Though I am old enough to have voted in general elections since 1983, I cannot recall any time when the result of an election seemed so uncertain. I do not, of course, mean that there is much doubt who is going to be prime minister on 5 July. But what happens next?
Pretty much as soon as the first results were announced after the 1983 election, any well-informed person could tell where the country would be by the time of the next election. Large-scale privatisation was promised in the Tory manifesto and, in more general terms, private enterprise was obviously going to get stronger. With the exception of Arthur Scargill, everyone understood that trade unions would be weaker.
But where will Britain be in four years’ time? The next government will come to power staggering under the weight of its self-denying ordinances. Starmer has made more promises about what he will not do — reverse recent tax cuts, abolish the triple lock on pensions — than promises about what he will do. Positive proposals are remarkably vague — “Great British Energy” sounds more like a slogan from a Seventies advertising campaign than a policy.
Partly, of course, the problem lies in the practical constraints that will face the next government. The Covid pandemic and lockdown will make themselves felt for decades more. Just before the election was announced, the compensation scheme for those who were infected by blood transfusions brought the prospect of another £10 billion on the national debt. The fact that Labour has been so far ahead in the opinion polls for the last few years has produced an odd situation: the official opposition — which expects to be in government for several years — has worried about public finances more than the government. Once he had headed off the crisis of crashing bond markets in 2022, Jeramy Hunt has not had to do much except ensure that the government did not actually go bankrupt until it had staggered over the finishing line of electoral defeat — at which point he can arrange lunch with a head-hunter and start talking about how to restore his own finances.
Being in opposition — even when the opposition is heading for defeat — can be fun. Think of Neil Kinnock appearing in a Tracy Ullman pop video or William Hague knocking nine bells out of Tony Blair at PMQs. Starmer and his team look miserable. Not since 1945 has a ministerial team looked so exhausted on the cusp of victory. The desperate concern to avoid mistakes make the shadow cabinet appear as if they are at the end of a marathon egg-and-spoon race rather than sprinting to victory.
What happens after the election will depend, in part, on the scale of a Labour victory. Psephologists insist on the size of the swing that would be required to give Labour an absolute majority. But in a strange way, not getting a majority might be useful for Labour. It would give them a means to escape from the straitjacket that they have squeezed themselves into. A government dependent on the votes of Liberal Democrat or Green MPs would be able to blame policy shifts on other parties. It would, to take the most obviously example, be much easier to take Britain back into the European Single Market if this could be presented as the price that Labour had to pay for Liberal Democrat support.
All the signs suggest, however, that Labour will get an absolute majority and probably a large one. I can imagine lots of things that might go wrong for the Conservative Party in the near future — presumably, they can too, which is why they have decided not to hold out for a later election. It is harder to see what might go wrong for Labour. Keir Starmer’s weaknesses are very different from those of Donald Trump but, in both cases, the weaknesses have been so obvious for so long that they are priced into the electoral market.
In addition to this, Starmer is a pure-blooded Labour man. He does not like other parties and seems to have no more time for those of the Left than for those of the Right. In this respect, he is very different from Tony Blair, who learned from an eclectic group of what he would have called “progressives”. Mainly this meant Roy Jenkins and some of the other figures who had left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981 (an unforgivable crime in Labour orthodoxy), though he also picked up ideas from, for example, writers who had been associated with Marxism Today.
Starmer is also a traditionalist in his attitude to Labour voters. He seems to rejoice more in the return of prodigal sons from “Red Wall” seats than he does in the possibility that the party might build a different kind of support base among people who have not previously voted Labour — or not previously voted at all.
In a strange way, this traditionalism was accentuated by Jeremy Corbyn. The struggle between the two men felt like the last battle in the Labour civil war of the early Eighties. But now it is less obvious what Left and Right mean in the Labour party. Green politics cut across conventional views of industrial growth. Opposition to the European Union was a Left-wing policy in the early Eighties but now most of the Left opposes Brexit, and, though Starmer seems determined to ignore this fact, so does most of the electorate. Similarly, the use of allegations about support for terrorism or antisemitism against the Corbynistas seems a bit odd now that the United States is desperately trying to rein in Israel.
The most important question about the aftermath of the election, however, involves the losers. Elections produce seismic shifts when — as in 1945 or 1983 — the losing party recognises that they need to adjust their policies in the aftermath of defeat. Usually this has meant accepting some element of the policies of the winning party. It seems unlikely that the current Conservative Party will react in this way to a Labour victory. Many on the Tory Right have very safe seats; John Hayes, who heads the Common Sense Group, has the largest majority in the country. It is possible that tactical voting will take some of these down or that Tory voters will rebel against a former Home Secretary who slagged off the police and got herself sacked twice. But, on the whole, I would guess that the Tory right will be strong after the election. Indeed, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch may be the only politicians looking to the near future with relish.
Will the Conservative Party survive? Some say that its instinct for power is its secret weapon. But this cuts both ways. What purpose does the party serve if it looks as though it may not be in government for a long time? Centrists may quietly join other parties or leave politics altogether — on the whole, the moderate Tories are the ones who stand a chance of getting a job in the real world. It is possible that the Conservative parliamentary party will eventually shrivel to a rump of rent-a-gob backbenchers who would be happy to trade the prospect of ministerial office for a regular gig on GB News. Nigel Farage is right to say that he and Jacob Rees-Mogg ought to belong in the same party, but that party is not going to be anything that would be recognised by Thatcher or Macmillan or, for that matter, the Third Marquess of Salisbury. The kind of grouping that might be formed by a merger of Right-wing Conservatives with Reform would attract a significant electorate but, without the brand loyalty that went with traditional Conservatism, that electorate would probably not be large enough to form a parliamentary majority.
Labour might also run into problems. I doubt if rebellion on the Left (mainly expressed in university towns and seats with large Muslim populations) will do it much damage at the coming election, and I would guess that Starmer can count on a very disciplined parliamentary party afterwards. But Gaza, green politics and opposition to Brexit are not going to go away. These are often the issues that the young care about most and also, curiously, the issues that are most likely to unite parts of the Labour Party with other political groups — including some who might, until recently, have described themselves as Conservatives.
Perhaps all this will eventually create a different kind of movement — not necessarily one that operates inside the Labour Party or even in any conventional party. Not only am I unsure which party will win the election after next, but I am, come to think of it, not even sure that I know which parties will be serious contenders when the time comes.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/