I have discovered Matt Goodwin. Of course I have long known about him, as he is frequently quoted in articles on British politics. He started as an objective-sounding commentator on the rise of British populism, and has been slowly morphing into an partisan advocate for it. But he still has a certain respect for evidence, unlike many of his fellow advocates. Which means that it is more useful to read and digest his output, and not dismiss it out of hand. Recently a friend quoted one of his Substack posts at length, and this was interesting enough for me to subscribe to his feed, though not enough to be a paid subscriber, which limits my access somewhat.
The post quoted talks about the death of the British Conservative Party. Most political commentators assume that the party will recover to some extent before the forthcoming General Election. This has been the pattern for pretty much for every governing party in Britain that had been lagging the opposition in the year before an election. Personally I am not so sure this time, and Mr Goodwin helps me to sustain that doubt – albeit that we have very different ideas about where this should lead. He thinks that nationalist populism will be reborn and triumphant in a new guise; I think that it will usher in a long period of mediocre Labour-led government.
Mr Goodwin’s argument is that the Conservatives won their substantial majority in December 2019 by “leaning in” to the populist trend evident elsewhere in the developed world, and mobilising a discontented group of voters angry at the level of immigration, the loss of national sovereignty and “woke” values infecting state institutions. These voters backed Brexit, and, he suggests, form a majority in 60-80% of parliamentary seats – evidenced, I suppose, by the referendum result in 2016 (whose parliamentary majority was much higher than its voting majority). This was main reason for the Tory victory, rather than the personality of the party leader at the time, Boris Johnson, or fear of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, he says. However, since that election, Mr Goodwin argues, the Conservative leadership have completely failed to live up to the expectations of these voters. Mr Johnson proved lazy and incompetent, filling his Cabinet with lacklustre loyalists. Subsequent leaders, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have been out of sympathy with the populist project, in their different ways. Instead they listened to business lobbyists “addicted to cheap labour”, and to the liberal SW1 elite. The current government has no coherent ideology, and continues to be liberal on immigration in practice, if not in rhetoric. Whether this is a matter of their own policy preferences or sheer incompetence doesn’t really matter. The newly motivated 2019 voters have been betrayed, and will not be brought back to vote for the party, but will either stay at home or vote for the Reform party. It gets worse. The oncoming electoral disaster awaiting the party will wipe out all those MPs with populist sympathies, leaving the more liberal part of the coalition in charge – who will then blame the populists, and fail to rebuild the winning coalition. Or so Mr Goodwin suggests.
Mr Goodwin feels that the Tories have squandered an opportunity to drive forward a government true to the principles of low immigration and ultra-nationalism. It is worth developing that thought a little. The narrative prevalent in 2019 was that restricted immigration would boost wages for lower-skilled workers and enabled a redistribution towards many of the left-behind groups. This isn’t nonsense. A couple of years ago our local refuse collectors got a massive pay rise because restrictions to foreign lorry drivers had drastically increased pay for these workers. This was an example of this idea in action and working. So why has the government used the inflation crisis as an opportunity to squeeze public sector pay rather than try to draw in more local workers with more generous pay? It is not just businesses that are addicted to cheap immigrant labour, but public services are too. Generous public sector pay settlements in areas formerly reliant on immigrant labour would be a sign that the government believed their narrative. But, of course, it is in fact much harder than that.
I haven’t read much of Mr Goodwin’s work, but his narrative seems to be that a large majority of British voters are sympathetic to conservative values, especially over immigration and national sovereignty. These voters are being ignored or patronised by an “elite” of about 25% of the country, mainly university graduates, who have liberal values, and who control almost all the state institutions and big business. This dynamic is present across the Western world and is why populist movements of the right, from Donald Trump in the US to Marine Le Pen in France, and the AfD in Germany are gaining popularity. This narrative clearly touches on a grain of truth – but there are many problems with it.
