Rainy Day Tories

The Schadenfreude Election

Credit: Youtube Screenshot

Rain and the movies have a long and distinguished history, with many different moods and permutations. Gene Kelly dancing; the romantic rain of Four Weddings and a Funeral; the dystopian drizzle of Bladerunner; the vengeful downpour of The Unforgiven, or Andy Dufresne’s ecstatic moment of liberation in The Shawshank Redemption - rain can always add something extra to a story.

In politics, however, rain is something you generally want to avoid. Because if you do find yourself standing in the rain without an umbrella to announce a general election, it is only ever likely to be a pathetic fallacy - a confirmation of your foolishness, lack of preparedness, poor choices, and perhaps a sign that the gods have abandoned you.

This was how it was on Wednesday, when a sodden Rishi Sunak stood at the lectern with the strains of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ ringing in his ears and pulled the plug on one of the most calamitous eras in British politics. Watching the Head Boy robotically intoning his Bold Plan while the rain rolled down his tailor-made suit, we all knew that the end was in sight, and the dismal look on his face suggested that he did too.

It was an extraordinary move that took the country, the opposition, and his own party by surprise, and suggested that Sunak has as much contempt for his own MPs as they have for him. It was simultaneously feckless, reckless, exhausted, thoughtless, and desperate. Insofar as there was any political calculation behind it, we can only assume that Sunak hoped that at least the students would be off on their holidays by July 4th and not bother to vote.

Beyond that, the date appears to have been decided according to a scale that begins with awful and ends with wipe out. That same evening, Sunak had a Sky journalist forcibly ejected from his campaign launch in front of the cameras. There were rumours that Tory MPs were planning to unseat Sunak in order to install a successor who would cancel the election.

Perhaps even these plotters realised that unseating your own unelected PM to cancel an election is not your smartest move. But even as the party scrambled to find 200 candidates to fill vacant seats, more vacancies were coming available, as MPs and cabinet ministers deserted the sinking ship with an alacrity that can only be described as indecorous.

Within days Redwood, Leadsom, and Gove had decided not to defend their legacy or fight for Sunak, and they probably won’t be the last to make the jump. No one will be surprised that Boris Johnson will also be absent from the campaign, according to the Mail, because he has ‘booked a series of foreign trips that will take him out of the UK for the majority of the critical period.’

If Johnson thought it was in his interest, you know those trips would swiftly be cancelled. But who would want to get involved in this campaign-of-the-damned, or defend their party’s record, when you yourself helped destroy your own government? Better to slope off and let the whole thing crash and burn, and hope that you can avoid being associated with the wreckage and come back later when it’s all been forgotten.

Even Farage, another great English patriot, decided that working for Trump was better than putting himself up for a candidate as a representative of the ‘party’ that was supposed to outflank the Tories from the right. That left only the Head Boy and his advisors to steer the Tory ship through the reefs, and the evidence suggests that is not a task for which they are not well-suited.

By the end of the week Sunak had headed off the Titanic Quarter in Belfast for a walkabout, because what better way to generate some positive headlines? He also managed to get himself photographed in Morrisons, so that only the word ‘Moron’ was visible above his head. At a food distribution centre in Derbyshire he interviewed high-viz jacket ‘ordinary people’ who turned out to be Tory councillors. Footballing man of the people that he is, he asked some Welsh voters about their chances in the Euros, only to discover that Wales have failed to qualify.

And on Saturday he took the day off for a brainstorming session with his advisors, emerging the next day with a plan to introduce compulsory military service for eighteen-year-olds.

Genius. Never mind that these are the politicians who removed the freedoms that once young people to live and work anywhere in Europe, and then turned down an off for a new visa scheme for 18-30s. Now they want to bring back national service to ‘foster a culture of service’ and make society ‘more cohesive.’

By the end of the day Sunak’s plans had been attacked by a Tory defence minister, a former admiral, a former chief of the general staff, and Nigel Farage, who said, correctly, that they were an appeal to ‘his’ voters. Meanwhile, Sunak’s team were out on in the tv studios, attempting to explain that a)the scheme wouldn’t be compulsory, b)maybe there would be a little compulsion c) it wasn’t clear what kind of compulsion it would be.

If they knew the answers, we don’t, and we probably never will. Because this is the kind of policy you will unroll if you assume that all British voters are a sclerotic pensioner in a pub somewhere in Buckinghamshire already on his third pintat midday, nursing memories of old John Mills films and complaining that the country has gone to the dogs and there’s no respect, and national service never did him any harm.

It’s too easy to imagine Sunak and his advisers holed up in a country house with the spin doctor Stewart Pearson from The Thick of It. Family badger culls? A referendum on hanging? Force asylum seekers to pick fruit? Assisted dying for the long-term unemployed? Fines for foreign languages speakers? When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, but it’s hard to see what a government this clueless can do in the next five weeks to reverse the polls that point almost unanimously to a crushing defeat.

