Politics at the end of 2021
By: John Kell
Tags: Covid 19, British Politics, Boris Johnson, UK Politics, British History

Over on my Substack, Policy Pulse, I restrict myself to addressing public policy questions quite strictly, and not straying into the tempting intrigue of politics (do subscribe for free if you’d like a weekly email looking at a selection of policy issues across a wide range of sectors). Here on Medium is where I very occasionally write blog posts about politics that mostly turn out to be wrong. So, here’s one of those.

The prompt for this piece is the appalling situation we are now in, where the UK government has failed to take an essential policy decision in the face of a crisis threatening the lives of thousands of UK citizens, and the wellbeing of many, many more. Unlike the devolved administrations, the UK government has decided not to introduce social restrictions (in a Cabinet meeting on December 20th), and to provide only some support for businesses facing a substantial downturn.

On the policy substance, they might just get lucky. Possibly a combination of the omicron variant causing less severe illness and transmission being lower than feared (eg because people are self-regulating, plus the booster campaign starting to bite), will mean there is not a large volume of deaths from COVID and also from other causes untreated because of the NHS running out of capacity. But that’s not the point. Clearly, it’s the wrong policy call: crossing your fingers and hoping for the best at a moment like this cannot be justified: the correct option was to introduce restrictions and save lives, even if it later turned out that not so many were at risk as there could have been. Any other course of action is a grossly irresponsible gamble with public policy for almost unimaginable stakes, of the sort that a capable government in a functional democracy should never be making.

So, how did we politically come to this point, and where might we go next?

The parallel with 1931

The obvious comparison is the crisis in 1931 that saw the Cabinet of Ramsey MacDonald refuse to sanction a package of spending cuts that a very firm and clear consensus view across all policy experts viewed as necessary (whether they actually were, just like whether the social restrictions will be truly necessary this time round, is not the point). The Cabinet collapsed and MacDonald ended up forming a National Government to address the crisis, remaining as Prime Minister of a largely Conservative administration, with Labour cast into opposition.

The dilemma this time round was similar: the policy consensus was for more restrictions, with Jonathan Van Tam and Chris Whitty presenting that case to the Cabinet. But it was clear that, just like Labour in 1931, the Conservative Party generally, and many Cabinet ministers in particular, would not consent to the measures, for reasons every bit as ideological as those of Labour politicians in 1931. But this time the outcome was different: the Prime Minister sided with the ideologues, and the government as a whole refused the jump.

The immediate reasons for the contrasting outcomes are not hard to fathom. Unlike MacDonald in 1931, the Prime Minister is sufficiently cowardly and unprincipled that he will try to save his skin by simply not attempting to implement the necessary measures, no matter what the consequences for the country he governs. Indeed, the Cabinet meeting on the 20th appears not to have been one where any decision to implement measures was ever going to be made, but more an exercise in making ministers feel listened-to in the wake of the resignation of David Frost. And added to the failings of the current Prime Minister, politics is much more tribal: the Government will prioritise (what it perceives as) its political interests over the wellbeing of the nation; and we are clearly in an era, as also shown in 2019 as the Brexit process slid into chaos, where no politicians from the two main parties feel able or inclined to consider a national government of any sort with any seriousness.

One question arising from the non-decision is whether the government will be punished for it electorally. If the best-case scenario happens and Christmas is “saved” without a major uptick in deaths or more severe restrictions in the new year, it might even be rewarded for it. But even if there is a serious collapse in NHS performance, and many deaths from both COVID and shortcomings in care for other patients, previous episodes of the same have not appeared to move the dial much in the polls. Then again, the story of polls in recent years has often been that they are very stable, until suddenly they aren’t; it’s equally possible to imagine the recent drop in Conservative support being quickly recovered as persisting or even deepening.

