It’s unnerving to feel actions have broken free from consequences. Think of the almost physically jarring sensation when a computer – or worse, a vehicle – ceases to respond to your instructions. Many politicians have leant on the need to ensure a connection between working hard and having nice things when making the case for, say, lower taxes or welfare cuts; why they don’t apply the same logic when discussing, say, house prices or the impact of increased student fees is left to the reader to decide.
All this, at least, afflicts only the relatively young. But there’s another break in the wiring of public life that affects essentially everyone on this island – one that, I’ve begun to suspect, is proving even more consequential for our politics.
A horribly long time ago now, the Tories ran their 2010 campaign under the twin slogans of “Year for change” and “We can’t go on like this”. What they were actually promising to change is difficult, from this distance, to reconstruct – but after 13 years of Labour, the last couple of which had not gone brilliantly, enough people were ready for something new, and in so far as the old government had broadly been about public service renewal, and the new one was broadly about a smaller state, they got the chance.
That, though, was surely the last time a promise of change was in any visible way delivered. The Tories’ unexpected majority in 2015 election result was treated, not unreasonably, as an endorsement. Drill into the detail, though, and public satisfaction with the status quo was much harder to detect: Labour’s vote share was up by more than the Conservatives’, and the very different fates of the Lib Dems and SNP explained almost everything.
It surely shouldn’t have been a shock the next year when, asked a question that could be parsed as, “Are you happy with the state of this country?”, a slim majority voted “hell, no”. Exactly how the Brexit vote should be interpreted in terms of the UK’s relationship with Europe, its place in the world or its immigration policy would be debated at fascinating length for years to come. But the one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that it was a vote for change. Longer queues at airports aside, it is far from clear they got it.
And so it’s continued: 2017 was meant to be a lock for Tories, yet they managed to lose seats thanks to a large, unheralded swing towards Labour under Jeremy Corbyn. Two years later, the Conservatives learned their lesson and offered “levelling up” (a promise of a better deal for the parts of the country that felt left behind), and campaigned on the slogan “Get Brexit done” (a phrase that can be parsed as “enough already”). To the extent that a fourth election victory running for the same party can ever be seen as a change election, 2019 was it.
Yet afterwards – would you believe it? – for all those bold promises, the country somehow continued along the exact same trajectory as it had been on before, only this time we were all locked in our homes for 18 months as well. So the Tory vote collapsed, and Labour won a huge majority on a manifesto with the single word “change” on the cover, only to retcon this as “stability is change” the moment it actually made it to government.
Is it any wonder Labour’s support immediately collapsed, too? Is the message not clear enough at this stage? The one constant in the past decade of British politics is that, when you ask the electorate what it wants, it has consistently replied, “Not fucking this.”
It would be easy to paint the voters as fickle and ungrateful, like a child that screamingly rejects every food offered or the cat sat by a bowl demanding a secret third thing. But I’m not sure that’d be fair: for all the merry-go-round of new prime ministers or a new election every half an hour, it feels likely that the things the public are asking for are fairly clear. Better public services; prosperity and security; and (don’t shoot the messenger, I don’t agree with it either) reduced immigration. The demand for all those things has been pretty much consistent. None of them have been on offer for a very long time.
Every time we asked the electorate its opinion, vast numbers of voters press the button clearly marked “make things better”. Yet every time, things just keep on getting worse.
There are all sorts of reasons for that, some the fault of our leaders, but many of them not. Demographic change and geopolitical headwinds are against us; there are limits to what governments can do. But for all the head scratching about the enthusiasm for Reform on one side or the Greens on the other – or, come to that, for Brexit or Corbyn, the SNP or Plaid – I suspect much of the explanation is actually incredibly simple. People tell the government what they want, yet the government doesn’t deliver it. They vote for change and find nothing changes at all.
Little wonder, by this stage, that an unnerving number of voters are just about ready to kick the whole thing over and start again. When the computer freezes, you start mashing the keyboard in the hope of waking it up.
[Further reading: Britain is blind on immigration statistics]
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