Rarely have defeat and humiliation been so richly-deserved. I have spent most of my adult life under Tory governments, but I have never known anything like the last fourteen years.

It’s been a wild, spirit-crushing ride from the Big Society to the vicious, pointless cruelty of austerity that made the most vulnerable people in society pay for a crisis they had not caused. The persecution of ‘welfare scroungers’ was accompanied by thenscapegoating of migrants and asylum-seekers, culminating in Cameron’s hapless, ill-considered flutter at the Brexit casino, and the years of lying, gravity-defying parliamentary fights and pseudo-fights that followed.

The arrogance and stupidity of men like Davis and Frost; the corruption and the toleration of corruption; the depraved, decadent premiership of Johnson; the gross mismanagement of the pandemic; the gormless fanaticism of Truss and Kwarteng; the foolish cruelty of the Rwanda policy; the anti-woke culture wars; the near-collapse of the NHS, the police, the social care sector and the criminal justice system; the spread of hunger and poverty in a developed country - all of these outcomes are part of the Tory nightmare we have yet to wake up from.

And throughout these years, we have had to endure a procession of the most dismal liars, chancers, and mediocrities that have ever marched through British public life. Dowden, Braverman, Patel, Francois, Gullis, Bradley, Clarke-Smith, Jenkyns, Dorries, Atkins, Whately, Jenrick, Rees-Mogg - the list is endless and endlessly shameful.

These are the scrapings of a discombobulated party that has driven out politicians with even a modicum of honesty, integrity, competence, and good sense, leaving only the shriekers, the shouters, and the oleaginous grifters to represent a dazed, disorientated, and punch-drunk country that has only just begun to understand how far it has fallen and how foolish it was to place its fate in the hands of such people.

Fourteen years after Cameron asked voters to choose between ‘stability and strong government’ and the ‘chaos of Ed Miliband’, the UK is a country where the NHS has 121,000 staff vacancies and waiting lists are double what they were in 2010; where dental care is so difficult to get that people are pulling out their own teeth without anaesthetic. It’s a country of food banks, crumbling schools, teacher shortages, record levels of household debt, soaring rents, and stagnant wages, where sewage-polluted rivers seas have become a symbol for the absence of corporate accountability and a metaphor for the national predicament.

All this is the responsibility of the party that has ruled the country for the last fourteen years, and that now has the audacity to ask for another five. For all these reasons, the Tories have to be not merely defeated, but annihilated on July 4th. And yet there is a curious disconnect between the scale of the disaster and the low-key tone of an election campaign that feels more like a weary change of management, than the significant social or political shift that you would expect to find after these calamitous years.

The main beneficiary of the Tory Party’s headlong descent into the void has been the Labour Party. On one level, it’s a remarkable achievement to be in the position that Labour is in - poised to reverse its historic defeat in 2019 within a single electoral cycle. Labour has achieved this, partly by purging itself of every trace of the Corbyn project, and partly by skilful politicking that has enabled the party to present itself as the only credible alternative to a Tory Party that has lost its collective mind as a result of Brexit.

The four Tory governments that followed the referendum all owed their existence to Brexit, and between them they have so discredited and divided their party that neither their centrists nor their extremes can stand its latest iteration. Gone are the virtues that were once associated with the Tory moderates and the one-nation conservatives: a sense of duty and commitment to public service, competence, expertise, and caution; a wider sense of the national rather than party interest anchored in real possibilities rather than fantasies.

Having jettisoned all that, the Tories became the maniacal, hollowed-out, gutted wreck that is now seeking to win the next election - a party of chancers, incompetents and culture warriors who either shared in the Brexit fantasy, or pivoted towards it because it served their ambitions, or lacked the courage to take responsibility for the damage that Brexit had inflicted on the country.

You would have to be a spectacularly terrible opposition not to capitalize on this. Electorally-speaking, the centre ground, even the right-of-centre ground was there for the taking, and Labour have occupied it by becoming everything that Conservatives were once supposed to be. No wonder David Lammy boasted in the US that he was a conservative with a small c.

In purging itself of the left and engaging in performative punishment of the left to attract these voters and neutralise the right-wing press, Labour has successfully made itself appealing to Tory voters who can no longer stand their own party. If the polls are to be believed, Labour stands on the brink of unravelling the 2019 Johnson coalition that some Tories once believed might represent a permanent shift in their favour.

This should be good news, and yet it doesn’t feel as good as it should, partly because Labour has co-opted so many Tory nostrums - iron fiscal discipline, strong borders, private sector involvement in the NHS, flags and patriotism etc - that its mantra of ‘change’ doesn’t feel like much more than a change in personnel.

