By John Gustavsson
Saturday, July 06, 2024
While Americans celebrated Independence Day, British
voters went to the polls in a snap election called by Prime Minister Rishi
Sunak. The timing came as a surprise to most, including his
own MPs, as Sunak was widely expected to hold out on calling an election until
the fall (the deadline being late January). Having trailed in the polls by over
16–20 percent ever since he took over as prime minister in October 2022, Sunak
apparently decided to jump before he was pushed, choosing to end his rather
mediocre run as prime minister on his own terms.
The election was never going to end in anything other
than a Labour victory, but the scale of the loss is truly dramatic. Having won
a comfortable majority of 365 seats (out of 650) in 2019, the party has now
been reduced to just 121 seats, the worst performance ever in the party’s
190-year history.
Much of the blame for this must be placed on Sunak, a man
with whom most Americans are probably unfamiliar. Despite not having suffered
any major scandals, and despite having been rather popular back when he was a
member of Boris Johnson’s government, Sunak’s approach to government proved
ineffective. The story of Sunak is the story of an anti-rebel without a cause,
a metaphorical dog who caught the populist car, but who
had no idea where he was going to steer it afterward. His — and his party’s —
fate should serve as a warning to center-right Americans hoping to wrestle back
control from the populist right.
How Did We Get Here?
In December 2019, the Tories, led by Johnson, won an
astonishing majority. Johnson campaigned on getting Brexit done, whereas the
Labour Party campaigned on re-running the referendum and going back to the
negotiating table. The Brexit-weary public overwhelmingly preferred Johnson’s
“get it over with” approach. Johnson’s folksy demeanor and promises of
unprecedented government investment to “level up” the forgotten North England
region also allowed him to make inroads and win seats that had belonged to Labour
for generations.
During the pandemic, the Tories rode high in the polls as
Johnson rallied the country. Generous stimulus programs and a vaccine rollout
that was the envy of the world carried the party even as the first signs of
inflation began to appear. The ship would not begin to leak until December
2021, when reports appeared saying that social events had taken place during
the pandemic in the government headquarters, contrary to the rules at the time
banning all such events. Like Watergate, the initial reports were not too bad.
Yet, unbeknownst to everyone at the time, the Tories had just hit the iceberg
that would take down the ship. Unbeknownst to everyone, except to at least one
person.
Sunak, then secretary of the treasury, would go on to register his campaign website domain in December, just
weeks after the scandal broke. Sunak may not have leaked the story to the
press, but having been present in the government HQ during the pandemic, and
having attended
at least one lockdown-breaking event, he knew that more revelations were soon
to follow, revelations that would force Johnson to resign and create a vacancy
for the role as leader of the Tories and prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Sunak waited patiently for Johnson’s popularity to
collapse. Then, in early July 2022, he orchestrated a coup that saw dozens of
members of Johnson’s government, beginning with Sunak himself, resign en masse over the course of a single day. His
position now untenable, Johnson was finally forced to go. At this point, the
Tories were trailing Labour by five to ten percentage points in the
polls.
As treasury secretary while handing out stimulus money
left and right, Sunak had been popular with voters in and outside his party. At
the end of 2020, he was the most popular politician in the country. As he would find
out in the Tory leadership election, however, those days were long gone. Having
recently raised
taxes to pay for pandemic spending, Sunak found himself on the defensive,
having to fend off accusations that he had betrayed both conservatism and his former boss Johnson. In the end, party members overwhelmingly opted for
Liz Truss, who had stayed loyal to Johnson until the bitter end but who ran on
an aggressive, Thatcherite platform very different from Johnson’s. Truss’s main
concern was cutting taxes and crushing the unions whose strikes were paralyzing
the country just as they had back when Thatcher first took office in the late
1970s.
Truss would, of course, go on to serve fewer than 50 days
as prime minister. Her budget proposal and the subsequent chaos have become the
stuff of modern-day legends.
Yet, while Truss did herself no favors, her premiership
would almost certainly have survived had it not been for the machinations of
Sunak. Apparently unable to accept his defeat, Sunak’s allies in parliament publicly declared their intention to vote down Truss’s
budget bill. This was absolutely unheard of: Any MP unwilling to support their
party’s budget would be expected to leave the party or face expulsion. For
scores of MPs to rebel against their newly elected leader who was presenting a
budget proposal in line with the one she had just been elected on was even more
absurd. The political chaos worsened the market instability caused by the
rushed budget.
