in my survey of the state of Britain’s political parties I have come to the Conservatives. What they need to achieve requires two distinct steps. The question is whether their leadership has the skill to do this, or whether it will tumble in the process of trying.
The Conservatives suffered an unmitigated electoral disaster in July: both in terms of share of vote and in seats won it was their worst performance in living memory… and considerably beyond that. They lost votes in three directions, to Labour, to the Liberal Democrats and to Reform UK. This is all the more remarkable because in 2019 they achieved a landslide victory and it was widely assumed that they would stay in power for the foreseeable future. But this dramatic reversal contains the seeds of hope: politics has become so volatile that even a disaster on this scale can surely be reversed in less than five years? The party now has a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, who is bringing a fresh approach to the leadership. For reasons that I have explained in my earlier post on Labour, incumbency is a tough gig in a world where economic growth has suddenly become much harder to achieve. And Labour’s vote share makes it look vulnerable. Recent opinion polls already show the Conservatives with a small lead, albeit with a still dismal share of the vote.
With rather touching naivety the Financial Times political columnist Stephen Bush suggested a short while ago that what the party needed to next was to grapple with the new economic reality (though he does not frame that reality in quite the same way as I do) and come up with a policy framework that addresses it. Oh dear! Success in current politics comes with magical thinking. Look at the impossible policy programme put forward by Boris Johnson to allow the Conservatives to win big in 2019. Look at Donald Trump’s winning formula in this year’s US election. There is no reward for presenting voters with tough choices, and especially not in a very competitive political market. The party has no need to grapple with the awkward realities of public policy. But that is not as easy as it sounds. Any old magical thinking will not do. After all Labour under Jeremy Corbyn also indulged in magical thinking in 2019, and that was disastrous. The party has to create a narrative which resonates across a wide audience.
Successful politics is about coalition-building: aligning support from disparate groups of voters. Mr Johnson successfully built one that embraced working class voters in Northern, Midland and Welsh constituencies, alongside professional voters in prosperous suburbs, and traditionally conservative rural voters. Mr Trump has done something very similar. This is not easy. Matt Goodwin, the radical-right political commentator, correctly identifies that just such a coalition ensured the Conservative victory in 2019, and the party’s betrayal of the working-class element sealed its defeat. But he then goes on to excoriate those suburban and metropolitan voters (“elites”) that were part of the coalition as being the scum of the earth. How do you rebuild the coalition then? Political activists like Mr Goodwin actually aren’t that interested. They want to promote the interests of one part of a winning coalition, and are uninterested in any compromises that might be needed to bring about ultimate success.
That sounds unhelpful to a Conservative leader, but he isn’t entirely wrong. That seems to be the lesson from America. Mr Trump, while building his successful campaigns (as opposed to what he actually did in office) never compromised with his “base”. This consisted of two distinct, though overlapping groups. These were working class voters with lower educational attainment, who are often looked down on by governing elites, and conservative religious communities, who have their own policy agenda, and dislike of irreligious liberals. Once these groups were secure and enthusiastic, he could work on less committed groups, and persuade them to suspend judgement on issues that they were less comfortable with, and indulge in magical thinking in others. These people were persuaded that it was time for a shake-up, and that the Republicans would surely not be as bad as they sounded. This is what I am describing as the two-step. Secure the radicals first, then move onto the moderates.
It is not the only possible two-step. The more traditional one is to make a strong bid for the “centre ground”, and then turn to the radicals to say that “this is the best you are going to get”. This is the Tony Blair version of the two-step, which secured him three electoral victories for Labour. It is also what Sir Keir Starmer is doing for Labour currently. The radicals-first two-step does seem to be easier to do from the political right. Mr Corbyn did make a valiant attempt with this strategy for Labour, and it came much closer to success in 2017 that most people expected. But he did not understand how to keep the more sceptical voters on board. He was no match for Mr Johnson.
Both versions of the two-step are open to Mrs Badenoch. In the radicals-first version, she would move her tanks onto Reform UK’s lawn, and use the party’s superior resources and organisation to crush it. She needs to lean in to the sort rabid ranting indulged by Mr Goodwin, and weather the criticism from her own side. And then, in about 2027, she needs to start promoting scepticism for Labour, and getting more moderate Conservatives to suggest that she isn’t so bad, and that Labour are truly awful – in the way that so many less extreme Republicans have done for Mr Trump. The centre-first option would involve crafting an appeal to more professional voters first, and then crushing Reform. To be honest, this does sound much harder. Professional voters are much harder to woo with magical thinking, and that would indeed mean confronting some of the policy dilemmas that Stephen Bush was suggesting. Sir Keir understands this well, and would challenge her at every step.
Either way, it requires both political guile and forcefulness. There is no way through the middle with the two-step. Is Mrs Badenoch up to it? It is very early days, and it is hard to tell. The early signs are not encouraging (for her party – more encouraging for those who do not wish her well). It does indeed look as if she is trying to thread a middle way, a bit like the ill-fated Ed Miliband tried for Labour in 2010 to 2015. She enthusiastically attacks wokeness, but she is also trying to give her approach a bit of intellectual rigour, so as to dress it up for more professional types. That gets her into trouble. Is she, or is she not, in favour of maternity pay? She may find these early days bruising, but she may learn from them – much as Sir Keir did in his early days as Leader of the Opposition.
The jury is out. She is already attracting a heavy weight of sneering and criticism. If she does try to carry the battle to Reform as her first step, then a lot more of this is to be expected, and her ratings will dip in the population at large. But if the Reform ratings start to come under pressure we will know if she is winning. I don’t wish her well, but it will be interesting to watch.
Copilot again. If I had asked it to make the knight look like sir Keir Starmer I don’t think it would have allowed me
A while a go I promised to offer my thoughts on each of Britain’s six main political parties. I started with the Liberal Democrats, the party I know best. Today I move on to Labour.
Labour won an exceptional majority in this year’s general election – and unprecedented in the scale of its advantage over the Conservatives. But this is based on under 35% of the popular vote, on a relatively low turnout. A big victory was widely forecast, so perhaps many of the party’s voters stayed at home. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement, though; the Conservatives surely suffered more from the stay-at-home effect. There is, therefore, a sense that Labour’s advantage is fragile, and could be lost after a single term. To be fair, Labour’s leadership seem very aware of this. Perhaps that is one reason why their first months in office seem to be plagued by a strange hesitancy. The Conservatives, under a new leader, sense there may be an opportunity – especially since Donald Trump’s victory in America shows that the electorate’s anti-incumbency mood works even more easily for the right than it does for the left.
