This week the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, set the date for a general election for July 4th. My original headline for this post was "About Damn Time", but I decided instead to go with a play on words relating to the US's Independence Day. This Tory government has been a disaster, and it's time the UK broke the shackles and liberated itself from their haphazardly misrule.
I say "this" Tory government, but which do we mean? There's the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government that ruled from 2010 to 2015; the Tories ruling on their own under David Cameron from 2015 to 2016, when he had to resign after the Brexit referendum turned out for Leave; the Theresa May government that lasted from 2016 to 2019; the Boris Johnson government that held the reins through the Covid pandemic until 2022; Liz Truss's 45-day tenure in 2022; and finally, Rishi Sunak's government, which has been in power since then.
In that time, other than the 2010 general election that brought the Tories to power after 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, there have been three general elections, in 2015 (which gave Cameron's Tories enough of a majority to rule without the Liberal Democrats), in 2017 (to cement Theresa May's position post-Brexit vote, but ended up forcing them to team with Northern Ireland's DUP), and finally in 2019, when Boris Johnson faced off with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and returned a pretty strong majority.
They've all been pretty terrible. We might look back at the pre-2015 days as a beacon of stability - and they were - but those five years saw the Tories pretty much run roughshod over their coalition partners as they slashed public services, cut welfare benefits and raised university tuition fees. I was in the UK for the first three years of their term, and I remember the student protests at the tuition rises, which went from about £3,000 a year to over £9,000 - that might seem laughable to us in the US, where you have to fork out much more than that even to attend public universities, but consider that tuition tripled from one year to the next, effectively putting higher education out of reach for a certain amount of families.
That period was notable because the Tories had come to power on a wave of excitement about their young, dynamic new leader, Cameron, who urged people to call him Dave and seemed to court the votes of the bien-pensant sections of the electorate by biking to Parliament and installing a wind turbine on his home. He seemed to position himself as a sort of Conservative Obama, and he also benefited from anger at the chaos caused by the 2008 global recession - stuff like that always blows back against the government in power, and a significant portion of UK voters in 2010 seemed to blame Gordon Brown for the recession.
Never mind that it was actually caused by bank deregulation and risky behavior by investment bankers, plus the infamous sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. Voters were pissed off at their lost jobs and cratered portfolios, and they needed someone to punish. The sad thing is that they punished possibly the one politician, Brown, who was best-placed to cushion the UK's fall.
There was some idea that Cameron's Tories had shed the "nasty party" label that's always dogged the Conservatives, but he immediately started talking tough about "benefit scroungers" and illegal immigrants. In 2013 his Home Office secretary, Theresa May, approved a campaign where vans inviting illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest drove around.
This same kind of atmosphere led Cameron to call a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU or not. When it blew up in his face, he resigned, leaving the UK to enjoy May's premiership and everything that followed. May's time was pretty chaotic, as she found herself trying to negotiate a Brexit deal that would actually deliver on the Leave campaign's (false) promises, and having to fight against her own party multiple times in the process. Part of the problem was that, notwithstanding promises to avoid a "hard" Brexit, the other option was taking on a similar status to Norway or Switzerland, which meant following directives from Brussels - which they'd been doing before 2016, but with the crucial difference that, as members, the UK could actually influence those policies.
When May resigned, Johnson became the Tory leader and promptly won a landslide election against Corbyn, painting him as a dangerously loony socialist. This delivered the famous Red Wall Tories, i.e. those who stood for constituencies that had voted Labour (ergo "red") for generations, in part because of fears that a Corbyn government would immediately rejoin the EU.
Johnson faced two big crises in his premiership, the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Neither was his fault, and the latter allowed him room to actually behave in a moderately statesmanlike way, by becoming one of Ukraine's most vocal defenders. Of course, this was after decades of the UK turning a blind eye to Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin turning London into their own playground; on top of that, the war kinda saved Johnson's bacon, by diverting attention from the scandal that arose when it emerged that he'd broken his own lockdown rules to host parties at 10 Downing Street.
His handling of the pandemic was pretty awful, even apart from Partygate, as it became known. He was probably the first major leader to catch Covid, and his government's inability to settle on a policy (lockdowns vs herd immunity) led to way more cases and deaths than was necessary. Indeed, the only advanced economy that did worse was the US, which had its own mismanagement going on.
I could go on about Liz Truss and the shenanigans surrounding Rishi Sunak, but I don't have all night. The main point is to sum up the chaos that the UK has suffered as a result of this succession of Tory governments. Cameron's pitch in 2015 was that Labour would cause too much chaos, but in the end he destroyed the UK's biggest trade agreement, which has led to decreasing international confidence in the UK and gutted investment. Immigration has soared, even though the aim of Brexit was to kick the foreigners out, and UK businesses have a hell of a time exporting to the Continent. Brexit also almost destroyed the Northern Ireland peace accords of 1998, which depended on both Ireland and the UK being EU members, so there wouldn't be a hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.
For me, the original sin is Brexit, and everything bad comes back to that. Liz Truss may have taken just 45 days to tank the economy with unfunded tax cuts, but she wouldn't even have been in the conversation for PM if the Brexit referendum hadn't happened. Likewise with Sunak's signature policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda - if Labour had won any of those elections from 2010 on, he wouldn't have been there to implement this cruel policy.
So when I say that this upcoming general election signals independence from the Tories, I'm hoping that it breaks the back of the Conservative party for another few election cycles, just like Blair's 1997 victory did. I'm not naive enough to think that it'll destroy the Tories as a party, or naive enough to think that they'd be replaced by a more sensible center-right party.
But I do hope that it sends the worst, most xenophobic elements like Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman or Priti Patel packing from Parliament, never to be seen again. As a friend pointed out on Facebook when I posted about this very subject today, it could hopefully be an opportunity to introduce a more progressive voting system, which would give more representation to parties beyond just Labour and the Conservatives. At the very least, they could get ranked choice voting, which was the Lib Dems' pet project in 2010 and the main thing that the Tories bulldozed cynically to destroy their coalition partners.
Beyond that, I'm reminded of conversations I had with friends in the lead-up to the 2010 election. Some were so angry at Brown and Labour that they asked things like, "Who'd vote for Labour now?" I even remember seeing an article somewhere suggesting that saying you planned to vote Labour was enough to get you ostracized from your friend groups in some circles. Even back then I could see that Cameron's "call me Dave" act was false, and that they'd just pick up where Margaret Thatcher and John Major's policies left off.
Fourteen years later, I'm absolutely not above saying, I told you so.
No comments:
Post a Comment