With Truss’s resignation, Sunak succeeded in forcing out
a second prime minister of his own party within a few months.
After this, Sunak was elected unopposed, with no input from party members.
There is, however, a reason why the man who wields the dagger never wears the
crown. By wielding the dagger against first Johnson and then Truss, Sunak
alienated both the working class and Thatcherite supporters in his party.
Sunak’s Fumbles
Despite these troubled circumstances, Sunak’s ascension
to premiership was nonetheless a victory for the moderate wing of the Tory
party. After the boorish populism of Johnson and the radical footnote that was
Truss, the grownups were finally back in charge. The problem was that they had
no idea what a grown-up, center-right solution to Britain’s problems looked
like.
Whereas Truss was happy to confront the unions and the
civil service, and Johnson was happy to increase government spending as much as
necessary to keep voters happy, Sunak was too cautious to do the former and too
sensible to do the latter. On inflation, Sunak’s policy consisted mostly of not
rocking the boat and hoping inflation would come down on its own. Johnson may
have provided government handouts to keep voters happy, whereas Truss would
have carried out radical supply-side reforms to address the underlying problem.
Sunak chose “none of the above,” and when inflation proved to be less
transitory than was initially thought, this approach proved to be a mistake.
Meanwhile, tax levels are the highest
they have been since record-keeping began 70 years ago.
On health care, one of the top three issues of voters according to polls, Sunak’s
indecisiveness in the face of paralyzing strikes also contributed to his
downfall. Johnson might have conceded to the doctors’ and nurses’ demands for
higher pay and used deficit spending to finance it, whereas Truss would no
doubt have emulated her hero Margaret Thatcher and actively undermined the
strikes by offering no concessions while actively encouraging strikebreaking. While the latter is
greatly preferable, either would have worked better than Sunak’s
middle-of-the-road approach. Being a former chancellor, the equivalent of a
secretary of the treasury, he could not find it in himself to give in to the unions
and risk chronic deficits from exploding public-sector pay. Yet, he also lacked
the courage and decisiveness to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions.
On immigration, Sunak fumbled it even worse. Despite
immigration’s being one of the key reasons the British voted for Brexit,
migration has actually spiked since the U.K. left the European Union. Boats
cross the English Channel from France on a daily basis, with 30,000 asylum
seekers making the trip in 2023, a number that will, by all accounts, be higher this year. As they are now outside the EU, the U.K.
has no way of forcing France to take back asylum seekers (EU rules stipulate
that asylum seekers generally must apply in the member state where they first
arrive).
To deter these economic migrants, Sunak attempted to
deport asylum seekers to the African nation of Rwanda while their claims were
being processed. A deal with Rwanda was made during the Johnson
administration, but the flights were postponed again and again as the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) intervened to delay them.
Within the Tories, some moderate elements wanted to
abandon the Rwanda plan. Others wanted to leave the ECHR jurisdiction. Sunak
decided on a worst-of-both-worlds approach: He insisted that the Rwanda plan
was the only way forward, but at the same time, he refused to leave the ECHR.
The opposition from the British courts and civil service, which have dragged
their feet even after all the necessary legislation was put into place, has
also been solid. Even as conservatives across Britain begged for a showdown
with the bureaucrats, Sunak instead put his trust in the system. The flights to
Rwanda never took off.
Finally, on crime, another traditionally strong topic for
conservatives, the Tories again have little to show after 14 years in power.
After savage cuts to policing during the austerity years of the
early 2010s, police officer numbers have even now only partially recovered. This may help explain why British
police are struggling to contain violent protests, stop antisemitic hate
crimes, and why firearms- and other weapon-related offenses have increased. At
the same time, a progressive institutional takeover of the legal system has led
to police arresting citizens over politically incorrect tweets. When Suella Braverman, a member of Sunak’s cabinet
and potential future party leader, called out the police’s inefficiency, Sunak summarily
fired her. To be clear, Sunak is not a progressive. His problem is that, while
he rejected the populist approach, he had few if any practical solutions of his
own to offer, and certainly not any that could be implemented and yield results
within a reasonable time frame.