This uncertainty is because we are in a transitional period in global politics. This is the onset of the low-growth era. Until now politics has been based on the assumption that steady economic growth would improve living standards across the population, and drive increased tax revenues that can be spent by expanding benefits or increased public services. There are other ways of looking at this problem. Advocates of Modern Monetary Theory produce strong arguments to suggest that governments don’t spend money raised by taxes – they simply need to manage the balance of income and expenditure so as not to let inflation loose. In an innocent age of just a few years ago, when inflation seemed to be yesterday’s problem, it seemed that governments could run up big budget deficits without any problem. But inflation in America is one of the reasons for the anti-incumbency mood, alongside the not unrelated issue of immigration. Liberals can be quite dismissive of inflation – but it is politically toxic. Most people regard it as a breach of the trust they place in state institutions.
By and large, politicians are in denial about the arrival of the no-growth era, and so are most political commentators. They suggest that growth is a matter of finding the right policy mix, with the right political drive behind it. Growth is a political choice, they say. But it isn’t. Low growth results from a convergence of economic circumstances (a less favourable trading environment; adverse demographics; the state of technology; climate change), and the revealed preferences of the public from their consumer and political choices alike. Practically until the US polling day, The Economist suggested that the Democrats’ political fortunes would be changed once the US public started to appreciate the country’s excellent growth record over recent years. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on them that the American public is protesting at the costs of that growth. So far all I hear is the very lame argument that voters think their pay-rises are due to their own achievements, but that rising costs are due to political failure. Meanwhile the Republicans have won comfortably with an anti-growth agenda, although, of course, they and their voters seem to think that its is the opposite.
The problem for Labour is that they are dug into the old growth assumptions. Their plans don’t add up without it. They may be lucky – as there are some specific opportunities for Britain. They might even reach their objective of achieving the highest growth in the G7 – though mainly because the other six countries will perform so poorly. Having said that, Donald Trump’s concerted attack on world trade is bad news for Britain. Another problem is that their pre-election promises on taxes have forced tax rises on business that look distinctly unhelpful for private sector growth – though the overall fiscal effect of the recent Budget was positive.
Meanwhile the public’s anti-growth mood remains. They are sensitive to inflation – the risk of which is heightened by using fiscal policy to drive growth. They don’t like immigration, which is essential to manage the skills shortages that growth throws up – even if not all immigration actually eases growth. Most infrastructure development, including housing, throws up vociferous protests, which causes delay and cost overruns. The problem, though, is that the public remains subject to severe cognitive dissonance. They still think that they are pro-growth policy and have the possibility of stable or lower taxes, a strong social safety net, including state pensions and the NHS, and robust public services. Alas it is in no politician’s interest to bring this dissonance to the point of resolution. With the possible exception of the Greens, no political party is remotely close to tackling it.
What is the answer? That really is the topic for another post, as I’ve digressed far enough from the state of the Labour Party. But there are opportunities out there, and it should be possible to promote improved wellbeing even in a world where conventionally measured growth remains low. But it requires a whole new approach to managing our society.
Meanwhile the Labour government is left with little choice but to try and muddle through, and hope for some economic and political good luck. If they want to make a drastic change in course, they will have to do so by presenting a new manifesto at the next election. It is too early for them to start preparing for that, at least in the open. It is possible that they will start to understand the economic reality in three years time or so and rethink their strategy. But their chances of reaching a second term, which they will desperately want, mainly depend on what happens to the opposition. Here things look much more promising.
The populist backlash is likely to grow. Labour is unlikely to be quite as inept as the Democrats were in fending it off. They are cautious to point on immigration, though unlikely to stem the flow by enough to assuage the public; they will probably keep their woke tendencies at bay. But popular frustration with slow progress will grow, and much of their agenda on infrastructure and clean energy will draw criticism. And yet the populist mantle is being fought over tooth and nail by the Conservatives and Reform. Neither looks strong enough to prevail over the other, leaving the opposition to Labour divided. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, will try to consolidate their grip on the Tory left flank. Four years is a very long time in politics, but this dynamic, which won Labour its outsized majority, is their best chance of victory next time.
Meanwhile Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, will start to find his party gets unruly. He has too many MPs to keep quiet with government jobs or the prospect of them. Leftwing causes will come along to challenge is plodding centrist cause. But the growing threat from the populist right may well be enough to keep these in check. Having won power, his party really doesn’t want to lose it.
That is lucky for Sir Keir. The central premise of his party’s programme – that it can restore economic growth to about 2% per annum – is unattainable for more than a couple of years. His is the last stand of the old politics. The new has yet to fully take shape.
This week Rachel Reeves, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the first strategic Budget the country has had since George Osborne’s in March 2016, unless you count Kwasi Kwarteng’s short-lived effort in Autumn 2022. Mr Osborne’s effort was, of course, simply maintaining the strategic course he set when he first became Chancellor in 2010, and on which doubled-down in 2015 once he’d dispensed with his Liberal Democrat coalition partners – a strategy usually referred to as “Austerity”. That was to shrink of the British state’s footprint, reversing the trend established by Labour, especially from its second term starting in 2001. Ms Reeves is reaffirming the role of the state, but whether that is simply consolidation or a decisive expansion remains unclear. What is over is the firefighting, bluff and pretence of the years 2016 to 2024; there is now a serious engagement with the challenges confronting Britain.
Mr Osborne’s budget of 2016 was quickly overwhelmed by the Brexit referendum in the following June, which saw a new prime minister, Theresa May, and Chancellor, Philip Hammond. They rejected the Osborne strategy with a turn against Austerity. But the mess left by the referendum result was not conducive to clear strategy, as nobody really understood what the result meant. Was it the creation of a small-state “Singapore on Thames” as many senior Brexiteers wanted, or just a grumpy turning inwards? Any chance of the new government coalescing around a coherent strategy was destroyed when it lost its majority in the snap election of 2017. A new government emerged under Boris Johnson in 2019, but his strategy was to have his cake and eat it – to avoid any difficult choices: a strategy not to have a strategy. Liz Truss and Mr Kwarteng took over in 2022, and although they did appear to be strategic, their efforts collapsed almost before they had started. The Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt regime’s only strategy was to try to survive until their political fortunes turned. They pushed through cuts to National Insurance based on fictional forecasts of future government spending. It was fundamentally unserious.