The Conservatives’ wild ride

This brings us to the internal dynamics of the Conservative Party. These are, after all, what has been driving the country into increasingly bizarre and dangerous situations over the last decade, with a totally needless running-down of public services and all the resulting harms including actual falls in life-expectancy, followed by Brexit and everything that is flowing from it, and now the current and previous failures over COVID-19, which have caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

The most important development may be that what was the Conservative Party’s split over the European Union is now a split over how to handle COVID. Or perhaps more accurately: just when the EU split appeared to have been decisively solved by Brexit (with the Tories on the losing side being marginalised or even forced out of the party), the split has re-opened over COVID. Even that doesn’t quite capture it: the split is really the same tension between interventionist and laissez-faire leanings that has always existed within the party (wet versus dry Tories, to use another classification), and in fact it continues to fester over Brexit itself, with some Tories feeling it has not delivered the low-tax, low-regulation settlement they were expecting. I’m not convinced by the argument that just because this or that particular politician is on one side of the divide over Brexit but the other over COVID that somehow it’s not the same split: these things are never totally neat, and the pattern of which politicians are in, or in the orbit of, both the European Research Group and the COVID Rese- sorry, Recovery Group, is clear enough. This split has, in an impressive variety of ways, wrecked the premierships of four Conservative leaders to date, so its active continuation is bad news for Boris Johnson.

It’s possible to speculate plausibly both that Johnson might hang on for a remarkably long time, despite the apparent fractiousness within his party, and that he might be replaced in relatively short order (meaning, in 2022 — perhaps in time for his replacement to make the leader’s speech at the autumn’s party conference). Taking the more optimistic view of Johnson’s prospects (from his point of view) first, I’m cautious about leaping to the received wisdom that the Tories are ruthless at knifing their leaders. They aren’t. They didn’t ditch Major in the mid-90s — tellingly, a leader who had won them a somewhat unexpected general election victory. They made an almighty meal of ditching May, failing to use the processes they had for that exact process and eventually having to improvise new rules and processes on the hoof to pressure her out — and she was a leader who apparently nobody at all thought was any good, and who had a track record of carelessly losing a parliamentary majority. How much harder are they likely to find it, in practice, to ditch a leader who won them a thumping majority only two years earlier, at a time when apparently nobody else could? Even if a confidence vote of Tory MPs gets called, he might well survive it; in that scenario, would there really be such determined efforts to force him out, or would the matter be regarded as settled, at least for a time?

But, looking at the argument in the other direction: plenty of MPs and much of the public can now see Johnson for what he is: utterly unfit to hold office, at a time of national crisis. A Conservative Party that has the experience of binning May fresh in its memory, and might not be keen on another prolonged period of fudge and uncertainty under an ever-weakening leader, might find itself running out of patience surprisingly quickly and decide that if a confidence vote is called it would be best to settle the matter quickly.

Polling is currently bad for Johnson, but that doesn’t automatically spell disaster: things can change. But if the local elections are a 1990s-style bloody nose, his prospects might darken quickly, just as May’s did after the 2019 European elections. It’s widely held, and plausibly so, that Johnson’s relationship with is party, and particularly with its MPs, is highly transactional: they installed him because he could win. If he looks like being able to maintain the electoral coalition that brought the 2019 majority, he could still be in good shape. But if it starts to look like his Red Wall trick was only good for one election, and the electoral coalition he assembled simply cannot be utilised again, his usefulness will clearly be over. Now, that would be a bold prediction, given the long-term trends in Labour support declining that led to the collapse of the Red Wall in the first place. But if enough people think he can’t repeat it, then clearly he is of no value to the party and binning him off becomes an easy call.

How is Johnson approaching this political situation? Currently, he seems to be attempting to give the Tory hardliners what they want. This does not have a history of ending well: their track record is simply of demanding more and more and more. Indeed, the extent to which they appear to be over-reaching now, having tasted victory with Brexit, is probably a key dynamic for the coming months. They really do appear to have become unhinged. Ultimately, the public likes being kept safe; yes they didn’t want Christmas cancelled, but looking beyond that immediate context the lockdowns and other restrictions so despised by the Research Group Tendency have been staggeringly popular and well-supported policies. More broadly, the extremists are seriously unhappy with the entire approach of the Government, seeing it as high-tax and heavy-handed. Again, they appear to be over-reaching: while a Brexit vote meant different things to different people, a low-tax, low-regulation, small-state form of Brexit very clearly does not command an electoral majority.

