Author: Phil Burton-Cartledge

  • The big story of this month’s UK election was a Conservative meltdown, while support for Labour barely rose at all. Along with disastrous missteps by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, long-term structural factors mean the Tories are in decline.


    Outgoing British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party Rishi Sunak delivers a statement after losing the general election, outside 10 Downing Street in London on July 5, 2024. (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

    At first glance, the result of the British general election seems like a massive popular mandate for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Labour ended up with 411 seats in the House of Commons, while the Conservative Party had just 121. But we have to reckon with the British electoral system, which can give parties a large majority of seats without even a small majority of votes.

    Labour will form a government with less than 34 percent of the overall vote. That’s barely 2 percent more than the party achieved with Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2019, on a much lower turnout. The real story of the election was a Tory collapse. The Conservative vote share dropped by 20 percent, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK divided the right-wing bloc with its anti-immigrant platform.

    Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby, and the author of a book about the long-term crisis of the Conservative Party, The Party’s Over. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.


    Daniel Finn

    To begin with, can you give us a sense of how bad this defeat was for the Conservative Party, and how it compares to John Major’s loss back in 1997?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    In 2019, when Boris Johnson took the Conservative Party to victory, it won a majority of eighty seats. It won 365 seats overall with a vote of nearly 14 million. This year, the Conservatives lost 251 seats, and their vote more than halved to 6.8 million. Effectively, they’ve been handed the worst election performance in Conservative Party history. You’d have to go back to 1922 for them to have won fewer votes in absolute terms than this, and they actually won that election in 1922.

    This is a worse defeat than 1997. Back then, John Major was still able to poll nine and a half million votes and get 30 percent of the overall vote. They had 165 seats in 1997, and that was regarded as a very bad defeat by Conservative Party standards.

    This is much, much worse. When you consider that it took thirteen years for the Conservatives to clamber back from that defeat in 1997 and form a government, albeit in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, if they were to recover at the same rate this time around, you’re talking about another twenty years before the Conservatives can get back into power.

    But things are even worse than that. Defeat suddenly flushes out all of the problems that Conservatives already knew they had but sat on before the election. There was some recognition among Conservatives that they need to have an offer they can make to younger working-age people, particularly around getting people on the housing ladder. You’ve had Conservatives opining about how constituency associations — the membership of the party — have been allowed to wither on the vine. You’ve had people complaining that in their safe seats, there hasn’t been door knocking taking place for well over twenty years.

    There is that feeling of disconnect between themselves and their mass Conservative base. It could be papered over by the air war that Boris Johnson was able to launch in 2019, making the election all about Brexit and riling up the base without having to do the hard work or put down deep, authentic roots in those communities. But this is the election where that has really come home to roost.

    Former prime minister Liz Truss, who will go down in Conservative Party lore for all the wrong reasons, had one of the safest seats in the country. Labour turned over her majority and was able to dump Truss out of the House of Commons. If that isn’t a measure of how bad the Conservative defeat is, I don’t know what is.

    Daniel Finn

    In terms of explaining the reasons for this defeat, there was an argument that you made in your book, according to which the Conservative Party is facing a long-term decline because of a number of important structural and sociological factors. That was very much going against the grain of conventional wisdom when the first edition of your book came out — people were talking about Johnson bestriding the political scene like a colossus, ruling for another ten years, setting the agenda, yet you were arguing that the 2019 election victory hadn’t changed that picture of long-term decline.

    Now since December 2019, there have also been a number of contingent scandals — although perhaps they reflect something deeper — from the demise of Boris Johnson’s leadership, plagued by a series of scandals that were known as “partygate,” to the short-lived fiasco of Liz Truss in Downing Street and the economic damage that resulted from it, and then the distinctly underwhelming leadership of Rishi Sunak, culminating in this snap election that appears to have been called almost on a whim. How do you think the balance can be struck between those long-term structural factors and what the Tories have gotten so badly wrong in the last three or four years?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    When I wrote the book, I was very clear about the long-term problems of the Conservatives, but you could not have foreseen the short-term issues — the kind of things that Boris Johnson would get up to in office. I offered a bit of a forecast that if everything went okay for Johnson, the long-term decline of the Tories would only start to nibble at their heels over the course of the 2020s. They would still be competitive in this election, and it would be in the late 2020s and throughout the 2030s that things would start getting difficult if they did not address the long-term issues.

    But then we saw “partygate,” with the revelation that senior Conservatives and Downing Street staff were having parties when everyone else had to abide by lockdowns. You had the scandal around that and the fact that Boris Johnson lied repeatedly, claiming he did not know anything about these parties when he attended them himself and emails went out in his name inviting people for drinks. This was followed by the Truss fiasco and Sunak’s management of decline. All of that sped up the process of long-term decline, which was already in train.

    But something I didn’t talk about in the book a great deal — in hindsight I should have — was the effect of the competition the Conservative Party was facing from the right. You’ve had the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK. In 2019, Johnson was able to win because he effectively out-Brexited the Brexit Party, making that election all about Brexit.

    The lump of the electorate that is overwhelmingly right-leaning and that found UKIP and the Brexit Party quite beguiling amounts to roughly 14 or 16 percent of the vote, depending on the day. In the last election, they all lined up behind Boris Johnson because of his promise to deliver Brexit. Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, also said that he was only going to run Brexit Party campaigns in Labour-held seats. That undoubtedly helped the Conservatives as well, because Farage was able to cream off a layer of Labour Party voters who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum but still would not countenance voting Conservative.

    This time, Reform stood nearly everywhere. The difference that counted in favor of the Conservatives back in 2019 counted against them this time. There were somewhere in the region of 170 seats where the margin of victory for Labour or the Liberal Democrats over the Conservatives was smaller than the numbers of votes that went to Reform. That was another contingent factor as well.

    If you take things in the round, lumping together the Conservative vote with the Reform vote — which you couldn’t really do in an actual election — it comes in lower than what Boris Johnson was able to achieve in 2019. But it’s still a substantial block of votes, and greater than what Labour achieved this time as well. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform have all had a similar voting base: overwhelmingly composed of older people or retired people, overwhelmingly propertied, and more likely to find authoritarian, nostalgic politics quite attractive, because of the social positions that they occupy.

    The right-wing voting block is in long-term decline: they’re not replacing themselves, and as a result, the block can only get smaller as time goes by. It was already smaller in 2024 than it was in 2019. But again, if Boris Johnson had not presided over “partygate,” or if there hadn’t been the kind of foolishness that we’ve seen from the Conservatives over the last four or five years, the bulk of Reform voters might well have stayed with the Conservatives, and the margin of victory for Labour would have been a lot narrower than it has been.

    Daniel Finn

    As you say, there was a real difference between the desire of Farage and his allies to damage the Conservative Party this time around compared with 2019, so it’s worth asking why that was the case. Second, if you compare this election with two previous high points for Farage’s political vehicles: back in 2015, UKIP got about 12 percent of the vote, and then in 2019, the Brexit Party got 30 percent of the vote in the snap European election and topped the poll.

    In both of those cases, you could say that Farage and his supporters were representing a point of view that didn’t otherwise have representation in British politics. Back in 2015, they were calling for Britain to leave the European Union and to scrap free movement of workers from EU member states, which neither Labour nor the Conservative Party was willing to advocate at that point.

    Four years later, it was three years after the Brexit referendum, and everything was in flux in British politics. For many of the people who had voted Leave, there was a sense that their vote had not been implemented or honored, and they were worried that there was going to be some sort of scheme cooked up by the political class to prevent it from happening at all. Farage represented that point of view, and his success motivated the Tories to select Johnson as their leader and commit to Brexit at all costs by the end of the year.

    Five years on from that European election, we’re in a situation where Britain has left the EU on terms that were considered particularly hard. There have been all kinds of new restrictions put in place on immigration, and both of the two major parties are committed to that — not just the Tory Party, but also Labour. In the last days of the election campaign, Keir Starmer said that he couldn’t envisage Britain rejoining the EU, or even rejoining the customs union or the single market, in his lifetime.

    On the face of it, it might seem like there was no longer a need for a political formation like Reform, and yet it has done very well and got a higher vote share than UKIP got back in 2015. Why do you think that constituency is still there, and what potential do you think there is for that party and that political perspective in the period that’s opening up now?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    I think it comes down to the words “Brexit betrayal.” Whatever you might say about the debates within the Conservative Party and why there was a significant section of those within it who were anti-EU, the way they were able to mobilize large numbers of votes in the referendum was precisely because of the anti-immigration pitch that Vote Leave and the various unofficial anti-EU campaigns put forward. Yet in practice, while Boris Johnson may have adopted very tough rhetoric, over the course of the last four or five years, we’ve actually seen record levels of immigration, albeit not from the EU this time.

    A lot of people voted for Brexit because they identify immigration with all kinds of different things — uncertainty, discomfort with the way the world works, and a sense that Britain is being taken away from them, as well as the idea that these people are stealing jobs from their children and grandchildren or exacerbating the housing crisis. Those people cannot understand why they voted to end mass immigration and yet mass immigration is still happening. The Tory press has been going hard on this issue too.

    In the early stages of his premiership, Rishi Sunak addressed the nation and said that he had five priorities, one of which was stopping the boats in the English Channel. You have refugee camps in northern France from which people have come over on dinghies to enter the country “illegally” — I use that term advisedly. This has been talked up as a problem by the media, and BBC reporters have even gone out in dinghies to try and interview people as they’ve been coming across on these small boats and ask them why they’re doing it.

    Sunak embraced the ridiculous Rwanda scheme, whereby people who arrived here “illegally” would be sent to Rwanda for processing. If they were eventually granted asylum, it was unlikely that they would ever end up in Britain anyway — they would have to make their homes in Rwanda. That scheme has spectacularly failed. It was very expensive, which of course was something that Keir Starmer was able to alight upon. The Conservatives haven’t been able to fulfill the promises they made around immigration, so Farage has capitalized on that.

    Second, Boris Johnson linked Brexit very clearly to what he called “leveling up.” This was the idea that somehow the EU was holding Britain back and that any money Britain handed over to the EU could then be reinvested in the relatively neglected regions and nations of the UK. London and the Southeast are extremely dynamic economies, but the rest of the country has effectively been left to go to seed and now exists as the repository for a reserve army of labor that will go into the capital and the economically dynamic regions. Johnson said that he wanted to do something about that.

    However, for a variety of reasons — not least because of clashes with Sunak and the Treasury — those schemes were derailed or wound down. They ultimately became ways of funneling public money from the center to Conservative-held constituencies — not just the formerly Labour-supporting areas they were able to win in 2019, but quite wealthy Conservative areas as well. For example, Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister who is sadly one of the survivors from this election, was able to divert money to his local high street in a fairly affluent area.

    You have a perception of pork-barrel politics where things hadn’t changed at all for the poorer regions. Jonathan Gullis was a relatively prominent, so-called Red Wall Tory who won Stoke-on-Trent North in 2019, which historically had been a Labour seat. I went to visit his constituency, where I used to live locally, about eighteen months ago. There were a lot more boarded-up shops than I remembered from my previous visit, but the only new thing on the high street was his constituency office. There is a sense that the Conservatives have taken everything for granted, and as a result, people have turned against them in droves.

    There was a debate in the Conservative Party in the early months of 2020 about what they were going to do with all of these working-class seats. James Frayne, a senior Conservative strategist who has worked for the Centre for Policy Studies and a number of other think tanks, wrote an article for Conservative Home, which is effectively the online brain for Conservative activists. He argued that the party didn’t really need to do anything — all that it had to do was go hard on immigration and cut people’s benefits, and working-class voters in those seats would thank them for it. That is exactly what the Conservative Party has done, and nothing has changed; so people who would never vote Labour but were angry at this turn of events voted for Reform.

    When it comes to Farage’s own motivations, he helped Boris Johnson win that huge majority in 2019 by specifically targeting Labour seats, but he has received no thanks for it at all. The Conservative Party still wants to keep him at arm’s length. There are a few figures in the party who think that a lash-up between the Conservatives and Reform would be wonderful, but they’re very much in a minority. Farage understands that he is an outsider and has been treated as a pariah. For his pains, he decided that a bit of revenge was necessary.

    We should also note another reason why Farage decided to return to British politics and lead Reform into this election. Reform is a limited company, owned by Farage as the majority shareholder, rather than a proper political party. He can appoint himself managing director and leader if he wants. He was due to spend this summer in the United States campaigning for Donald Trump. He only changed his mind after Trump was sent down for felony charges in relation to the Stormy Daniels case.

    It seems to me that Farage has decided that associating himself with Trump would perhaps not be the best thing for his long-term future in British politics. He returned to Britain and targeted the Conservatives on their vulnerabilities.

