Tim Bale's Blog

The landlady of a pub in Essex has been expressing bemusement about the complaints of “snowflakes” after her display of golliwog dolls attracted the attention of the county’s police – only for them to be told, reportedly by the home secretary Suella Braverman, that they shouldn’t be wasting their time on such “nonsense”.

Six years ago, a not dissimilar incident unfolded in a cafe at the foot of the South Downs in Sussex, where the proprietors’ insistence on displaying a golliwog behind the counter prompted a complaint from a dismayed member of what Braverman terms the tofu-eating wokerati (namely me). On that occasion, however, it was the proprietor who called the police on the snowflake – even if, much to my disappointment, they never turned up in the end.

That incident prompted me, with the help of the polling organisation YouGov, to do a spot of survey research on public attitudes to golliwogs in England, Scotland and Wales. Was I a hopelessly politically correct outlier? Could I possibly be entirely alone in feeling more than a little uncomfortable about them?

The results were, to use a cliche, shocking but not surprising, at least to me. It turned out that some 63% of the public didn’t think it was racist to sell or display a golliwog doll – although, interestingly, slightly fewer people (53%) thought it “acceptable” to do so. Those who thought it was racist made up just 20% of the sample, and those who thought it unacceptable 27%. The rest said they didn’t know.

But that was then, this is now. The Black Lives Matter movement and the support given to it by prominent celebrities (not least some English footballers) has since loomed large in the national debate. Its advocates might reasonably expect attitudes to have shifted in their direction. And given there were pretty big differences between the attitudes of younger and older people in 2017, as well as between graduates and non-graduates, they might expect demographic change and the expansion in higher education to have helped too – if only at the margins.

YouGov was kind enough to repeat the exercise this week to see whether such a shift had indeed occurred. And lo and behold, it had – although not for everyone.

Six years ago, a majority said selling or displaying a golliwog doll wasn’t racist. Now it’s a minority. True, that minority still makes up nearly half the population, but a 15-point drop from 63% to 48% in a little over half a decade seems pretty significant. Meanwhile, the proportion of people who think it is racist has gone up from a fifth to just over a quarter (from 20% to 27%), with another 25% (up from 17% in 2017) opting for “don’t know”.

There’s been a similar “progressive” shift when it comes to whether selling or displaying golliwogs is or isn’t acceptable. The proportion of people who think it is acceptable has dropped 14 points from 53% to just 39% since 2017, with the proportion who think it isn’t rising from 27% to 34%. There’s been an identical increase (from 20% to 27%) in those saying “don’t know”.

The enduring divisions

Age continues to play a huge part in all this: a stunning 74% of those aged 65 and over continue to insist that selling or displaying a golliwog isn’t racist – a view confined to a mere 13% of 18- to 24-year-olds.

Among the older group, 64% say it’s acceptable to display one. Only 10% of the younger group agree. Education also continues to matter: twice as many graduates (42% – up 11% on 2017) as non-graduates (21%) say it’s racist.

There are, too, significant differences on both counts between those living in an ethnically diverse city like London and other parts of the country, and between middle- and working-class people, with those living in the capital and middle-class people more likely to brand the selling or display of golliwogs as racist and unacceptable.

What’s most striking, though, is the difference partisanship still plays in people’s attitudes. Only 13% of Conservative supporters and people who voted leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum think selling or displaying golliwogs is racist.

That figure (more or less depressingly, depending on your point of view) represents an insignificant change on six years ago. It is also dwarfed by the 47% of Labour supporters and 42% of remain voters who think the same about displaying these dolls.

Essentially, when it comes to golliwogs at least, the times are changing. Unless, that is, you’re old, less-educated, a Tory, a “leaver”, or a certain pub owner in Essex – in which case you’re more likely to be heard singing the same old song, and will probably continue to do so until, eventually and inevitably, your voice falls silent.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/essex-pub-dispute-do-people-really-still-think-golliwogs-are-ok-i-conducted-a-snap-survey-203632

Ginger Rogers may be better known as a movie star than as a political strategist, but since Liz Truss trashed its already badly-tarnished brand last autumn, the Conservative Party has had little choice but to follow her advice.

“Nothing’s impossible I have found,” sang Rogers in the appositely-named Swing Time, “For when my chin is on the ground, I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.”

Sure, by the time they fight the next general election the Tories will have spent 14 years in power. And sure, they’re currently miles behind Labour in the opinion polls. But they’ve got a new leader, and they’re not giving up hope just yet. So are they right to think nothing’s impossible?