Labour’s first job after taking power in July was to restore those public spending estimates to some kind of reality, without sparking the kind of panic over fiscal probity that Mr Kwarteng had done. They made this job much harder because they chose to humour the Conservatives’ fiction on the public finances rather than challenge it. They promised not to raise taxes on “working people”, and specifically not Income Tax, National Insurance or Value Added Tax. Since taking power they then suggested that they had discovered a surprise “black hole” of over £20 billion, or perhaps £40 billion. But mostly this was known about before the election – and repeatedly pointed to by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But no political party addressed the issue properly – not the Lib Dems, Reform UK or the Greens, never mind the main two parties. All said that public services could be maintained based on implausible taxes on other people, or equally implausible cuts to benefits. Ms Reeves decided that raising employer National Insurance was not too egregious a breach of election pledges, and went for that. This raises the overall tax take to its highest ever level as a ratio to income, but well within European levels. Whether this really means the largest extent of the state ever, I suspect, depends on how you treat benefits, which is more of a negative tax than a part of the state apparatus, and which have been steadily creeping upwards. But looking ahead beyond the next two years, Ms Reeves continued her predecessors’ fictions on public spending, and cut safety margins to nothing, in order to demonstrate medium term financial targets were being met.
That was because the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast meagre growth. Labour’s plans had always been based on improved economic growth – but they cannot give the OBR anything solid enough to raise their forecast. A lot of growth comes from the zeitgeist, out of reach to policymakers and economic forecasters alike. And many of the government’s pro-growth policies have yet to be worked out. Landing a big extra tax burden on businesses in the short term, moving to workers medium term, leaves a bit of a credibility gap there, and it’s hard not to think that Ms Reeves is relying on a positive change to the zeitgeist to get her out of the hole.
Still, the government was never going to solve its economic challenges in one go. This budget is seen as a necessary first step, setting a credible baseline from which to move forward. To me that is a convincing enough narrative, but one that clearly leaves many questions. I have already mentioned growth. Social care is an issue that overshadows all health and welfare spending – and even the Tories attempted to tackle it on occasion – but it has so far been ignored by the government. The government wants to increase the efficiency of government services – but so has every government I can remember: what makes this time different? And many stretched government services, notably those within the remit of local government, are getting little if any extra funding: how sustainable is that?
The one thing going for the government is that expectations are dismal – it will not be so hard to beat them. They aren’t making the mistake that Mr Johnson made in 2019. A good run of luck could change the climate completely.
For me the jury is still out on this government. This Budget isn’t a bad start by Ms Reeves, but many more tests are to come.
My life being what it is, my posting on this site will remain erratic. I do take time thinking about my posts and composing them – so I have to make time while juggling with other things. After an absence of over a month, I am planning to run a series of posts here on the British political parties after the election of July. We have entered a period of multi-party politics, with no less than six parties able to have a significant impact on the next General Election (Labour, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, Greens and the Scottish National Party – I am perhaps being a bit dismissive of Plaid Cymru). I plan to have a look at each of these six.
I start with the Liberal Democrats, the party I know best. I joined its predecessor the SDP in 1981, and my membership has been continuous ever since. I have been active as a local party officer (Treasurer and Chair) and election agent. I have served as Treasurer of the London party, and on a couple of policy working groups. And I have attended many party conferences, though not this year. I am no longer very active locally, but I do belong to the party’s Federal Audit and Scrutiny Committee – so do regularly exchange with senior officials of the party, albeit only tangentially on the subject of political strategy. I gave the current leader, Ed Davey, his Chair’s reference so that he could stand as a parliamentary candidate in Kingston, before he first won the seat in 1997. I’m no outside observer, but I will try to comment as if I was – with a bit of inside knowledge. As a member of the family, though, I will refer to the main protagonists by the first names.
The party managed a superb result in July, with 72 MPS, the best result for it or predecessor parties since the days when the Liberals were a party of government a century ago. This was delivered on the basis of a relatively modest share of the vote (about 13%) that was actually a small decline on its previous performance. This has added immeasurably to its stature; it is taken much more seriously by the outside world, and its supporters are happy. It feels like a big moment for the party, which for the past five years has been teetering on the edge of extinction and irrelevance, and it poses the big question of who the party is and what it is for. It is worth looking at this in the context of the party’s history.
When the party was created in the aftermath of the 1987 election, from a merger of the Liberals with the SDP, the party was at a very low ebb. Its fortunes revived under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown. Paddy wanted the party to matter. It was his aim to enter government in coalition if he could, and to influence government even if that wasn’t feasible. As New Labour emerged under the leadership of Tony Blair he saw an opportunity to influence that party in a future government by working alongside it in opposition to the Conservatives. In the 1997 election Labour won a landslide, and needed the support of no other party. But it was a breakthrough election for the Lib Dems too (winning over 46 seats, up from 20 in 1992, although with a lower vote share). There continued to be a relationship with Labour, and it was possible to see Lib Dem influence, especially on constitutional matters. But the relationship was going nowhere. Labour did not see the need for it. Tony Blair was “unpersuaded” by the case for electoral reform for parliamentary elections, the Lib dems central objective. Paddy resigned and was replaced by Charles Kennedy.
Some people in the party look back on Charles’s leadership as a bit of a golden age. The Conservatives remained unpopular and the party was able to harvest disaffectedLabour voters. But there was muddle at the heart of it. This period peaked in the 2005 election, when the party won 65 seats, on the back of Labour unpopularity over the Gulf War in particular. With the third successive substantial result for the party, it seemed to be part of the Westminster furniture. And as MPs retired they were replaced, not by local activists as had been the way before, but by political professionals working internal politics, in the manner of the Labour and Conservative parties. There seemed to be (almost) such a thing as safe Lib Dem seats, not so attached to the personal local standing of the MP. These political professionals started to dominate the parliamentary party, and one of them, Nick Clegg, became its leader. The objective of these professionals was clear: to enter government in coalition, so that they could shape policy. This seemed like the natural next step in the party’s growth and maturity. But its offer to the public was not a clear one. To insiders the party was bound by its liberal and internationalist values, but this was less important to voters.
