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British politics is now unconnected to power – we need leaders who understand this

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We should look to candidates who prioritise things they can actually do something about

Politics is fundamentally about power, one would think. Liz Truss barely had any when she arrived; now she has gone. Sunak has a little, but not a lot, more. Boris had it in spades in December 2019, but had lost it by earlier this year. Elsewhere I have written about the extent to which Cameron’s 2015 election victory represents something of a modern high, by mandate and power, albeit subsequently wasted.

Yet the politics of the UK these days is largely reminding me of the quote, usually misattributed to Kissinger, that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low”, aka Sayre’s Law. The fact is that, like academics eyeing each other warily across the High Table (Maurice Bowra’s adage that he felt “more dined against than dining” was just such an exposition), politicians of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are now squabbling over an ever-diminishing realm of authority, and this should impact electoral choices.

The Truss-Kwarteng debacle a few weeks ago demonstrates the limitations of what an “independent” medium-sized country actually are. Whilst on the face of it we can deplore financial markets and globalisation, and say to ourselves that this happens even to the greatest powers – Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform in 1994 foundered “fucking bond traders” – we also know that size matters. Taking on the financial markets as a large economy is different to taking one on as a small one. This is a rather Manichean world and Britain is showing itself to have neared the dividing line.

Of course, this could all have been better managed and the specifics of the Truss administration made a bad situation worse. But with Sunak coming in, we can judge whether simply a more articulate and deft touch would make the difference, much as Leopold II succeeded Joseph’s reforms in the 1790s. In fact, he will not, because Sunak understands precisely that Britain can ill-afford to operate outside the bounds of economic convention dictated to us, from the major institutions via the capital markets. Britain cannot have a truly independent monetary or fiscal policy, and Sunak will not want to test this again. This is because of two factors: first, Britain simply is not big enough, with an economic hinterland of adequate heft, to support Sterling and the government borrowing markets on its own. It is almost uniquely globalised in terms of its financing and the shift to this model in recent decades (see my previous note on exchange rates) means that Brexit or not, this will not improve. Secondly, Britain is buffeted about by two economic forces – the EU and the US – who do carry their weight. Interest rates in both will effectively dictate British interest rates; the only scope for freedom are in those occasional periods of divergence between the two:

Source: IMF database, figures annual

Interest rates are of course only one lever of economic power (albeit an important one in a financialised economy); but the recent reaction to Kwarteng’s budget shows that fiscal tools are equally to be judged by the narrow minds of financiers of little imagination, and it was not only the exchange rate that collapsed for a time, but also the cost of borrowing which rose (Clinton’s “bond traders” in action). The notions that Britain could just “do its own thing” was always fanciful, at least without accompanying “pain” which no politicians are as yet prepared for.

So what does all this mean? Well for me, as an active Conservative Party campaigner and even one-time candidate, it means thinking about leaders who will actually will do something because they are focused on areas which a domestic agenda can still influence. Truss vs Sunak was a false dichotomy because neither promised actionable agendas. I supported Kemi during the last leadership contest, first because I agree with her, and secondly because those areas were one a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland can actually do something about.

I am more or less talking about kulturkampf in a broad sense. Readers of this blog will know that I prioritise issues of identity above most other things because nation-building is both important and something of a lost art in the globalisation age. Kemi’s most impressive speech for me was her response to the House during Black History Month in 2020, where she laid out some very obvious but important points about British culture:

“Our history is our own; it is not America’s. Too often, those who campaign against racial inequality import wholesale a narrative and assumptions that have nothing to do with this country’s history and have no place on these islands. Our police force is not their police force. Since its establishment by Robert Peel, our police force has operated on the principle of policing by consent. It gives me tremendous pride to live, in 2020, in a nation where the vast majority of our police officers are still unarmed.

On the history of black people in Britain, again, our history of race is not America’s. Most black British people who came to our shores were not brought here in chains, but came voluntarily because of their connections to the UK and in search of a better life. I should know: I am one of them. We have our own joys and sorrows to tell. From the Windrush generation to the Somali diaspora, it is a story that is uniquely ours. If we forget that story and replace it with an imported Americanised narrative of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, we erase the history of not only black Britain, but of every other community that has contributed to society.”

I commend everyone to watch this.