Millions of disillusioned voters understandably asked
themselves what the point of a conservative government is if it is unable to
secure the borders or the streets and leave ordinary people with more money in
their pockets. The election results should be understood not so much as a
rejection of conservative policies but rather as a rejection of a government
that failed to carry out conservative policies.
That Sunak called an election without first consulting
with his party further contributed to the disaster. His decision to leave early
during D-Day commemorations became a talking point for well over a week, and
though he would later put in some good debate performances, these happened at a
point when voters had, by and large, made up their minds. His disaster of a
campaign also allowed the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage who unexpectedly
returned to British politics after the election was announced, to split the
right-wing vote as traditional Tory voters searched for an alternative.
Astonishingly, Labour’s 412 seats were won with a share of the vote less than 2
percentage points higher than they received in 2019 when they won a mere 202
seats.
What Happens Next?
Sunak clearly spent years plotting his ascent. Had he
spent more time thinking of how he would approach the problems plaguing his
country once he ascended to power, his legacy may have been different. For
moderate elements in the U.S., not least in the Republican Party, this poses a
serious question: What does a center-right solution to the chaos at the border
look like? How do we fight the rise in violent crime? We can all agree that
Trump’s protectionist approach to the economy is wrong, but what does the
alternative look like? Not only are policy proposals needed, but these
proposals need to yield positive, noticeable change within a reasonable
electoral time frame (i.e., two to four years). Sunak’s approach of winning
first and making up policy later ended up costing both him and the Tories any
chance they had of another term in government.
As for Keir Starmer, despite his Tony Blair–style
majority, his mandate is far weaker. Few credit Starmer for this upcoming
victory, including within his own party. While Starmer was able to silence
far-left critics within his own party loyal to his predecessor, the socialist
Jeremy Corbyn (whom Starmer expelled from the party), these far-left critics
fared very well in Thursday’s elections, with voters, not least in many Muslim
areas choosing to elect independent, “anti-Zionist” candidates over the more moderate,
Starmer-approved Labour candidates. With the U.K.’s foreign-born population
being an important component of Labour’s core voters, this development could
prove to be the beginning of a serious headache for Starmer down the line.
Meanwhile, Starmer repeatedly refused to entertain rejoining the EU, despite
his own pro-EU stance, stating just days before the election that he did not
see Britain rejoining in his lifetime. This again puts him on a collision course
with another of the party’s core voter segments.
What relations may look like with the U.S. under
Starmer’s premiership is difficult to say: Starmer is a practical man, not an
ideological Marxist like his predecessor, and he is reportedly “infatuated” with Joe Biden. Should the latter be reelected,
one can expect a relationship not too different from the one Bill Clinton had
with Tony Blair. Should, on the other hand, Trump win in November, Starmer will
face extraordinary pressure from within his own party to pick fights and not be
a toady like Blair was perceived to be to Bush during the later years of his
premiership, something that cost him his legacy with British voters.
In summary, the lesson from Sunak’s failure is that if
you wish to take a party back from populists, you have to have alternative
ideas that still effectively address the problems that made your voters choose
the populists in the first place. Just being a “normal politician” and “the
grown-up in the room,” as Sunak loves to portray himself, simply is not enough.
Political gamesmanship and cold-blooded knife-wielding may be enough to topple
one or two populist leaders, as Sunak can attest, but the real challenge is
what comes after that. In the end, it appears that, though unwittingly, Sunak
may have burned down his party only to find himself king of the
ashes. Policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic ought to take note of
his fate.
Sunak has now resigned both as prime minister and as
leader of the Conservative Party. Some voices are calling for Nigel Farage to
merge his Reform Party (who won five seats with 14 percent of the vote) with
the Conservatives, with Farage taking over as leader. This would be a serious
mistake, first due to Farage’s persistent unpopularity with independent,
centrist voters, and second due to his views on Russia, which place him outside
the U.K. political mainstream. I personally believe Kemi
Badenoch, a Thatcherite conservative currently serving as the secretary of
state for business and trade, would be the best choice.
The Tories face multiple challenges: providing a strong
and credible opposition to Starmer over the next five years and winning back
Reform voters while at the same time convincing centrist and low-information
voters to give them another look. This is a monumental task that will require
the party to unite behind a leader and give that leader time to rebuild. While
Rishi Sunak and his party may have deserved this loss, we should hope, both for
the United Kingdom and for the West as a whole, that the country may soon again
enjoy conservative leadership.
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