How the Tories lost Britain
Summary
Somewhere along the line the Conservatives gave up on prosperity.
Britain heads to the polls Thursday, and talk about another election gamble that hasn’t paid off. In the same way President Biden hoped Americans wouldn’t notice his age and Emmanuel Macron assumed the French would rebuff the insurgent right, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thought—wrongly—that a summer election would focus voters on his virtues.
In the event, voters still are trying to figure out what those virtues are supposed to be. Opinion polls have tightened a bit, but the situation remains much as it’s been for most of the past 18 months with the center-left Labour Party running some 20 percentage points ahead of Mr. Sunak’s Conservatives.
Winning would have been a tall order for the Tories since they’ve been in power for 14 years. But the likely scale of their defeat wasn’t inevitable. Labour leader Keir Starmer is an uninspiring prospective Prime Minister. Labour is still riven by infighting between its leftist and centrist wings, and lingering problems with antisemitism have bubbled up since the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the anti-Israel protests that followed. Given this opposition, why are the Tories facing a wipeout instead of a respectable loss?
Much of the answer rests with the economy. The Tories have spent their years in power oscillating wildly between free-market instincts and big-state conservatism. Despite early attempts to rein in government spending after the 2008 global panic and ensuing recession, the Tories resisted major debates about reducing the role of the state in the economy.
Apart from periodic gestures toward tax-rate cuts for some, in general the Tories have focused on squeezing ever more revenue out of the economy to fund the government they refuse to reform. Revenue as a share of GDP increased during most of their term in office, and the tax code became more complex than it’s ever been. The biggest supply-side reform the Tories accomplished was an overhaul of working-age social benefits that encouraged work. This provided a big boost to the economy—labor participation rose to 76% in early 2020 from 70% in 2010—but also isn’t on its own much to show after 14 years.
The result is government revenue at the highest share of economic output since the immediate aftermath of World War II, and anemic growth. This policy schizophrenia also helps explain why even when GDP growth has been strong, living standards haven’t improved. Average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, have increased only £16 in 14 years.
The Tories thought voters wanted them to become a kinder, gentler party on social issues and especially climate policy. This was wrong on immigration, where for better or worse voters wanted a firmer hand—especially in illegal immigration. Tory climate follies have been ruinous. Having legally committed the U.K. to achieving net-zero carbon emissions, the Tories later had to abandon a string of green mandates on everything from electric vehicles to home heating. Now they get credit from neither the green left nor climate realists.
The party also never made peace with Brexit, instead descending into factional infighting over its implementation. The climactic fiasco came in 2022 when party members selected Liz Truss to lead them after Boris Johnson was deposed, and party grandees in Parliament promptly throttled her supply-side tax reform plans after she stumbled into a recoverable financial-market hiccup.
The Tories lucked out after 2015 when Labour elected as its leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom voters viewed as too much of a radical leftist to trust with power. But Mr. Starmer is perceived as a safer pair of hands, and the Tories also aren’t able to score him on the policy merits. Voters don’t believe Mr. Sunak’s warning that Mr. Starmer will raise taxes because taxes already are so high under the Tories.
Struggling to explain to the electorate what the party stands for, the Conservatives risk what’s being described as an extinction-level event Thursday as voters defect either to a centrist-ish Labour or the Reform UK party promising immigration restrictions and the tax reforms the Tories ought to have implemented years ago. If a party of the political right can’t make a convincing case that it will deliver prosperity, voters start wondering what the party is good for.