Doubtless answers to polling questions and probing in focus groups can demonstrate majorities of the public supporting certain conservative views, and scepticism over immigration in particular. But turning these attitudes into both an election-winning coalition of voters, and keeping faith with them once in power, is a much more complicated business than Mr Goodwin allows. Those majorities can vanish very easily once the harder choices behind them are exposed. The 2016 Brexit referendum majority was a small one; populists have repeatedly fallen at the last hurdle in Europe – and their victories often aren’t what they seem. British media often report that the populist Geert Wilders “won” last year’s election in the Netherlands – but what they mean is that his party received more votes than any other. It was still less than 25% of the total vote, scarcely more than the serial British losers, the Liberal Democrats, get in a good year. Other winners, such as the populist coalition led by Giorgia Meloni in Italy only succeeded by making some major compromises to establishment politics – notably by dropping opposition to the Euro.
A particular part of the problem is that a critical part of the conservative coalition is formed by the mass affluent – people with a significant stake in financial assets such as property, pension schemes and other investments. Property investment are typically financed by mortgages. Shortly after the Brexit referendum I attended an event put on by an investment manager for the mass affluent (I too am part of this group, and I was one of their clients); I was taken aback that the overwhelming majority of people in the audience were pro-Brexit. These people were not the left-behind working classes of the Brexit legend. The mass affluent, and especially those with mortgages, have a huge stake in financial stability. Fulfilling the anti-immigration dream of rising wages for lower-skilled workers means letting inflation rip, at least in the short term. It is a wealth redistribution exercise, and inflation is one of the classic mechanisms by which such redistribution takes place. People imagine that a tiny mega-rich minority take the strain of wealth redistribution – in fact the pain goes much, much wider. Conservatives may be insouciant about the effect of conservative policies on economic growth – but that is largely because they assume that somebody else will face the pain. In particular high inflation leads to higher nominal interest rates, and that can cause the dreams of newer property owners to collapse, as their mortgage payments become unaffordable, and their property values plunge into negative equity. And those without mortgages will still see the real value of their assets sinking. High inflation is one of the reasons that Americans think their economy is in terrible shape, and blame President Biden for it – in spite of otherwise very good statistics. A conservative government can’t afford to let inflation get out of hand. Hence the tough line the present government is taking on public sector pay and the softer line on immigration.
In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the Conservatives fell apart after 2019. They needed a strong dose of economic good luck to come anywhere close to fulfilling their promises. Instead they had the opposite – the Covid pandemic followed by the escalation in the costs of fossil fuels. Even a competent government would have found itself having to make impossible choices. It was Donald Trump’s good luck that he lost power in 2020, before the inflation surge took off. The main reason why Britain’s Conservatives are doing so badly while other conservative movements are doing so much better is that they are in power and the others aren’t, and therefore they cannot escape the blame for the economic mess. Their incompetence just compounds the problem.
The problem for all conservative populist movements is how to reconcile their hostility to immigration and free trade, and worship of national sovereignty, with maintaining a financially stable economy. This is not impossible – the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has succeeded in just such an accomplishment – but it requires the cooption of those hated elites, who bring with them the administrative competence required, and not hounding them out of government. The Conservatives after Brexit did have an opportunity, but by selecting Boris Johnson as their leader in 2019, they threw away that chance. One of his first moves was expel almost all his most experienced MPs who had demonstrated administrative competence. He demanded that loyalty was the only prerequisite for ministerial office.
This is yet another example of a wider political lesson. Electoral success is gained by stitching together coalitions of voters who can agree on some things, but who also have conflicting vested interests. The creation of these coalitions, and holding them together in power is where the skills of political leadership lie. Elements of a coalition will aways end up feeling let down or taken for granted. This has happened with unusual speed to the Conservatives after 2019.
What of the future? Mr Goodwin is wrong to suggest (as I think he does) that a stable electoral coalition can be built on a radical populist base, i.e. based on very strict limits to immigration. But what is surely true is that no stable governing coalition can be put together without the support of conservative voters. The current Labour leadership clearly understands this, though many of its activists do not.
What of the Conservative Party? The odds are surely that it will reform and survive after losing the next election. A radical rival, based on the Reform Party perhaps, would undermine it but not destroy it, unless a particularly skilled leader emerges from the shadows that understands that it must ultimately make compromises. That leader is not Nigel Farage, Reform’s most successful leader, who effectively owns Reform. And even if the party goes down to a heavy defeat, unseating its most radical MPs, I don’t see that the rump party will reject radicalism. Too many of its centrist denizens have left, and its activist base remains radical. A long period in the wilderness beckons. Probably.
