THE BIG READ: Why the Conservatives are on course to lose two general elections next year
The current Tory record will serve as a millstone around the neck of the party going into the 2024 general election and also the election after that in 2028 or 2029
A YEAR or so after Labour’s landslide 1997 election victory I had lunch with one of the members of the previous, routed Conservative Cabinet.
He had been one of a small group considered a likely future party leader and was still of an age where a return to high office one day seemed eminently possible, though nervousness was starting to exhibit itself in Tory circles about Tony Blair’s continuing giant opinion poll lead.
He set out his thinking as follows: “The electorate still doesn’t want to hear from us. They’ve got a new government and want to give it a fair crack of the whip. There’s no point us expecting to cut through until the second half of the parliament.”
We kicked around that idea for a bit before I said: “What if this phenomenon of the electorate not wanting to hear from you lasts up until the next general election and beyond?”
“Well, yes, that’s quite possible,” he replied. And as you will recall, dear reader, this is what happened. The Tories under William Hague never got a look in, save for a few days in the autumn of the year 2000 when farmers, truckers and others protested about the price of fuel and there was the briefest of spikes in the party’s poll rating. They went on to lose the 2001 election almost as badly as the 1997 one, in effect setting Blair up for an automatic third win in 2005.
Rather like his beloved Arsenal FC, sitting top of the Premier League at the time of writing, Sir Keir Starmer has won nothing yet. But the list of reasons to doubt that he will win big next year is now vanishingly small, pretty much now consisting solely of the idea that the electorate may yet somehow get “spooked” by the idea of Labour running the country again. Almost nobody is suggesting that the Tories will have much to present to the electorate next autumn - if that is when the election takes place - by way of positive achievements.
This should lead us to start thinking of the longer-term consequences in the likely event that voters are not sufficiently spooked by Labour to prevent it from winning a thumping majority. Should we expect a half decade disaster, such as Labour delivered between 1974 and 1979, or a ten-year tenure? Such crystal ball-gazing is naturally an inexact science given the unpredictable flow of “events” and then there is always the prospect militant trade unionism (of a middle class variety this time round) wrecking a Labour government. But there is no getting away from the fact that the political circumstances of right now point to at least a two-term Labour administration.
For starters, Labour seems on course to win very big, leaving the Tories facing the challenge of turning over enormous numbers of seats in the subsequent election in order to get back to power. But more significant is that the Conservative record on the key issues which decide elections and motivate right-of-centre voters is so horrendously bad that it will not be soon forgotten.
On living standards, taxation levels, public finances, core public services and immigration of both the legal and illegal variety the Tories have become a byword for lamentable failure. They have been unlucky in this parliamentary term to run smack into the first order crises of Covid and Ukraine while simultaneously attempting to manage the Brexit transition. But they have presided over rocketing inflation which eroded living standards, frozen tax thresholds which are doing the same, monumental deficits, surging NHS waiting lists, plummeting accessibility of GPs, collapsing police and criminal justice system performance and crumbling transport and housing infrastructure which obviously cannot cope with the burdens placed upon it by our greatly-expanded population.
This population growth has been fuelled by stratospheric levels of legal immigration that nobody would have believed had they been foretold back in 2019 when the Conservatives fought an election under the flagship promise that “overall numbers will come down”. Allowing employers to under-cut pay rates via importing cheap foreign labour was made an official policy by the Tories amid a massive liberalisation of every migratory route, from student and student-dependants visas to special schemes for Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine, from marital routes for South Asians to a “shortage occupation” list containing some of the least essential employment categories imaginable. Then there has been illegal migration, most excruciatingly visible via the Channel boats phenomenon which the Tories have spent more than four years promising to stop and then not stopping.
And all of this has been (under) delivered accompanied by plentiful dollops of sleaze from within the Conservative parliamentary party, from Paterson to Pincher and on through those MPs chasing sex, drugs and money more in the manner of a drill music posse than a responsible governing outfit.
So how good will Labour have to be for the public to decide they are worth a second term around about 2028 or 2029? Not very is the answer. On economic growth, living standards, taxation levels and the state of the main public services, Labour can be distinctly average and still truthfully claim to have outperformed the current Tory shower. Incredibly, the same is even more true on the emotive – and for Labour potentially fatal – subject of immigration. Keir Starmer could preside over average annual net migration levels of half a million and still look voters in the eye and tell them he had brought immigration levels down from those overseen by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. The more likely net inflow he will in fact oversee – around 300,000 a year would be my guess – would once have been kryptonite for Labour in the eyes of working class voters. Now it seems like a stable and responsible number in comparison to what we have seen in the second half of the current Tory governing term.
On illegal immigration, one reads that Starmer is now pondering his own offshore processing scheme for asylum seekers. Such a policy will not prove a decisive deterrent against the Channel boats unless it is accompanied by much lower approval rates when cases are finally determined (Starmer is not envisaging a Rwanda-style permanent transfer scheme). But again this speaks to a Tory managerial failure which has seen those approval rates soar to around 80 per cent, so it should not be beyond the wit of Labour to get them down a fair bit.
Clearly, we are running ahead of ourselves here. But if we agree that the 2024 election is already a write-off for the Tories, then the one after that is the first at which they could recover. And I am just pointing out that the balance of probability suggests that
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