    He also mobilized an explicitly racist vote by coming out with a number of dog whistles during the election, such as when he said that Rishi Sunak, who is from Indian heritage, doesn’t understand our culture. That message was picked up loud and clear by racist voters who would normally have stayed at home during this election, and that unquestionably boosted Reform’s showing at the polls too.

    Daniel Finn

    If we think about the future of the Conservative Party over the years to come, what direction do you think they’re likely to embark on from this point? Is there going to be an attempt to move back toward the center or further radicalization toward the right? Which remaining Tory politicians are likely to be the key figures, and is there a potential path for them toward recovery over the next decade or so?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I’d have thought it was obvious that they were going to turn to the right because of the gravitational pull of Reform. Reform was able this time to break through the first-past-the-post system and win five seats in Parliament. The party won 4.1 million votes, which is more than were cast for the Liberal Democrats, who won seventy-two seats. Some Conservatives will say, “It’s obvious that we need to go hard on immigration and tax cuts” — tax cuts were another component of the Reform platform — “and then votes will flow to us.”

    There is a degree of sense in that, from a rational-choice point of view. As happened in 1997, the Conservatives have suffered a devastating defeat. From the standpoint of recovery, they need to sort out their core vote and establish a foundation before they can build (or rebuild) the rest of the building.

    Turning right — because of course, the Conservative grassroots are quite right-wing — makes sense in that context as well. You’d be able to build the core and start recovering on that basis, which is exactly what William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard did between 1997 and 2005. It was only after 2005, once they had cohered their core vote, that they were able to start going after the center ground.

    You do have a number of right-wingers jockeying for position who could do this. You have Kemi Badenoch, who was previously the minister for equality. You have Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, who is renowned for spouting conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” and various other right-wing touchstones. You also have Priti Patel, who came up with the Rwanda scheme in the first place.

    On the other hand, we should consider the observation of Paul Goodman, onetime editor of Conservative Home and a former Conservative MP. He pointed out that the way that the devastation has rippled through the Conservative parliamentary group means that it is no longer as right-wing as it was before the general election.

    There are more — again, I use these terms advisedly — centrist or center-left figures in the spectrum of the Conservative Party. Bear in mind that these “centrist” or “One Nation” Tories were quite happy to go along with the Rwanda scheme and all the other horrors that the Conservative Party has come out with over the last five years, so everything is relative.

    Their favorite son is a guy called Tom Tugendhat who stood in the 2022 Conservative leadership election. He didn’t come close to winning that time, but this could be one of those occasions where he might be in a better position. He’s relatively centrist by Conservative Party standards. He has that aspect of the army major — not in a bawling sergeant-major sense, but in that quiet, reserved officer mold. He’s probably the nearest figure that the Conservative Party currently have to Keir Starmer, who is cut from very similar cloth.

    It depends on who the Conservative MPs decide should go forward to the membership. The way the contest works is that everyone who wants to stand for the leadership needs a proposer and a seconder, but it gets whittled down to two candidates by the parliamentary party, who are then put to the membership. The more centrist elements of the Conservative Party will want to make sure there are two centrist candidates that go to the membership, because if it’s a contest between Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch, for example, Badenoch will walk it, because the membership are incredibly right-wing.

    While Badenoch might be able to consolidate the Conservative base to some extent over the course of the next four or five years if she becomes leader, it means they can kiss the 2029 election goodbye. On the other hand, Tom Tugendhat might have a harder task consolidating the base, but the reasoning will go that he could have more of a chance of winning back some of those liberal or centrist Tories who were attracted to Starmer’s changed Labour party and to the Liberal Democrats this time.

    Either way, I can’t see them coming back any time soon. This is because of the nature of the electoral system, because of the pummeling that the Conservatives have just received, and because even though they have suffered a devastating defeat, the process of decline is still ongoing. They need to have a proper reinvention if they want to be electorally competitive again.

    I can’t see either potential course cutting it for 2029: a more centrist Tory Party competing directly for votes while they still have Reform menacing them to the right, or a right turn to embrace some of the Reform voters while leaving more centrist voters in the bosom of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. I can’t see it happening unless something catastrophic happens — unless somehow Reform and the Conservative Party are able to unite, which is very unlikely, and the Labour vote declines.

    Daniel Finn

    Looking at this performance from Labour, there’s something quite odd about it, because there has never been such a discrepancy between vote share and seat share. Labour has come back with a commanding majority of seats comparable to Tony Blair’s landslide back in 1997. But that time, the party got around 43 percent of the vote, whereas this year, it was slightly under 34 percent of the vote. It was only a couple percent higher in relative terms than the Labour vote share in 2019, and because of the lower turnout, it was actually lower in absolute terms — more people voted for Labour in 2019 than in 2024.

    This doesn’t seem to have been something that anyone expected to happen, certainly going by the polls. From the start of this year until Sunak called the election, even at the lower end of the scale, Labour’s vote share didn’t go below 40 percent, apart from a single poll where they were on 39.5 percent. Yet they ended up with 33.7 percent.

    Does that mean that the polls were wrong, or is it a case of Labour having lost support over the course of the election campaign? If it did lose support, why was that, and is it going to be a problem for Labour?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    That trend in Labour’s polling became pronounced more or less at the time when Farage announced his decision to stand. Part of that shift wasn’t a question of Labour-supporting people transferring to Reform — rather, Reform was flushing out people who had previously intended not to vote, so Labour’s vote share went down proportionately in the polls. But you’re right: no one predicted that it would be this low.

    If you look at safe Labour seats — like Keir Starmer’s seat, for example — he had a ridiculous majority in 2019 of nearly 28,000 votes. His majority is now about 11,500, and turnout in his seat was down by more than 10 percent as well. It seems to have been a deliberate strategy. All of a sudden, now the election is over, Labour is saying it was their mastermind Morgan McSweeney who decided that they needed to go after seats rather than votes and game the system.

    There’s a certain logic to that, which has meant that safe Labour seats were robbed of all resources. There was no campaigning in those seats, and everything went to what they identified as the key marginals. As a result, Starmer’s majority collapsed; Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary, came within five hundred votes of losing his seat to a left-wing independent, Leanne Mohamad; and Jonathan Ashworth, who was a key strategist and member of the shadow cabinet before the election, actually did lose his seat in Leicester to an independent candidate.

    We’ve seen a big fall in Labour’s vote in its safe areas because all the resources have gone to the swing seats. But we shouldn’t say that this is entirely down to the genius of Morgan McSweeney, because as I said earlier, there were about 170 seats where Reform made the difference between a Conservative win and a Labour or Liberal Democrat win. It was a gamble for the Labour Party to go for width rather than depth.

    Will this cause some problems? It is certainly niggling at the new powers that be. Since Starmer has taken office, he’s been asked about this, and every time he keeps saying, “We’ve got a strong mandate,” as if repeating the words makes it true. But the problem he has is that it’s not just irritating left-wingers on social media who are saying, “You haven’t got a mandate, your numbers are rubbish, you got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed.” People on the right know about this as well and have been playing it up.

    Nadhim Zahawi, who was a senior figure in previous Conservative cabinets, said that even though it was a bad night for the Conservatives, it wasn’t a fantastic night for Labour; because of the shallowness of Labour’s vote, he argued, there is an opportunity for the Conservatives to come back quickly. According to Zahawi, all they need to do is go hard on tax cutting and so on. So he’s clearly learned nothing about what has happened, but he’s aware of this point.

    Nigel Farage is aware of it as well, and he’s been talking about it since the election. Although I think it’s a mistake and a sign of hubris on his part, Farage has been saying that his party is going after Labour votes and seats at the next election. He is going to start targeting Labour more because he knows the majorities are very, very slim.

    This is obviously a problem for Labour when it comes to doing anything controversial in government. We on the left know that Labour is weak despite its majority and despite what Starmer says about having a mandate. Democratically, its legitimacy is very low. That weakness gives added impetus to any street movements or strike activity to make political headway. It’s very much possible for us to lean on Labour MPs.

    It’s also worth noting that in over forty seats, the Greens are now in second place to Labour, having stood on an explicitly left-wing platform. They have also demonstrated an ability to take Labour seats, having won Bristol Central from another shadow cabinet minister, Thangam Debbonaire, so Labour is going to have to be thinking about the Left as well.

    But knowing the Labour Party and its instincts as we do, it’ll notice that while there are forty-odd seats where the Greens are in second place to them, there are ninety-odd seats where Reform are the runners-up. There is going to be a temptation to go hard on immigration and other right-wing issues.

    For Starmer and company, while they will try to plow on regardless and ignore democratic pressures, you’re going to have pressures from left and right in this parliament on Labour MPs who would quite like to remain Labour MPs, thank you very much. There is real potential here for the Left to make breakthroughs and lean on Labour MPs, and also potential for parliamentary rebellions as well. If Starmer thinks that he’s going to have a fairly stable government — and of course stability was one of the themes that Starmer ran on — I think he’s got another thing coming.

    Daniel Finn

    Behind so many of these overlapping political crises that we’ve seen over the last decade, from Brexit and the Leave campaign to the Scottish Independence movement to the rise and fall of Corbynism, we can talk about the problems with the British economic model that have really come home to roost. Of course, Britain was one of the pioneers of neoliberal policy-making and went further and faster down that road than countries like France and Germany. For a long time there was a good deal of smugness about that on the part of British politicians, who saw themselves as the way and the light for other European countries. Now you get regular reports in publications like the Financial Times saying in effect that the whole setup is creaking and in danger of falling apart.

    There’s a spectacular dearth of investment, and infrastructure is crumbling. There’s been a period of wage stagnation of a kind that hasn’t been seen for a couple of centuries since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, which is anticipated to carry on for the rest of this decade. You have regional inequalities within England that are wider than those between western and eastern Germany or between northern and southern Italy. Against that backdrop, is there any prospect of stabilization, and are there policies that any feasible government is likely to enact that can address those problems with the British model of capitalism?

    Phil Burton-Cartledge

    When you read the Labour Party manifesto, there is a recognition that these problems exist, but the solutions fall short or leave a lot to wishful thinking. When Rachel Reeves made her first speech as the new chancellor, her message was no different to what she’s been saying for the last couple of years.

    She believes that the way to make things better doesn’t involve redistributing the ill-gotten gains of the rich or anything like that, because that’s far too radical. You need economic growth, which is going to lift all boats. That’s what she’s putting her emphasis on.

    I think what we will see, at least in the policy language coming out of the new government, is similar to what we saw under George Osborne when he was chancellor — in other words, a focus on GDP figures as a measure of growth to the exclusion of all else. Reeves is very much a model technocrat, far more so than Starmer. She’s fixated on the numbers, on deliverables, on trackers and spreadsheets.

    In that spirit, Reeves will be looking for quick wins. I expect that when the renegotiation for the European free-trade agreement comes up next year, governing the relationship between the UK and the EU, Starmer’s government will be looking to lower trade barriers that have been put up over the course of Brexit in order to facilitate economic growth.

    Reeves is also committed to a much more industrially active state, so there is going to be an abandonment of neoliberalism, at least when it comes to industrial policy — it’s not going to be left to the market anymore. But she’s pursuing this goal through initiatives like Great British Energy, which are in effect investment vehicles or public-private partnerships that are designed to take the risk out of infrastructure investment for private business.

    I think we’ll see large numbers of companies starting to invest in British infrastructure because ultimately the profits from doing so are going to be underwritten by the Treasury — it’s a guaranteed return. Of course, that will boost the GDP figures as well. Reeves and her allies will hope for various spin-off effects from this such as more employment and an upward push on wages.

    But looking at various parts of the Labour manifesto, where the party identifies problems and crises, you find gestures to the effect that something has to be done rather than actual policies. By not promising anything concrete, this gives Labour a great deal of leeway to do whatever it wants to do.

    With higher education, for instance, the manifesto recognizes that there is a funding crisis and that levels of student debt are unsustainable. It doesn’t say what it’s going to do in response, but it promises to look into it. Of course, looking into it will be a job-creation scheme for civil servants and researchers.

    We’ve got a quiet commitment to expand the state, although no spending figures are attached to it. Starmer has also put a lot of emphasis on giving metropolitan mayors and local authorities across England, Wales, and Scotland more powers. We haven’t seen yet what the nature of these powers are going to be.

    There were some proposals authored by Gordon Brown in late 2022, where it seemed that Labour was aiming to create a sort of German model. Local government in Germany has a lot more freedom to raise its own finances and pursue its own economic strategies. It seems to me that Starmer is going to go down a similar route, with each local authority area responsible for developing a growth plan.

    When those growth plans come through, I think Starmer will be minded to give local authorities enough powers to follow through on the plans, which again means more civil-service jobs and more jobs for wonkish researcher types and academics like me. The hope is that this will have an effect of unlocking further investment and entrepreneurial talents in the regions.

