…And I feel fine
This week: could the Tories really go the way of the dinosaurs? Also: some English counties that are more than one county; and a map of rising sea levels to play with.
I sometimes wonder if the dinosaurs ever wondered what that big, glowy thing growing ever brighter in the sky was. If so, do you think there were sensible, level-headed dinosaurs telling other dinosaurs to stop panicking?1
Over the last 10 years I’ve been yelled at a lot on the internet. There are three very obvious reasons for that – my work, my views on Jeremy Corbyn, and my actual personality – but it has provided an insight into the assumptions people make about exactly where I fit. For a while I was seen as a Blairite, even, in some more unhinged quarters, a Tory. After the 2017 election, when I briefly got quite excited about Labour closing the gap, I was an apologist or fellow traveller. There are plenty of LibDems who will always be convinced that I’m secretly one of them, on the grounds that I like, variously, trains, Doctor Who and long, tedious arguments about planning policy; but most people who’ve thought about it now seem to put me on the soft left.
The odd thing is, though: I’m not sure my politics has changed in the slightest since I started paying attention some time in the mid 1990s. Through Blair, Brown, Miliband, Corbyn and Starmer, my position has remained entirely consistent: I want a Labour government; but man I hate this Labour leadership. The latter needs no explanation, really, but the former is less about love for the Labour party than my views on the alternative.
Which is why, despite the fact this country feels like it’s in the biggest mess of my lifetime and it’s far from clear Keir Starmer can fix that, I can’t help feeling the occasional twinge of excitement. Because some members of the Conservative party – the great survivor, one of the oldest and most successful political parties in the world2 – are going around panicking about an extinction level event; and their leaders and client media are smiling indulgently and telling them not to be so silly.
The polls always narrow! It’s just a big star, guys!
Sensible, vaguely centrist but nonetheless Tory-aligned friends seem to agree, for the most part, on two propositions. Firstly, that Labour will win the next election, and looking at the nutjobs ruining their own party this may be no bad thing; secondly, that the polls will definitely narrow. And on the face of it, that instinctively feels like the most likely outcome. Polls do, generally, narrow; and neither Starmer nor his party have done anything recently that would justify the sort of majority that’d make Tony Blair look like Theresa May.
Except – unlikely things do happen. Looking through some historic polling the other week, in an attempt to win an entirely pointless argument with a friend, I realised that an assumption I’d long held about what had happened in the ‘90s wasn’t true. It was neither the collapse of the pound on Black Wednesday in September ‘92, nor the arrival of Tony Blair in July ‘94, that had caused Labour’s poll to spike. It was both those events and more: the impact the former had on personal finances; the drip, drip of scandal over years as an exhausted government ran its course. Actually, Labour wasn’t habitually getting the sort of poll leads it’s been running for four months now until well into 1993.
What should terrify the Tories now, I think, is that – as Will Jennings noted in his own, newly-launched newsletter – there’s been a similar sort of build up in the Labour lead underway for two years now. A lot of the economic pain has yet to fully hit; and no one especially seems to rate Starmer. And yet, the polls already look like they did in 1995. It looks a lot like the public have made their mind up.
But of course, the election may be nearly two years off, and polls do tend to narrow, right? There’s no cost to expressing your dissatisfaction in a poll. But what happens when the reality of Labour sets in? Won’t voters turn back to the Tories then?
Perhaps they will. But if it’s worth asking why they would. A lot of younger voters – “younger” here meaning “under 60” – aren’t just dissatisfied, but furious, about Brexit or the state of public services or being mocked for working from home, and only one of those things is immediately fixable. What’s more, when polling deficits narrow, it’s generally because governing parties have done something to improve their stance. What actually could the Tories do? They’ve boxed themselves in on Brexit and tax cuts, and whatever his flaws Keir Starmer simply isn’t that scary. It’s at least possible his polling lead is real, and that if it does narrow the main beneficiaries will be the LibDems in seats which Labour simply can’t hope to win.
Right up to election day in 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour party was still worried it could lose – hence the chats with LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown about possible coalitions. The majority that feels so inevitable in retrospect seemed like a long shot at the time. So what if it really is happening again? What if, given that in 1997 the country was booming and now we’re the sick man of Europe, the predicament faced by the Tories is actually, if anything, worse?
What if that thing heading towards the Tory party, that pollsters keep telling us might be an extinction level event, is, in fact, an extinction level event?
It probably won’t happen. The world isn’t that kind. And if it does god knows it won’t be the end of right wing politics in this country. But last weekend the Tory aligned bit of the media made two big interventions in British politics. The first was a hagiographic interview with one disgraced ex-prime minister; the other, a 4,000 word self-justification relaunch from another.
Sometimes things are exactly what they look like. And that burning thing might just wipe you out.
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