British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak attends a Conservative party rally, after he called for a general election, in London, Britain, May 22, 2024.
Credit: Reuters Photo
By Adrian Wooldridge
A British general election on July 4th almost certainly means the end of 14 years of Tory rule.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has finally put the Conservative administration out of its misery. The government has been bleeding out in public for months. Today, Sunak finally decided to put an end to it by calling the vote.
There was no obvious trigger for the decision. The latest inflation figure — a less-than-expected fall to 2.3 per cent — may have removed any last hope that the Bank of England would start cutting interest rates as soon as June. A bill of some £10 billion ($12.7 billion) for people who were given infected blood may have deprived Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt's chance for a tax cut before the vote. But Sunak may simply have recognized what most of us have long ago acknowledged: That there is no point in staggering on.
Why suffer the humiliation of seeing yet more MPs defecting to the other side? Or of yet more well-known MPs announcing that they will step down at the next election? Or of more embarrassing revelations about MPs’ weird conduct?
The Conservative government — now on its fifth prime minister since 2010 — has been a pointless charade for months now. Sunak stoically tried to revive its fortunes by setting out five missions (such as reducing inflation) and imposing some discipline on his wayward party. In vain. The targets proved elusive, particularly when it came to the core Conservative issue of immigration, and the party proved uncontrollable.
There is little doubt that Britain is headed for a Labour government — the first Labour government since Gordon Brown’s loss in 2010 made way for the coalition under David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Some pollsters have argued that the Labour Party needs to poll more than 10 percentage points more than the Tories even to form a majority because its supporters are less efficiently distributed (Labour racks up super-majorities in some urban areas). But much of Middle England, the Tory heartland is now leaning to Labour just as in 1997 when Tony Blair won his first of three elections.
And the Tories are vulnerable to both the Liberal Democrats in the Blue Wall and Keir Starmer’s resurgent Labour in the Red Wall. The Economist's seat prediction model currently gives Sunak a 1 per cent chance of winning.
What exactly a Labour government will mean is much less clear. Starmer has done a superb job of crushing the Corbynite left. In 2019, the Labour Party was led by the semi-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn, who wanted to nationalize 10 per cent of the shares in leading public companies and who sympathized with both Russia and Hamas.
Starmer has established control of every level of the party, not least candidate selection. But if politics is the art of telling a story about what you do with power, then Starmer has failed. He signaled that his heart is further to the left than Blair’s by pledging to tax private schools. But at the same time, the chancellor-in-waiting, Rachel Reeves, has pledged to accept austere fiscal rules, lowering corporation tax and giving more oversight to the Office for Budget Responsibility.
The likely election of a Labour government is much more about voting against the Tories than voting for Starmer. There is none of the Blair-mania almost three decades ago. Starmer is widely regarded as a boring figure with little of interest to offer. But there is a palpable desire to “throw the bums” out. It’s hard to overstate how strong the anti-Tory sentiment is in Britain at the moment — not just in the Labour heartlands of the inner-cities but also in traditionally Tory areas.
The past 14 years of Tory rule have tried almost everybody’s patience beyond endurance. David Cameron subjected the country to the divisive Brexit saga for no better reason than to solve a problem of internal party management. The hardline faction then forced through an extreme version of Brexit (withdrawing from both the Customs Union and the Single Market) that nobody had voted for. And it did so through a mixture of lies (claiming that Britain held all the trump cards in its negotiations with Europe) and guerrilla warfare (undermining Theresa May’s government). The party’s internal wars landed it with one of the worst leaders it has ever had, Boris Johnson, who drove out many of the most talented young Tories. His successor, Liz Truss, was even worse, and left Prime Minster Sunak scrambling from crisis to crisis.
With today’s announcement of an election, a singularly traumatic period of British political history is drawing to a close. But what the next period of political history will bring is much less clear.