On the day before the 1992 general election, the bookmakers at Ascot were offering odds of 6-1 against John Major’s Conservatives winning. I was with the economist Roger Bootle, and we agreed that Labour, well ahead in the polls, was bound to win. It was pointless betting on the Tories, even at those odds. When the results came in we kicked ourselves.
When I told Lord Kinnock, the Labour leader at the time, this story years later, he jokingly said I should have telephoned him from Ascot. He said that on driving back from canvassing in south Wales the previous week he and his wife, Glenys, had had an uneasy feeling that, notwithstanding the polls, the election was “slipping away” from them.
We come now to the imminent general election on 4 July, the campaigns for which already seem to be boring, not to say annoying, so many people. Labour has been consistently ahead in the polls, while the fissiparous Conservatives are widely considered to be heading for a historic defeat.
This time the bookmakers’ odds are very different. At the time of writing they are quoting 30-1 against the Tories, while Labour is on 1-41 to win the most seats – that is to say, a £41 bet on Labour would fetch you a mere £1.
Most people seem to think that Labour is a racing certainty, even though they don’t regard Keir Starmer as inspiring.
The nation has had enough of the impact of austerity, not least on the NHS. And Brexit is proving a bigger disaster by the day. The self-harm of removing freedom of movement is affecting so many areas of life and bureaucratic restrictions on trade are causing serious damage to business, and therefore to us customers.
The two major parties have made the very topic of Brexit a no-go area – the Tories because they are responsible for it and Labour because, though it was right about Brexit, it is frightened of alienating the so-called red wall voters who deserted it last time.
We are having a general election five years on from a landslide Conservative victory, won on the back of the slogan “Get Brexit Done”. Well, the Tories got it done, and now they are done for.
Brexit has produced casualties all over the place. Even as I write, the unsurprising news comes over the airwaves that Labour’s plans for a major housebuilding programme are likely to be hampered by a shortage of construction workers caused by the xenophobic attitude towards our former European partners, resulting in an exodus of east European building workers.
Now, I say Labour’s plans because – notwithstanding my cautionary tale about the 1992 election, the result of which has haunted Labour ever since – there can be little question that the Conservatives are in for a drubbing on 4 July. People have, frankly, had enough.
His lies about Labour’s tax plans are only one of the many own-goals Rishi Sunak has inflicted on himself. True, the Liz Truss fiasco has damaged the Tories – for which Sunak was not responsible – but it was not just that. This government has been found out, as the accumulated damage of austerity since 2010 hits most people in one way or another.
Sunak was a Brexiter from the start. The dramatic negative impact of leaving the single market has shown up in the nation’s miserable growth performance. The Centre for European Reform has estimated that UK annual tax revenues would have been about £40bn higher if the country had not left the EU. These losses have impelled both major parties to deny that they plan to raise taxes, and the British public to tell pollsters they believe taxes will be raised anyway. As Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times says: “The Conservative party has become the last casualty of Brexit.”
It was symbolic of the low to which the party has sunk that the prime minister had to apologise for leaving the D-Day commemorations insultingly early to attend a television interview in London where he denied lying about Labour’s tax plans.
As one friend of mine quipped: “Finally a [Brexit] prime minister apologises for leaving Europe.”
Brexit is fast becoming a tragedy. As what has happened since D-Day reminds us, the stability and peace in Europe since the second world war are the achievement of an economically united Europe – until the Brexit catastrophe.
The Russian moves in Ukraine, and fears of further revanchism by Moscow in eastern Europe lay a huge responsibility on a Starmer government.
Economically, Starmer’s ambitions for growth require a closer relationship with the EU, not least the single market. And to meet the wider geopolitical threat, especially if a future President Donald Trump distances himself from Europe, we in the UK need to stop distancing ourselves.