    That’s pretty much what we can expect from a Starmer government when it comes to addressing the crisis of British capitalism. You’re going to have a push from the center saying, “We want to go in this direction,” but devolution will mean that local authorities are going to be able to do what they want within limits in terms of pursuing economic growth. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves will be making sure to create as benign and risk-free an environment as possible for British and foreign capital to invest in infrastructure.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Rishi Sunak’s Tory Party is on a path toward electoral calamity. The Tory meltdown is the culmination of a deep-rooted, long-term crisis that was temporarily staved off by the Brexit referendum but has now returned with a vengeance.


    British prime minister Rishi Sunak, soaked in rain, announces July 4 as the date of the UK’s next general election, at 10 Downing Street in London, on May 22, 2024. (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

    When Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, stood in the pouring rain last week to announce a general election, there could hardly have been a less auspicious beginning to the Conservative Party’s campaign. In the space of a few days, it has gone downhill from there.

    Eighty-five Tory MPs have shown their confidence in their party’s ability to win another term by declaring their retirement. These include the former PM Theresa May, long-serving minister Michael Gove, and erstwhile Tory leadership contender Andrea Leadsom. Twenty-two of these MPs have served in the Commons for fewer than ten years, and ten of them were only elected in 2019.


    Finding the Floor

    The first policy announcement of the Tory campaign did not go down well either. On May 24, Sunak said he would reintroduce compulsory national service for eighteen-year-olds if reelected. Young people would have to choose between a year-long military placement or “voluntary” work for community groups and charities.

    To add to the general sense of chaos, one of Sunak’s ministers had rubbished this very policy three days previously, and Tory messaging over sanctions for noncompliance is all over the place. Sunak has suggested taking up a position would be a condition for a later career working in the public sector, while others have suggested that parents could be fined or even called for the imprisonment of refuseniks.

    The haphazard campaign launch and the trumpeting of unpopular policy initiatives mark the shambolic beginnings of the end for a Conservative Party overdue for its reckoning. While there in no popular enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour Party, ever since the calamitous forty-nine-day rule of Liz Truss, the main opposition party has maintained a sustained poll lead, usually ranging between fifteen and twenty-five points, depending on the pollster.

    Projections on seat share differ only on one detail: how badly the Tories are going to lose. John Major laid the previous floor in 1997 when his party was returned with 165 seats. A lot of forecasters say this year’s result will be worse, with some even suggesting it will drop below 100 seats. That would represent a cataclysm and a defeat that some Tories worry their party would not recover from.


    Decline and Decomposition

    They are right to be worried. What is happening to the Tories is the culmination of the long-term decline and decomposition of their vote, which was accelerated by Brexit, Boris Johnson, the Truss debacle, and Sunak’s time in office. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, during the 2010s, the party became increasingly dependent on a coalition of propertied interests, with its core mass base provided by elderly voters.

    These layers of the electorate were shielded from the direct consequences of the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government through protection of pensioners’ incomes via the “triple lock” — a guarantee the state pension would rise in tandem with average earnings, inflation, or a baseline figure of 2.5 percent (whichever is the highest).

    Deft manoeuvring around the “need” for cuts and judicious scapegoating helped ensure the Tories then escaped the political consequences of systematic cuts to public services, especially the National Health Service, that this demographic cohort depends on. But there was more to this loyalty than the consequences of Tory policy from 2010 onward.

    First of all, there is the social location of being a pensioner. Because the incomes of pensioners tend to be fixed and cannot be made good in an emergency by reentering employment, their experience is analogous to that of the petty bourgeoisie. As many Marxists have observed, dependence on one’s own modest capital and ability to labor produces a political disposition toward stability and a hostility to real and imagined threats.

    This is an echo of their propensity to be buffeted by forces larger than themselves: from the whims of the market and the competition of other businesses to the mass movements and collective consciousness of workers. Parties offering authoritarian programs emphasizing law and order and victimizing scapegoats (often racialized ones) therefore tend to attract disproportionate petty bourgeois support and, in more recent years, a mass base of pensioners, too.

    The second factor, which you might call the “strong force,” comes from the tendency to acquire property over time. In Britain, as in many parts of Western Europe and North America, higher real wages and cheap credit, combined with schemes like Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy, in which public housing was sold off at a generous discount to tenants, saw millions become owner-occupiers throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

    In Britain, this layer kept hold of their — often quite modest — properties through to retirement and old age and were caught in a dynamic where they had a material interest in the inflation of property values. With successive governments of all parties refusing to build enough houses to meet demand or replace the public housing stock already sold off, rising generations of younger people have been locked out of property acquisition.

    This has had two significant political consequences. For the elderly property owner, it has strengthened the tendency to right-wing, authoritarian politics that was already latent in the social location of pensioners. In contrast, for younger people — today’s under-fifties — the housing shortage has severed the link between aging and the propensity to vote for the Right which, in the British case, means the Conservatives. Not being able to acquire property has delayed or prevented other conservatizing processes, such as starting a family.


    Brexit and Beyond

    These developments help explain why the UK’s European Union (EU) membership referendum and the results of the last three general elections saw such a stark divergence of political preferences between generations. The elderly won the referendum for Leave because of their greater propensity to turn out in support of a campaign that touched all their concerns.

    For such voters, leaving the EU meant returning to an imagined past of security and national assertiveness, embracing “British values,” and keeping out obvious markers of discomfiting social change — above all, immigrants and refugees. The fact that leaving the EU has not led to greater stability — anything but — doesn’t matter for a layer of people who are relatively insulated from its effects.

    When the 2017 and 2019 elections came round, May and Johnson respectively mobilized this same support base by using similar tropes and arguments. May’s gamble to win a renewed majority failed because the opposition largely cohered around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. This was not the case in 2019, when Johnson increased the Tory vote by only 300,000, but Labour crashed to defeat as its voter coalition was pulled apart.

    However, the character of Johnson’s mandate made it clear, even on election night, that he had maximized the strength of a coalition based on mass pensioner support. Unless the Tories did something to reach beyond that layer, the party faced a crisis of political reproduction that would make it progressively harder to win elections. As its elderly supporters passed away, they were not being replaced on a like-for-like basis by a new generation of conservatives.

    Far from meeting the challenge, the Tories and their three prime ministers since 2019 have only accelerated the crisis. Things initially went Johnson’s way for about two years. This period stretched from his superlative approval ratings during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to the electoral high point of the 2021 local elections, where Labour councils fell like dominoes to the Tory onslaught and Labour lost the formerly safe seat of Hartlepool to the Tories in a parliamentary by-election.

    What undid Johnson from this point on was a series of attempts to shield key allies and the prime minister himself from the consequences of wrongdoing, above all the celebrated “party gate” allegations, in which it transpired that those working at Downing Street had egregiously ignored social distancing and quarantine rules while the rest of the country was in lockdown.

    Since many people had been barred from seeing gravely ill loved ones and attending funerals while the Downing Street parties were going on, this scandal was the first hammer blow against the Tories. Johnson’s promise to “level up” the country by using money saved from EU membership did not see the light of day. The idea that the Tories would use their newfound love for state-directed projects to rebuild infrastructure and kick-start a new generation of home building turned out to be as characteristically empty as all of Johnson’s other rhetoric.


    Trussed Up

    When Liz Truss was campaigning to become Johnson’s successor, her prospectus didn’t just fail to address the problems facing the Tories — it ignored them completely. Her view — which coincidentally was shared by the hedge fund interests that backed her leadership bid — was that if her government slashed taxes for the rich, British capital and foreign investors would pour money into new ventures and create new jobs.

    In practice, ever-diminishing corporate tax rates and the whittling away of higher tax bands had not led to a commensurate rise in investment. But this didn’t stop Truss and her supporters from arguing that it was in everyone’s interest to hand more money to the rich. By extension, they assumed that if the economy was booming, it would magic away the wider problems afflicting working-age people.

    The result of this short-lived experiment was a run on the pound, a near collapse of pension funds, and an emergency hike in interest rates over and above what was due anyway. Far from helping anyone, Truss’s experiment in flat-tax capitalism sent mortgage rates soaring. It exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis and destroyed the ill-deserved Conservative reputation for economic competence.

    It was to Sunak’s credit that he had warned of the dire consequences Truss’s plan would have during the 2022 leadership contest. But after he was appointed by a cabal of Tory MPs who ensured there would be no competitive election, the new leader’s chosen remedy was to do nothing. In fact, he made a virtue of pushing a prospectus that promised little.

    Widely blamed (or praised, depending on one’s perspective) for derailing Johnson’s state-led investment schemes, Sunak oversaw the scrapping of major infrastructure projects such as the high-speed rail links between London and other major cities (apart from the line to Birmingham). He made a virtue of provoking strikes by rail and hospital workers, making sure employers received enough money and political backing to ride out the disputes. In line with the practice of previous Tory administrations, he ensured that public-service funding did not meet demand.

    Consistent with his record as Johnson’s chancellor, Sunak evinced a desire to reduce the state’s capacity to do things. He hoped that this would temper the electorate’s expectations of what a government should and should not deliver and allow for private provision to fill the gap for those able to pay for it. In other words, his do-nothing program did not come from a place of inexperience or incompetence. It was rooted in a class-conscious form of politics.


    Search for Scapegoats

    Unsurprisingly, as there have been no marked improvements since Sunak came to office, the brief polling rally that the Conservatives experienced upon his elevation has since deteriorated, leaving the party in the same position Truss bequeathed them. With no material successes to shout about, Sunak’s time in office has been preoccupied with substitutionist activity in the form of a search for new scapegoats.

    For example, having noted that the Leave victory in the Brexit referendum was largely founded on anti-immigrant posturing, and that the same positioning helped cohere a large coalition of Tory voters in 2017 and 2019, the Conservatives have ramped up the antirefugee discourse with their cruel and absurd Rwanda scheme.

    After Paul Kagame’s authoritarian government received a series of incentives, it agreed to take a few hundred asylum seekers. For Sunak, the cost of the plan was no barrier. He argued that if people who came to British shores “illegally” knew in advance that they would end up in Central Africa, this would deter them from making the journey in the first place. As a gimmick, all the Rwanda scheme has accomplished in practice is to underline Sunak’s inability to stem the flow of boats across the English Channel.

    Sticking with the theme of racism, his hard-right former home secretary Suella Braverman spent the latter part of her time in office attacking Palestinian solidarity demonstrations as “hate marches” and claiming that Islamists and antisemites now controlled the country’s streets. Although Braverman was sacked after inciting a far-right mob who attacked the police at the Cenotaph in London on the day before Remembrance Sunday, Sunak and several of his ministers subsequently adopted the language that she had used.

    The Tories have also jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon, which has slowly been gaining ground among Labour MPs and prominent media commentators. Their appropriation of “feminist” arguments that victimize and dehumanize trans men and trans women forms part of an effort to frighten core Tory supporters, offering the same diet of authoritarianism dressed up as stability and a stand against frightening and unfamiliar manifestations of social change.

    It is in this wider context that we must see Sunak’s farcical national service proposal. It is an attempt to exploit spite and antipathy toward young people who are assumed to “have it too easy.” Just consider the following words from an article in the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph supporting the idea:

    National service should not just be confined to those turning 18. Those young adults who benefited so much from lockdown and furlough — their health and jobs preserved by an enormous national effort — should be given an opportunity to thank their elders for their sacrifices.

    Sunak’s election campaign is the last gasp of a historically exhausted party. The task of trying to turn the situation around by appealing to working-age people is difficult, because his own political outlook (and that of the Tories in general) seeks to undercut any demands made on the state.

    Steps to addressing the housing shortage would cut against the interest that the existing Tory coalition has in keeping property values high and maintaining the private rental sector. A move away from a politics of scapegoating would deprive the Tories of a tried-and-tested method of binding their supporters together.

    As a result of Johnson’s stupidity, Truss’s recklessness, and Sunak’s do-nothing attitude, the age at which someone is more likely to vote Tory has more than doubled since 2019, from thirty-nine to seventy. To prevent complete disintegration at this hour, all the Tories can do is double down and hope there will be a viable enough rump left from which to fight back after the election. Even such a limited measure of success could well prove to be out of their reach.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Rishi Sunak, the wealthiest MP in the British Parliament, has today officially become prime minister. After months of chaos and scandal, his task will be to steady the Tory ship. Expect more austerity as the Conservative Party continues to unravel.


    British prime minister Rishi Sunak waves to members of the media after taking office outside Number 10 Downing Street on October 25, 2022, in London, England. (Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)

    Since November last year, the UK’s ruling Conservative Party has been gripped by rebellion, chaos, and a collapse in popular support. Be it revelations that Boris Johnson partied in Downing Street while the nation groaned under the weight of COVID restrictions or Liz Truss’s tax cuts for the rich during a sharp rise in inflation, this ten-month period has been the most painful in the Tories’ recent history. And with the appointment of Rishi Sunak as the new prime minister by a cabal of MPs, the agonies are not about to abate.