The precedents, we should remember, aren’t entirely discouraging. In 1992 and 2015, most pundits were predicting defeat for John Major and David Cameron respectively. Yet both men pulled off unexpected victories.

Moreover, Labour has a massive mountain to climb if it’s to win a majority in 2024. True, it might not need the 13-point swing that some claim, but – as the polls begin to narrow as we approach the election itself – even the seven or eight point lead some analysts calculate is required could begin to look like a big ask.

Then there’s the way that Rishi Sunak is busy “scraping the barnacles off the boat”. With Jeremy Hunt’s help, he’s undone at least some of the damage done to the government’s reputation by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. High-profile industrial disputes look as if they might be on the way to being resolved, too. And with the signing of the Windsor Framework, Sunak has improved relations with the EU at the same time as inflicting a humiliating parliamentary defeat on the self-styled Spartans of the ERG, as well as on Boris Johnson and assorted has-beens on the back benches. Meanwhile, Johnson’s woeful performance in front of the Privileges Committee seems to have finally put paid to damaging leadership speculation.

As a result, Sunak’s personal ratings are on rise – not spectacularly so but enough to put him in touching distance of Keir Starmer, whose own ratings, remember, are hardly stellar. Voters’ evaluation of party leaders aren’t the be-all and end-all but still count for something.

So, of course, do their evaluations of the economy, and these are likely to improve as the government hits its laughably modest targets on growth and inflation and then doles out a few tax cuts next year. Meanwhile, Sunak’s “Stop the Boats” pledge might bring back a few proverbial Red Wall voters into the fold – particularly if broadcasters can be encouraged to follow the Tory press which still does so much (too much, some say) to set their agenda.

For all that, however, the fundamentals don’t auger well for the Tories. The Budget ensured that most of us will find ourselves paying far more tax this year, while polling suggests that voters didn’t think it did much to help them with what, for all-too-many, really is a cost of living crisis brought on by stagnant, if not falling, real wages. Throw in the fact that people know full well that the NHS is struggling badly, and you have a ready-made recipe for a Labour landslide – especially if the SNP begins to lose its hold over Scotland and the Lib Dems can pick up 15 or so Tory seats in the so-called Blue Wall.

Finally, anyone expecting the Tories tough talk on asylum to save their bacon might need to think again. For one thing, it’s unlikely to trump voters’ concerns about the economy and public services. For another, there’s a serious risk that Sunak ends up overpromising and under-delivering – something which could even tempt Nigel Farage back into frontline politics. If that happens, and he decides to contest Tory as well as Labour seats this time around, it really will be game over for the government.

Originally published at https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/tories-hold-off-labour-landslide-next-election

Rishi Sunak is on a roll. If you believe Conservative spin-doctors, the prime minister is stopping small boats crossing the channel, he’s saved a bank and its customers from going under, and he’s helped shape a relatively well-received Budget — one that should allow him to spend just before the general election he has to call sometime next year.

Above all, he’s proved that pragmatism can solve even the thorniest of legacy problems, getting his Northern Ireland Brexit fix through the Commons with only a small rebellion from a dwindling band of Brexiter malcontents and disgruntled former leaders, including Boris Johnson.

At least some of these claims are credible, and have led to a significant uptick in Sunak’s personal poll ratings, up 5 per cent on last month. But it’s far from uncomplicated good news for his party — Sunak’s successes have not so far triggered an increase in support for the Conservatives, still lagging behind Labour by about 15 to 20 per cent.

His MPs shouldn’t abandon all hope of a halo effect. If voters admire a leader while harbouring reservations about their party, an election campaign that puts said leader front and centre can potentially swing things even a beleaguered government’s way.

No surprise, then, that this is the strategy many analysts expect the current government to follow — a markedly unpopular Tory party hiding behind the skirts of a sympathetic and popular Sunak. But while it may be the best option available, recent precedents are not particularly encouraging: leaders aren’t the be-all and end-all in winning elections.

To hear his most ardent admirers, Boris Johnson almost single-handedly won the 2019 election for the Tories. Yet detailed polling during the campaign suggests that that victory owed far more to the slogan “Get Brexit Done”, plus widespread antipathy to then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, than to Johnson’s personal appeal. Indeed, Johnson was actually less popular with voters by election day than both Corbyn and Theresa May had been in 2017.