We can debate the specifics of her message here, but the important point is that she can campaign and do something about this. There is a culture war to be won, through the media, through institutions, through agency capture and other machinations if we really want. These are all within the remit of a leader. What she cannot do anything about, is bring interest rates into the realm of fairness for savers and the hard working rather than constantly inflating domestic household debt. At least, not for now – although if you get the identity question right, at some point down the line you can begin to ask the people for the sacrifice needed to finally rectify the economy and bring it back to something which serves the population and not the other way around.

Britain needs to break out of its mindset that it still carries the kind of status and power which allows for true independence. It is this wrongheadedness which led to one specific strand of Brexit support for which I have no sympathy whatsoever – the Dan Hannan school of “Singapore on Thames”. If these politicians spent half as much of their time trying to change things that are changeable, instead of pursuing doctrinaire dreams of economic engineering, Brexit might actually be made to work. In the meantime, the economic shackles we live under continue to demonstrate what a poor economic choice Brexit was. Better panem et circenses.

How Labour continue to be over-represented

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As an addendum to my previous post, I have been poring over the numbers again and it struck me as notable that the Tories, despite never having dropped below 30% of vote share in modern times, have often won fewer than 200 seats whereas Labour, despite having dropped below 30% on at least two occasions (1983 and 2010), have never breached this psychological nadir. This year, again, they were forecast initially by the exit poll to weigh in at around 191 seats, but somehow managed to scrape in at 202 in the end.

In any first-past-the-post system, the winners will always benefit disproportionately and this is as true of the US electoral college as it is of Canadian ridings or British constituencies. For instance, people complain about Trump’s electoral college over-representation in the last presidential election in 2016 but forget that Obama benefited from a vote-to-college exaggeration twice before him, as did Bush and Clinton etc. This is simply an inherent function of this kind of system, and might be considered a sort of “winner’s dividend”. However what also appears to be true is that in Britain, the Tories have traditionally always had to “work harder” for their majorities than Labour, the result of a structural and psephological imbalance between the two parties’ support.

To highlight this, I have looked at how many votes per seat each party has had to win for their large majorities, comparing the Tory landslides under Thatcher and Boris, vs the Labour landslides under Blair. Even adjusting for total vote (in 2019 terms), the Tory majorities were much harder to come by:

Number of votes required per seat won by landslide winners (thousands, 2019 basis)

Majority winners

Note: in order to create a like-for-like comparison, I have adjusted the raw votes per seat upwards to the 2019 total vote numbers since the electorate has grown larger in absolute terms over time

To turn this around, if we look at how poorly the losers of those elections fared, one can see how under-represented or not they are in defeat. Again, the numbers show Tory defeats being much worse than Labour ones, which manifests itself in how the Conservative Party was at below 200 seats for the whole period between 1997 – 2010, something even Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn have not managed.

Number of votes required per seat won by landslide losers (thousands, 2019 basis)

Majority losers

Lastly, I look at the “tipping point”, in other words how the parties fare when close to each other – for instance in the two hung parliaments that we have had this decade. Extraordinarily, in both cases the Tories, despite being the winners of each election, still had to accumulate more votes per seat than the defeated Labour Party, turning the entire concept of a “winner’s dividend” on its head. By way of comparison, John Major’s slender absolute majority in 1992 only just saw the Tories needing fewer seats than Labour.

Number of votes per seat required in close elections (thousands, 2019 basis)

Close elections

At the very least this shows that the tipping point is well above the natural 50/50 threshold between the two parties. With the Tories having won a swathe of seats across the northern Labour heartlands, and with the impending promise of boundary changes, this could evolve somewhat; until it does though, Labour can relax in the knowledge that as a starting point, the electoral system still somewhat favours them.

The long arc of Tory progress (and why the SNP can be ignored)

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Cameron Boris

On election night, I – unlike some around me (they know who they are) – was not losing my head. I had reasonable confidence of a substantial Tory majority, and had even put my money where my mouth was – being a buyer of a Tory majority at 44 in the spread betting markets. I had one central thesis: that the British electorate does not produce hung parliaments when there is a clear choice before them. Rather, hung parliaments only occur when the parties cannot distinguish themselves from one another (1974, 2010), or when they are unknown quantities (2017, pre-war). By this logic, Boris was in a good position to win outright.