In 2010 the party did well to hold onto 57 seats in the face of a resurgent Conservative Party. With a hung parliament, this was the moment the professionals had been looking for: they entered coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives. The party made a solid contribution to this government – it is striking how many successes over the 14 years of Conservative-led government have the party’s fingerprints (renewable power and gay marriage, for example), and how things went wrong after the party left (Brexit…). But the party’s left-leaning supporters felt bitterly betrayed. This was especially deep for three groups in particular: students, let down by the introduction of tuition fees in spite of promises made during the election; public and third-sector workers, who developed hostility to austerity, which threatened their jobs, into a near-religion; and working class voters, shocked at the party’s support for Tories. Nearly half the party’s support vanished almost overnight. Then the Conservatives, sensing weakness, pulled won over many of the rest by playing on the fear that the party would let Labour in. The 2015 election was a massacre – the party only just hung on to 8 seats. Third place in parliament went to the SNP. Like Icarus, the party had flown too close to the sun and were punished for their impudence.
The party managed something of a revival following Brexit, as the party most committed to opposing it, recovering to 12 seats in the 2017 election. New members flooded in. Under Jo Swinson, another of the 2005 intake, though somebody that had to win her seat from Labour rather than walking into a held seat, the party doubled down on its opposition to Brexit, while Labour vacillated and the Conservatives turned into hardline Brexiteers. The party launched a well-funded campaign in the December 2019 election suggesting that they might lead any government that emerged – as way of avoiding the question of which of the others they preferred. But they flew too close to the sun again, and support melted: they were limited to 11 seats, in spite of decent vote share by post-2015 standards. The high hopes of many members at the start of the campaign were crushed; quite apart from the party’s own poor performance, Boris Johnson’s victory meant that Brexit would indeed be “done” – something that they had become passionate about.
Ed Davey took over at this low point. It needs to be remembered that he has witnessed all this history first hand. I first remember him when he moved into our local party area in the late 1980s; for some reason I have it my mind that he was ex-SDP, though he must have moved in after the merger. He was working as an economist at the British computer company ICL (which was later subsumed into Fujitsu) but not long afterwards he took up a position as an economics researcher for the central party. He then became the parliamentary candidate in the Liberal council stronghold of Kingston, where he enthusiastically adopted the Liberal style of community politics, and won a striking victory in 1997, when his seat wasn’t one of the official targets (it didn’t stop me going to help…). He witnessed the evolution of the party in the period of its significant presence in opposition from 1997 to 2010, but he wasn’t part of the intake of 2005, who did so much to shape the culture of the parliamentary party. Nevertheless he became a minister in the Coalition, eventually at cabinet rank – and appeared to be having the time of his life. He took to being a minister like a duck to water. A lot of the credit for Britain’s remarkable progress on renewable energy is down to him, though he was building on groundwork laid by Chris Huhne. But he lost his seat in the 2015 massacre, though he won it back in 2017. I worked with him on fundraising for the Lib Dem London Assembly campaign of 2016, where his wife was a candidate.
Ed is not for flying close to the sun, unlike his predecessors Nick and Jo. The party reorganised with a highly professional Chief Executive, Mike Dixon, recruited from the charity sector (by Jo, to give credit where it is due). It focused on the mundane issues that were the primary concern of voters: health and social care, sewage pollution, and so on. It concentrated resources on areas where the party already showed strength – primarily in Conservative-held suburbia. Strong message discipline was developed; activists were encouraged to knock on doors to talk to voters. The reward, in July, was beyond all but the wildest dreams of activists (Lib Dems can dream wildly). This, of course, was a question of capitalising on the opportunities made by the other parties – especially the Conservatives and SNP, but Labour helped by not scaring voters. But experienced Lib Dems know all too well about having an opportunity and fluffing it during the campaign. Many of the victories were massive. In a parliament where there are an unusual number of close results, and MPs with under 40% vote share, the Lib Dems are in a relatively comfortable position (although there are a few close results, of course). They would have done extremely well even if Reform UK had not spit the Conservative vote. There are not many second-placed seats left, though I live in one of them. This sizeable number of MPs looks eminently defendable, though in some places campaign infrastructure needs to be built.
So, where on earth does the party go from here? The message from Ed is to show humility, and to keep working on the themes that party campaigned for – it is important to maintain the trust of the electorate. But how do you expand on such a good result, and what is the party building up its parliamentary presence for?
The party itself is more coherent than at its previous high of 2005. Its MPs look distinctly professional, and it draws a huge amount of its support from professional people. The working class supporters it used to attract have not returned, by and large. It is a party of middle class angst. When populists like Matt Goodwin rage against the “elite” and their “luxury beliefs”, they include people like Lib Dem supporters, who, in fact, are frustrated with their powerlessness. They want the country back in the European Union; they look sympathetically at the plight of refugees; they want to confront the black spots in British history; they wouldn’t mind a bit if an Indian or African family, or a gay one, moved in next door; they want state schools to promote these values. But these values do not have mass appeal. In polls the Lib Dem vote share hovers in the range of 10-15% and never beyond.
Still, there are two electoral opportunities. One is to keep mining from the seam that has already given so much: disaffected Conservatives. That party has to scratch the populist itch, and chase voters that supported Reform, the Lib Dems’ polar opposite. More liberal and pragmatic Conservatives will surely continue their exodus. And then there are disaffected Labour supporters. There are bound to be a number as the government faces grim choices on public spending, and the more liberal must choose between the Lib Dems and the Greens. There are very few Labour seats that are realistic targets for the Lib Dems, but attracting Labour supporters will help secure the Lib Dems’ existing gains, and even to pick off a few more Conservatives (for example in the seat where I live, East Grinstead and Uckfield, where Labour has a significant vote). In some relatively affluent middle class suburbs where the party is still third, they might be able to move to second place, to either party.
Some of the party’s members want to attack a distinctly conservative Labour government from the left – as they believe Charles Kennedy’s party did in the Blair years. But that risks putting off many of the voters that the party has drawn from the Conservatives. The party can push for closer integration with Europe, however – such as joining the Customs Union or even the Single Market. The party can’t afford to ignore people who voted for Brexit, but it is not nearly so much of a problem for them as it is for Labour. Brexit is widely seen as a disappointment, and the number of people who voted for it is in steady demographic decline. One day the party might even talk about rejoining the EU – but that remains a long way off. If there is an upwelling of support for electoral reform, the Lib Dems are ready to embrace it. Beyond that I don’t any big shifts in campaigning themes.
