Phwoaarrrrrr. He’s only bloody gone and done — oh hang on, Boris isn’t in charge anymore. Rishi Sunak, the UK’s bank branch adviser — “Hi I’m Rishi, take a seat, I’ll just get some details” — who turns down your loan application, has taken the country to the polls six months earlier than required. Great Britain and Northern Ireland will elect a new House of Commons on July 4, a commemorative date of an earlier British government triumph.
It is a truth universally observed that the election will result in a rout of the Tories and the installation of a majority Labour government. Labour currently leads in the polls by a stonking 23%, which in a first-past-the-post system translates as a genuine landslide, a majority of 100-150 seats or more in a 651-seat Parliament. That includes a reclamation of many of Scotland’s 60-odd seats from the beleaguered and chaotic Scottish Nationalist Party.
The reason for the Tories’ presumed upcoming defeat is a big double whammy. The government has been beleaguered, as all Western governments have, by the remorseless rise in the cost of living, the housing crisis (especially in London and the south-east), and the steady decline of social services — especially the NHS through underfunding. The austerity of the Cameron-Clegg years closed local public libraries, rural bus services and a hundred other features of the basic web of social life. The privatised water supply collapsed through underinvestment, sending huge volumes of liquid shit into the rivers and the sea, achieving the unlikely effect of making British beaches even less attractive than they previously were.
That was all bad enough, but it was something they might have been able to buffer with their 80-seat majority, if not for multiple crises of legitimacy and conduct, first by the Johnson government (ironic term, since Boris apparently has no real government of his johnson), and then by his disastrous successor Liz Truss. Johnson’s deep reluctance to impose an early COVID lockdown, followed by a more extended lockdown made necessary by that earlier failure, piled up the excess deaths and kicked a hole in the economy, signing the death warrant for hundreds of beleag- it’s a measure of where the UK is at that I now have to stop repeating the word beleaguered — of struggling high streets.
When it was revealed that Johnson’s staff and the PM himself had broken the rules on social gatherings and travel, when Johnson obfuscated and lied repeatedly, the reaction to him was one of disgust and then fury. His position became contradictory. It seemed impossible that he could continue as leader drawn from a parliament. But he was the only Tory who could guarantee the support of the “red wall” of working-class seats that had fallen to the Tories in the “get Brexit done” election, and delivered the 80-seat majority.
Those voters saw Johnson as a one-nation Tory, nationalist before he was economically right or left, a perception helped by Johnson’s conversion from Manchester liberalism to a “growth by any means” approach, which saw him backing large-scale state investment in regional topping up, such as the “Northern Powerhouse” proposal.
When he had to go, the Tory right, responding to their own internal faction imperatives, replaced him with someone they saw as politically aligned but that the “red wall” saw as anathema. Liz Truss, a former Liberal Democrat, had so utterly taken up the growth mantra — but in an “animal spirits” fashion — that she proposed borrowing vast amounts to avoid a new austerity round and cutting taxes to release economic dynamism afresh. This sent confidence in the UK economy plummeting, threatening the borrowing rate and the viability of pensions and other funds, and she was gone in 44 days, her reign less than the life of a lettuce featured by one of the nation’s life-denying tabloids.
But the Tories could have elected as leader a lettuce — or, for Scots, “that wee green thing I never seen before” — and won, had there not been a changeover of Labour leaders. Jeremy Corbyn and his semi-socialist program won 40% of the vote in 2017, a 10% gain on predecessor Ed Miliband. But this was only because Corbyn was known to be anti-EU and pro-Brexit, and was thus seen as guaranteeing the anti-immigrant politics that much of the British working class wanted.
Many of his supporters in the South were unwilling to acknowledge this. There was left pressure on Labour to be pro-immigrant, and right threats of open revolt if some sort of reopening of Brexit was not offered. Labour went to the polls with a hideous kludge policy of a second referendum on Brexit implementation, and the Boris got his 80-seat majority.
The election led to a new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. Incredible isn’t it; Viscount Bill Shorten (see how that sounds) has taken Labour swiftly to the right on immigrants and the increasing numbers of boat-borne refugees coming across the English Channel; on reversing a series of re-nationalisations the Corbyn team had proposed (aside from rail); and on the more ambitious socialist state-private economic coordination and investment they proposed for a new industrial green revolution. It’s still to the left of, for example, the Albanese government, but something the British middle class can live with. Brexit is a closed book, so the red wall will largely return. They would only ever have voted for Boris anyway. And the fact that Starmer is white and Anglo will be good for a few seats.
What could go wrong for Labour? It is really difficult to see the Tories winning even a plurality from here, but two things could happen. The “Reform” Party, Nigel Farage’s second successor to UKIP, currently polling at 13%, could withdraw from key constituencies under some deal, and that would give the Tories a 20- or 30-seat boost from their current position. Labour’s scent of victory could tempt the left to fire a few warning shots about better policies, and Tory mid-range seats could get very suddenly nervous. The Murdoch and other right press could decide that they have to hold the Tory party together and unleash a feral assault of unknowable power (most likely less than in past decades). And sheer random events, local and global. But if the Tories were to come within cooee of even plurality victory from here, then polling is the loser. It is over, broken, unusable.
Which is how the UK feels to many at the moment. Sunak’s role now seems to be to keep the Tory party viable altogether, which may be why he’s gone early — he has been told the terrible information about what’s coming later in the year. He’s also under internal threat of being rolled. Better lose your head in the election guillotine than be the lettuce they use to test the blade, I guess. The temptation is to say, and our British cousins will say, that as centrist as Keir Starmer is, this will be a chance for social democratic renewal.
Hahahahaha. But we know, don’t we? Phwoarrrr.
Stop press: things are moving fast, in real-time. Sunak made the official announcement outside Number 10, just as a rain storm started, drenching him, and a political troller usually set up outside Parliament played the 1997 Blair anthem “Things Can Only Get Better” from a boombox. And it was announced that dissident Tories are going to try and roll Sunak before the Commons sits next Thursday, then call the election off. As the man said, “An arrow shower sent out of sight/somewhere becoming rain.”
Is it finally over for the UK Tories? 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.