The May campaign offers the direst of warnings to Tories who think the electorate’s misgivings about the party can be assuaged by focusing on the leader. I have discovered that polling research designed to test whether calling an election that year was a smart move was far from positive. The resulting recommendation for a campaign built around the supposedly “strong and stable” May was made by strategists who had no idea what a poor communicator she was — then seized on nevertheless by insiders who did, but hoped it wouldn’t matter.

That wasn’t, of course, the only reason things went catastrophically wrong. The absence of a clear command structure, an undercooked media strategy, and an overambitious manifesto and seat-targeting operation also played their part. So, too, did the failure to persuade voters — most famously, Brenda from Bristol whose views went viral — that another general election needed to be held just two years after the last one.

None of those mistakes was repeated in 2019: Isaac Levido was firmly in charge of strategy, the Tory manifesto was deliberately dull and effectively bombproof, its media operation well organised and its targeting far more realistic. Since Levido will be running the Conservative campaign next year, too, we’re unlikely to see the dysfunction and division of 2017.

But perhaps the most important difference between 2017, 2019 and 2024 will be that, in Sunak, the Tories have a leader who might turn out to be better respected than Johnson and better able to front a presidential-style campaign than May — in an election that is due, not chosen for party advantage.

Whether, though, after more than a decade in power and with arguably precious little to show for all those changes of leader, that will be enough to save the Conservatives remains to be seen.

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/9bab4f4c-aea1-4f25-999f-062a625a5c1d

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

So wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. They were talking about how what had previously been taken for granted could be swept away by capitalism. But they might as well have been talking about the way the contest for the leadership of the Scottish National Party has upended all our assumptions about that party – not least, that it was exceptionally united and had an impressively large and loyal rank-and-file membership.

That’s because, following Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation, the party has rapidly succumbed to the kind of bitter ideological infighting between ambitious rivals that many of us had begun to associate almost exclusively with the Conservative Party south of the border.

And not only that: in the course of the contest, the party has been forced, under pressure, to admit that it has nowhere near as many members as the rest of us had assumed – an admission that prompted the resignation of the SNP’s embattled chief-executive, Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell.

Quite why the latest figure of 72,186 members had to be dragged out of party HQ is, for the moment at least, anyone’s guess. But what is certain is that it constitutes a marked drop on the 100,000-plus that was widely quoted before this latest number was reluctantly released.

And it seems equally certain that we are seeing the end of a truly phenomenal period of grassroots growth for the Scottish nationalists which began after (and probably during) the 2014 independence referendum.

The SNP, of course, isn’t the only party in the UK to have experienced something of a membership growth spurt during the last decade. Lots more people were prompted to join the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. And, although it escaped most people’s notice, the Liberal Democrats attracted a lot of new members when they returned to opposition after five pretty brutal years in coalition with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015. Meanwhile, the Tories themselves issued just over 172,000 ballots to members in the summer 2022 leadership contest won by Liz Truss, compared with the 159,000 or so it had issued in 2019 when Boris Johnson replaced Theresa May.

Reasons for leaving

The question of why people join political parties has preoccupied academic observers since the pioneering survey research carried out by academics Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley in the late 1980s – a tradition built on more recently on by the Party Members Project run out of Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex.

What we’ve tended to pay far less attention to, however, is why members leave. This is the issue that should now be worrying the SNP, assuming that, like most political parties, it welcomes not just the legitimacy a thriving membership confers on its cause, but also the money and manpower members contribute.

That doesn’t mean that there’s been no research into this question. It is one we tried to answer in our book Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century, and which we followed up more recently after Keir Starmer replaced Corbyn in 2020 – a development that caused much soul-searching last summer when the party was reported to have lost tens of thousands of members.

Although parties often fret (not without reason) about administrative failings or the cost of membership or even boring or conflictual meetings driving members away, our surveys of people who’ve quit parties show that none of these matter that much.

Instead, what prompts people to let their membership lapse or, more dramatically, to leave in high dudgeon is a sense that the party is going in the wrong direction, or adopting a particular policy or policies that they disagree with.

Our research also shows that this ideologically-motivated distancing and detachment is often bound up with dissatisfaction or plain disagreement with the leader of the party – whether that be the incumbent or their successor.

What is particularly interesting in this regard is that the SNP’s recent loss of members occurred on Nicola Sturgeon’s watch, not as a result of her resigning. This suggests that, for whatever reason, a fair few people had become disillusioned with her leadership and the direction in which the party was going.

