Stuck in a Loop

The rise of Labour in the opinion polls and the decline of the Conservatives has been the key political development of recent months, greeted with excitement by the centre, foreboding on the right and not a little irritation on the left. In fact, the underlying trend since the 2019 general election has been a steady decline in support for the Tories, with occasional pandemic-related bumps, and a corresponding if muted oscillation in support for Labour. The recent polling leads for the latter have tended to be modest, with support rarely exceeding 40%, while the slump for the former seems to have been arrested in the most recent data as the issue of sleaze has gradually given way to a renewed focus on the management of the pandemic. What this suggests is that there hasn't been a sea-change in public attitudes, but there has been a not unusual mid-term decline for the governing party. This has in turn led to the usual feverish speculation of a Conservative Party leadership challenge, but a new face is unlikely to be introduced until shortly before the next general election, both to avoid being tainted by association with the travails of the coming year and to gain the full benefit of the boundary changes due next year. Mid-2023, in anticipation of a spring 2024 election, remains the most likely window.

This year is likely to be grim for the Tories for a number of reasons. Inflation will almost certainly exceed pay rises and the hike in National Insurance contributions and energy bills in April will hit many people hard, which will probably be reflected in the council elections in May. Gloom on the household front will be exacerbated if interest rates rise as well. While the pandemic could dissipate and possibly even reach an identifiable "end" during the year, this is unlikely to provide a bounce for the government in the way the vaccine programme in 2021 did. Despite these headwinds for the Tories, there is little evidence that Labour is about to sustainably breach the ceiling of around 38% in the polls, despite another round of hopeful press pieces that Keir Starmer was finally going to energise the nation this week (the sense of anticlimax was, once more, palpable). The problem is that Labour doesn't appear to be addressing most voters, preferring to focus on a narrow demographic motivated by flags and vapid slogans, but even Starmer doesn't appear to have much confidence in the latter (the painful brain-fart during his post-speech Q&A was emblematic) while his closest allies are becoming increasingly concerned by the lack of definition.

The obvious flaw in a strategy based on winning back the "Red Wall" is that it would simply return Labour to the position it occupied in 2010 and 2015. At best, a hung parliament, at worst a narrow Conservative majority. The 2017 result was a better indicator of what Labour can feasibly achieve: losing only 6 of its leave-leaning seats in the North and Midlands to the Tories and gaining 30 spread across the country, against the background of a significantly increased national vote, particularly among the young and working-age. But that result seems unlikely with a current leadership and programme geared to the status quo and a patriotic, security-oriented pitch designed to appeal to property owners and the elderly. One explanation for this approach is that a hung parliament is the strategic goal. Broadly, the idea is that Labour re-establishes its hegemony across former industrial towns while retaining the big cities (even on a depressed, in both senses, vote), while the Liberal Democrats make in-roads into rural and exurban Conservative-held seats. The problem is that while informal electoral pacts can work in by-elections, they are a non-starter in general elections (Labour supporters aren't going to be motivated by the prospect of Ed Davey becoming a minister), despite the loud urgings of centrist media. 

That media chaff isn't simply the persistence of the government of national unity nonsense that was in vogue in 2019. It also reflects how much the political centre genuinely admired the coalition government of 2010-15. While much of the country struggled under the impact of austerity, and specific minorities found themselves targeted by cruel policies such as the hostile environment, the pundit class and the social interests it represents were perfectly happy, and not simply because the coalition agreement sidelined the prospect of a referendum on EU membership. Property values were preserved, the burden of debt payments fell on the poorest, and liberal gestures like equal marriage flattered the actual metropolitan elite. It is in this context that we should consider epiphenomena like Gina Miller's True and Fair Party. This isn't simply a home for militant remainers, as the focus on financial and government virtue indicates, but nor is it likely to bother the scorers come election time. It is a media confection by which liberal Tory dissatisfaction with the government can be channelled.