What’s it all for? The Liberal Democrats are a natural party of government, even if they so rarely exercise power. They are happy to engage in conversations about the sort of compromises needed to make things happen – it’s part of the mindset of a professional, perhaps. At conferences activists discuss detailed proposals for policy as if power was round the corner – to the incredulity of outsiders. And where the party controls councils, it is very pragmatic. For example, a neighbouring council to where I live is refusing planning permission for local housing developments regardless of their merit, and it is suffering fines as a result, because of implacable opposition by the Greens and Conservatives alike. Lib Dems protest that this is nonsense – the fines take away resources from desperately stretched public services. And they know that the shortage of housing is extreme. Instead they want to engage with the planning process and allow some developments and while opposing others. This pragmatism contrasts with the Conservatives, who gradually became a party of protest, even while in government.
That pragmatism will manifest itself with measured opposition at the national level, compared to hysteria from the Conservatives and Reform. But it only goes so far. The party is not engaging with the critical economic debate on how to balance taxes, public services and benefits. And how to balance the demographic need for immigration with the pressure it puts on infrastructure such as housing. Instead they complain about pressure on public services and cuts to benefits, while only suggesting half-baked gimmicks to raise extra taxes. This, of course, copies Labour strategy before the election – but the party shows no sign of engaging with the difficult policy choices that any government must face.
But the party now has an army of MPs, which will be supported by an even bigger army of paid researchers and the like. They will want something more than mere political survival. In my view the party needs to aim for working in coalition with Labour after the next election, if that party’s majority vanishes, as well it might. Perhaps it is still too early to think of such things, and the party needs to learn the lessons of the previous coalition episode. It would help if the party was on the up, and entering coalition from a position of strength.
Ultimately, if the party can’t fly close to the sun, it is unclear why it should exist. How far Ed recognises this I don’t know. But he does know how important it is to ascend with humility. And I am sure he is right there.
05/07/2024. London, United Kingdom. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria arrive at Number 10 Downing Street upon his appointment. Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street
Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s Prime Minister, can be summed up in a single word: Focus. He is learning the problems that this characteristic brings. His focus on winning the election on 4th July has made his life much harder now that he has won. Labour has made an awkward start to its term of office.
In government Sir Keir’s focus is on five “missions”. This is an admirable approach compared to the chaos of Conservative governments, especially since 2016. We can quibble about the design of those missions: number one is “kickstart economic growth”. Growth makes a poor target: it’s both a bit like targeting happiness, which is something that happens when your are trying to achieve something else, and a bit like targeting the birth rate, which just isn’t under state control. It is under this heading that housing is being tackled: much better to have targeted housing specifically, surely. Social care doesn’t make it into the five – which cover the energy transition, law and order, education and the NHS (or in fact health) – but which of the others would you drop? Neither does immigration, which would have featured in any Tory big five – but that is more understandable. Focus is integral to achievement,- but it comes at the expense of risk management. A lot of the skill of management is learning how to balance the conflicting requirements of focus and risk management. Sir Keir must not be too relentlessly focused – he needs to have a strategy for dealing with the many other issues that have the potential to derail. He needs to use trusted colleagues for this.
What Sir Keir had clearly hoped was that the sight of a government clearly focused on achieving the nation’s priorities would present such a contrast to the previous government that he would have a prolonged honeymoon – especially as there is no coherent opposition. That has not been so. The summer’s big unforeseen event was the rioting that followed the Southport murders – but these played to Sir Keir’s strengths. A strict no-excuses crackdown was what the public wanted and this was delivered without hesitation. But from this emerged a big problem: neither he nor his most important colleague, his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, are good communicators. They are wooden in their presentation and in their responses to questions. This has not helped them in their presentation of bad news about the government finances, the need for continuing austerity, and in particular the cancellation of the winter fuel allowance for all but a few state pensioners, just as fuel costs were rising again. They are blaming this on the previous government covering up a black hole in the nation’s finances -but this is coming across as insincere. Not without reason.
The problem is that the “black hole” in government finances is not at all surprising – so acting surprised looks fake. Throughout the election campaign the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a well-respected think tank, complained that all the parties were painting too rosy a picture of the nation’s finances. It really wasn’t hard to see why. The previous government was trying to use inflation to squeeze public sector costs – and noticeably force down the real pay of public sector workers. On this basis they fairly transparently cooked official forecasts that they could make cuts to National Insurance – even after they had tried to raise the tax in 2022. But Labour were silent about all of this, choosing not to challenge the Conservative’s general policy direction. Both parties seem to have been obsessed by the thought that the 2024 election could be a repeat of the one in 1992, where the Tories successfully built a campaign on “Labour’s Tax Bombshell” that turned a seemingly inevitable victory for Labour into defeat. Labour promised not to raise any of the main taxes (Income Tax, National Insurance and VAT), matching a Tory promise and said they would match Tory spending projections except in a few specific places. They were evasive on the clear implication (highlighted by the IFS) that this meant austerity in most aspects of government spending. Sir Keir’s focus was on winning the election with an outright majority, and he wanted to leave nothing to chance. If he was being dishonest, then he was no more so than the Tories, the thinking g seems to have been.
But, as my mother used to say, two wrongs don’t make a right. Labour could have been more honest about the state of the nation’s finances before the election, and they weren’t. The focus on winning the election has made the task of government much harder. Sir Keir has been desperate not to repeat the Tory habit of over-promising and under-delivering, and has been caught out over-promising. He is, of course, trying to pin this on the previous government, in the manner that David Cameron’s coalition government pinned the blame for its austerity policies in 2010 on the previous Labour one. But Mr Cameron, his Chancellor David Osborne, and even his Lib Dem deputy, Nick Clegg, were all much better communicators than Sir Keir of Ms Reeves (not that this did Mr Clegg any good…). Their hopes rest on the fact that with the next election four or more years away, some more positive events may have overtaken this difficulty.
I am disappointed. I had allowed myself a brief moment of hope. The speed with which the government settled the various public sector wage claims seemed to show a degree of imagination. They must have overcome firm Treasury pushback that “we can’t afford it”. But the better country that they want to bring into being features a happier public sector workforce, and better pay for the bottom and middle quartiles, and less dependence of cheap overseas immigrant workers. Squeezing public sector pay, with no plan for when any catchup might happen, is just takes the country further away from this goal. This is the reason I think that Jeremy Hunt, Ms Reeves’s predecessor, was one of the most disastrous Chancellors of recent times. He swallowed the Treasury logic on payrises and then made things worse with tax cuts.
But that flicker of hope has been suffocated. No evidence of such a degree of long-term vision has emerged. Instead the story was that the urge to settle the disputes was because they were unpopular and a distraction, and the previous government could be blamed. I was particularly disappointed that the government allowed the Treasury to defer the previous government’s plan to tackle the growing social care crisis, for the nth time. The government has to stick to its promises on tax, and social care didn’t make it onto the big five priorities. But the long-term consequences are not good, and some kind crisis is in the making. Labour’s focus on the election is making the challenge of decent long-term government harder.