    Sunak has three tasks to perform. With the pound and UK government bonds getting tossed around by the turbulence of the global money markets, the former chancellor has to offer the squally seas something to becalm them. This will come in the form of a program for paying down state debt, and the Financial Times briefed this morning that Sunak has set a five-year target to get it falling. This means continuing with the emergency reversal of Truss’s ill-fated mini budget under the new chancellor and former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The markets did not move in either direction following news of Sunak’s appointment, and so this can be chalked up as a victory of sorts.

    The second is to make sure everyone but the wealthy and the Tories’ core supporters pay for the crisis. This means another round of “balancing the books” by further cutting a public sector already weakened by more than a decade of austerity. That said, this is much easier said than done, as the Tories are already overseeing industrial disputes on the rail network and at Royal Mail, with strike action also due from university workers and the threat of stoppages from nurses. There is a chance that the government is taking on too many fights at once to force such a program through, and a forced retreat would prove catastrophic for the new prime minister’s fledgling authority.

    The third task is to bring the Tories back together as a viable party of government. The Daily Express, a paper whose current raison d’être is the slavish worship of Boris Johnson, reported that many Johnson supporters are now willing to throw their lots in with Sunak — many, but not all. An anonymous Tory has branded Sunak a “a plutocrat with no real principles at all.” Lee Anderson, an MP on the party’s far right and chair of the party’s self-declared “blue-collar” group has proclaimed “anybody but Rishi.”

    Chair of the Tory think tank, the Bow Group, said tens of thousands of members were likely to depart after they were denied a vote by the maneuvering of MPs, and Nadine Dorries — Johnson’s former culture secretary — is on the record for saying that Sunak lacks legitimacy because he does not have a mandate of any kind.

    Moreover, if Sunak tries to implement another round of austerity, he’s likely to face opposition from his own backbenchers. Winning dozens of former Labour seats in the 2019 election has made a layer of new Tory MPs vulnerable to the political fallout from their traditional attacks on the poor and the vulnerable. Johnson had political sense enough to realize this and therefore promised to “level up” areas of the country that had suffered under the decade of Tory rule.

    It’s important to note that while Sunak was chancellor, he sought and managed to frustrate these ambitions to address the UK’s regional inequality. What remains of the agenda is likely to get scaled back even further when his new program for government is unveiled on Friday. These MPs, organized under the Northern Research Group, were a source of instability during Truss’s brief reign because she refused to guarantee an uprating of social security payments in line with inflation. By implementing more cuts, it’s difficult to see how Sunak can escape causing more turmoil.

    Sunak was once lauded thanks to his overseeing the job guarantee scheme and loans and grants to businesses that kept millions of people afloat during the acute phase of the COVID crisis. But this political capital was swiftly thrown away when he announced a rise in National Insurance in September 2021, got a police fine for attending a gathering during COVID restrictions, and lost face after it was announced his billionaire wife was a beneficiary of a tax-avoidance scheme.

    He has a reputation for being smooth and relatively charismatic, but he is politically flat footed and his rise to the top quite sudden. If a master of bullshit and skulduggery like Johnson could not bring the Tory party to heel, the chances of Sunak doing so must range from slim to nonexistent.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Tory members this week elected Liz Truss as Britain’s new prime minister. Arriving to office amid a cost-of-living crisis, Truss’s self-styled Thatcherism promises to only deepen the country’s woes.


    Liz Truss is now the prime minister of the United Kingdom, following her victory in the Tory Party’s leadership contest. (UK Government / Flickr)

    In British politics, the summer months are known as the silly season. Parliament goes into recess in early July and does not return until the first week of September. With official politics on pause, the media seizes on the ephemeral and ridiculous to fill the column inches.

    This year, while Westminster went on holiday politics did not. The one story that has absolutely dominated the summer has been the cost-of-living crisis. Low inflation, an objective zealously pursued by all governments since 1979, has slipped from policymakers’ control. In August it reached 10.1 percent, with some forecasters predicting it could go as high as 22 percent by early next year.

    A major contributor to the crisis has been the Europe-wide energy price spiral — sparked by the war in Ukraine and exacerbated by government and private energy providers failing to invest in generation and storage while shuttering old power plants and bulldozing gas storage facilities. As a result, energy bills have been rapidly rising since this spring. Bills for an average two-three bedroom household have shot up: from £1,200/year last year to £1,971 now to a projected £3,549 in October, with some suggestions it could reach £6,000 in January. After a decade of flatlining wages, many millions of people simply won’t be able to heat their homes this winter — unless the government steps in.

    It’s into this scene that Liz Truss now steps as the country’s new prime minister, after winning the Tory Party’s leadership contest — the third in six years — with a slim, but not absolute, majority on Monday. “As strong as this storm may be,” she declared in her inaugural speech on Tuesday, “I know the British people are stronger.” Her premiership promises the usual tax cuts and deregulation in an effort to make Britain a place for “business-led growth and investment.” What this means for the “British people” themselves, however, remains to be seen.


    The Rise and Rise of Liz Truss

    On the overly long campaign trail, Truss recounted how she did not come from a typical Tory background. She was born to left-wing parents and in her teenage years was a leading member of the centrist Liberal Democrats’ youth section, famously calling for the abolition of the monarchy at their 1994 party conference.

    Shortly afterward she joined the Tories, serving as a lay officer, twice as an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate, and as a local authority councilor in Greenwich before finally entering Parliament in 2010. Since then, her politics are best described as being driven by career opportunities.

    In 2012 she was among five Tory MPs of the now notorious book Britannia Unchained. This collection by “rising stars” in the Tory parliamentary firmament was a hard-right free-market tract, in which British workers were memorably described as among the worst idlers in the world. The other authors included Kwasi Kwarteng, now appointed as Truss’s chancellor, the outgoing deputy prime minister Dominic Raab, and Priti Patel, Boris Johnson’s home secretary. Britannia Unchained might have been extreme, but it merely condensed what the David Cameron government was in fact already doing. Most important, the book boosted the profiles of its contributors; promotion for Truss was only a matter of time.

    Her chance came when she was appointed a junior minister with responsibility for childcare in 2012. Demonstrating her neoliberal credentials, Truss changed the rules to allow more toddlers and babies to be supervised in a nursery setting by a single member of staff — conveniently allowing employers to cut their workforces and maximize profits. In 2014 after getting moved to the environmental brief, she cut subsidies for solar generation on what she regarded as land fit for farming, thereby contributing to the UK’s energy generation crisis.

    Most stark, after the Tories won the 2015 general election, she came out strongly in favor of Remain in the European Union membership referendum, arguing that staying in the EU was in Britain’s economic self-interest, citing the EU’s protection of the environment, among other things.

    When Leave ultimately won the referendum, she transformed herself into a born-again Brexiteer, committing herself to delivering Brexit’s “opportunities.” When Theresa May took over from David Cameron, she remained loyal throughout May’s troubled premiership and quickly jumped on the Johnson bandwagon when he declared his leadership campaign in 2019. Rewarded with the position of international trade minister and later foreign secretary, Truss used the positions to pump up her brand. She signed post-Brexit trade deals, sometimes on worse trading terms than what was available through the EU, all the way declaring that she was maximizing the country’s new economic freedoms.

    When Johnson’s government finally collapsed two months ago, Truss was careful to ensure she was nowhere near the scene. When it came to her own bid for power, she could subsequently trade off her position as the continuity candidate.


    Moving Right

    Doing this has meant courting the right of the party. She has spent the last two months tickling its belly. On Brexit she has promised a showdown with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol. Presently, under the deal formulated and signed by Johnson, UK goods going into the North are subject to checks as the province is governed by EU customs arrangements.

    Truss has talked tough on this, almost as if it was imposed on the UK and not designed by her predecessor. And it plays well with a membership who thinks being British magically entitles the country to favorable trading relationships and the right to opt out of international rules.

    She has also pledged to carry on the war on the woke, making use of her hustings to make provocative comments about womanhood and trampling on the rights of trans people. On law and order, she has pledged 20,000 more police officers; previous Tory governments had cut that many officers between 2010 and 2019. She has also pledged to introduce police force league tables to generate competition between them. Beyond British shores, she wants to expand on the existing scheme whereby refugees seeking asylum in Britain will be deported to Rwanda in Central Africa for processing and, it seems, resettlement.

    But her centerpiece policies are, on the face of it, classically Thatcherite: tax cuts. A Truss-led government can be expected to reduce income tax for high earners, reverse the rise in National Insurance (introduced by former chancellor Rishi Sunak to pay for adult social care), and cancel a scheduled rise in corporation taxes.

    Drawing from the Thatcherite playbook, Truss maintains that tax cuts encourage businesses to invest, thereby helping the UK to avoid recession. In reality, her policies will only benefit the better off, shielding big business from paying more toward the inevitable energy bailout, and helping continue the culture of profiteering with no investment that has characterized Tory economics since 2010.

    Unfortunately for Truss, energy bills are now the focus of the news media and as a result, more people than usual are paying attention to what the Tory candidates have said on the issue. Unsurprisingly, Truss has been found wanting.

    Asked repeatedly about her plans on energy, she has mostly stuck to the line of tax cuts plus the preannounced small package of measures that support pensioners and the poorest, as well as a £400 cash payment to every household. Elsewhere, she has repeatedly claimed to be “against handouts.” With such a gaping hole where a policy should be, even Keir Starmer’s Labour Party could not pass up the chance to steal a march.

    In mid-August Starmer committed Labour to freezing bills at the £1,971 level, paid for by expanding a levy on oil and gas profits. Truss’s failure to say what she will do probably explains why she enters office with appalling polling numbers. According to pollster Opinium, between the beginning and the end of August Truss has dropped from a +39 percent to a +8 percent rating for “competent” among 2019 Tory voters, +33 percent to -2 percent on “trustworthy,” +29 percent to -4 percent on “is a strong leader,” and +28 percent to -11 percent on “looks like a PM in waiting.” The more Johnson voters have seen of her, the less they like.


    Storm Clouds Ahead

    When Truss enters office on Monday, she knows she has to come up with a plan and fast. She promised Laura Kuenssberg on her new BBC politics show that she would outline a plan within the first week, but whatever she comes up with poses problems for her standing in the party.

    First, Truss was ultimately supported by more Tory MPs than Sunak, but she commands a plurality, not a majority, of support from parliamentarians. Her cabinet, newly assembled, has excluded people from Sunak’s camp, including powerful establishment figures, like the former levelling up secretary and Rupert Murdoch lackey Michael Gove and other former senior ministers.

    If she does not throw this section of the party the bone of offices and/or policy concessions, they could cause her trouble. Second, this has been a particularly bad-tempered leadership contest. Sunak’s attacks on Truss have had a scorched-earth quality about them, calling her tax and borrowing plans inflationary, unconservative, and immoral. Truss can expect to have these lines quoted back at her at the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions by opposition MPs.

    This fundamental disagreement about the way forward can be expected to surface, if not over her crisis package, then later on other issues. Likewise, early on Truss’s courting of the right of the parliamentary party means they will expect her to go along with their schemes, particularly on distancing the UK further from the EU and egging on a showdown over Northern Ireland. Under May and Johnson, elements of the Right have proved extremely fickle and are likely to cause difficulties if she departs from the script they’ve put in front of her.

    Of course, the other big difficulty for Truss is . . . Truss. On the campaign trail, she made several unforced and discomfiting errors. At the last hustings event on Wednesday, for example, responding to an audience member, she said she would “look into” making speed limits advisory. In 2021 there were 128,000 casualties from road-traffic accidents, resulting in over 1,500 deaths. More serious, in early August a proposal was leaked from her campaign team that she planned on scrapping national pay agreements in the public sector so she could reduce the pay of civil services and state employees outside of London and the South East of England. Within hours of the story breaking, she publicly U-turned, but it demonstrated a distinct lack of political sense — especially in a cost-of-living crisis. Even Johnson was nominally committed to “leveling up” the deprived UK regions.

    Most salient, perhaps, Truss is reportedly considering an all-out assault on workers’ rights. These involve further curtailing the right to strike, scrapping the forty-eight-hour limit on the working week, and reducing basic holiday entitlements. Considering the massive crisis already facing her, simmering Brexit difficulties, and party-management issues, picking a fight with an increasingly combative labor movement against the backdrop of the biggest squeeze in living standards for decades is not just foolhardy, it’s stupid.

