THE VOTERS ARE REVOLTING

John Boydell - Friday, 20 October 2023

As always, I’m not on anybody’s “side” politically, just trying to champion common sense.

The voters are revolting. ‘What do we want?’ ‘Better living standards!’ ‘When do we want them?’ ‘Now!’.

If you want to win elections, you need the voters to be feeling their lives are getting better, not worse. There are other factors, of course, but this is the big one. Fail to deliver then common sense and history indicate that your days in office are numbered. Naturally, citizens will ask themselves whether they are better off than they were when you came into office on the back of policies and promises to make them better off than they were before. In this case, the reflection period to compare then to now will be around fourteen years by the next election. Real wages during that time have not risen for the vast majority, while inflation has been at its highest level for decades, with a similar tale in relation to the tax burden. As I’ve mentioned a number of times, the country is broke, with little sign of the economy growing meaningfully to help us pay our way. A tax giveaway prior to an election is a usual card for a chancellor to play but that’s looking a tough one to deliver, with Jeremy Hunt repeatedly sending out “difficult decisions” messages including to a section of his party shouting loudly for tax cuts. He’s at the forefront of the figures and they will be awful. It would be fascinating, if we had the chance, to contrast his private off-the-record commentary about the British economy with the rather upbeat one he presents when speaking in public. The IFS is blunt in its recent assessment, saying the UK will fall into a “moderate recession” in 2024 and is in a “horrible fiscal bind”, code for you can forget tax cuts and increased public spending. Paul Johnson of the IFS comments "The price of our high levels of indebtedness, failure to stimulate growth and high borrowing costs is likely to be a protracted period of high taxes and tight spending." Exactly. That, regrettably for the new-improved [sorry about my predecessors] Rishi Sunak is the launch pad for the likely 2024 election, not the wished for feel-good combination of falling unemployment, growth, improving public services, rising house prices, lower taxes and rising living standards. So, if you’re PM and can’t fight on your party’s record, what do you do? Simple: a) reinvent yourself as “new”; and b) paint the other lot as worse than your lot (and so more dangerous to vote for). The problem with that is, firstly, the Prime Minister has been deeply involved with much that the public perceive has gone wrong and, secondly, Labour looks like a safe(ish) place, having distanced itself so far from Jeremy Corbyn and his “far left” offer that was so comprehensively rejected in 2019’s general election.

What do Labour and the Liberal Democrats make of all this? They have plenty of bullets to fire that will find traction with much of the public: economic failure; high inflation; record taxes; rolling strikes; record NHS waiting lists; rule-breaking; struggling public services; care system chaos; increased immigration; increased asylum seekers and so on. They’ll both be turning up the volume on those messages.

Logically, the Liberal Democrats will be looking to gain seats in places that are historically Tory but where there are opportunities to present an alternative to those that couldn’t bring themselves to vote Labour. They’ll have some success, perhaps even making enough gains to hold the balance of power when all the results are in. The test for them, having gained a bigger presence and so louder voice in Parliament, is whether they can look more relevant than the generally well-meaning but rather wishy-washy party that so many of the public see. Many of them will remember the damage that was done by the previous pact with the Conservatives under David Cameron, when blame attached to them. If a Lib/Lab pact comes about, the Liberal Democrats are likely to be more thoughtful about the scenarios that could develop. But, what’s the point of politics if you can’t change things? If Labour gains a majority, then Ed Davey and his colleagues will need to up their game, and consistently, if they want to exercise influence.

Labour will be debating its election strategy. It’s recent conference was well-managed but didn’t break a lot of new ground. It wasn’t presented as such but the effective policy of keeping a low(ish) profile and letting the Tories damage themselves looks like continuing. It feels a bit safety-first and, arguably, it would serve the party well to be bolder in what it puts forward to the electorate, who are likely to be receptive to what seems sensible, thought- through, economically literate and socially empathetic. The risk, of course, is putting something forward that doesn’t comprise those things, fueling the inevitable Conservative attack that Labour will be worse than what people know from the Tories. The answer is to think things through, analyse and cost them, for then presenting them to the electorate can give sense of confidence and “grip”, in contrast to the demonstrable lack of grip on show in recent years. If Labour has a majority, it will have a honeymoon period and it can argue for a while that lack of progress is due to having to “sort out the mess” left by the Tories, until the batteries start to fade on that line. The reality is that it will face the whole raft of issues currently facing the government: they will not go away and will significantly hem in the room for manoeuvre of whoever is in power. There are no radical solutions (think Liz Truss) but there are opportunities to make incremental changes; think of a flight of steps, with a step at a time allowing the summit to be achieved. It will require a continuance of the discipline Labour has recently shown as an organisation; there will be plenty of siren voices offering simple (and sometimes populist) solutions on the back of demands for instant changes of course. They would have to be resisted, with the step-by-step approach allowing small but demonstrable gains and that comforting sense of “grip”. Do not follow the course of over-promising and under-delivering, which has been around for some years. Work out what you can do, explain it and deliver it. Whoever forms the next government, get real with the voters and they may give you a real chance in return.