That bodes well for Labour, in spite of its evident mediocrity. But it too could be ruined by economic bad luck. There may yet be an opportunity for the 2019 conservative coalition to come back quicker than anybody expects. Opposition is much easier than government, after all.
“I think that it will usher in a long period of mediocre Labour-led government …………There may yet be an opportunity for the 2019 conservative coalition to come back quicker than anybody expects.”
It sounds like you’re in two minds about this!
If we had an election right now the outcome would certainly be a Labour Govt with a sufficient majority to enable it to survive for a full 5 year term. So, on conventional thinking, I can’t see any reason to suggest you could be right about a speedy right wing return.
There is one huge potential problem for Sir Keir Starmer which has generally been ignored by the mainstream press but has been picked up recently again by right wing media: the possibility of a new party to be launched by Jeremy Corbyn. Many are claiming these reports are just right wing attempts at mischievous disinformation, but I’m not so sure. If there was no substance to them JC could easily say so. My reading of the situation is that there is a new party in the offing. The first de facto candidate will be Jamie Driscoll in the upcoming North of Tyne election.
Most Labour Party members will prefer Jamie to their own official candidate. The potential for conflict and mass expulsions is enormous. We could well see an official split in the party in the next month or two.
How this is going to affect the arithmetic of the next election is anyone’s guess. If it does happen then a thumping Starmer victory will look far less likely.
Yes I’m dithering a bit on that! I think that Starmer will get a big enough majority to last a full 5 years, but he may annoy too many voters while in government. He has some very difficult choices of his own to make about tax and public services, and he isn’t backed by an experienced team of potential ministers. That may give the Tories an opportunity to reform if they manage to find a capable leader, and win back in 2029. On the other hand (if they pick Braverman for example, if she survives the election) they could disappear down a rabbit hole.
As for the Left, I don’t have a feel for whether they will mount serious opposition to the Starmer regime. It’s not hard to understand their frustration though. I don’t think Starmer is a skilled politician and coalition builder – and he may struggle to keep the party together once they are in power.
On the subject of a new left party: Paul Mason has just published this in the New European.
“A new Corbyn party on the left is good news for the right”
He’s right of course. However, if it happens, we will need to ask why. Is it the fault of the Left for being unreasonable and not accepting their expulsions quietly and going off to do something else like tending their allotments or taking up stamp collecting or whatever?
Or, is it the fault of the Labour right for getting a leader elected on one platform but doing the exact opposite afterwards?
I would blame our electoral system which forces all parties to focus efforts on winning “centre ground” voters, who at the moment seem to be quite conservative. All very well but heavy expectations are then placed on party unity, which means debate is suppressed. I also think that with more skill Starmer could have have maintained a broader church within Labour. It’s no particular comfort that the Tories are stuck in a very similar bind. Unfortunately not enough of the public feels strongly about the electoral system. They’ll grumble but rally round the old system if it comes under threat.
Yes I fully agree that Starmer could have done a lot more to maintain party unity. A good example of how Starmer has been divisive rather than conciliatory, as he originally promised to be, is in his treatment of Jamie Driscoll.
Hardly anyone had heard of him until Starmer decided that he wasn’t going to be allowed to stand again as mayor for the NE of Tyne even though his track record in the job was good – as even many Tories had acknowledged.
His crime was interviewing Ken Loach at a film event in the NE.
I’m not sure that ‘skill’ was a factor in Starmer’s decision. I’m sure he knew what he was doing and the effect it would have.
We now have a fight emerging between the left and the Labour Party in Rochdale which will test out my previous suggestion that Starmer is much more vulnerable to what might be described as a “left insurgency” than the mainstream has erstwhile considered possible.
This looks to be changing with the Daily Mail floating the idea of an early “Gaza Election” so that the Tories can take advantage of a left/Labour split on the Palestine question. This is of course the primary immediate issue but the discontent on the left isn’t just about that and neither is it confined to the Muslim community. If the Labour leadership aren’t scared of George Galloway, and the emergence of a Cobyn led “real Labour Party” they should be!