    This is Britain’s new prime minister: an opportunist who changes her tune when career dictates, a politician who treats the main issue of the day as an inconvenience that will be addressed in due course, a figure whose personal ratings are in free fall before she’s even taken office, and a party leader prone to gaffes, unforced errors, and reckless decision-making. Looking at Truss’s records, there’s little to suggest that she will act decisively against energy prices.

    Just like Johnson’s government, in all likelihood the next couple of years will be excruciating to watch and painful to experience — and all without her predecessor’s bumbling charisma to help her though.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are vying to become the fourth Conservative leader since 2016. Neither candidate has any real answers to Britain’s problems — or even the dilemmas facing their own party.


    Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak before taking part in the BBC Tory leadership debate live on July 25, 2022. (Jacob King / PA Wire via Getty Images)

    This summer, Conservative Party members will choose the next leader of their party from two candidates: the former chancellor, Rishi Sunak, or the current foreign secretary, Liz Truss. Whoever prevails will become the fourth Tory prime minister in six years. We have not seen this kind of leadership turnover in a governing party since the late 1820s, prior to the foundation of the modern Conservatives.

    The immediate cause of Boris Johnson’s career as prime minister may have been his brash, lazy, and reckless approach to the job. Yet there is a deeper crisis eating away at the Tories that underpins these successive changes of personnel, one where the party is in tension with the general commercial interests of British capital.


    The Road From Bruges

    Since the UK joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner of the European Union, in 1973, there has always been a section of British business skeptical of European integration if not outright hostile to it. This sentiment has tended to be centered on the City of London, Britain’s financial center, which the Tories and (to some extent) Labour have long regarded as sacrosanct.

    The City is significant not only for its tax revenues. As a world-leading center of finance and commercial capital, it helped ensure the UK retained a pivotal role in the global economy after the demise of the British Empire. A significant but minority fraction of British capital and the ruling class it supports had a key interest in its continued health. This set Britain apart from the other states of Western Europe, particularly France and (West) Germany, whose economic models were more rooted in state-directed industrial development.

    Where there are sunk interests, there are decisions to be made about what best serves them. We have often seen such debates reflected in the ranks of the Tories, the traditional party of British capital (especially so after the eclipse of the Liberals by Labour in the early twentieth century). The outsized importance of the City means that its concerns filter through into the official politics of the British bourgeoisie.

    The debate about “Europe” gained potency in Tory ranks during the late 1980s and early 1990s. On the one hand, there was the political conjuncture. Margaret Thatcher’s reengineering of the British state smashed the labor movement and rode roughshod over centers of knowledge and expertise within its own institutions. The objective was straightforward: the restoration of the primacy of capital over labor.

    In pursuit of this agenda, the executive — the government, in other words — acquired virtually untrammeled power to subordinate any aspect of society to capital accumulation if necessary. Thatcherism was and is based on neoliberal economics, which claims to be engaged in “rolling back the frontiers of the state.” But it is only possible to put such economics into practice by means of authoritarianism and violence, as demonstrated in much bloodier fashion by Thatcher’s Chilean friend General Augusto Pinochet.

    In a famous 1988 speech delivered in the Belgian city of Bruges, Thatcher attacked the perceived drift of the EEC toward federalism under the leadership of European Commission president Jacques Delors:

    We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at European level.

    For Thatcher, Europe was a potential fetter on her project — a means of interfering in and infringing on her government’s sovereign right to rebalance the relationship between capital and labor as it saw fit. And so the Tory rediscovery of sovereignty as a fetish was born. The fact that this concept came to be central for Tory narratives of nationality and Britishness (Englishness, in effect) during and after the Brexit campaign is no accident.


    Cameron’s Gamble

    The second key point about the EEC/EU was the City of London and its relation to it. With Britain as a member state, the City was subject to regulation, and increasingly faced competition from Frankfurt, which Germany was building into a rival financial center. The debate about Europe cannot be separated from the City’s commercial interests.

    There were some fundamental questions to grapple with. Should the City remain in the EU and submit itself to regulations from Brussels and the European Central Bank, while enjoying its status as the bloc’s single largest financial center and a key source of capital? Would it benefit from less regulation and more autonomy without leaving the EU altogether? Or would it thrive better outside the framework of European integration, attracting greater trade volumes as an offshore clearing house for emerging economies, inward investors, and money laundering on behalf of authoritarian regimes and dictators?

    Politics is concentrated economics, and economics is always more about class struggle than market share. Euro-skepticism was and is a much more potent force in Tory politics than in the Labour Party, particularly following the election of Tony Blair and the advent of New Labour. The division among the Conservatives over Europe persisted during their thirteen years of opposition that followed their heavy defeat in 1997. After they returned from the wilderness, it was never far from the surface in David Cameron’s “modernized” Tory party.

    Cameron’s superficial gestures toward a more liberal Toryism resulted in significant chunks of the party base and its parliamentary group becoming more sympathetic toward the UK Independence Party (UKIP) of Nigel Farage with its call for outright withdrawal from the EU. Sometimes they colluded directly with Farage. Tory strategists, not least Cameron himself, identified the growth of anti-EU populist politics as a particularly corrosive threat to the Conservative base. They feared that UKIP might take seats at a general election and allow Labour to profit from a divided right-wing vote.

    In an attempt to put this challenge down, Cameron announced a gamble on the UK’s EU membership with an in/out referendum if the Tories won the 2015 general election. Contrary to expectations, the electorate returned the Tories to office with a slim overall majority. Without the pro-EU Liberal Democrats to veto Cameron’s referendum as junior coalition partners, he had to make good on the promise.


    After the Referendum

    The subsequent referendum campaign fully exposed the extent of the Tory split. Although most leading Tories backed the Remain campaign, just 56 percent of its MPs did so. Former London mayor Boris Johnson was the best-known figure in the Leave camp, with self-advancement on his mind: Johnson famously wrote pro-Remain and pro-Leave articles for publication in the Daily Telegraph depending on which side he ultimately took.

    Remain had backing from most of the political establishment, as well as British business, the trade union movement, and the regional nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Leave campaign did not command the same support. However, a mixture of anti-immigration sentiment and (English) nationalist populism, support from right-wing newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail, and a certain image of being opposed to the liberal establishment helped carry Leave over the line.

    Cameron resigned, and his successor, Theresa May, set her government on course for a “hard Brexit” — shorthand for being as far removed from anything to do with the EU as possible. May pledged to stop free movement of labor from EU member states and take Britain out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. She saw this as the path of least resistance in terms of party management: the number of Conservative MPs who were not reconciled to leaving the EU was smaller than the combined forces of those who accepted the result plus the 44 percent of her parliamentary party who had backed Leave in the referendum.

    While May favored a hard Brexit as a way of keeping the Tories together, she did not relish the prospect of being held to ransom either by the pro-Remain rump of Conservative MPs or by the pro-Brexit right, whose organizing center was the innocently named European Research Group (ERG). Labour was in the grip of a vicious civil war, with opponents of Jeremy Corbyn having mounted a leadership heave immediately after the referendum. During the early months of 2017, May’s party routinely enjoyed double-digit leads in the polls. In April, she called a general election, expecting to cash in on this advantage.

    May’s election pitch depicted her campaign as a struggle against those who wanted to thwart Brexit. Unfortunately for May, Labour refused to paint itself into the Remain corner, stating in its manifesto that it accepted the referendum result and would focus on the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU. This, among other things, helped Labour under Corbyn to deny May her hoped-for majority with a large increase in support.

    The Tories did manage to win 13.6 million votes or 42.4 percent, which was the highest tally achieved by any party since 1992. But the votes piled up in the wrong places for May and the thin majority Cameron had bequeathed to her vanished. May had to rely on a parliamentary deal with the ten MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) just to stay in office.

    The Conservative leader was now even more the prisoner of her backbenchers, and her government entered into two years of permanent crisis. As May set about negotiating with the EU in earnest, her main priority was finding a form of words that would keep her party together, rather than settling on a constructive future trading relationship. The need to keep the DUP on board made her task even more difficult.


    Toward the Summit

    The main stumbling block for May proved to be the status of Northern Ireland. With EU support, the Irish government insisted that there could be no return to a hard border between the two parts of the island. There were only two ways to avoid that: either May could accept a closer relationship with the EU’s single market and customs union for the whole of the UK than her 2017 manifesto had promised, or else she could agree to special arrangements that would set Northern Ireland apart from the rest of the UK. May tried to avoid making a choice with the so-called backstop, a way of postponing the decision on Northern Ireland’s status that ended up pleasing nobody.

    While May faced and won a no-confidence vote in late 2018, her Brexit deal, deemed too soft by Tory Brexiteers and too hard by the Westminster opposition parties and her own anti-Brexit refuseniks, was defeated three times in the House of Commons. But there was no parliamentary majority for any other position, as a series of indicative votes in the House of Commons revealed, whether that meant a softer Brexit that would keep the UK in the EU’s customs union, or a second referendum to revisit the whole question.

    With no chance of breaking the deadlock at Westminster, May resigned after suffering a thumping defeat at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in the 2019 European election. This resulted in the second Tory leadership contest in three years. From the beginning, Boris Johnson was the favorite to succeed May.

    Johnson was generally known as a celebrity politician with a talent for public pratfalls, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and thumbing his nose at propriety. For the heavily pro-Brexit Tory membership, the profile he enjoyed from his eight years as London mayor and acknowledged role as the leader of the Leave campaign made him the ideal candidate to break the logjam and see off the challenge from Farage. Running with the sole objective of leaving the EU as soon as possible, he won the contest with ease.

    This most untrustworthy of characters, who already enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for lying, was subsequently able to establish his credibility with angry Leave voters by unlawfully suspending parliament and expelling dissenters in his own party. Johnson promised to take Britain out of the EU by the end of October, even if that meant leaving in the absence of an agreement. He initially wanted to call a snap election before this deadline, but the opposition parties got in his way. Instead, Johnson negotiated a fresh Brexit deal that, unlike May’s, would give Northern Ireland its own special status, allowing the rest of Britain to make a clear break with the single market and the customs union.

    Johnson was now able to call an election with a thin manifesto and the slogan “Get Brexit Done” as his main pitch to voters. Labour, on the other hand, was hopelessly split between those who were determined to stay in the EU and those willing to accept some form of Brexit. Its leadership eventually adopted a position of promising a second referendum on Brexit with Remain as an option on the ballot paper to prevent the party from falling to bits.

    The price of this new line was the desertion of three hundred thousand voters to the Tories in exactly the right places. A swathe of constituencies that Labour had traditionally held fell to the Tory Brexit advance. Johnson built on May’s vote, slightly increasing the 2017 Conservative vote share to secure a majority of eighty seats in the House of Commons.

    Johnson had proved his credibility on the issue of Brexit, and throughout the early part of his premiership he stuck to his pledge. The withdrawal agreement passed through Westminster by the end of 2019. Not even the most acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic over the year that followed could be allowed to drive Johnson’s hard-Brexit strategy off course.

    He concluded a deal with the EU along those lines in the final weeks of 2020. The establishment was routed, the promise of sovereignty had been fulfilled, and London was open for business. Johnson was now at the summit of his powers, and the only way was down.


    Dubious Dividend

    Johnson’s manifesto promised there would be a Brexit dividend for each part of the country, offering the opportunity to undo decades of regional decline and reactivate the plucky, can-do spirit Britain showed during the dark days of World War II. There has been no such dividend.

    Johnson has only returned a fraction of the funding that David Cameron’s government systematically stripped away from the regions. Resistance from the Treasury thwarted the idea of serious support for Johnson’s “leveling up” vision. During his two years as chancellor, former City man and self-confessed Thatcherite Rishi Sunak was pointedly reluctant to provide the money, while Johnson himself lacked any real interest in the subject beyond boosterist speechifying and other theatrics.

    The Johnson government also ratcheted up authoritarianism, with greater police powers to ban and penalize disruptive forms of protest, and a particularly despicable scheme to transport traumatized refugees to Rwanda, supposedly to deter people smugglers and traffickers. Johnson’s high-handedness and more or less open contempt for Britain’s constitutional niceties was starting to worry senior figures from the civil service and across all political parties, as well as among business leaders, who were increasingly being left to sink or swim in the post-Brexit mess.

    Johnson’s downfall began in November 2021. A Westminster inquiry found backbench MP and close Johnson ally Owen Paterson to have received money for lobbying ministers on behalf of a corporate client — a clear breach of parliamentary standards. He faced a thirty-day suspension from the House of Commons and a recall petition in his safe North Shropshire seat. Andrea Leadsom, another former minister, put down a motion calling for the suspension of the punishment until a new disciplinary committee heard Paterson’s case under less stringent standards.