Unfortunately for the SNP, it seems fairly likely – especially given the bitterness engendered by the contest to replace her – that whoever takes over from Sturgeon may well end up presiding over further losses, as those disappointed with the result quit too.

If that does happen, then we should also monitor what happens to membership of the Labour and Green parties north of the border, as well as of the alternative nationalist party, Alba. That’s because one thing we also know from our research is that a surprising number of people actually leave their party in order to join another one. So watch this space.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/the-snp-lost-tens-of-thousands-of-members-under-nicola-sturgeon-heres-why-that-should-worry-her-successor-202170

Credit where credit’s due. The fact that the SNP has about 100,000 members in a nation of four million or so voters is little short of phenomenal if one compares that total with, say, the Conservatives’ 170,000 in the whole of the UK, which contains easily ten times as many voters. That didn’t, of course, stop the Tories letting that tiny and unrepresentative subsection of the wider electorate to decide who was going to replace Boris Johnson last summer. Then again, the disastrous consequences of that decision did persuade Tory MPs to deny their grassroots a second bite at the cherry a few weeks later when Rishi Sunak took over from Liz Truss without a membership ballot.

Whether the fact that the SNP, with far more members per voter, will escape the same kind of criticism when those members are invited to replace Nicola Sturgeon in a few weeks’ time, who knows? But it’s only fair that Scotland should know more about the people who are going to be making that big decision on its behalf. Parties are notoriously reluctant to release information about their members beyond how many they’ve got and, frankly, they only tend to shout about that when the numbers are going in the right direction. My colleague Paul Webb and I have been able to get round that by commissioning YouGov to carry out numerous party member surveys, the last of which we conducted shortly after the 2019 general election. This is what it told us about the SNP’s rank and file.

When it comes to demographics, the pattern will be (depressingly?) familiar to anyone’s who’s read Footsoldiers, our book about party members in the UK as a whole. The SNP grassroots split 58:42 male: female. Agewise there’s a skew towards the older generation: 71 per cent of SNP members were over 50 (40 per cent in the 50-64 bracket with 31 per cent over 65); those aged 25-49 made up 26 per cent, meaning only 3 per cent were 18-24. There’s also a skew towards the middleclass as well as the middle-aged: nearly three quarters of SNP members fell into the ABC1 rather than the C2DE bracket.

So much for what they look like; what about what they think?

Perhaps predictably, SNP members are left-wing – very left-wing.

More than nine out of ten agreed that ‘”government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off “, that “big business takes advantage of ordinary people”, that “ordinary working people” don’t get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, and that “there’s one law for the rich and one for the poor”.

SNP members are also relatively socially liberal, though there are limits. We didn’t ask about gender recognition: however, seven out of ten, for instance, were opposed to the death penalty.

On the other hand, they were much more evenly split on the need for stiffer sentences more generally speaking.

We also asked them, incidentally, about leadership qualities: intelligence mattered; so did strength; but what mattered most was being “in touch with ordinary people”. And that means Scottish voters as well as SNP members.

Originally published at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-members-scottish-independence-future-33c9rcwdm

It was always going to be debatable whether Rishi Sunak’s decision to appoint Lee Anderson as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party was truly inspired or else utterly insane.

But it’s become all the more debatable now that the notoriously loud-mouthed member for the red wall constituency of Ashfield in Nottinghamshire has declared himself in favour of bringing back the death penalty — primarily on the grounds, apparently, that: “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed.”

To those Tories who are particularly worried — for good reason according to the polls — about losing the support of primarily older, working class, often formerly Labour-supporting voters in the north and the midlands, this is exactly the sort of fighting talk that (along with the government’s promise to “stop the boats”) might just win them back.

Dog whistling is all well and good, they argue, but when you need a bloody great blast on the fog horn, then Lee’s your man — a real straight-shooter, and always from the hip.

Research suggests that they may be on to something. Surveys conducted after the last general election found that, when presented with the statement “For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence”, some 63 per cent of those who voted Tory in 2019 agreed. And the figure for those who switched from Labour to Tory at that election was, at 62 per cent, pretty much the same.

Capital punishment also finds favour with the Conservative’s grassroots members. A survey conducted in the wake of the election found that some 53 per cent of them agreed with the same statement.

That matters because it’s not enough to have folk willing to vote for you, you also need to actually get them out to vote. Rank and file members aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to mobilisation — mainstream and social media can help; so can paid-for ads and phone banks. But boots on the ground still count — especially when it comes to delivering leaflets, canvassing and “knocking up” voters on polling day.