Assuming Labour is pursuing an updated version of the 35% strategy of the Miliband era, it will depend on the Liberal Democrats eating into Conservative support nationwide, which would explain the party's pusillanimous attitude in North Shropshire. The Liberal Democrats have increased support over recent months but, by-elections notwithstanding, this appears to be mainly at the expense of the Greens. The loss in support for the Conservatives appears to have benefited both Labour and Reform (formerly the Brexit Party) as well, though this appears to be down to much the same group of fickle voters (hardly suprising given the increasing similarity between the rhetoric of the two parties). In other words, Labour appears to be picking up some Tory protest votes at the margin but doesn't appear to be winning over liberal conservatives in significant numbers. Of course, this is fine if the plan is to win back the Red Wall seats on a combination of patriotism, managerial competence and the preservation of the status quo for retirees, while looking to the Liberal Democrats to erode the Tories elsewhere.

It's worth noting that the 35% strategy came in for a lot of criticism from the Blairites, primarily because it didn't focus enough on economic "credibility" - i.e. being pro-business and comfortable with fiscal austerity. What's changed is not simply that the impeccably Blairite Rachel Reeves is now Shadow Chancellor but that the terms of the economic argument have shifted considerably since 2015. This is due to a combination of factors: the realisation that Brexit would carry an economic cost, the foregrounding of inequality and under-investment in 2017, and the "levelling-up" rhetoric of 2019 combined with the forced state intervention of the pandemic. The personalisation of the government's economic tension between Johnson's largesse and Sunak's frugality reflects this underlying shift. There is now a widespread appetite for public investment, not just to repair the welfare state after more than a decade of austerity but to address the opportunities and threats of both Brexit and climate change. And, significantly, there is a recognition that this will require greater taxation of wealth.

Some commentators, like James Meadway, have rightly noted that Labour's current economic plans are leftwing relative to its post-1980s history, but this tends to elide the very clear message by Starmer and Reeves that what they envisage is investment in support of private capital, with nationalisation off the table and the labour market once more a site of discipline and virtue. The idea that they might piggy-back on the shift in mood to deliver a more egalitarian outcome strikes me as wishful-thinking. For all the gestures towards "radical insourcing", this is a very pro-private sector leadership. On taxation, there are vague promises of "wealth taxes" and more substantive promises to reduce the burden on the "hard-working", but implicit in this is the traditional idea that private sector growth will expand fiscal revenues enough to both fund better public services and keep employment taxes in check. How this is to be squared with the extraordinary demands of climate change, and the equally extraordinary losses arising from Brexit, isn't fully explained and I'd be surprised if there was any more clarity this side of the next general election.

Commentators sympathetic to Starmer have emphasised the radicalism of the commitment to fighting climate change and the promise of improved employment rights, but again these appear radical relative to Labour's recent history rather than to the government's programme. While the Tories are never going to enhance worker's rights at the expense of employers, their levelling-up rhetoric and demand to cut taxes on workers will muddy the waters (much as "fuck business" successfully did), while Labour's plans owe a lot to the green paper produced by Andy McDonald, who subsequently resigned from the shadow cabinet when Starmer refused to back his calls for a £15 minimum wage and statutory sick pay. In other words, there isn't as clear a gap between the parties as many suppose and good reason to believe that Starmer and Reeves's pro-business approach will narrow it further. Likewise, the £28 billion annual spend on the climate crisis looks superficially impressive, but the substance is likely to be closer to the Private Finance Initiative than the more transformative Green New Deal touted by Rebecca Long-Bailey. 

We're at a point in the electoral cycle when Labour should be launching some signature policies that clearly differentiate it from the Tories, but instead it is still offering underwhelming tweaks such as a cut in the 5% VAT charged on domestic fuel bills, which the government might end up adopting anyway. Climate measures have the potential to both draw a dividing line and exacerbate splits in the Tory ranks, but an overly-zealous approach would risk alienating British capital. That Ed Miliband has been slapped down on nationalisation and had responsibility for business removed from his brief shows which way the wind is blowing. With Starmer missing his latest opportunity to positively define Labour, the predictable result has been the liberal media's return to sleaze this week, revisiting stories about the Prime Minister's refurbishment of Number 10 and crony access to the contracting fast-lane in 2020. The sense of deja vu that surrounds Labour is not simply the result of the rehabilitation of the Blairites. It reflects Starmer's inabilty to break out of the loop of his "under new management" phase. It's hard to see 2022 bringing anything other than more of the same, which means the speculation over the next Conservative Party leader may soon give way to speculation about a Labour leadership challenge.