    Johnson threw his weight behind the move, and people who had formerly indulged the prime minister now turned against him. Under a stream of criticism to which Johnson was unaccustomed, with the normally loyal right-wing press joining in, Paterson had to resign. In the subsequent by-election, the Liberal Democrats — the traditional third party in England and Wales — took the seat in spectacular fashion, with a swing of almost 70 percent.


    Partygate

    This was the squall before the storm. Between December and January, allegations surfaced that there had been parties taking place in Downing Street when the rest of the country was under the cosh of pandemic restrictions. At first, Johnson denied there had been any such parties, but then, as more evidence emerged, it turned out that he had personally attended at least half a dozen gatherings, including one in his residence above Number 10.

    There was a flood of calls for him to go, including some from his own political side. One Conservative MP, Christian Wakeford, who had a wafer-thin majority in his northern English constituency, crossed the floor and joined Labour.

    Johnson resisted pressure to resign and announced an inquiry led by a senior civil servant, Sue Gray, into what the media quickly dubbed “Partygate.” He later connived with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, for her force to announce its own investigation. It was a high-risk strategy for Johnson, as no sitting prime minister had been issued with a criminal penalty notice before, and he would be expected to resign if he received one. However, Johnson believed that this would enable him to play for time and drag out the story, hoping to draw its sting.

    He seemed to be right in this assessment. When the police issued him with a fine, he did not resign as prime minister, apologizing instead while pleading that his attendance had been an accident. Neither the Met nor Sue Gray probed the party in the Downing Street flat nor other occasions when, according to witnesses, Johnson had played more of an organizing role in rule-breaking social events.

    Discontent with this situation boiled over when MPs returned from a short break in early June. Enough Conservative MPs had submitted no-confidence letters to force a vote on Johnson’s leadership. About 60 percent of the Tory parliamentary group supported Johnson — a smaller percentage than had backed Theresa May in 2018 — but he assured restless Tory backbenchers that he was listening and things would be better from now on, with no more scandals.

    This promise barely lasted a month. On June 30, Christopher Pincher, the party’s deputy chief whip, had to resign his position after allegedly committing a drunken sexual assault on two men. It quickly transpired that Pincher was well-known for his “handsy” proclivities and there had been complaints made about his behavior for many years. As Pincher was a key Johnson ally, journalists asked the prime minister if he knew that he was a sexual predator.

    At first, the Tory leader outright denied any knowledge. Then he changed his story several times, first saying that he had heard rumors, then acknowledging that he was aware of allegations but had since “forgot” about them — in spite of claims that Johnson had sometimes been heard referring to his ally as “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature.” With Johnson’s ministers expected to defend this constantly changing line in the media, it was not long before the dam burst.

    On July 5, the health secretary Sajid Javid gave Johnson notice that he was resigning in protest. Later that day, completely out of the blue and without warning Johnson in advance, Rishi Sunak resigned as well. Over the next two days, sixty junior and senior ministers quit Johnson’s cabinet. Practically everyone who was not a Johnson loyalist on the backbenches went on strike. Johnson had no choice but to step down as Tory leader, setting a new contest in motion.


    After Johnson

    The Tories turned to Johnson as the medicine for their Brexit crisis, but the cure proved to have some very nasty side effects. Establishment politics has taken a coarser, more vindictive, and antidemocratic turn under his leadership. For Johnson, accountability is merely a word in a dictionary, not something to which Tory politicians should be expected to submit.

    The balance sheet of his premiership was entirely negative. The UK may have left the EU, but Brexit is far from done, with continued friction at the borders over trade and travel. Northern Ireland, which remains inside the customs union, has economically outperformed the rest of the UK. One of Johnson’s final acts as prime minister was to attack the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit agreement he had previously negotiated.

    A parliamentary committee found that tens of thousands of people had died unnecessarily due to Johnson’s mismanagement of COVID-19, which alternated between a tardy, lackadaisical approach and an authoritarian one and back again. The UK now faces an economic crisis, with double-digit inflation and soaring energy prices while real wages have flatlined.

    This is the mess that Johnson’s successor will inherit. The choice before Tory party members is one between two kinds of continuity candidates. Rishi Sunak has effectively promised that nothing will change if he becomes leader. The deeply unpopular increase in National Insurance (NI) — a tax typically perceived as funding the National Health Service and social security — will remain. At some point down the line, we can expect further assistance for households with the scheduled hike in energy prices.

    Sunak is a self-professed Thatcherite: at his campaign launch on July 23, he described his approach as “common-sense Thatcherism.” Sunak is on the hard right in terms of economic policy and campaigned for Brexit, but his own receipt of a fine during Partygate has compromised his position, as have revelations about the tax status of his wife, Akshata Murthy. Murthy is an heir to the $100 billion Indian IT giant Infosys, and may have avoided paying up to £20 million in taxes by registering as “non-domiciled.” This helps explain why Sunak entered the contest as the underdog.

    Observers consider his rival Liz Truss to be the right-wing choice. So far in her career, Truss has been a political chameleon, swapping her principles when self-interest demanded. Over the space of twelve years, she has moved from being a keen champion of Cameron’s liberal Toryism and earnest Remain campaigner to become a champion of Brexit and an enthusiastic prosecutor of the so-called “war on woke.” In Britain, that typically focuses on attacking and scaling back the rights of trans people.

    Much of the Tory establishment, who are backing Sunak, deride Truss, but she can rely on support from the pro-Brexit ERG and the tacit backing of Johnson himself who appears to still be smarting from the former chancellor’s “betrayal.” In a series of clumsy photo ops over the last few years, Truss has taken to aping Thatcher’s style, and is also keen to lay claim to her legacy. However, her central pitch promises the reversal of Sunak’s NI rise and more tax cuts — always Tory code for more wealth transfers to the rich.

    This pledge raises a major problem for the received economic orthodoxy. Truss has said that she is willing to borrow to fund tax cuts, but Sunak counters that such borrowing would not only be potentially inflationary but would also add to the government debt — something Conservatives are supposed to avoid.


    Uncertain Future

    At present, polls suggest that Truss enjoys a strong lead among the Conservative membership and edges out Sunak for popularity with the public at large. But less than a third of Tory MPs backed her to get into the final round of the contest, while Sunak had the support of approximately 40 percent. The leadership candidate who placed third with MPs, Penny Mordaunt, has yet to declare for either Sunak or Truss, but is temperamentally and politically closer to the former — especially since she has been on the receiving end of a dirty-tricks campaign from the Truss camp.

    If Truss wins, she will face a parliamentary party where two-thirds of Tory MPs did not endorse her. The last time something similar happened was in 2001 when Iain Duncan Smith became Conservative leader. His stewardship of the party was beset by crisis and limped on for only two years. It’s reasonable to assume that a figure as insubstantial as Truss would find herself similarly buffeted by her party. In that scenario, the next election — likely due to be held in 2024 — would be Labour’s to lose.

    Neither Truss nor Sunak has the answers to Britain’s problems. They do not even have the answers to their own party’s difficulties. It’s clear British capital is uncompetitive outside of the EU. The introduction of post-Brexit rules has seen companies lose market share in Europe. With “leveling up” proving nonexistent outside of Johnsonian rhetoric, there is no thriving domestic market that can cushion the shock.

    What’s more, the summer of 2022 is set to be defined by the threat or reality of industrial action. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) trade union, which represents rail workers, has organized several disruptive strike days on Britain’s transport network. Despite the usual press bile against strikers, public support has swung behind the workers.

    This is not only because their pay demand is merely asking to keep pace with high inflation. The RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, has proved to be a hit with his plain-speaking defense of the strike and ability to make fools out of condescending broadcast journalists. He has also used his platform to encourage other people to join their union and demand their fair due.

    Industrial discontent is spreading, with successful ballots by postal and telecommunications workers. Threats of industrial action secured inflation-busting pay rises for British Airways employees. Education workers are also balloting for action, and even unions representing nurses are talking up the possibility of strikes.

    In response to these developments, the Tories have predictably defaulted to a line of outright hostility. Both leadership candidates have pledged to ban strikes on public transport, and the government recently passed a new law enabling businesses to hire scab labor during strikes. However, with Tory legitimacy eroded and strikes enjoying popular support, this will be another headache for Johnson’s successor. Going back to the Thatcherite cupboard and disinterring the old slogans about “militants” and “union barons” won’t wash.

    No matter how many tax cuts the Tories offer, or anti-strike measures they sign into law, it’s becoming obvious that the government has alienated swathes of British business. As for the City of London, it has retained its status as a world leader in financial services, despite losing out on EU capital-raising channels and on share volumes. However, as the cost-of-living crisis and the increasing decrepitude of Britain’s public services show, what’s good for the City isn’t necessarily good for the rest of the population or even the rest of business.

    Johnson thus leaves the scene with the settlement Thatcher struck consolidated. But it is difficult to see where the Conservative Party can go from here to win the next election, with a divided parliamentary group and two rival leadership candidates whose prospectuses will not tackle the UK’s problems. Populist posturing and scapegoating can only go so far, and if the cost-of-living issues go unanswered, the Tories will have nothing but political pain to look forward to.

    Whatever happens, we can be sure that both Sunak and Truss will seek to maintain the current balance of forces between capital and labor, despite the evidence of public sympathy for striking workers. If that means using the whip of inflation and the discipline of a shrinking economy to keep workers in line, they will be only too happy to do it.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Last week’s election performance by the British Labour Party was deeply underwhelming. Despite enjoying every advantage, Keir Starmer has failed to convert a popular backlash against Boris Johnson’s government into support for his own plodding leadership.


    Sir Keir Starmer congratulates winning Labour candidates in the Cumberland Council election on May 6, 2022 in Carlisle, England. (Anthony Devlin / Getty Images)

    Barnet is one of the London councils that the Labour Party won control of in last week’s English local elections. Paying an early morning visit to the district after the results were in, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, declared this was a “turning point for Labour.” He went on to boast his party was winning from “coast to coast” and that “we had sent a message to the prime minister.”

    However, with a net gain for Labour of just 29 council seats in England, compared with 191 for the Liberal Democrats and 61 for the Greens, it was a message that lacked any kind of serious electoral menace. Despite receiving the kind of positive media coverage that his predecessors Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband could only have dreamed of, let alone Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer is still showing little evidence of an ability to connect with voters.


    The Johnson Backlash

    It was unquestionably a bad day for the ruling Conservatives. As the results trickled in last Friday, what commentators had anticipated to be a measured protest against Boris Johnson’s government became a full-scale Tory rout, with 491 local government councillors lost to the party.

    The municipal authorities taken by Labour included Wandsworth and Westminster, two affluent London areas that had long been Tory fiefdoms. Labour’s takeover of the newly constituted Cumberland council in northwest England was also a blow to the Conservatives. This local authority area encompasses three Tory-held parliamentary constituencies, and the result suggests that the government will have a hard time holding onto them at the next general election.

    However, despite these successes, the real story of last Thursday was one of Labour underperformance. The only exception to this rule was Wales. While the party gained 115 new councillors, over half of them hailed from Welsh Labour, which has a distinctive political profile.

    Under the leadership of Mark Drakeford, who serves as first minister in the Welsh regional government, the party has successfully reinvented itself in office around a recognizably social democratic program. In 2021, when the Tories triumphed in England’s local elections, Labour defied expectations to achieve its biggest ever Welsh Assembly vote. It built on this performance last week by taking 66 new councillors — an emphatic win.

    Elsewhere, Labour’s gains were much patchier. In Scotland, the party elected 20 new councillors while the Tories lost 63; in England, there was a net gain of just 29 versus Tory losses of 342. The headline-grabbing advances in London were tarnished by the loss of Harrow to the Tories. Labour also forfeited the mayoralties of Croydon and Tower Hamlets.


    A Tale of Two Boroughs

    Croydon is a fiefdom of Labour’s right-wing faction whose council leadership was on the hook for catastrophic financial mismanagement and a determination to favor the interests of property developers over those of local residents. The Tories successfully ran against the Labour incumbent with a platform of fiscal conservativism that promised to end the waste of local resources.

    In Tower Hamlets, Labour’s defeat came at the hands of a very different political challenger. The victor, Lutfur Rahman, won the mayoralty on a clear left-wing platform for his Aspire party, which is only organized in Tower Hamlets. Aspire also took 24 of 45 council seats, winning 22 of those seats at the expense of Labour.

    Aspire is the successor to Rahman’s previous vehicle, Tower Hamlets First (THF). Rahman and his allies began to organize against Labour in an area where the party has long taken the support of working-class British Asian voters for granted. He first won the mayoral election in 2010 as an independent and was reelected for THF four years later.

    However, an election commissioner subsequently disqualified Rahman from office on extraordinary grounds, invoking a nineteenth-century law against “spiritual influence” in UK elections. The law was originally meant to stop Irish Catholic priests from supporting the Home Rule Party. The commissioner, barrister Richard Mawrey, invoked it on the grounds that imams in Tower Hamlets had endorsed Rahman.