There are, however, several potential downsides to Anderson’s advocacy of the death penalty.

One obvious risk is that what plays well in the red wall goes down like the proverbial lead balloon in the so-called blue wall — seats, largely in the south, which, replete as they are with more affluent and more highly educated voters, may be at risk of falling to the Lib Dems.

Just as importantly, perhaps, our research on Tory MPs suggested that only 21 per cent of them thought that the death penalty was the most appropriate sentence for some crimes, which means it’s unlikely ever to be endorsed as government, let alone Conservative, policy.

If that gets out — which, given the media’s wholly understandable interest in teasing out intra-party divisions, is highly likely — then it will look like yet another case of Tory infighting.

Worse, it may reinforce a seemingly growing feeling among some of the party’s voters that it’s being led by people who aren’t, in their eyes, “true conservatives” prepared to stand up for common sense — one that many Tory MPs worry may see them give Reform UK a go.

Rishi Sunak must have known the risks involved in appointing “30p Lee” but he may be regretting running them already.

Originally published at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/death-penalty-call-puts-lee-anderson-in-the-minority-l5rngc8pm

Brits seem less and less enamoured with Brexit, encouraging some to begin to wonder whether – whisper it softly – there might soon be majority support for rejoining the European Union. A look at the polling suggests, however, that anyone who hopes so might be jumping the gun.  Moreover, talking up the prospect may be counterproductive.  The decline in support for Brexit does seem – in part anyway – down to some 2016 Leavers changing their minds.  But ‘some’ is nowhere near enough, and their numbers are unlikely to grow if Remainers try to browbeat those who still have no regrets into reconsidering their decision.

Thanks to John Curtice, as well as to the various polls he collects in order to produce his invaluable rolling averages, many people may be aware that the number of Brits exhibiting what has come to be called ‘Bregret’ has risen over time, such that when people are asked how they’d vote now some 57% would support (re)joining the EU vs 43% who want to stay out.

This is both a composite and a headline figure – composite because, like every ‘poll of polls’ it melds together responses to different surveys asking slightly different questions; headline because it excludes the Don’t Knows/Won’t Says.  And at the moment it produces a marginally bigger gap between (re)join and stay out than most individual polls.  For instance, a survey conducted just before Christmas by Omnisis suggested join was on 45% vs 32% for stay out, with the remainder (23%) not able or willing to say one way or the other.

A more recent survey by PeoplePolling, with fieldwork completed just after the New Year, suggests the gap is similarly smaller than the headline figure, albeit with even more respondents (just over a quarter, in fact) declaring themselves unwilling or unable to voice an opinion.

But it also does something more interesting, asking one half of the sample the basic join or stay out question but asking the question to the other half only after reminding them that joining would mean going back into the single market, applying EU law, accepting freedom of movement, and paying into the EU Budget.  The impact isn’t huge but it is instructive: Don’t Know/Won’t Say hardly changes but join drops from 42 to 38% while stay out rises from 33 to 35%.

Delving into the poll’s crossbreaks, we find what we’d expect when we compare, on the one hand, those who voted Leave in 2016 and (separately) those who voted Conservative in 2019 with those who voted Remain and (separately) voted Labour. The former favour staying out over joining by roughly 70:10, the latter favour joining to staying out by the same margin.  We’re also reminded of quite how much age makes a difference.  Up until age 49, getting on for half of respondents are joiners with only around a fifth saying they’d stay out.  Those aged 50-64, however, favour staying out by 40 to 31%, and those aged 65-plus favour doing so by 59 to 26% – a huge margin made all the greater by the fact that far more retirees seem willing and able to state a preference one way or the other.

Now, if you’re pro-EU, there is some (albeit slightly morbid!) encouragement to be had here.  Recent research suggests that, if there has been a decline in support for Brexit (and there does seem to have been) around a third of that decline is due to ‘voter replacement’ – a polite way of talking about the fact that a fair few old, Brexity voters have shuffled off this mortal coil to be replaced by younger people who are overwhelmingly opposed to Brexit.  If these people hold on to that view as they get older, then a ‘cohort effect’ may eventually produce a majority for rejoining.

The other reason support for Brexit seems to have declined has to do with a growing feeling among Leavers that it’s been bad for the economy, not least in the wake of Liz Truss’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s whacky few weeks in charge.  This, of course, may not offer so much encouragement to rejoiners: after all, an economic recovery could theoretically see some of those disenchanted Leavers swing back to thinking the country was right to quit the EU in 2016 and that they would vote to stay out today.