Still, it isn’t all bad news for the government. None of the contenders for the Conservative leadership look capable of leading a revival for that party. The rift on the right, with the success of Reform UK, looks as if it will do for Labour what the rift on the left did for Mrs Thatcher in the 1983 and 1987 elections – enable landslide victories on the basis of lacklustre vote share. And the Lib Dems show some of the same problems as Labour. A relentless focus on doing well at the election at Tory expense leaves them ill-equipped to tackle Labour. The prospect that Sir Keir will get a second term remains good. The mandate that he seeks at that election will be critical to the success of his project overall. He needs to give himself much more room for manoeuvre.
PS Other commitments mean that this will be my last post for at least a couple of weeks. I plan to resume after the Lib Dem conference with my thoughts on what that party should do next.
“Somebody needs to HONEST with the British people about the immigration CRISIS.” Thus begins a recent Matt Goodwin Substack rant (the capitals are his). He has a point: no politician wants to lay out the difficult choices raised by immigration policy. Needless to say, that lack of honesty applies just as much to Mr Goodwin.
Mr Goodwin is an itch I continue to scratch, I’m afraid. He is increasingly unhinged, and now regularly pushes the boundaries of racism, and goes over the boundary of Islamophobia, in my view. I used to read him because his academic training led him to be reasonably factual – but that is increasingly untrue, and anyway with his cherry-picking and lack of context, factual accuracy is pretty useless. His writing is also getting longer and more rambling, making it quite hard to read – though, interestingly, he is putting a greater proportion of it in the public domain (I refuse to be a paid subscriber, because this implies support, and he uses the funds to promote his output). But I still feel I need to know what he’s up to.
Mr Goodwin’s article is an attack on the Labour government’s policies against illegal immigration in particular. It is part of Mr Goodwin’s effort to stir up a frenzy of hate against Labour’s wokism – clearly imitating the way Republicans stir up hatred of Democrats. The difference is that he is also highly critical of the Conservatives – but that is another story. But if you try to discount the ranting, he does make some valid points about gaps in the government policy. Most illegal immigrants claim asylum, and most of the claims are granted. And even where those claims aren’t granted, many are from countries, like Afghanistan and Syria, that we can’t deport people back to. The business model, as Tory politicians like to call it, of the people smugglers is intact, so we can expect the small boat crossings to continue unabated. The tacit assumption seems to be that the government feels that the level of inflow is tolerable. The plan is to process the claims more quickly, so that claimants don’t have to put up at government expense for as long, and start integrating into society more quickly, taking jobs and paying their way. But the government does not say this, giving validity to the accusation that they aren’t being honest.
The question of illegal immigration is one dimension of immigration policy. Legal immigration is no less controversial. Here the new government seems content to continue with the last government’s policies. The policy here seems to be to reduce the immigration statistics through making policies on workers’ and students’ families more restrictive, and hope this, along with a calming down of flows from Ukraine or Hong Kong, will take the sting out of the public criticism. Alas the public don’t respond to statistics, but to concrete developments. From immigration these are pressure on public services and housing, poorly integrated immigrant communities, and public money being spent on housing asylum seekers (especially when these are housed in hotels in poor areas). If asylum seekers are processed more quickly – the Tories at one point deliberately prolonged the process in the hope that it would put people off – the housing at public expense should decrease. But it is far from clear that the other problems will be much affected by current policies. Stretched public finances mean that little is being done to expand capacity – and there are no quick fixes on housing supply. As for integration, the government’s stricter stance on bringing families over means that successful integration is less likely.
The deeper problem with legal immigration, of course, is that there is a high need for immigrants both as workers and as students. This is where much more discussion needs to be. Liberals tend to wave away this question, simply saying it proves that the country needs current immigration levels. But the problems with housing and pressure on public services remains. Conservatives suggest that this is an “addiction”, but do not engage with serious ideas about how the country might break the habit. On the assumption that higher-paid immigrant workers aren’t too much of a problem – they integrate easily and bring valuable skills and entrepreneurship – then we need to think about lower paid workers. Could we encourage more locals out of the workforce to tackle the roles that need filling (typically in healthcare, social care, hospitality and agriculture)? Could we make do with less of these services? Japan is an example of a country that is beset by similar (actually worse) demographic pressures, but insists on keeping immigration to the minimum. There are plenty of problems, but it can be done. I think the first thing is that rates of pay for these roles will have to rise, making it easier to recruit and retain staff already here. A productivity revolution is unlikely in these sorts of services (though Japan is trying to use robots), so it means that they will be more expensive. That means some combination of higher taxes, inflation and service closures (fewer rural pubs for example). This is where conservatives like Mr Goodwin aren’t being honest with people. The Conservative Party, for example, seem obsessed with the idea of lower taxes, and are still saying that the government needs to restrict public sector pay. They probably don’t understand how contradictory this is with their calls for lower migration.A more honest public debate would force them to confront the question.
And what about illegal immigration? Conservatives (including Mr Goodwin) are railing against the international treaties which provide the guiding principles of British policy. They want them gone in the name of sovereignty. So that they can do what? There are two main ideas: push the boats back in the Channel, and return migrants regardless of the dangers they face. These policies work better in pub discussions than they would in practice. The boats used by the smugglers are flimsy: they are practically sinking when the authorities reach them. Pushing them back means letting their passengers drown. This would go down well in some quarters, but it is hard to see that as being sustainable in a civilised country. And sending people home to Syria and Afghanistan? The logistics aren’t promising, and those countries probably wouldn’t want them back. And if they did, there would be plenty of stories of returning refugees being mistreated and even killed. British did something like this after the Second World War, forcing Russian Cossack refugees back to the mercies of Stalin. Standards have changed since then.
The awkward truth is that the best hope for managing refugees is internationally, in close cooperation with our European Union neighbours. That would not reduce the flow – but it would make it more orderly. Refugees could apply for asylum from abroad (France, say), and if granted come across legally. Others would be returned to France, etc. But in order for our neighbours to accept returnees, we would have to agree to a substantial legal flow. It is ironic that Brexit has given Britain less control over its borders – not even the Remain side in the referendum predicted that. National sovereignty is an overrated idea in the modern world. The world is in the middle of a refugee upsurge and Europe in particular can’t avoid it. Britain needs to be part of managing it in stead of pretending that the problem is somebody else’s.
