“I have been a staunch Tory voter all my life, but cannot support a party that really does not think of the people, but only to balance the books at the moment,” wrote Helena Parker in a letter to the Guardian this week. “I cry myself to sleep each evening, while they are warm and fed. The MPs will not think of me, but I think of them”. Such sentiments are dooming the Tories to electoral oblivion.
Unless something extraordinary happens, the Conservatives look set to be fighting at the next general election only for the difference between a respectable second place and a humiliating second place. In a byelection in Chester, Rishi Sunak’s party recorded its worst ever result since 1832. By comparison, Labour recorded its best performance in the city’s history to retain the seat in Thursday’s vote. At this point in the electoral cycle, opposition parties usually benefit from the government’s difficulties. But the news that Sajid Javid, a former Conservative chancellor, has decided to quit parliament is a sign that the Tory ship is going down.
Sir Keir Starmer’s gamble is that by staying policy-light now, the message won’t sound stale when his party does have something to say. But there are risks in such a strategy. If the economy improves more quickly than forecasters predict, Mr Sunak may be able to claim that the Tories are more economically competent than Labour. Sir Keir’s interventions on windfall taxes and price controls have outflanked the Tories, but Labour does not have a story – yet – of how it could better deal with this economic emergency. The party, if it is seeking a mandate for change, will need one.
Two years is a long time in politics. Given that the SNP remains popular in Scotland and the boundary review will disadvantage Labour, to even get a majority in parliament Sir Keir requires a swing of about 13%. That is perhaps why Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, thinks that the 13.8% swing from the Conservatives to Labour in Chester – one of the largest since the second world war – may not be enough at the next election.
A mood of pessimism is abroad in the country. Fewer and fewer people think that life will get better for themselves, their families and their children. James Kanagasooriam, the pollster who coined the term “red wall”, notes that the Conservative party is getting the blame for the current gloom while the public yearns for better public services, higher wages and lower levels of poverty. Brexit, he says, crowded out concern and debate over Britain’s economic model. Now the costs of leaving the EU are reinforcing the idea of Tory incompetence.
Britain’s battered state raises important questions. But the answers lie in how the economy and society has developed since 1979. To fix the country will require a transformative plan and a plausible narrative about the causes of high inequality and low economic growth. The timidity with which Labour responded to the Guardian’s exposé of how the natural monopoly profits of the water industry are siphoned off by a largely hidden, extractive form of capitalism speaks volumes about the party’s inability to face up to questions of economic ownership.
Without an offer of real redistribution to households with collapsing incomes, Sir Keir risks being seen by voters as part of the problem, not the solution. Labour has shown some interest in putting collective national interest ahead of private interests, but shies away from issues of who controls economic power. The party’s history has two big reference points: a big state welfarist 1945 programme and a more market-friendly 1997 one. The world has moved on. But Britain will be poorer if its main opposition party cannot produce a platform for today’s problems rather than yesterday’s.
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