The take-home message from the polling right now, then, is that, while Brexiteers aren’t exactly winning the battle for hearts and minds, there doesn’t seem to be much prospect of a sure-fire majority for rejoin emerging anytime soon.

As to why that’s the case, we can only guess.  Most likely it’s that many Brits just don’t think they could face the chaos, even the trauma, that would inevitably accompany an attempt to reopen the question of the UK’s membership, and anyway it’s only been two years since we left so perhaps we should give it more time?  Also, the SNP aside, opposition parties – principally Labour and the Lib Dems – haven’t provided voters with much encouragement to think rejoining is a serious option.

That’s mainly because they’re convinced (rightly) that they need to win back Leave voters in order to have any chance of victory at the next election.  But it’s also because they’ve finally twigged that telling people they’ve made a stupid mistake isn’t, psychologically, the best way of convincing them to undo it.  Better instead to let them come to that conclusion themselves – perhaps through the evidence of their own eyes and experience, perhaps as the analysis provided by those much-maligned experts begins to filter down, or perhaps as (unlikely as it may seem) ‘EUstalgia’ becomes a thing.

Rejoiners, then, would be well advised to let (human) nature to take its course and to heed the old proverb – ‘least said, soonest mended.’ Whether, however, the EU would really want the UK back in the fold if they succeed in putting together a majority to apply for entry who knows?  Right now, I rather doubt it.

Originally published at https://encompass-europe.com/comment/least-said-soonest-mended-public-support-in-brexit-britain-for-re-joining-the-eu

If Jeremy Hunt’s first Autumn Statement doesn’t run into problems over the next few days — not least with his Conservative colleagues — he will be exceptionally lucky. Every Tory chancellor who has delivered a Budget since 2010 has had to come back to the Commons to reverse one or more proposals — although none quite so spectacularly as his predecessor, Kwasi Kwarteng.

George Osborne, who Hunt apparently called for advice on this week’s package, knows this all too well. In 2012, he was forced to beat a strategic retreat on multiple measures after his “omnishambles” Budget. Nadine Dorries suggested that Osborne and prime minister David Cameron were “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”.

Dorries was voicing a wider concern among Conservatives that the wealth and privilege of its top team make spending cuts and tax rises difficult to sell to hard-pressed voters — even if some of them, including this week’s cut to the capital gains allowance on dividends and second homes, are, symbolically at least, targeted at the well-off.

That concern is even greater now, given that the two Tories attempting to rein in public spending are far wealthier than Cameron and Osborne.

Hunt is reportedly worth at least £14mn and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (thanks to his wife, Akshata Murty) £730mn. But does the fact that half of the country apparently thinks Sunak is too rich to be prime minister really create a political problem? British attitudes to the rich are rather more nuanced — and less hostile — than imagined. Courtesy of detailed research conducted in the US, Germany, France and Britain by Rainer Zitelmann, a sociologist, we can see by how much.

Britons seem far less prone to envy than their continental cousins. Zitelmann classifies 34 per cent of the French and 33 per cent of Germans as envious of the rich, but only 18 per cent of British respondents (and 20 per cent of Americans) fall into that category.

The study also revealed, however, that the nation regarded some rich people as more deserving than others — entrepreneurs, the self-employed and top musicians and actors, with athletes not too far behind. Bottom of the list (no surprise perhaps) come bankers. Helpful for the proudly entrepreneurial Hunt, perhaps, but less so for Goldman Sachs alumnus Sunak.

Fortunately for both, although a fairly predictable set of negative characteristics are associated with the rich, only about a quarter of Britons picked ruthless or greedy. They were also significantly less likely than the Germans and French to blame the rich “for many of the major problems in the world” — Labour voters (33 per cent) were much more likely than their Conservative counterparts (13 per cent) to hold the wealthy responsible.

That divide resurfaces on attitudes to tax. Only 20 per cent of Labour supporters (compared with 46 per cent of Tory supporters) opposed “excessive” taxes on the rich since they’d worked hard. Asked if the rich should pay very high taxes to ensure the gap between rich and poor didn’t grow too great, 53 per cent agreed while just 21 per cent of Tories did. More Britons — by a margin of 38-29 per cent — favoured very high taxes for the rich than worried about them being excessive.

