In the ancient world described in The Leopard — everything must change so everything can remain the same — it is the confessional where the leaders deposit their secrets, making them beholden to the priests. In our era, it’s Peloton, the plugged-in home exercise system, where people yell at you through a small screen mounted on your stationary bike.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is inevitably a big fan, because his secret fantasy is to manage a Lloyds branch in High Wycombe while completing an MBA. He has claimed to be up at 6am, pumping along to Britney Spears (of course, in the TayTay-Lana Del wars, he’s a Britney fan). Alas, the bicycle does not lie, showing, according to Guido Fawkes, that he is rarely on “the road” before 8pm.
The PM’s so switched on he hasn’t switched his settings to private. He did, however, complete a 5km pump along a fake landscape in Big Sur California — the road to Silicon Valley, where Sunak may be heading after July 4, his independence day. The leader of a nuclear-armed nation has apparently kept his Green Card updated like, well, an MBA student working as a High Wycombe bank manager.
Let’s hope the fantasy road was smoother than the election trail because that has been rocky. From the announcement of the election in a rainstorm, as New Labour anthem “Things Can Only Get Better” pumped, Sunak and the Tories have stumbled on their road to what everyone presumes — read, prays — will be a drubbing come summer.
Day one saw Sunak appearing in Wales, where among a sparse crowd Tory councillors were planted to throw in a few Dorothy Dixers (the phrase is unknown in the UK), after which Sunak asked another crowd if they were looking forward to the finals of Euro 24, from which the Welsh team had just been knocked out.
In Belfast, he appeared at the Titanic exhibition. At Birmingham Airport he stood beneath an enormous “Exit” sign. That was day two. After that, someone hit reply all at Tory HQ on an email saying that MPs weren’t campaigning, and that key factional leader Steve Baker, the prime mover of Brexit, was on holiday in Greece.
By day five, Team Sunak had arrived at that point of the campaign usually appearing in week three: it came off the road for an entire day to sort it all out. The cause was less these petty gaffes — although commentators underestimate them; the public take them as the most basic indication of leadership abilities — than managing the first big, and bizarre, announcement of the campaign: the proposed reintroduction of national service.
A stint in the forces for 18-year-olds, or a year doing community service on weekends for those wimpy pacifist ninnies who don’t want to be yelled at on a parade ground. The proposal has no military utility whatsoever, and in yet another gaffe it was revealed that the defence minister had rejected the idea days before.
Of course he had. The modern army needs nine robotics PhDs and a dog to bite the PhDs if they touch any buttons. It needs small highly trained forces, specialists and tech, tech, tech. Conscripting millions in a North Korea-style outfit would be a high drain on the resources needed to run a high-tech military, a net negative.
But then it’s not aimed at military utility. It’s aimed at grumpy oldies who want to see whiny yobbish youth given some discipline, a sense of self and a familiarity with the use of dangerous weapons, apparently. The policy was the first sign that, to no great surprise, the campaign is about saving the furniture (Sunak is very much the type of man who buys his own).
The strategy would be to get enough residual Tory voters out to begrudgingly back Team Blue such that the expected landslide does not run down into the shire and middle suburban seats, which can happen in first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting. Tory minds were concentrated by the Canadian FPTP election of 1993, when the Conservatives were reduced to two — yes, two — seats.
The UK Tories are aiming to avoid any collapse that takes them below 100 seats. That sort of landslide is looking less likely, as it was always going to, once the election campaigns started. The next big margin would be 150, and the big one is 200 (in a 650-seat Parliament) — that would be the possible difference between two terms out and three.
This strategy is confirmed by the more recent announcement that they will extend the tax-free threshold on the aged pension, so that it never, without other payments, creeps into the taxable income frame. That won’t cost much — two and a half billion — but it’s another sign to youth that they don’t matter crap in this set-up. Shut up, soldier on and subsidise the boomers.
Labour? Well, it has developed the innovative strategy of campaigning against itself. About 70% of its campaign appears to be modelled on a reformed ex-alcoholic trying to get back into the family home. “We’ve changed,” the party wails. “We’ve really changed.” “Changed”, in this case, meaning “no longer led by Jeremy Corbyn”, now expelled from the party and running as an independent in North Islington.
But therein lies a problem. Corbyn got 40% of the vote in 2017 (up from Ed Miliband’s 30% in 2015) and part of that was getting a working-class vote which — satisfied that Corbyn was pro-Brexit and therefore de facto anti-immigration — was enthused by proposals for large-scale public investments, rail and energy nationalisation and the like.
So, leader Sir Keir Starmer is now saying that the party has changed but also that he is “a socialist” — something Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown, would never have said in office — and spruiking ideas like “Great British Energy” — Corbynite economic energisation schemes, given a patriotic gloss. It’s a gamble, but Labour has to do it, with the ferociously anti-immigrant Reform Party nobbling at their base, as much as at the Tories.
Great British Energy. Corbynite, but as everywhere, tilted towards the private sector, rather than drawing much back into the public sphere. T’would be better, much better, to have Labour, but socialist it won’t be. Leopards don’t… etc, etc, and neither will Sir Keir Starmer. On the fake road to July 4, in the most middle-class nation on earth, everything must change to remain exactly the same.
Will anything really change for the UK under a Starmer-led Labour? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
