Director of Policy Exchange, Lord Godson, analyses what Reform’s breakthrough means for the Future of the Right – while the head of Policy Exchange’s Future of the Left Programme Jonathan Rutherford assesses what Labour’s losses mean for the Government.
Future of the Right: The Local Elections
Are these the elections where the stigma of voting Reform fell away?
Victories in both the Runcorn and Helsby by-election and for the Greater Lincolnshire and the Hull and East Yorkshire Mayoralties have demonstrated that Farage’s party can simultaneously threaten the heartlands of both Labour and the Conservatives. Though the Liberal Democrats may also have some reason to be pleased, it is clear that Reform is, for now at least, the principal beneficiary of voter discontent.
Low turnout, however, means that extrapolating from these results to the General Election is a mug’s game. We are in the era of five-party politics: in the West of England, turnout was just 30%, meaning Labour’s candidate won having attracted just 7.5% of the possible electorate. This is a student union level of mandate – and speaks to the deep levels of disillusionment amongst the electorate.
Policy Exchange’s polling last summer on ‘The Sofa Voter’ set out the tremendous opportunity which non-voters provide to any leader who can connect with them. 2.7 million of those who didn’t vote in last summer’s General Election ‘seriously considered’ voting – enough to have swung the election. This is not simply a question of Right or Left. As both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson showed in their different ways in London, charismatic political leaders – unafraid to set out a clear vision – can draw in voters from across the political spectrum.
By contrast, the current Labour Government, not unlike the Conservatives before them, appears to be trying to satisfy every part of its wide, but shallow, voter base – rather than setting out a strategic direction and bringing the country with them. Such a strategy could perhaps work with a better economy. In today’s straitened times, the need to make hard choices with little sense of an overall vision is leading to their support dissipating in every direction.
Morgan McSweeney is trying to focus the Government on the issues that voters care about: reducing crime, cutting immigration, stopping the boats. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood rightly made the judges back down over two-tier sentencing. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has been courageous in both banning puberty blockers and beginning the hard task of reforming the NHS.
But how much does this cut through when other parts of Government are announcing bans on gas boilers or tearing up two decades of consensus on education? The upcoming Gauke review on sentencing – anticipated to call for fewer people to be jailed – exemplifies the challenges of Labour trying to be all things to all men.
For the Conservatives, the challenge is more existential. For the first time since the 1920s there is a serious chance that one of the top two parties in British politics could be displaced. The challenge of Farage to the Tories has echoes of the emergence of Ian Paisley to dethrone the old Ulster Unionist Party: he forces them to take account of his every move and to react to his every word.
In 1996, Samuel Marechal, the son-in-law of the Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, published a book, “Ni droite, ni gauche, francais!” Much the same could be said of Reform. This Janus-faced nature of Reform is one of their greatest strength, allowing them to contest rural shires and post-industrial heartlands simultaneously – whilst supplanting both the Greens and the Conservatives in the West of England. And yet, in this lies also the greatest opportunity for the Conservatives: for, despite Farage’s own undoubted business experience, he has still not delivered a heavy-weight economic message. From large-scale nationalisations to taxing our own electricity generation, Reform’s policies lack credibility.
That said, unlike parties of the Right in Canada and Australia, association with Trump has appeared to do Farage no harm in the current phase of the electoral cycle in the UK.
The Conservatives also need a much stronger answer on economics – not just to win, but to govern. The underlying discontent with the way the country is run has its roots in our failed economic model. How will they shrink the size of the state, cut taxes, curb the growing power of the unions, prune the thicket of regulation and wean our economy off cheap immigrant labour? What was once the meat and drink of every Tory, from the Cabinet Minister to the grassroots activist, now often takes second fiddle to debates about culture.
Thatcher’s kitchen-sink economics made bread and butter issues inspiring. As Policy Exchange’s Thatcher Centenary Project is demonstrating, it was Margaret Thatcher’s determination and character, her clarity of thinking and policy – as well as her interest in ideas – that allowed to deliver the long-lasting, transformational change that she achieved.
Today’s challenges are different, but no less severe. The public are understandably frustrated with some elements of capitalism – particularly the ‘stakeholder capitalism’ of certain large companies and utilities, seen as having an inside track to Government and manipulating rules and regulations to rip off both customers and the taxpayers. But the fundamental principles of the free market and of the wealth-generating powers of enterprise remain sound. No country has taxed its way to prosperity.
To differentiate themselves from Reform, the Conservatives must set out how the difficult economic reforms necessary will improve ordinary people’s standard of living – and then they must say it again, and again, and again, as Thatcher did, to the point of tedium. Such an approach would also do them no harm at all in heading off the Liberal Democrats who are snapping at their heels across the South and South-West. Conversely, this week’s success means that Reform will come under increasing scrutiny as to whether their policies really add up – as well as how they are running the councils where they have taken control.