This was despite the best attempts by the media to misread the polls. Like sub-par generals, journalists are always doomed to fight the last war, and the pollster who did “best” last time always exercises a disproportionate influence on their discourse the next time around. This year it was the YouGov MRP’s turn for lazy writers to place too much faith in, never remembering that no one pollster has ever been the “most accurate” twice in a row. In the event, the polls-of-polls were all broadly correct.

Of course there are other points of note about the Tory performance. On the one hand, there can surely be no denying Theresa May her contribution to breaking the Red Wall, and perhaps it really needed two heaves to get there; on the other hand, the media narrative on Boris being unpopular was I think well wide of the mark. Amongst key voter demographics, Boris was a positive, not a negative, and not just in contrast to Corbyn. Anyone who witnessed the acceptance speech by Ian Levy, the winning candidate in Blyth Valley, or to the reactions in Workington or Darlington, cannot doubt how central Boris was and how well he played on the doorstep as a loveable scamp who transcended class in his determination for Brexit.

Yet hidden amongst all the shock and turmoil lies a more profound truth: the Tories have been quietly improving their standing amongst the electorate for the last twenty years. Indeed the party have improved on their share of the vote at every election since 1997. They have also improved on their absolute numbers of votes since 2001 (the one surprise here being the considerable popularity of John Major even in 1997).

Conservative Party vote share and vote totals since 1997

Tory progress

This has not always translated into increased numbers of seats, due to the vagaries of the electoral system. 2017 saw Theresa May lose seats even as she surged to the highest vote share since Thatcher’s first election in 1979. William Hague, too, managed only a single net gain in 2001 despite a whole percentage point increase in votes. But set against this is the extraordinary fact that the party have now managed twice, in three elections, to work its way out of a hung parliament and back into a majority – a particularly difficult feat.

The cherry on the cake, of course, is that for those of us who lived through the dark days of the 1990s, we live to see a Tory government now likely to rule for at least fourteen years, and maybe nineteen. And whereas every other administration has won their biggest victories at or near the beginning (1945, 1966, 1983, 1997) only to see a long slow decline, somehow we have endeavoured to our greatest moment so far at the fourth time of asking, after a decade of being in power and all the scrutiny that comes with it. This is unprecedented and we are I think, allowed just a moment of self-satisfaction.

Majorities won by successive single party governments since 1945

Majorities

The one dark cloud being touted is Scotland. It will prove impossible for Boris not to yield to the SNP for a second referendum, they say. Yet for my own part, I reject this media interpretation. We should be clear that the SNP, whilst doing well in absolute terms, underperformed their own expectations and their previous results, and ended the night a slightly disappointed party. At 45%, their vote share was notably lower than the milestone 50% that they achieved in 2015, at the height of their post-referendum popularity. In seats, too, they failed to obtain the psychologically important 50 seats which they had set for themselves, and which would have cost Ruth Davidson a chilly outing in Loch Ness.

SNP and Conservative Party vote shares since 2015 vs support for Scottish independence

SNP

Source: Scottish independence polling from YouGov / The Times

Reading overlying themes onto partisan performances has its limitations. Reading Brexit results onto Tory or Labour support is impractical, for instance. But this is less so for one-issue parties such as the SNP or the Brexit Party. Their secular decline in their vote share since 2015 reflects the commensurate decline in popularity of the Scottish independence proposition over the same period. Much as the SNP have made headlines with the help of simplistic reporting, they are actually worse off than they have been in the recent past.

And here, given the success of my previous theory, is my second one: the popularity of independence in Scotland correlates directly with the efficacy of government in Westminster – not the nature of that government or its political colours, just plain ability to govern. Hence why the build up to 2014, with a coalition in place, led to one peak; the minority of 2017-2019 another (as were the mid-to-late 1990s). But I predict that as Boris gets his feet under the table and gets on with life, Brexit included, Scottish sentiment will begin to recede. Boris need not pay such calls for independence any heed, and all credit to him, he seems to be headed this way.