The public is entitled to feel let down by its leaders, who spot an opportunity to stir up trouble, but are unable to implement solutions once in power. Now that they are out of power, the two factions of the right will probably try to outdo each other with tough rhetoric, while not engaging with the deeper issues. Surely the best chance for for the centre and left (Labour and the Liberal Democrats) is to be honest. Instead we get denial. The issue will continue to poison British politics for the foreseeable future.
“What did you expect? Britain’s protests reflect DECADES of elite failure.” Thus starts a Substack post by populist commentator Matt Goodwin. This was in the aftermath of a violent attack on a mosque in Southport which in turn followed an appalling stabbing in that town, when three little girls were murdered, and several others injured.
What we expected, Mr Goodwin, was that the victims would be given due respect, and that their friends and neighbours be given the space to come to terms with the horror of what occurred. And we expected that time would be given for the facts of the incident to be established, and for lessons to be drawn from those facts. We expected common human decency. We did not expect the community’s grief to be hijacked by outsiders to promote their particular frustrations and grievances. At least the riot gave the community a chance to show their real mettle by turning up to help clean up the mess afterwards, and offer the mosque’s congregation messages of support. But, alas, further riots have taken place in other towns, well and truly hijacking a proper response to the tragedy – though at least these are leaving the town of Southport alone.
Mr Goodwin’s diatribe is worth reading for any of those wanting to get a better understanding of the undercurrents in British political life. It’s a powerful polemic and, apart from being too long and a bit repetitive (making it hard to re-read), it is well-written. The idea is to make people angry, and not to put forward a coherent argument in a process of debate. But Mr Goodwin is an academic, and a coherent argument does lie behind it, and, though there is a lot of insinuation, it is reasonably factual (though taking facts out of context is very much his method) – unlike much of what gets written in this space. It is worth trying to understand it, and drawing out where it is right, where it is wrong and where it is hard to know. That’s what I want to do here.
Mr Goodwin’s argument is that the riot stemmed from a protest by “ordinary people” fed up with the effects of mass immigration, which is disrupting society and making it less safe. The critical fact about the murders, so far as Mr Goodwin is concerned, is that the the arrested suspect is the son of a Rwandan immigrant, allowing blame to be put at the door of immigration policy. Mr Goodwin’s ire is directed at policies, including “unrestricted” immigration, being practiced for “decades” by a liberal governing elite, taking in all the main political parties (apart from Reform UK and its predecessor, Ukip), the mainstream media, and government agencies. These liberal policies are excessively indulgent to minorities, he suggests, and do not take account of the impacts on “ordinary people”, who feel they didn’t consent to them, and don’t recognise their country any more, after decades of change. I could go on – Mr Goodwin is especially vitriolic about the Labour Party and left-wing academics, of which he doubtless has a lot of direct personal experience. Notwithstanding the complaint that these voices of complaint are unheard, readers will doubtless be very familiar with what is being said. Indeed these views have been expressed by Conservative politicians, such as Suella Braverman. They are frequently heard, though rarely endorsed, on mainstream media, and especially the BBC. Mr Goodwin does unequivocally say that attacking the police is always wrong, and in a later Substack post, he condemns all the violence as simply damaging the communities in whose name the complaints are being made. But he also complains of double standards over how the police and politicians handle these protests compared to those made on behalf of Palestinians, say – or counter demonstrators, often by Muslim men, which in some cases have been violent too. His critical argument is that the protests should not simply be dismissed as being the work of “far-right” activists, and it isn’t just a matter of misinformation and disinformation. It is a symptom of millions of people being utterly fed up.
So, where do I think Mr Goodwin is right? Firstly, that alongside the violence, is a voice of protest that is a reflection of many people’s views. Mr Goodwin suggests that these are drawn from a majority of “ordinary people”. That’s a stretch – but his alternative characterisation of “millions” is surely on the money. Many people would hear what Mr Goodwin has to say, and thank him for expressing their views faithfully. It’s a lot of people, and they feel ignored or betrayed by the political class. The Conservatives under Boris Johnson courted such people in the 2019 election, and won over many of their votes on the basis of promises to limit migration and “level up” left-behind places. A vision was painted of a high-productivity country, with higher wages, which did not depend on immigrants, especially lower-paid ones (I’m not comfortable with the usual formulation of “lower-skilled”). But this was a have-your-cake and eat it vision, typical of Mr Johnson, that did not acknowledge the difficulties in reaching such a promised land, and the costs. Those costs are skill shortages in industries such as healthcare, social care, agriculture and hospitality, to name only the most obvious. These skill shortages lead to higher wages, which was exactly the intention, of course. But these, initially at least, lead to inflation. It’s not possible to pay for the higher wages through higher productivity in the short-term, and often higher productivity actually occurs in industries that are not directly affected by the skills shortages, meaning that things have to be rebalanced. Inflation is inevitable, even if is part of a temporary process of readjustment in the economy. Higher inflation means higher interest rates and more expensive mortgages. Mr Johnson’s government was not ready for this, and in any case was blown off course by the Covid crisis, followed by the Ukraine war and the rising costs of fossil fuels. After he went, as the chaos and low-level corruption of his government became too much, the Conservatives changed tack. They became passionate opponents of inflation, and obsessed with cutting taxes. That meant taking a hard line on public sector salaries, and letting inflation cut the real cost of public services – which in turn led to an increased dependence on cheap imported labour. The government buckled under the pressure of labour shortages, and other pressures to revive short-term economic growth, and allowed immigration levels to continue at high levels and even to increase. It is not hard to see why so many people feel betrayed and angry. A reaction was to be expected.
The second place where I think Mr Goodwin is right is that immigration is causing real stress. The most important stress point in my view is in housing. The rise in property rents – in the region of 6% per annum since the start of 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics – and significantly higher in places like London -is causing widespread hardship. The country struggles to expand its housing stock fast enough – with dysfunctional planning controls, to say nothing of labour shortages. In this sense, the popular plea that immigration should be stopped because “we are full” has some merit. Claims on immigration’s other effects, on public services and public order, are much harder to substantiate. But the impact on housing is serious enough by itself.