What we regard as “excessive” is moot. Conservatives are fond of reminding people of tax rates imposed on the rich in the 1970s — so “punitive”, they argue, that they stifled entrepreneurship and turned voters against high taxes, leading them to elect Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Recent historical research on public attitudes to taxation from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s, however, reveals that this narrative took hold only in the late 1980s, and is largely a myth. In reality, any “tax resistance” was outweighed by concerns about public services and overall fairness. It’s unlikely that Hunt’s modest decision to lower the 45p income tax threshold from £150,000 to £125,140 will encounter much opposition.

These days, a majority in Britain support a range of potential wealth taxes, one example being an annual tax of 1 per cent or more on those whose total wealth (excluding home and pension) exceeds £500,000.

All this suggests that Labour (back in 2008 the party dressed activists in top hats in a failed campaign to stop a wealthy Tory candidate winning a by-election) would be wasting its firepower in mounting too crude an attack on the UK’s multi-millionaire Downing Street neighbours. But a more subtle attack on the authors of “Austerity 2.0” could prove useful for the party, given this week’s decisions on tax — particularly in mobilising its own supporters.

The politics of envy? Maybe. But, as the essayist William Hazlitt put it nearly 200 years ago, “Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it.”

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/a7bd1a68-998c-4d26-8a32-c3847b34bc88

Liz Truss made much of her connection with Leeds during her bid for the Tory leadership.  But, somewhat ironically, that connection’s even stronger than ever now that she’s resigned as Prime Minister. Not only did Truss live and go to school there for a while, but the 44 days she spent at Number 10 before announcing her resignation ended up exactly matching legendary football boss Brian Clough’s comically short stint in charge of the city’s football club in the summer of 1974 – a period immortalised in the pages of David Peace’s novel The Damned United, which was later made into movie starring Michael Sheen as the famously motor-mouthed manager.

Football fans of a certain age with only vague memories of what happened next can be forgiven for thinking that it was all downhill for Leeds after that, as tensions within the squad, as well as more bad managerial appointments, eventually saw the club demoted, never to recover the glory days they’d experienced under the man Clough took over from, Don Revie.

In reality, however, it wasn’t like that. Clough was rapidly replaced by former England captain Jimmy Armfield, who swiftly stabilised the situation and then further strengthened the side, which, during the four years he was in charge, reached a number of international and domestic cup finals and semi-finals, as well as finishing every season in a reasonably respectable league position.

In case it isn’t obvious by now: for Revie read Johnson; for Clough, read Truss; but the real question is, is Rishi Sunak Jimmy Armfield?

It’s easy to see why he might not be. In contrast to how Revie left Leeds (to take on the England job, incidentally), Johnson didn’t exactly leave his party with a ruthlessly efficient set of players capable of executing their individual roles to perfection but working well as a team too.

Indeed, by the time Johnson departed, over fifty of his frontbench had resigned in protest and he only narrowly won a confidence vote a few weeks previously. And when Truss came in she did a Clough by foolishly replacing tried and trusted team members with ones she reckoned were better suited to her style of play, simultaneously alienating both MPs who’d stuck with Johnson and MPs who hadn’t.

On the other hand, the mess Sunak inherits may, paradoxically, represent something of an opportunity for him. If he is more sensible than Truss and Johnson, both of whom rewarded loyalty rather than talent, and instead reaches across the party when choosing his frontbench team, that could come across an immediate improvement – as long as those MPs who were unaccountably given jobs under the previous regimes are prepared to accept their fate.

Whether that happens may depend on what Conservative MPs think of the party’s electoral chances. If, in reasonably short order, Rishi Sunak looks like he may be capable of saving some of them their seats, then they may well suck up their resentment. If he doesn’t, they’ll probably take it out on him, believing that, had he not removed them from their government post, it might have helped them secure a job with a lobbying firm or as a political pundit following their ejection from the Commons.

But what, I hear you cry, of ideology?  Surely the biggest problem Sunak faces isn’t a mere human resources issue but one of principle?  Won’t ‘the right’ of the parliamentary party go after him after his rejection of Truss’s tax cutting, supply side agenda?

To which the answer is: maybe; but maybe not.

There has been an awful lot of loose talk recently about both Sunak and Hunt being ‘moderates’ or ‘centrists’.  Perhaps, relative to Truss and Kwarteng, they are. But in relation to the rest of the parliamentary party? I don’t think so. In fact, they are more or less what most Tory MPs are these days – bog-standard Thatcherites who want taxes and spending as low as possible and the state as small as possible, but not so low and so small as to lose the confidence of the markets or the goodwill of the electorate.