    Mawrey explicitly stated his belief that Muslim voters could not be trusted to think for themselves:

    A distinction must be made between a sophisticated, highly educated and politically literate community and a community which is traditional, respectful of authority and, possibly, not fully integrated with the other communities living in the same area.

    The Anglican cleric Giles Fraser described Mawrey’s verdict on Rahman as “a judgment steeped in the history and prejudices of English cultural superiority,” while a legal commentator compared it to “a report from a District Collector to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal circa 1935.”

    The Tower Hamlets electorate doesn’t seem to have been too impressed with Mawrey’s decision to oust Rahman, either. After completing his five-year suspension from elected office, the former mayor defeated Labour candidate John Biggs by a bigger margin than in 2014.

    Completing the uneven picture for Labour, the Tories made advances elsewhere in England. Examples include Hartlepool, where Keir Starmer had already lost a high-profile parliamentary by-election a year ago, and in many former Labour strongholds whose Westminster seats were captured by Boris Johnson in 2019, such as North Staffordshire’s Newcastle-under-Lyme.


    An Open Goal

    Labour should be doing much better than this. Like the rest of Europe and indeed the world, Britain is in the grips of a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation is expected to reach double digits by the end of the year, and economists are forecasting that a recession is imminent.

    To make matters worse, the Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has insisted that nothing can be done to relieve these economic pressures. His woefully inadequate response to spiraling energy prices is a small tax rebate and a compulsory loan to cover a portion of rising fuel costs, to be paid back by those who receive it at quarterly intervals.

    Meanwhile, the personal standing of Boris Johnson has collapsed after revelations that he hosted and took part in as many as seventeen parties in Downing Street while the country was under pandemic lockdown restrictions. The image of Johnson partying while the rest of the country had to abide by stringent rules on social gatherings has destroyed confidence in the prime minister. In recent months, his premiership has been almost entirely focused on day-to-day survival.

    This conjuncture shaped Labour’s strategy going into the elections. Starmer focused on the “PartyGate” scandal and made sure it was the top issue in his weekly parliamentary questions to the prime minister.

    In relation to the cost of living crisis, Starmer and his shadow chancellor have been pushing the idea of a windfall tax on the oil companies to fund a £600 energy bill relief payment. But there was one big problem with making this a central plank of Labour’s local election campaign: no matter how many seats Labour won, it would never be in a position to deliver on the pledge. The idea of a windfall tax may have put the Tories on the spot over their inaction, but as a positive promise it was a gimmick that fooled nobody.

    This was all that Starmer had to offer. In areas where local Labour leaderships had a decent, relevant manifesto to put forward — such as Preston, with its ongoing community wealth-building project, or parts of London where Labour politicians put the stress on their plans to tackle housing shortages — the electorate by and large rewarded them.

    On the other hand, when a narrative about national politics dominated Labour’s campaigning message, Labour wasn’t rewarded with substantial votes. Indeed, the fact that the other opposition parties did better than Labour in England shows that Starmer has been unable to associate aversion to the Tories in government with support for his own leadership.


    Exit Stage Right?

    This was another subpar electoral performance, on top of Starmer’s existing record of local council failures and by-election embarrassments. His inability to generate any kind of electoral enthusiasm is now well documented. There is simply no clamor for the anaemic, authoritarian, and socially conservative brand of Labour politics by which Starmer has defined himself.

    Even so, Thursday’s election might have been enough to rescue Starmer from another round of speculation about the future of his leadership. However, new developments have intervened to generate more trouble for the Labour leader. Having made so much hay from the revelations about Boris Johnson’s partying, Starmer is now under intense scrutiny for his own alleged breaches of the lockdown rules.

    While campaigning in a previous set of local elections in April 2021, Starmer attended a dinner in Durham that seems to have been in contravention of the limits on social gatherings. Tory-supporting newspapers have pressed the Durham police force to reopen an investigation. Starmer has now promised to resign if he is found to have broken the rules, as has his deputy leader, Angela Rayner. These elections could well prove to be the last ones fought under Starmer’s leadership — and given how poor the results were, that would be no bad thing.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • Boris Johnson has always been a liar and a hypocrite, but he was British elites’ liar and hypocrite. As he sinks deeper and deeper into a COVID-related scandal, those same elites may have lost their use for Boris.


    Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic during a virtual press conference on January 4, 2022. (JACK HILL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

    Ambling around unconvincingly in a police outfit to promote his new war on drugs, in December Boris Johnson proudly declared: “Those who break the law have nowhere to hide.” I doubt the so-called county lines gangs flinched at his show of bravado, but for Johnson and those close to him in Number 10, these words might come to haunt them.

    Having already lied about Christmas parties taking place at the center of government when COVID restrictions, backed by the force of the law, clearly stated they were not allowed, the principal private secretary organized a socially distanced soiree in May 2020 and invited one hundred people, just as the country was enduring its most stringent lockdown. The emails leaked to ITV News could, and should, be the end of Johnson’s political career.

    If that wasn’t bad enough, the prime minister himself has admitted attending. With the government hoping the issue would get forgotten over Christmas amid brussels sprouts, gift giving, and a restriction-free New Year, an unwelcome spotlight on his hypocrisy is a less than optimal start to 2022.

    Nevertheless, this moment of danger for Johnson raises wider questions. Of all the things the Tory government are responsible for — the unnecessary deaths and the light-minded and seemingly reckless approach to public health, for a start, and the rest, like the betrayals over his “leveling up” agenda and the National Insurance increase — the question is not so much why the partying scandal has taken lumps out of Johnson’s poll ratings but why some of his erstwhile allies, particularly in the media, have chosen this moment to find their knives and plunge them in.

    The first argument is that Johnson has served his purpose and has now outlived his usefulness. This purpose was comprehensively besting Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in an election after the fright the British establishment got in 2017. Not only were anti-cuts politics mainstream to an extent unthinkable before and during the election two years earlier, but socialist and left-wing ideas came surging back long after it was common sense to believe them buried and forgotten. In this reading, getting Brexit done was cover for peeling off a section of the Labour vote and putting the Left back into its box. With Johnson’s primary objective achieved, there is no longer any need to suffer his antics.

    The second is the seemingly growing threat from Labour itself. Having trailed behind the Tories and achieved nothing but woe with terrible by-election results, it was Keir Starmer’s leadership that had a question mark hanging over it going into the 2021 party conference season. But debacle after debacle cannot but affect the politician presiding over them, and so with the Owen Paterson corruption affair and “partygate” finally tilting the polls in Labour’s direction, Johnson is not looking like the electoral asset he once was. Getting rid of Johnson now might appeal to some Tory MPs concerned about the whiff of corruption and scandal, and give his successor plenty of time to settle in ahead of the next election.

    The final argument is an establishment backlash against his extreme and often authoritarian behavior. Johnson’s efforts to prove he was serious about seeing Brexit through prior to the 2019 election played fast and loose with the law of the land, including his attempted closures of Parliament and a cheerful willingness to risk the integrity of his own party by unceremoniously booting out grandees and otherwise loyal Conservatives. This might have been excused by the exigencies of the situation and the priority of defeating Labour, but the creeping authoritarianism of Johnson’s government and its contempt for any measure of accountability came to a head with the Paterson scandal.

    The move to shield the former North Shropshire MP from a minor tap on the wrist while overhauling parliamentary standards to make it even more toothless concentrated some establishment minds on his potential danger to the modicum of democracy we have in this country, and therefore Johnson’s threat to a chief prop of the state’s legitimacy. Other establishment figures might have had their material interests in mind too: a regime of unaccountable cronyism could mean they might miss out on government-backed business opportunities. Therefore, getting shot and replacing Johnson with someone a bit more in tune with the wider interests of their class would be a better outcome than letting him continue.

    But these arguments only go so far. Given the numbers of people invited to the parties and how leading journalists and editorial offices must have known about the extent of Johnson’s flagrant contempt for the rules, why have they chosen now to report on partygate? Why have they belatedly discovered the chief rule-maker was also the chief rule-breaker? Are they in cahoots with behind-the-scenes shadowy forces who have it in for the prime minister? Occam’s razor suggests not.

    The Westminster media game overlaps with but is not identical to the politics it reports on and influences. In the first place, its commentary on who’s in and who’s out is dependent on access to the leading personalities of the day. If one’s criticisms have to be tempered by the desire to keep their contact list current, the lobby has an incentive to muzzle itself. The leaks will keep coming provided the boat isn’t rocked too much.

    Additionally, for almost the entirety of the pandemic, the Tories have been well ahead in the polls, partly because they’ve been the undeserving repository of a spirit of national solidarity that was particularly prominent in the early phase of COVID and has had a lingering effect among some layers of voters. For journalists, reporting on Johnson’s partying a year ago, and especially not long into the restrictive period in 2020, might have had knock-on effects on confidence in the government’s competency in managing the pandemic and the rollout of the vaccine program. This would undoubtedly have had career implications for any reporter or editor who blew the whistle, with the threat of action by the Tories against any programming that stuck its head above the parapet.

    With this immediate danger passed, and thanks to movement in the polls, it’s significant it was the Mirror’s Pippa Crerar — the paper least compromised by associations with the government — that broke the initial story and opened the floodgates. The initial revelations were a hot story that captured the public’s attention, and as the media are in the business of competing for attention, the rest have now followed suit — some of them in tune with the growing Tory hostility to the prime minister and getting egged on for their own purposes, but all of it to be relevant to audiences old and new.

    Johnson’s difficulties are entirely of his own making. His hubris has brought him low, as it was always going to do. This episode reminds us that our opponents are not a monolithic bloc, and divisions among their ranks can open up political opportunities for the labor movement. This is such a moment.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.

  • The approach that delivered electoral success for the UK’s Tories over the last decade is starting to run out of road. But for now, the Conservatives are lucky to have an ineffectual Labour opposition that’s afraid to criticize their pandemic response.


    UK prime minister Boris Johnson in August 2020. (Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street via Flickr)

    Adapted from Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain by Phil Burton-Cartledge (Verso Books, September 2021)

    When Britain departed the European Union (EU) at the end of January 2020, it did so with the Tories at the peak of their powers. Not only had they won convincingly in 2019, but this was also the culmination of rising support for their party since 2001.

    To talk about the problems the Tories have, and to argue that the party is facing long-term decline, might seem premature, if not downright delusional. But there are powerful social forces working against the Conservatives.


    Sawing Off the Branch

    The Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments were corrosive of their own political dominance. Thatcher’s successful assault on the labor movement left the door open to rolling back the social wage. The preeminence of the executive, with its crude but ruthless attacks on independent points of authority within the state system, and the accelerated closure of swaths of the country’s industrial base, alienated natural supporters in the professions and among the petty bourgeoisie who made a living from the working-class communities the Tories destroyed.

    Compensating for the liquidation and estrangement of these constituencies was the government’s hope that new loyal Tory voters could be generated. These efforts revolved around selling off council homes and opening the housing market, while allowing a limited popular capitalism in the public share–issue of newly privatized utilities. This was enough to keep the Tories in power until 1997.

    After thirteen years of recovery, the Tories returned to office in 2010 and David Cameron set about fashioning a program explicitly aimed at keeping this (now aging) cohort of property owners wedded to the party. The following five years were a period in which a layer of this support was radicalized by the nostalgic certainties proffered by Nigel Farage and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The Tories chose to pander to them by doubling down on social security attacks and scapegoating, while conceding a referendum on European Union membership.

    As is well known, the result of the referendum yielded a stark age polarization. For younger workers, their vote to Remain was a vote for stability and certainty. For older workers and the retired, Brexit offered a promise of escape from an uncertain world, aggravated by the ontological angst of their social location and asset holding, via a projected assertion of national vigor.

    Subsequently, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson divined that their paths to election victory meant fundamentally reorienting the party around these voters. Gone were the homilies to modernization and reaching out. It was a risky strategy, especially when May’s gamble failed in 2017. But repeating the trick the second time around in 2019, Johnson was faced with a divided field of opponents and succeeded.

    Yet the pattern of the Tory vote, the concentration of its support among older voters, and its continued cultivation of this base prevents the Conservatives from convincingly intersecting with the bulk of the working-age population and presents them with an inescapable difficulty. People are not acquiring property at anything like the rates they were in the 1980s and ’90s, and therefore the link between aging and asset ownership is becoming more attenuated.

    This means that the electoral basis for their 2019 triumph will, with time, grow increasingly difficult to repeat. Unless the Tories do something by the end of the 2020s, the prospects for forming a majority government thereafter get more fanciful. Demography, however, is not destiny. A trend is not the same as hard determinism.