It’s effective politics to neutralise so many Tory attack lines, to the point when Sunak’s only current attack line is that it doesn’t know what Starmer stands for. As Chris Grey has pointed out with his usual meticulous logic, Labour has successfully prevented the Tories from turning the election into a ‘protect Brexit’ battle - possibly the only strategy that might have enabled them to rally the troops.

But strategic cleverness doesn’t necessarily translate into progressive government. You might win an election by avoiding elephant traps, dodging negative headlines, and writing columns for the Sun and the Daily Mail, but these newspapers will never be Labour’s friends. A Labour government will have to take decisions, and not merely the usual ‘difficult decisions’ such as rejecting doctors’ pay demands. It will have to make peoples lives better, and show them that government has their interests at heart. It will have to fight fights that need to be fought, and it will be attacked by powerful people and institutions that are more likely, in normal conditions, to see the Tory Party as their chosen instrument.

Labour will also have to give people a reason to trust and believe in it, not once, but twice, and hopefully more than that, because the UK cannot be turned around or moved to a better place in five years.

It’s a natural instinct, especially after so many years of catastrophic misgovernance, to hope that the next government will be better than the last, and for this reason it is profoundly depressing to see the likes of Natalie Elphicke being welcomed into the party, or read Rachel Reeves assuring Daily Mail readers that Labour will not be profligate with ‘your money.’

No one is asking Labour to be ‘profligate’, but money needs to be spent just to repair the damage to public services, let alone improve them, and unless that happens, no genuinely progressive government can expect to maintain public support for long. Reeves has said that an incoming Labour government will not continue with austerity, but it’s difficult to reconcile Labour’s pledges to reduce all taxes for working people, and use construction-based ‘growth’ to find money for public services.

It’s wearying to hear an incoming government talk about growth in an era of climate breakdown. We need a conversation about inequality and distribution and climate change mitigation. We need a government will fight with teachers, doctors and nurses and not against them, that will help young people buried under high rents and tuition fees who cannot buy houses, as well as the usual fagged-out cliche of ‘hard working families.’

We also need an honest conversation about immigration. Because the Rwanda plan may be an open goal, but if Labour continues to use the same tired language about toughness on criminal gangs that Blair and Brown once used, then it will find itself in the same quandary that harmed Labour in the past- a government that privately recognises the need for immigrants, but cannot admit it publicly.

The UK cannot continue to be a country that needs immigrants and simultaneously treats immigration as a crisis and a burden. This is one reason why we got Brexit, and Brexit remains the elephant in the national room that Labour will have to address at some point, even if they don’t want to address it now. In the same week that Sunak made his announcement, David Lammy and Stephen Kinnock were in the US visiting the Heritage Foundation - one of the most dangerously anti-democratic thinktanks in the US - to discuss the prospect of a future US-UK trade deal with Trump.

Does Labour seriously believe that the UK would get a deal from Trump that would benefit the UK, let alone a deal that would compensate for what has been lost? Why are Labour politicians even meeting such people? If Labour wins, it will be one of the few (nominally) social-democratic parties to win an election in the coming months. It will find itself in a world menaced by authoritarian right-wing political movements of the type that the Heritage Foundation supports. I haven’t seen or heard a single thing - either under Corbyn or Starmer - to suggest that Labour even recognizes these dangers or has any strategy for fighting them.

To govern this fractious country in times like these will require more than competence and a safe pair of hands. It will require honesty, vision and principle, and an ability to build alliances both at home and abroad. And if a Labour government fails and gets the blame for everything the Tories have done, the wounded beast may come back, even more feral and more extremist that it already is.

When Attlee came to power in 1945, Labour could count on soldiers’ votes, the experience of war-time national planning, the determination not to return to the thirties, and a public that wanted to see major changes in the way British society was run.

We aren’t in that place at all in 2024. Maybe that’s why the main emotion I feel at the thought of the election is not hope, but schadenfreude. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver once thanked God for ‘the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks.’ Like millions of people, I want to see the Tory trash washed off our sidewalks. I want to see once-safe seats fall, Portillo moments squared, the end of careers that should never have become careers in the first place, and some kind of reckoning for the last fourteen years.

I hope voters across the country will vote for whoever is most likely to achieve that outcome. Because whatever Labour might or might not do, one thing is certain: there is not the remotest possibility that things will get better under this party-of-the-damned that has so disgracefully mismanaged the power it should never have been given.

And so whatever my misgivings about the government that takes its place, I’ll take the schadenfreude, because it’s the endless tragedy of British politics that you very rarely get much more than that, and if you hope for too much, you are very likely to be let down.