The future of the Right has thus never been more uncertain. Labour can dare to dream that a divided Right will allow them to slip through the middle at the next General Election – even if their own popularity continues to decline. For the Conservatives, however, there can be no such false delusions. If they wish to counter Farage, defeat Labour and halt the Lib Dems, they must set out more clearly what they stand for, how will they deliver it – and why this will make people’s lives better.
There is a perspective that the Conservatives are split and must choose: between Red Wallers and Blue Wallers, Somewheres and Anywheres, Culturalists and Economists. This is false. Firstly, because every party is a coalition, and secondly, because culture and economy are not antitheses, but bedfellows. EDI imposes costs on corporations, low-skilled immigration depresses wages, high taxes not only depress economic growth, but empowers the state to reach ever further into our personal lives. The task now for the Conservative Party – and for Reform – is to unify economics and culture, to appeal both to people’s hearts and to their pockets. This is what almost every party that has ever managed to win a decisive victory has done: in policy terms, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Lord Godson
Director, Policy Exchange
Future of the Left: The Local Elections
There are moments when, like lightning in the dark, a brutal truth is revealed. Such a moment is Labour’s defeat by Reform in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. The Labour Government is currently a rudderless ship in a storm being blown toward the rocks.
There are times in history, when the balance of political forces at home is out of kilter, when there is widespread social disaffection and threats from foreign powers, that political opportunities arise to break with the old dead settlement and to turn the Ship of State in a new direction, and begin to win the trust and imagination of the people. We are living in such a time. There is a battle for the future of our country.
Here is a Party with all to play for and no Labour team that is yet capable of winning. The Government is in office but not wielding power. Lacking a sense of purpose, floundering in the inertia of the British State, entangled in the mass of Quangos and NGOs, it gives the impression of lacking the inner resources and political will to galvanise itself. Only the fear of Reform, as it gathers momentum, will force it to confront its own failing and act.
Ten months into its term, with four more years to go, the Government has one simple task. It must seize political power at the centre, define its collective purpose and drive political change. In fits and starts this has begun to happen.
Sir Keir Starmer has given three public statements in the last five months that outline an emerging political project.
In January, responding to the murders of the three small girls in Southport, he acknowledged the loss of a social contract. He recognised the growing sense that the rights and responsibilities that we owe one another, the unwritten rules that hold a nation together, ‘have in recent years, been ripped apart’. In February in the House of Commons, he defined the political future of the country as a form of national covenant, when he committed the Government to stand behind the people of Ukraine. It will require, he said, extremely difficult and painful choices through which the country must find social unity.
He went on to say, ‘We will have to ask British industry, British universities, British businesses, and the British people to play a bigger part; use this to renew the social contract of our nation, the rights and responsibilities that we owe one another.’ Economic security is national security but both will require ‘a whole society effort that will reach into the lives, the industries and the homes of the British people’.
And then in March in a speech on reforming the state he accused politicians of ‘hiding behind a vast array of quangos, arms length bodies and regulators’. It was a ‘cottage industry of blockers and checkers’. The State demanded more and more from people as it failed to deliver on its core purpose. Labour would restore democratic accountability and begin by abolishing the Quango, NHS England.
Sir Keir Starmer’s interest in the ‘social contract’ flickered on and off in Opposition, but is now emerging as a still small but significant political narrative.
The goal of Labour’s first term and its hope for re-election is the restoration of the social contract between Government and the people, persuading citizens to trust it, to consent to its rule, and to be willing to make sacrifices for the common good.
This requires the Government to demonstrate through practical outcomes that it works in the interests of the majority of the people. It must radically reduce immigration, stop the boats and reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in working class areas. And to repair the self-inflicted damage to itself and head off future civil unrest, it needs to establish a national inquiry into the rape gangs and rule out implementing Islamophobia in law.
Delivery is the essential step toward a new political settlement, not an end in itself. There can be no durable national security, nor per capita economic growth that rebuilds the national economy, without reducing social disaffection, restoring popular trust in our democratic institutions, and winning popular consent for the Government.
Can Starmer build such a project? The Government does not understand populism and lacks the necessary verve to counter it. It’s early poor policy design on the Winter Fuel Allowance and the farmers inheritance tax did it irreparable political damage. Tinkering with fiscal rules and obeisance to the OBR only highlights the absence of any political economy and undermines its promise of ‘national renewal’. However as Labour is crushed in County Durham ‘a stake through the heart of one hundred years of one party control’, it has only this one chance of redemption.
Jonathan Rutherford
Head of the Future of the Left Programme, Policy Exchange