Sunak's sinking

 By- Elections, recession and a party in decline. 

Source - Matt Goodwin - 16/02/24

When Rishi Sunak was appointed prime minister his supporters proclaimed the ‘adults were back in charge’. After the experiments with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the Conservative Party was back in the hands of grown-ups.

What the party needed, what the British people wanted, what the country craved, we were told, was a return to pragmatic, polished and professional Tories who knew what they were doing, who understood what the British people wanted.

That was the narrative in Westminster. That was the narrative pushed on by the likes of William Hague and the commentariat. That was the narrative cultivated by Team Sunak and countless critics of Johnson and Truss. And that was the narrative which underpinned the appointment —not the election— of Rishi Sunak.

But now take a look around. How are the adults performing? Last night, at the latest by-elections, at the latest test of the public mood before the general election, the Conservative Party was completely smashed apart.

In Kingswood, a pro-Brexit seat that’s been held by the Tories since they came to power in 2010, the party was turfed out of office, suffering a 16.4 per cent swing to Labour and watching the insurgent Reform party rocket into third place with 10.4%.

And in Wellingborough, an even more strongly pro-Brexit seat that’s been held by the Tories since 2005, the party was likewise thrown out, suffering the biggest ever drop in support for an incumbent party at a postwar by-election, watching Labour overturn a more than 18,000 majority, and seeing Reform once again finish in third place with 13% of the vote —a new record result.

This was, in short, another disastrous night for Rishi Sunak and the Tories, coming after a string of similarly disastrous defeats at previous by-elections. Sunak has now lost all but one of the eleven by-elections he has led the Tories into and along the way has suffered the worst results for any incumbent government in British history.

In the national polls, meanwhile, for reasons I’ve outlined, support for the Tories has continued to collapse to new lows. The old joke among pollsters was that the Tory vote would never fall below 30% because that’s when you get to pro-Tory pensioners in retirement homes who have dementia and don’t know what’s happening in the real world. But, this week, the Tories averaged just 24.6%, while YouGov put them on 22% —nearly ten points adrift of what John Major and the party managed in 1997 when they were nearly wiped out by Tony Blair.

Sure, the polls will narrow before the election. Some undecided voters, who Sunak tried to woo this week, will inevitably return to the Tory fold. But many will not. While some have already defected to Labour, a much larger number have either decamped to the insurgent Reform party, now averaging 10% in national polls, or have given up on politics altogether, saying they won’t vote at all.

Today, the Tories are only holding half the people who voted for them at the last general election, in 2019, and only a little more than one in three of the people who voted for Brexit, in 2016. These are supposed to be the party’s core supporters. But many of them are now abandoning Sunak in droves, running for the hills.

And do you blame them? Seriously? Given some of the other events this week it’s not hard to see why. For a start, Sunak’s failure to control Britain’s borders was reflected in the remarkable finding that just 1.3% of the illegal migrants who entered Britain on the small boats since 2018 have been removed from the country.

While Sunak likes to talk about his ‘success’ in returning a significant number of Albanians, both he and his ministers know that when it comes to the task of defending Britain’s borders and fixing our broken asylum system they are failing.

And most Conservative voters can sense it, too. Ask them how they think the government is managing immigration —which, remember, is their top priority at the coming election— and a striking 86% say it’s managing the issue “badly”.

All this is good news for the Reform party. The worse Sunak does on migration and the small boats, the more he fails to demonstrate progress, the more insecure and anxious the British people feel, the better Richard Tice and Reform will do. Reform is now matching its national poll ratings on the ground, at actual elections, and may yet find that rating inching upwards, especially if Nigel Farage returns.

And then came the latest data on the dire state of the economy, which confirms Britain is in recession and suffering the longest hit to living standards since records began, in 1955. Contrary to Sunak’s pledge to deliver economic growth, this week we learned that throughout his first year in office Britain’s economy grew by just 0.1%, while GDP per capita —which adjusts for population growth — fell by 0.7%.

This, too, will prompt many voters to ask Sunak some tough questions. Where is the growth you promised? Where is the strong economy? And where is the growth the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and countless other experts told us would surely arrive if Britain opened its doors to unprecedented immigration?

The answer is it’s nowhere to be seen, partly because rather than deliver the high-skill, high-wage, highly-selective, and highly productive immigration the Tories have been promising since Brexit they’ve instead delivered low-skill, low-wage, non-selective, and unproductive immigration from outside Europe, which has been shown to be a net fiscal cost rather than a net benefit to Western economies.

Instead of reforming our broken economy, instead of moving away from importing cheap workers to keep big business happy, to keep profits and consumption high and labour costs low, Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt and the Tories have just doubled down on the same status-quo these voters thought they had rejected in 2016.

And so, unsurprisingly, more and more of them are turning off and tuning out. Just look at the rates of turnout at the latest by-elections. Labour and Keir Starmer are not setting Britain on fire, far from it; the Tories are staying home.

These voters aren’t idiots. They know they’ve been led down the garden path by a Conservative government and a Conservative prime minister which have routinely overpromised and underdelivered. These voters want decent economic growth and an economic model which prioritises British people. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories have given them more of the same. These voters want much lower and manageable rates of immigration. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories keep putting mass migration on steroids. And these voters want strong and secure borders and a government which prioritises the security of the British people. But Rishi Sunak and the Tories have lost control of our borders, largely because they refuse to reform laws and leave conventions which make it impossible to remove illegal migrants and foreign nationals who commit crime, as we saw with the shocking case of Abdul Ezedi.

What is clear is that the longer this goes on the better the Reform party and the worse the Tories will do. That was, essentially, the lesson of the 2010s with the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Brexit Party. When you ignore the wishes of your core supporters, when you treat them with contempt, when you promise them one thing only to do something else entirely, they will soon find another political home. And that’s exactly what they’re doing today, by switching in growing numbers to the Reform party —as I warned they would— or simply by giving up on politics altogether. Ordinarily, of course, you might have expected the party to see all this coming —to learn the lessons of the last decade and to grasp the critical importance of delivering on the promises they made to voters. But instead the very opposite appears to be happening. Perhaps it’s time we put the adults back in charge?