    After Brexit

    Thinking through the Tories’ possible futures, the successful resolution of the Brexit crisis — from their point of view — throws up a difficulty. Given the character of their coalition, the nationalism running through the Leave campaign, and the ugly conflation of exiting the European Union with anti-immigration and racist politics, postwar nostalgia, and attempts to escape a world that is unfamiliar and unnerving, the question at the forefront of Tory strategy is what can replace it.

    With all the other Westminster parties besides the Scottish National Party (SNP) accepting Brexit, it might seem that this well has dried up. For example, since taking over as leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has rapidly buried the part he played in convincing Labour to adopt a second-referendum policy. In late December 2020, he instructed Labour MPs to endorse the prime minister’s EU trade deal.

    It seems there are two substitutes the Tories can use to keep their people on side. They can simply carry on waving the flag while trumpeting Brexit’s success. Despite stories of the multiplication of red tape and added fees and delays on exporting into the EU’s economic area, unsurprisingly, the Tory press has crowed about the EU’s difficulties sourcing the COVID-19 vaccine and its humiliating retreat from a dispute with drug firm AstraZeneca.

    This, trumpeted Johnson’s client media, was proof that Brexit was correct and that leaving the EU has literally saved lives. The same outlets had comparatively little to say about 126,000 COVID deaths in the UK and one of the worst death rates in the world.

    Stoking English or British nationalism might have further electoral uses, too. Thanks to surging polling figures in favor of Scottish independence and the SNP’s pledge to hold a further referendum, there is a rich seam of resentment in England that the Tories are well-placed to mine.

    In 2015, with some skill, the Tory campaign was able to present Labour’s Ed Miliband as being in de facto alliance with the SNP, claiming that the price of a minority government supported by Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond would be the breakup of the UK and the scrapping of the Trident nuclear program. The fact that Theresa May tried the same trick in 2017 and failed to make as much of an impression does not mean that the Tories will not try it again.

    Casting Labour as somehow weak on the union — forgetting how the party blew up its Scottish vote and parliamentary representation in its defense — dovetails nicely with Jeremy Corbyn-era attacks on Labour’s lack of patriotism and “softness” on terrorism and threats posed by foreign powers. This offers the possibility of cohering a polarizing dynamic ahead of the next election against Scottish nationalism and assorted other anti-England demons.


    Then there is the predominance of social liberalism that the Tories can use (and are using) as a wedge issue. The so-called “War on Woke” amounts to preserving as much of the prevailing political culture as possible so that scapegoating drives and Little England appeals, which have proven indispensable to the Tories over the years, retain their efficacy. Yet as a long-term investment, it is destined to repay diminishing returns.

    For one thing, getting right-wing journalists excited about exaggerated goings-on on university campuses does not have the same weight or resonance as Brexit, which cut to the quick of national identity. For another, social liberalism and anti-Toryism do not persist in a rarefied realm of ideas cut off from the everyday. Both are rooted in class or, more precisely, the experience of class cohorts: the brute realities of work and living at the sharp end of sectional policymaking are constituting the outlook of the rising generation.

    Then there is the option of fiddling with the electoral system. This has been a stated objective of Tory governments since David Cameron’s election and remains a key goal of Boris Johnson’s. At the time of this writing, the Boundary Commission for England is redrawing the political map of the UK to “equalize” the population size of constituencies and dilute marginal and Labour-held seats, further enhancing the Tory advantage of the party’s more efficiently spread voter base.

    Other measures, such as compulsory identification checks, ostensibly to cut down on the microscopic instances of voter fraud, are also in play to suppress Labour votes. Gerrymandering the system to their advantage is a Tory confession that they are ill-equipped to face the politics of their long-term decline, and it is entirely true to the custom and practice of the party. It is a short-term fix that puts off the inevitable pain but does not prevent it.

    The problem with these strategies is their time-limited efficacy. This might not matter to Boris Johnson and many leading Tories in 2021, as the consequences of long-term decline are not about to immediately pressure their electoral performance. They can afford to kick the can down the road. It will be for future Tory leaders to deal with.


    Finding New Voters

    The question is how the Tories can escape the situation they have contrived for themselves. With the conservatizing effects of age breaking down and Tory support destined not to replace itself like-for-like, the Conservatives must find new ways of winning over the rising generation of voters. Not a simple task.

    There are three overlapping possibilities. The first is simply doing nothing. As the members of the postwar generation pass away over the next few decades, their property will be inherited by their children in the Generation X and millennial cohorts. Now with assets at their disposal, a certain conservatization could set in, albeit at a later stage of their adult lives than was the case with their parents and grandparents.

    Waiting is risky, because this might not translate into support for the Tories from this cohort, given their collective memory of Conservative governments during their formative years and the ways that opposition parties might respond. The New Labour years showed that the Labour Party can intersect with and appeal to propertied layers by pandering to their peccadilloes and shielding them from the chill winds of globalization. It might do the same again.

    Another possibility is jump-starting the acquisition of property and getting millions more younger workers onto the housing ladder. In the 2010s, the Tories oversaw a complex array of part-rent–part-mortgage vehicles, help-to-buy initiatives with government loans, and the extension of the right to buy to some housing association properties — none of which have made a dent in the housing market. Resistance abides in government to the building of council housing in sufficient quantities to meet demand, and the Tories have allowed developers to shirk requirements to provide social housing quotas in large developments.

    All the while, planning laws have been watered down, as if the problem is recalcitrant local-authority opposition to more housing, rather than developers land banking or limiting construction to benefit from asset-price inflation. If the Tories were to reverse course and mandate a national housebuilding effort, property acquisition could be opened up with all the political consequences this entails.

    The Tories have not done so because more houses would increase supply, threaten prices, and create alternatives to the private rental market. In other words, it would go against the interests of their existing coalition of voters — particularly the caste of petty landlords that their policies have done so much to encourage over the last forty years.


    Detoxification

    The final strategy would entail a thoroughgoing detoxification and reckoning of the party with itself. The Cameron years tried to move with the rising social liberal consensus, but it quickly became apparent that this was merely window dressing, once his government had deepened the neoliberal settlement further. Passing equal marriage legislation while marketizing public services and pushing people on social security into destitution does not make for a progressive government of any stripe. Instead, it was just another Tory administration with slick public relations.

    If, however, the Tories were to become more consistently socially liberal and actively dump their attachments to scapegoating, callousness, authoritarianism, and opposition to equality — in conjunction with significant about-faces on policy — a reinvented Tory Party might also become a rejuvenated Tory Party. With one caveat: such a transformation is utterly fanciful and can only exist as a thought experiment.

    If the Tories were to model themselves on the plodding managerialism of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats while being consistently socially liberal, they would not be the Conservative Party. Indeed, such a transformation would demand driving out most Tory MPs, the party’s cadre of councilors, and most of the membership.

    Forecasting the future can only be an assessment of probabilities. Social relations, after all, are not mechanisms grinding out predetermined outcomes. As we survey the political landscape that the Conservatives have shaped to their advantage, it is worth tempering an apprehension of their difficulties with a lesson that British political history has taught us for two centuries. No one ever got rich betting against the Tories.


    Johnson’s Necropolitics

    At the start of 2020, Boris Johnson tweeted: “This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.” A little over twelve months later, affecting a somber tone, Johnson offered his apologies for every life lost to COVID-19 and took “full responsibility” as the official death toll passed 100,000. The story of how the Tories have mismanaged the pandemic and visited a catastrophe on the UK is deserving of several books, and, one would think, constitutes a stigma it would take the party a generation to wash away.

    But despite the scale of the disaster, the Tories have proven themselves very adept at managing the political fallout of the crisis. Survey work undertaken in January 2021 by YouGov found the public more likely to blame the rest of the public (58 percent) for the surge in infections in December and early January than the government (28 percent). Unsurprisingly, there are clear age profiles to the answers, with a plurality blaming the Tories found only among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.

    Amid tragedy, it has been an unqualified political success story for the Conservatives. How have they managed to escape so much pain? People have rallied around the government as the only means to defeat the viral assailant, particularly after the initial outbreak. Despite three lockdowns and numerous public health failures, this still accounts for some of the Tory support.

    In the absence of anything else, analysis of Tory policy must concede the success they have had in handling the necropolitics of the virus. This unpleasant-sounding concept was explored in depth by Achille Mbembe. Among other things, it refers to a state’s management of the politics of death: who should die and who should be exposed to the risk of dying.

    As a concept addressed to matters of war, conflict, and the deployment of state violence, necropolitics also lends itself well to the management of mass-casualty disasters and pandemics. As far as the Tories were concerned, their approach to this inescapable fact of governance was entirely consistent with Thatcherite logics: individualize the problem, overrule or ignore expert advice, and depoliticize the government’s strategy as much as possible.


    Theory and Practice

    The initial strategy document issued when global COVID deaths stood at 3,000 and the UK had just fifty confirmed cases reveals these logics. For example, section 4.8 states that new health legislation confers powers on “medical professionals, public health professionals and the police to allow them to detain and direct individuals in quarantined areas at risk or suspected of having the virus.”

    The document goes on to direct the separation of COVID patients from the general hospital population and, particularly, accident and emergency departments. Taken with other public health rules, these appear to be neutral and sensible precautions for mitigating infection.

    Later, the document addresses the powers of the authorities. Section 4.39 reads: “There are also well practised arrangements for Defence to provide support to Civil Authorities if requested” — in other words, to use the military when it is deemed necessary. Section 4.45 raises the possibility of “population-distancing strategies,” meaning the closure of schools and other public institutions, encourage working from home, and preventing large gatherings from taking place.

    The Tories proved slow to follow their own advice. Football matches went ahead, Cheltenham horse races happened, and, incredibly, hospitals sent elderly patients back to their care homes, precipitating a huge wave of infections that tore through the system. Peculiarly, this catastrophic blunder has attracted little attention from the growing army of conspiracy theorists, let alone the cadres of the bourgeois press.

    From the outset, government messaging firmly stressed individual responsibility for abiding by the rules. “Stay at home, control the virus, save lives” was simple and easily understood. When Johnson’s mercurial adviser, Dominic Cummings, broke lockdown rules in a trip to County Durham’s Barnard Castle, the outcry, far from damaging the government, affirmed individual responsibility for sticking to the rules.

    With the backing, as ever, of Tory institutional weight in the media, Boris Johnson was barely troubled by multiple scandals around personal protective equipment (PPE) procurement, the provision of laptop computers and tablets to schoolchildren, and the visible failure of the outsourced test-and-trace program. Instead, the press seized on illegal parties or people going to the beach.

    From this perspective, death in the age of coronavirus has nothing to do with government failures. It’s an individual tragedy, a stroke of the most atrocious bad luck. The Tories have accomplished self-erasure and presented 126,000 deaths as 126,000 unavoidable tragedies.

    Opposition leader Keir Starmer has proved to be a seemingly unlikely ally in the Tory management of COVID necropolitics. While carefully worded and supportive criticisms might have been appropriate in the period immediately following his election as leader of the Labour Party, overall, he has done very little to contest Johnson’s framing of the pandemic.


    Loyal Opposition

    Starmer has focused his criticisms on competency issues and has occasionally scored “wins” by calling for lockdowns and tougher action before the spread of the disease forced the government’s hand. This approach is quite deliberate, and Starmer has obviously calculated that a wider political critique is too risky. The result is that Johnson has not been held to account for the death toll, nor for the unerring coincidence of government contracts getting handed to firms with Tory links.

    Nowhere was this clearer than when it came to school reopenings. In summer 2020, in the manner of an annoyed headmaster braced for disappointment, Starmer said he “expected” schools to be open for the new term in September. When teachers’ unions were concerned about opening schools after the Christmas break with the more infectious and deadly “Kent variant” in circulation, Starmer refused to back their campaign despite majority public support for the teachers.

    One (unnamed) Labour leader summed up their perceived bind as they reflected on their focus groups: “The more we attack the government, the more people don’t like it. . . . When we criticize the government, people often respond, ‘You lot wouldn’t have done any better.’”

    So far, the Tories are winning the necropolitics. They are setting the agenda and framing the issues while the Labour opposition refuses to contest their terms. This bodes well for the Conservatives in their attempts to determine the course of British politics after coronavirus. The hope that an independent inquiry after the conclusion of the pandemic is going to shift the Tory voter coalition away from the party, when the deaths of 126,000 of their fellow citizens have not done so already, is a forlorn one.

    The unavoidable conclusion, despite the prospect of a declining voter coalition and other strategic issues gnawing at the Tories, is that once again, they are proving lucky in their opposition. Barring an event that can fundamentally shift the country and quickly dissolve the roots of their support in the country’s political economy, a fifth election victory is within the Conservative Party’s reach.


    This post was originally published on Jacobin.