If we end up finding out the hard way that new social restrictions were, and still are, necessary, things might come to a head very quickly: if Labour pile public pressure on by demanding restrictions in line with those implemented in the devolved nations, Johnson may have no option other than to bring the matter to Cabinet again — lining up the 1931 challenge for him to negotiate a second time — and, if it gets that far, to the Commons. It’s not out of the question, though I think it’s more likely he will prioritise saving his political skin over any ideas of governing the country responsibly, and maintain a course that does not involve an effective policy intervention.

He might only be buying himself a bit of time by ducking the question, however. Suppose there is a political cost to the ongoing cop-out, with public opinion being swayed by a further collapse in the NHS and yet more avoidable deaths and harm (as noted above, not a given by any means), then he’s in trouble anyway: the party could still knife him because of tanking popularity caused by his pandering to their own ideological extremism.

As ever, process is your valentine: both of Boris’s predecessors managed to find procedurally novel ways to be forced out of office, so maybe he will too. But yielding on a matter of principle or in the face of mounting pressure doesn’t seem like his style: it’s hard to see anything other than a rough landing for him, at the hands of either the Cabinet, his MPs, or ultimately the electorate. If he really does lose MPs, confidence vote survival or no, a Thatcher-style Cabinet putsch (backed by a meaningful threat of resignations) doesn’t seem at all implausible as an endgame. If he can hang on until the next election, threading his way between policy emergencies, public opinion and extremists on his own side, it will be an impressive political Houdini act.

Post-Johnson?

But if he is ditched, how would a Sunak or Truss administration tackle the same challenge of trying to get necessary policy choices past their extremist MPs? It may be that it wouldn’t have to: by the time a leadership election has been held, there might not be any further acute crisis phases of the pandemic. Let’s hope. But if the same problem were to confront one of those as PM, could a government in hock to the Research Group Tendency survive either taking yet another terrible decision, or doing the right thing?

Even assuming they can actually govern, what would the political prospects of a Sunak / Truss party be? Replacing their leader usually brings rewards for the Tories, though last time they moved to their fourth PM in a single stint in office, he proved to be the last in the run. Having a succession of PMs that last 2–3 years and then get ditched for being obviously useless is bound to dent a party’s brand. Could they retain the Red Wall seats and simultaneously fend off challenges in the Blue Wall under Truss or Sunak? The latter perhaps, but the former…? So the consideration comes back, in a rather circular way, to the question of whether the 2019 electoral coalition can be reassembled by anyone other than Boris, or even by him.

But we hit a more fundamental question here: what rules is politics running to now? With a party in office for at least 13 years by the next election, having won (more or less) four, the laws of political gravity are normally that the next election should be a difficult ask for them, at the very least. But politics has been operating oddly: if the post-Brexit realignment on cultural lines continues, and the Tories retain the Red Wall seats, or even flip the ones the Brexit Party saved for Labour last time, they could well hang on. I don’t think anyone is really confident about whether politics has reverted to something more like its normal or traditional patterns, or whether seeking guidance from past events for a still-developing new world is essentially a waste of time.

The Opposition

This brings us to Labour’s position. I was somewhat idly thinking initially about whether Starmer might be able to capitalise on a split in the Tories by calling for a national government (though this would only be sensible if there’s a Tory faction that might be willing to serve under him, and it’s hard to think who these might be from the current Commons). It seems implausible though, and Starmer has certainly not shown a propensity for any sort of bold political gambit.

Still, the basics of Labour’s position are that Starmer started with more MPs as Leader of the Opposition than Cameron did; his chances of becoming PM should, on paper, be reasonable. His critique of Johnson as un-serious, while not a fire and brimstone attack, looks like proving well-judged — more so than it did when he began it at this year’s Labour conference. Recent polling suggests that his steady approach to winning back the Red Wall, without throwing red meat to the excitable and extreme elements of his own party, might be starting to pay off. That said, it’s a sound criticism that Labour are not setting out a compelling stall or very clearly winning polling support other than by default — see Stephen Bush here, and John Curtice here. This might strengthen the argument within the Conservatives for ditching Johnson in the hope of clawing back support that has not attached itself firmly to Labour.

