It will now take a miracle for the voters to forgive the Tories. Our strike-addled NHS has imploded, with another 2,837 excess deaths in the most recent week. (January) 20 per cent more people are dying than normal; there have only been eight worse weeks since 2010 and all of those were during the first two waves of Covid.
Yet the Government’s lack of empathy is shocking, its refusal to admit that we are in a major emergency baffling. What is the plan? Why aren’t hospitals being put into special measures, or a supremo brought in to tackle the crisis? Do we even have a functional Government, or is it merely a Potemkin construct run by people who pretend to be in charge and enjoy the trappings of office, such as the chauffeur-driven cars and grace and favour residences, but are terrified of actually governing?
It’s not just the health service that is failing monstrously while the Tories watch uselessly: much of the rest of Britain is breaking too. Consumers were paid to use less electricity this week, ushering in a new era of explicit rationing. Trains and roads are in an appalling state. The economy is flatlining and wages are going down in real terms. Taxes are eye-wateringly high while far too many people depend on the state for their income. The housing crisis is getting worse. Policing is a disgrace.
The Tories have refused to make the most of Brexit, aren’t even pretending to level up, are doing little to combat the woke revolution and are busily waging war on motorists with their idiotic 20-minute cities. Freedom of choice, aspiration and hard work are out, replaced by bureaucracy, central planning, dependency and state controls: the conservative dream has turned into a nightmare.
Overwhelmed by ugly, reputation-shattering sleaze scandals, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives give every impression of having all but given up: their survival strategy seems to be to hide, say nothing and hope something, anything turns up. It’s too late: many of the Tory voters of 2019 feel that they have been taken for mugs.
Their bitter disappointment will reinforce a disillusionment towards the traditional parties that has been building for two decades. Middle England has been desperate for change since the mid-2000s, and deeply dissatisfied by the status quo. Many felt that they had been lied to over immigration, over the Iraq war – and then came MPs expenses and the financial crisis. Brexit was the great opportunity to kick the political class, and Boris Johnson, the quintessential change candidate, harnessed this mood beautifully in 2019.
Three years on, the opportunity to realign politics has been squandered, with Johnson derailed by Covid and his own deficiencies and Sunak governing as a centre-Left technocrat. None of the festering issues that so angered voters have been addressed, and the lack of meaningful economic growth since 2008 is starting to hurt.
The Tories misled their voters in four catastrophic ways. The first was to keep insisting that the NHS was the world’s greatest health system. The second was to downplay the cost of Covid and lockdowns; their true price, it turns out, was mass inflation, dislocation and a broken labour market. The third was to pretend that net zero carbon was a costless exercise with no authoritarian undertones. The fourth was in failing to make the case for capitalist economic growth.
Faute de mieux, the voters will plump for Keir Starmer in 2024: they will do so with zero enthusiasm though his majority could be immense, especially if Richard Tice’s Reform UK party continues to grab votes on the Right. However, the Labour leader is no anti-establishment candidate and has no fresh ideas. He will win by default and is likely to be in power for just one term. His failure will fuel the public’s fury at mainstream politics.
His majority may rival that of Tony Blair but the circumstances are, otherwise, entirely different. Blair was young, exciting and, at first, hugely popular; he was to the Right of the current Tory administration on numerous subjects. He was riding the Tory economic boom, though Gordon Brown ruined all of that and much more. Wages and wealth were rising and voters thought Britain was improving during Blair’s first term, even if the supposed progress was eventually exposed as chimerical.
Starmer will inherit a basket case and immediately make everything worse. His war on non-doms will further undermine growth and Labour has no meaningful plans to tackle the collapse of the NHS, the housing crisis, the failure of schools or stagnant real wages. With spending already at record levels, resources will be scarce: taxes will go up further but the money will be squandered. The nationalisation of GP practices will further centralise a failed socialist system. Starmer’s energy, transport, woke and net zero policies are worse than the Tories’.
Within a couple of years in government, Starmer’s popularity will have collapsed, with Middle England hunting for a new political home. The Tories will still be a mess. The Liberal Democrats will remain marginal, as will the Greens and Reform. There will clearly be an opportunity for new parties, led by political entrepreneurs who understand the gap in the market and target the mainstream majority.
Unlike in much of Europe, we must hope and pray that there is little appetite in the UK for extremists. Britain, I suspect, would be more likely to go the way of Canada in the 1990s, when a new centre-Right group crushed the old conservatives, or France more recently, when President Emmanuel Macron destroyed the centre-Right and centre-Left.
For the first time, with an increasingly volatile electorate desperate for change, such a dramatic upset might be possible in a British election even under first past the post. It would be relatively straightforward to construct an uber-populist, 20-point manifesto with every policy scoring 60 per cent or greater support. With the right leader, could such a grouping grab 35 per cent or more of the vote from a standing start?
Quite possibly, though I doubt I would like such a party: it would probably be good on law and order and wokeism but terrible on class warfare and the NHS. But that is the way British politics is at risk of going, whether we like it or not: the public are itching for a change, and our existing parties are not up to the challenge. DT.