I have a little sympathy with when Mr Goodwin says that a lot of policy at public agencies has been inept, and left-wing fads have been given too much headway. This is especially the case with universities, although a lot of this has been driven by student action, and the “cancelling” of speakers, often on flimsy evidence. The Tavistock Clinic’s life-changing treatments on young people with gender dysphoria leant more on fad than evidence. Looking further back in time, but still very prominent in Mr Goodwin’s list of evils, was the lack of action to combat the grooming of girls by Asian gangs in a number of towns – this had a lot to do with old-fashioned class prejudice, but it was also regarded as politically sensitive. Having observed some of controversies at Liberal Democrats conferences over the years, I get that with some people you are not allowed a proper conversation on sensitive issues.
There are number of grey zones – claims made by Mr Goodwin or his critics that are either hard to establish in fact, or where the evidence is mixed. The narrative that the unrest is all about “far-right” thuggery is pushed hard by the government, and fully supported by media such as the BBC, and criticised by Mr Goodwin. But there is clearly a lot of politically directed thuggery going on, and while I’m not comfortable with the label, I don’t have a better one than “far-right”. But there are a lot of others who come along to watch or cheer the thuggery on, including people local to the areas affected. Still, the thuggery is a serious law and order challenge, and the public expects political leaders to deal with it firmly. Anything that sounds like making excuses for people crosses an important line. This is something that Mr Goodwin seems to be finding out for himself: in his latest message, ironically titled “The British People need to feel safe,” he gives the impression of being under siege, and he appeals for more people to make subscriptions too support the promotion of his message. Here he does say unequivocally that he is against the violence – something he didn’t quite do earlier, except when the violence was directed against the police.
Another part of the grey zone is the claim that certain immigrant communities are making the country less safe. One BBC correspondent has been saying that violent crime has been falling through the period when the number of immigrants is rising. But the quality of British crime statistics is not what it was – and reported crimes depend on other factors than the number of crimes committed. And what if crime is falling because people are going out less? A lot of illegal immigration is linked to organised crime, and I would not be surprised if certain immigrant communities were linked to crime. But a lot of the right-wing tropes about no-go areas and such are nonsense. I used to live in an inner London borough, with large immigrant communities. But the danger posed to a single young woman walking home there came from a white British police officer. If I wanted to develop an idea that there was a national crime wave of violence against women perpetrated by white men, I would find it easy to produce a litany just as horrific as Mr Goodwin’s on immigrant crimes.
I’m also putting Mr Goodwin’s claim about multiculturalism in that grey zone. He promotes the common right-wing trope that multiculturalism has failed. This was not evident where I used to live – including when I was a chair of governors at a multi-ethnic primary school, where white British were in a minority. Local parents, from all communities, simply wanted their children to do well for themselves. The school adapted to the fact that so many children were from homes with English as a second language, and achieved national average performance regardless. But this isn’t always so. There are places where integration has not worked well – for example in some northern towns – and politicians seem short of ideas about how to move on.
There’s a lot more grey: claims made by Mr Goodwin where the evidence is in fact mixed, if it exists. Where do I think he is out and out wrong? One place is pinning the blame for the policies he likes on a tiny elite (sometimes widened to an “elite class”) imposing policies on an unwilling majority. That governing elite has a hinterland of people that largely share their values, even if they disagree with policy specifics, that runs into millions of people. This is after all how the politicians get elected. They include many people like me, who feel just as unable to shape public policy as people throwing bricks at police in Rotherham, and who don’t take well to be called a governing elite. Describing the political class as an elite has its sinister aspects too. Often this language is used by people who want to gain power and plant their own governing elite, which then moves on to practice self-enrichment using the state privileges. This is what happened in Hungary and Poland, for example. It is hard not to see Donald Trump’s entourage in that light. The striking thing about the liberal elites in Britain and elsewhere is how honest they are. It’s a question of being careful what you wish for.
A further place where Mr Goodwin is clearly wrong is blaming public policy on the elite’s “luxury beliefs” though I don’t think he uses that phrase in “What did you expect?”. There is a reason that public policy has taken the direction it has in the last couple of decades or so, including mass migration, and it is not a dilettante governing elite imposing its luxury beliefs. It’s because the country faced serious challenges, and this seemed to be the easiest way to meet them. I have already described how Mr Johnson’s government fell apart because of the impossibility of the vision he promoted. The is not to say that a low-immigration economic model is infeasible for Britain, or even undesirable. It is just a lot harder to get there than the idea’s supporters claim. Brexit is another example of a policy that was promoted without making clear what the full implications were. There was a case for Brexit, but one that involved a difficult transition that was glossed over or disbelieved by its supporters. And now our politicians are trying to promote the idea that the main tax rates can be left unchanged while public services are repaired. And so the government is kicking a response to crisis on social care into the long grass in order to preserve tax rates. It is fair to accuse our politicians of not being honest about the choices the country must make. But, I’m afraid the electing public are deeply complicit with that. If anything the luxury beliefs are the ideas that low immigration and post-Brexit prosperity can be acheived easily.
And finally there is the issue of culture. Mr Goodwin wants to suggest that there is a British culture that is being undermined by mass immigration, and foreign beliefs imposed by the elites. But culture is a moving target. Not so long ago pregnant women would commit suicide rather than endure the disgrace of being a single mother. Even more recently being gay was considered by most to be a disgusting perversion. Pretty much the whole of society has moved on. And our culture has always been part and parcel of a worldwide cultural melange. And it wasn’t all that long ago when British commercial emissaries, armed forces and religious missionaries went out into that wider world to export and impose our culture on the developing world – the era of Empire. Indeed I think Mr Goodwin wants us to be proud of that empire. But that history leaves us very open to importing cultures from elsewhere, through immigration amongst other ways – from our former empire, and from Europe, to which our history is so closely bound. Our country cannot live in isolation – we cannot escape treaties, international conventions and obligations, as there is no such thing as absolute national sovereignty. And by taking a fuller role in the wider world, we can make it a better place, by ensuring European security, or saving the world from global warming, for example. By trying to pretend that things can be otherwise, Mr Goodwin is simply stirring up trouble for no positive end.
There is much that is wrong with Britain. Class prejudice remains – and I think that lies behind much of what Mr Goodwin complains of. So does racism and misogyny. Drug addition and unhealthy lifestyles are rampant. Too many young people are drawn into violent gangs. There is too much sub-standard housing. And too many of these things are not being confronted by the political class – or the public that votes them into office. Mr Goodwin did the country a service after the Brexit referendum, when he tried to illuminate how many of our fellow countrymen felt. But he has gone way beyond that, as he is promotes a destructive political agenda, fuelled by false ideas. By trying to exploit the grief of Southport, or at least excuse those that are, he has sunk to a new low.