Support for Scottish independence (1978 – 2012)

Westminster effifacy

The progress that the Conservative Party has made since the mid-1990s is a tribute to various leaders, each in their way: William Hague for his “night shift”; Michael Howard, the man who arguably saved the Conservative Party with his performance in 2005; David Cameron and his decontamination; May and the recognition of the new tectonic plates of class and economics; and finally Boris, who with his ambiguity over Brexit somehow captured the skeptical but generous spirit of the age. Even Iain Duncan Smith was a useful placeholder. The fact is that this 80 seat majority is a tribute not just to Boris’ political skills, but rather to a long, slow, and painful rebuild which for all its highs and lows, has seen indomitable progress towards power. Just what the Conservative Party has always been about.

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A slightly self-congratulatory update (2 Jan 2020)

First, it seems this theme of long term progress has been picked up by various commentators, such as Martin Kettle at the Guardian, who notes that:

“The Tories have now formed four governments in a row. Remarkably, they have increased their share of the vote for the last six elections. They have 200 more MPs today than in 1997. Those who sit for seats in the north and Midlands have got most of the attention, and rightly so. But the tightening Tory grip in parts of the south that were once marginal also matters. The Tory advance across Wales is dramatic. And they remain a player in Scotland, something Labour can barely claim. They are UK-wide again. And they now have a new generation of MPs who can shape their party.”

Secondly, there was an interesting graphic from the Financial Times talking about the Tories and the working class:

However whilst the FT was trying to make the point about Tory inroads, much of this graphic simply demonstrates the underlying improvement in performance, which would naturally eat into traditional Labour voters since Conservative success basically equates to Labour decline. Either way, the choice of 1997 as the starting point is notable and the story a component of what I outlined above in the original post.

Quid est veritas?

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PROD-JEREMY-CORBYN-THERESA-MAY

It would have been nice if I could have kicked off this blog with a profound, far-sighted piece about global imbalance in politics, trade and governance. However, circumstances dictate that now is the moment to comment on this forthcoming UK general election, and specifically, my own intentions as a long-standing Conservative Party campaigner and former local government candidate.

I have decided to abstain from this year’s General Election. Since I am living abroad, I will not bother to spoil my ballot physically, but will not cast my vote. For a few of my acquaintances this has come as a surprise but, I suspect, not a shock.

First, I should be clear that I do not support Corbyn or the Labour Party’s electoral prospects. Corbyn himself is a weak-willed do-good wannabe who will always prefer the interests of foreigners to his own people – the only really long-standing political principle he has held. The idea that his manifesto has been “costed” is an absurd joke, rather akin to initial presentations on the Millennium Dome. Furthermore, aside from the a tiny kernel of an interesting policy in the form of the land value tax, he has demonstrated very little capacity to even identify, let alone tackle, the deep-rooted issues facing Britain today beyond Brexit. Thus he has offered nothing ideological or technocratic, to solve them.

The problem is, neither has Theresa May. Those issues which we face include median wage growth, house pricing, job creation and above all sustainable financing for SMEs, the real backbone of industrial and post-industrial economies. When we look at countries at their most successful – the US post war, Japan in the 1980s, Germany today – the Mittelstand has always been the most important component of the economy; and when we are surprised by the durability of some otherwise basket-case countries like France or Italy, it is their own SME sector which is saving them.

For the first time since I have been politically conscious, the leadership of the Conservative Party does not appear in its marrow to “get it”. May and her closest advisors do not even seem curious, for the most part – there is barely anything in the Tory manifesto that shows an understanding of how (small) business works. Being marginally less harmful than Corbyn on this is not really good enough. Neither is not understanding that the long term nexus of house pricing and finance is unsustainable. This emptiness is a dangerous thing, because political choices have rarely been about “funding / cutting public services” or “stimulating growth/ taxing it” as standalone options; they are about balance of priorities. Yet we now have a choice between two parties, neither of whom offer any such equilibrium.

In the background, I have also been staunchly pro-European and remain so. Even before the manifesto launch, the cognitive dissonance in rewarding the Conservative Party with my support this year may have been too much. I needed at least one opportunity to protest against the way the referendum was called, how it was campaigned for and how Brexit policy has since been handled (and staffed, wrt David Davis, Liam Fox et al). But over the course of the campaign this nagging concern has spilled over into something altogether more irrepressible and seen me for the first time since 2001, not campaigning on the doorstep nor even trying to persuade others to vote.

It is a poor choice of options for dinner, and a shame that this inn has fallen into such disrepair. We can only hope that tomorrow’s menu might be better.