What are we to make of the 2023 UK local elections? The results so far point to a crushing defeat for the Conservative Party, while Labour is on course for a solid, if not exactly stunning performance, and the Liberal Democrats are crushing the Tories in their heartlands.
Does this mean a sweeping Labour victory is at hand when the Tories finally get around to calling a general election? The psephologists are urging caution. Labour's performance is not such that they will sweep all ahead of them.
From the perspective of someone sitting a couple of hundred kilometres (yes, kilometres, I'm in a country with civilised units of measurements) to the east, there is a distinct whiff of 1997 about this. The UK has had their fill of the Conservative Party, who have been in power for way too long, and just want shot of them.
Empty vessels
Why are the Tories doing so badly? Quite simply because they have run out of ideas. There is no unifying concept for the party to rally around. On the far right are the Brexiteers, who are struggling to come up with new excuses for the failure of their pet project every time reality demolishes their previous ones. The decline in size and influence of the ERG is a symptom of how they are fallen: nobody really takes them seriously any longer.
Internal division has caught up with the Brexiteers, split between the Singapore-on-Thamesers and the John Bull 19th Century flag shaggers. They unified around the desire to leave the EU, but had nothing in common beyond that.
The Tory centre is too cowardly to challenge the Brexiteers, even though they know they are sunk. Thirteen years in power have seen them grow complacent, and made them forget they do not rule by right.
The Conservative Party - like much of the political right in the Anglosphere, and beyond - are an ideological vacuum, with no ideas for tackling the problems the UK faces. They don't even have bad ideas, though they tried it with Liz Truss and her utterly discredited Tufton Street neoliberal economics. The Thatcher revolution is what got Britain here in the first place, with a society ripped apart by inequalities of wealth, and the sense of injustice that has grown from that, on both the right and the left.
Hate farming
Which is why the Tories have turned to performative cruelty. Devoid of ideas for tackling stagnant productivity, ideologically opposed to industrial and social investment, and unwilling to raise taxes to pay for an ailing NHS, they try to distract the public with culture war hate baubles. Stoking fears about trans people in toilets, about immigrants arriving in boats, trying to suggest that the social order is on the verge of collapse because of, you know, them, where them is the scapegoat-du-jour of Britain's far-right newspapers. (Amazing that such a shrinking sector should still wield such power, when you think about it.)
But here's the thing. Nobody gives a shit about immigrants coming over on small boats while they are struggling to heat their homes and feed their children. They don't give a shit about trans people in toilets while their mortgage costs are spiralling out of control, while they can't afford the rent, while kids are still living at home because there is no affordable housing any longer.
As Bill Clinton's campaign team kept pointing out to him, "it's the economy, stupid". As the party in power for the last 13 years, the Conservatives are who the voters blame for the cost-of-living crisis and the state of the NHS. If they were going to fix it, they would have, a long time ago. But they were distracted by Brexit, and the chaos that has caused. Their solution was always, "qu'ils mangent de la souveraineté".
Not an automatic bye
While I firmly believe that the Tories are on course for a historic defeat (I stayed up for Portillo in 1997, I hope to stay up for Johnson in 2024 or whenever it is), that doesn't automatically translate into a landslide for Labour. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has been dull - a political asset in many ways in difficult times - and has failed to excite the voters. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are doing very well in local elections, but that has not always translated directly into parliamentary seats in the past.
The one thing animating the voting public is wanting to get rid of the Tories. There may not be a Labour landslide, but voters are clearly determined to vote for whoever can defeat the local Tory MP. In the Red Wall, that's Labour. In the Blue Wall, that's the Lib Dems. In some places, it might even be the Greens.
Of course, we will have to wait for a general election in the UK. They Tories may try to hang on until 25th January 2025, the latest possible date to call an election. More likely they will wait for next year and hope for better economic times, helped perhaps by Ukraine pushing the Russians out of their territory. Those times are unlikely to come, however, given the systemic weaknesses the Tories and Brexit have introduced into the British economy.
Tear off the plaster
The brave thing for the Conservative Party to do would be to all a general election as quickly as possible, take the defeat, and regroup for the next election. The Tories are going to lose anyway, so the sooner they start to rethink and reinvent themselves, the better for them in the medium term.
That would be the brave thing to do. But this current iteration of the Conservative Party is noted more for its stupidity and self-destructive urges than for its courage. So they will wait. They might even be mad enough to try to bring back Boris Johnson, a move which would pretty much guarantee them being wiped off the face of British politics.
Come to think of it, that sounds quite appealing.