The prime minister rounds up asylum seekers on the eve of local elections, not to sway voters but to appease the hyenas lurking on his backbenches. He will boost the army by sacking 70,000 civil servants, never mind the Institute for Government calling those sums purely “fictitious”. The Tory right’s rollercoaster death plunge would be entertaining if we weren’t all aboard.
Now their time is up, such Conservatives think the end of the world is nigh. If the approaching moderate social democratic government looks to them like Armageddon, that’s because they have become cultish fanatics.
Look at the frantic writings of their press. Here’s Allister Heath, the Sunday Telegraph’s editor: “Britain is already too far down the road to serfdom to turn back now”; “For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished”; “Middle England has been betrayed by Britain’s feckless new establishment.” His columnist Janet Daley echoed: “Betrayed voters are finally exacting revenge on our arrogant elites.” Another colleague, Sherelle Jacobs, wrote: “Britain has become a lawless country where good people have to live in fear” and “Endemic misery is pushing Britain towards a civilisational catastrophe.” That doomery reverberates among those Tory backbenchers who can’t tell the difference between their personal imminent loss of power, status and seats and “civilisational catastrophe”. The reason they are losing is because they have lost their reason.
A rather lazy view is that Labour will win only because of serial Tory abominations: no party could survive this record of misgovernment, and the pendulum was anyway overdue for a swing. But here’s the great question: is there something deeper, a quiet sea change in the public mood, in social attitudes and political expectations beyond a mere rejection of the present shower? Younger generations are refusing to turn Tory as they age, the way previous cohorts reliably did: is that just temporary indignation over their housing and hardship, or something epochal? Let’s take a deeper dive on issues Tories regard as their home turf.
Compare what most people think with what these Tories think. Sunak announces an end to “sicknote culture” by cutting disability benefits. But anti-welfare attitudes have fallen to record lows: the British Social Attitudes survey finds just 19% think people get benefits they don’t deserve, down from 40% two decades ago. Save the Children’s Focaldata poll finds nearly three-quarters of voters want benefits preserved not cut, including 69% of Tory voters. Sunak looks as if he’s flogging a moribund horse in these food-bank times, with a third of children living in poverty. Nor do people favour tax cuts, including 73% of Tory voters.
Immigration is usually a reliable light-the-blue-touchpaper winner for Tory votes. But attitudes have turned subtler since immigration swung the Brexit vote. On the Rwanda plan, the public splits 41% each way. Is it good value for money? Only 16% say yes, with a strong no from Tory voters. Here’s a good indicator of more relaxed attitudes: the EU offering freedom for young people to work and travel between the UK and EU was instantly ruled out by No 10 (while Labour fudged). But the public backs it by 68% to 15%, including a majority of people who voted to leave the EU. Ask 18- to 24-year-olds, and they are 77% in favour. No one wants undocumented boat arrivals, but nor, when asked, do people want to cut visas for students, medics, carers – or for workers in any of the sectors in which there are staff shortages.
A telling dead duck is the Tory attack on Labour’s “class war”, abolishing private schools’ tax relief. Clueless on class, Sunak said it “illustrates that they don’t understand the aspiration of families like my parents who were working really hard”, but YouGov finds 71% support the policy. You want more? On Brexit, people overwhelmingly think it has harmed every aspect of life – their own and the country’s. When Mark Littlewood, director of the Truss cabal PopCon, tells GB News that his “worry” is that Labour will “slowly realign us with EU regulation”, that ignores poll after poll showing people want a closer relationship, a majority even wanting to rejoin.
Swimming against the tide of broad-based public attitudes, the Tories sound like a party that intensely dislikes the country it governs, loathes the swelling numbers of well-educated, urban dwellers and especially the London they are trying to win this week. Their “woke” epithet is meaningless when it applies to just about everyone except them. The National Trust and Britain’s lifeboats service, too. Whatever their brand of patriotism, it’s not a love of the country as it is.
In her book, Liz Truss’s liberation from the “deep state” would abolish the Office for Budget Responsibility and the supreme court, weaken the Bank of England, leave the European convention on human rights, withdraw from Cop climate negotiations – oh, and abolish the United Nations. Hostility to all those is a shared cultural reflex among swaths of Tory MPs. A typical little tic shared by both Truss and Sunak, and the Spectator and Telegraph anti-lockdown obsessives. Yet many more people said Covid action was not strict enough (by 38% to 21%), rather than too strict. Nor is it popular that the government has retreated on banning no-fault evictions for renters and stopping restaurants stealing staff tips.
Despite gathering clouds of nativist demagoguery across the EU, here the party that is trying very hard to be populist is resoundingly unpopular. So here’s the question: is this just game over for a collapsed regime, or is this a “sea change”, as the Labour prime minister James Callaghan ruefully noted in 1979, where “it then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants.”
That dilemma is also crucial for the opposition. If the country is in a social democratic mood, dare it seize the moment? The lack of positive enthusiasm for Labour suggests the people are out ahead of the party whose frontbench fears that Thatcher still courses through the nation’s veins. Despite all this polling suggesting a progressive shift, Labour dares take no risks – and I don’t blame it, after lifetimes of losing.
I may be wrong – how easy to opinionise, how hard to lead the party over the winning line. These are volatile times, and a Labour government that fails to restore living standards and public services risks opening the door to PopCon or Reform UK insurgents. That’s a reason to expect Labour will be far braver in power than it looks now.
I remain convinced that we stand at a turning point, where the long-term emotional and political impact of the bankers’ crash, Covid, austerity, Brexit and the oil-price rise has left a country knowing that nothing but the state and strong international institutions can defend us all in a turbulent world.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
