What is the point in voting for a Conservative Party that promises higher taxes and immigration?
Source - Daily Telegraph - 23/10/23
Fans of Coronation Street are mourning the death of fraudster Stephen Reid, who was by far the best thing in it. Yes, he murdered three people; but most of those kills were accidental and all the victims were irritating, and one always admired how – after nudging a business competitor off some scaffolding – he would convince himself things would somehow turn out okay.
As an optimist and a hard worker, Steve serves as a metaphor for a Tory government that refuses to acknowledge its time is up, and will probably finish, as Steve did, screaming “I still love you!” at his closest friends while holding them hostage outside the Rovers Return.
Which brings me to those half-term contests at Tamworth and Mid-Beds. The Tories say: governments always lose by-elections, they tell us nothing. Yet as recently as 2021, the Government was gaining seats from them, and its recent run of defeats isn’t normal (from 1974-79, by contrast, Labour defended 21 seats and lost only 7). By-elections don’t accurately predict the outcome of a general election, but they do illustrate trends – such as the middle-class tax revolt at Orpington in 1962 or the rise of Scottish nationalism at Hamilton in 1967 – and smart politicians take heed. Defeat at Eastbourne in 1990 persuaded the Tories to ditch Maggie, helping them to win a surprise majority in 1992.
So it’s a testament to what clever commentators call the “system failure” of 21st-century politics that Westminster now sees by-election results entirely through the yin-yang cliche of “Labour up, Tories down”, ignoring the wealth of information hidden within swings. We’ve forgotten how to read democracy.
It’s true that Rishi Sunak’s recent streak of bad luck most closely resembles John Major’s, which indicates that the Conservatives are on the way out, but this is not 1997. There is no comparative wave of hope; Labour is winning by default, not enthusiasm. Turnout in Tamworth was a paltry 36 per cent and Labour won after gaining less than 1,000 votes (in Mid-Beds its vote actually fell).
So the real story is that traditional Conservative voters are abandoning not just the party but the process. Why? Because the economy is bad and Boris and Truss poisoned the brand, no doubt; but also, because the Conservatives do not strike voters as particularly conservative. After 13 years, the state is bigger, your taxes are up and immigration – legal or illegal – is running at record levels, so what is the point in voting for the blues?
Last week, the Justice Secretary announced that prison sentences of less than a year will be largely scrapped. No wonder that in both by-elections, the right-wing Reform party drew enough votes to throw the seat to Labour.
The Tory leadership has been tangling with its grassroots for years: they were in constant revolt under David Cameron, particularly over gay marriage and “green crap”, and Euroscepticism was the expression of a malaise that went well beyond imperial weights and bendy bananas.
How did people register dissent? By-elections at Clacton and Rochester, and to Cameron’s credit he did listen, inserting an in-out referendum into the 2015 manifesto to blunt the Ukip revolt. Thereafter, the battle to leave the EU reconciled conservative voters to the Tories, until it became obvious that ministers had no idea what to do with Brexit – and that what cynics call the “uniparty” had reasserted control at Westminster.
The populist storm is now truly broken; we are back to the two parties as competing brands of the same consensus (economics by the Treasury and cultural policy by the BBC), delivering largely the same product at slightly different speeds. Each tells us that the worst thing that will happen if they lose the next election is that the other party will win, but with the quality of life falling so far so fast, it’s hard to imagine how this could be a threat to the meagre status quo, which is why Tory warnings about Labour do not hit home.
Sunak’s attempts to triangulate around Starmer, himself a triangulator extraordinaire, involves correcting the green or immigration policies of his own predecessors, and the abiding impression is that he uses Right-wing rhetoric to cover Left-wing outcomes – the precise opposite of what a smart Conservative Party would do. Oh for a government that speaks in Christian platitudes while quietly slashing the state, reducing immigration to the tens of tens, and building a royal yacht for every month of the year.
For nearly two decades, our politicians have been elected to office on party labels that don’t reflect their views, relying on the votes of people who don’t agree with them. What is often interpreted as a realignment among voters – the Red Wall switching to Tory, or now the Blue Wall going Lib Dem – is just as likely evidence of a mass dealignment, of people detaching from their historic allegiances and screaming at a computer that has stopped working. They might click on Labour here, Reform there, but really they’re just hitting every darn button on the keyboard in the hope that one of them will reboot this system and get it working again.
Alas, the connection between democracy and delivery is so obviously severed that it’s probably best to regard what we’re left with as pure theatre. The fun is seeing if this week’s villain lives to fight another day.
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