Another emerging characteristic of politics is that anti-Conservative voters are getting good at allocating their support under first past the post. The Lib Dems’ two big by-election wins this year have prompted some comparisons with the mid-90s, though I was surprised to hear David Runciman and Helen Thompson rejecting the comparison out of hand on Talking Politics, on the basis that Starmer faces greater obstacles to winning a majority. That’s true, but unlike Blair in 1994 he’s not starting from a position where he’s aiming to win one, realistically: working majorities for one party do not get replaced by working majorities for another in a single general election (a truth that many commentators failed to recognise when hyping Cameron’s chances before the 2010 election, or castigating him after it). Even a 1997-style swing, given where Labour are starting from, would probably garner them a bare majority rather than a landslide (and Starmer is no Blair, partly for the reasons given above of a lack of a clear positive vision; then again, a recent MRP projection did indeed suggest a Labour majority, however implausibly).

None of that means the comparison with the 90s isn’t worth making at all. The point about tactical voting being a threat to the Tories could well be a potent one. As the polls stand today, Labour picking up 20–30 seats and the Lib Dems picking up 15–25 wouldn’t seem totally fanciful, and would deprive the Tories of their majority. Indeed, it seems to me that a combination of the Coalition and Brexit have got the Lib Dems off the horns of the Kennedy-era dilemma of what sort of party they are, and brought them into play at the next election in the most meaningful way for over a decade: they can now present themselves as socially liberal, economically somewhat to the right of Labour, and anti-Brexit, which is a coherent pitch to liberal voters in relatively prosperous southern areas who would fight shy of voting Labour but are repelled by Johnsonian Toryism; but any idea of out-flanking Labour to the left, as a “real” social democratic party, which was feasible in the Blair era, is clearly no longer a sensible tack for the party to attempt. What might be more complicated for them is the understandable desire to win back their traditional Celtic Fringe heartlands; whether that’s compatible with the approach outlined above, or whether it risks diverting too much resource to no gain, would need an expert in the Lib Dems to judge. It’s also the case that the Lib Dems are not as handicapped in prosperous southern Remain-heavy seats by the prospect of a vote for them effectively putting Starmer in power as they were by the idea of putting Corbyn in power; Starmer’s cautious, dull approach makes the Lib Dems’ job easier, and the Tories’ harder in these seats.

Where Runciman and Thompson were more on the money is that the question of Labour’s potential dependence on the SNP will become live as soon as things start looking up for Labour; however, whether people will find it so concerning when contemplating voting Johnson out in favour of Starmer after 13 or 14 years of Tory government, as they did with Cameron vs Miliband after only five, remains to be seen. However, let’s not overlook other aspects of this: in the past, when Labour has been down on 200-odd seats, that has included large chunks of Scotland; having 200 seats that don’t include Scottish ones indicates that Labour has strengths in parts of England where it historically did not. Also, let’s not overlook the terrible bind that a hung parliament would put Nicola Sturgeon in: she would have no leverage over Starmer to secure a second referendum, as the second she acted to keep him out of office, she would be the Tories’ friend, and Scottish Labour would immediately have a compelling argument that if Scots want a say in Westminster, a vote for the SNP is a wasted vote (indeed, imagine if a hung parliament failed to install a Starmer government in this way, and a second election swiftly followed with the Tories still in office — it would surely be a bloodbath for the SNP). Conversely, the SNP being able to rail at a wicked Westminster government for denying them a referendum is their happy place and could sustain them in office ay Holyrood for many more years yet; Sturgeon should be salivating at the prospect, if she can keep the party together in such a scenario of course.

Conclusion

So, where does all that leave us? Well, God knows. Johnson may well be in unsurvivable trouble. The Conservatives may not be able to win led by him, but equally may not be able to win not led by him. They risk falling apart if they attempt to take precautions in the face of the omicron variant, and risk an electoral backlash if they don’t. Keir Starmer might just manage to carry the precious vase across the slippery floor this time. But then again, the Tories’ hardliners and their powerful allies in the press and elsewhere may be able to triumph again, and the Tories may find a way to renuite behind a common purpose, harness shifting dynamics in the electorate and swat another Labour leader. It seems too early to bet against such an outcome. But what’s not in doubt is that the Conservatives’ political considerations have driven them to a monumental policy failure that in the past would have brought down the government by now.