Sunak is also one of the original Brexiteers, which might just mean he will be given a little more benefit of the doubt should he choose to take a more pragmatic the Northern Ireland Protocol – especially now he can argue he’s doing it for the sake of an economy. That probably won’t help him with the DUP, which in turn won’t help him get the Assembly up and running. But, hey, you can’t have everything.

In short, we hear a lot these days about the Conservative Party being ‘ungovernable’. And perhaps it is. But perhaps that’s partly a reflection of who was trying to govern it rather than something inherent or inevitable.

Theresa May was an ex-Remainer who blew her majority and tried to get a deal to which tens if not hundreds of her MPs objected. Boris Johnson was a disaster waiting to happen – the longstanding doubts about his integrity proved well-founded, and he was only interested in being Prime Minister, not in what prime ministers are actually there to do. And as for Liz Truss, the less said the better.

Rishi Sunak faces huge policy challenges, it is true. But they are, for the most part, not of his own making. His instincts align with the bulk of his parliamentary party. And he is intellectually, temperamentally and communicatively capable of doing the job of PM. Chaos, then, does not necessarily beckon.

Originally published at https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-damned-disunited-will-the-conservative-party-fall-apart-under-rishi-sunak/

The age of austerity: 2010 and beyond

Up until the financial crash of 2007/8, chancellor George Osborne and PM David Cameron were ‘compassionate Conservatives’, keen to ‘share the proceeds of growth’. But when the shit hit the fan, they were all about balancing the book with cuts to public spending (particularly on welfare and local authorities) bearing a much greater share of the burden than tax rises.

The anaemic economic growth that inevitably followed also translated into stagnant real wages, which only served to persuade people in less prosperous parts of the country that they’d been ‘left behind’ by a liberal elite down in London. This was music to the ears of populist politicians like Nigel Farage, whose wickedly successful campaign to link that discontent with voters’ latent Euroscepticism and their manifest anxieties about mass migration was gaining serious momentum – helped by hapless home secretary Theresa May’s draconian but doomed attempts to meet the government’s unachievable (and economically nonsensical) promise to reduce net migration to ‘the tens of thousands’.

Still, the Tories were canny enough to protect pensioners – their most reliable source of the support. The NHS also survived the cuts, if not a disastrous reorganisation; but waiting lists still grew longer and longer.

EU referendum: June 2016

Panicked by UKIP’s rising popularity, and claiming to be concerned about the government being on the hook for Eurozone bailouts, Conservative MPs pushed Cameron into risking an in-out referendum on the country’s membership of the EU. Worrying far too much about avoiding ‘blue-on-blue’ infighting and far too little about actually losing the vote, Cameron, who’d proved unable to persuade his party he’d brought back much of substance from Brussels, blew it.

Far more of his friends and colleagues – including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – came out for Leave than he’d ever imagined, and Dominic Cummings and his colleagues persuaded them to mount a brutally effective campaign highlighting more money for the NHS and taking back control of immigration, while Nigel Farage took things to another level with his infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster.

Jeremy Corbyn (literally) didn’t help much either. Nor, of course, did the UK’s highly partisan (and – in terms of circulation – overwhelmingly pro-Leave) print media, while public service broadcasters’ determination to provide ‘balance’ backfired by allotting as much airtime to outliers as it did to the ‘experts’ dissed and dismissed by Leave in predictably populist fashion.

The consequent coalition of ‘the left behind’ and ‘comfortable leavers’ ensured the country voted for withdrawal by 52-48 in June 2016. Cameron resigned with immediate effect, leaving the country’s economic and diplomatic policy in limbo and his party in a rancorous mess.

Theresa May and hard Brexit: 2016-2019

The Gove-Johnson partnership dissolved within days of the Conservative leadership kicking off, forcing the latter out of the race and ensuring the former stood no chance of winning it. Bad blood abounded as Theresa May – a ‘reluctant Remainer’, widely (if wrongly) seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’ – was left as the last candidate standing.

Convinced that the referendum was all about the immigration she’d been unable to control as home secretary, and desperate to prove her credentials to Brexiteers wanting trade deals done with the US and the world’s rising powers, May quickly made up her mind that withdrawal from the EU meant leaving both the single market and the customs union, not fully realising, perhaps, the complicated consequences for Northern Ireland.

Caught between her anxieties on that score and the unrelenting pressure to play hardball emanating from Brexiteer ultras in the ERG who never tired of reminding her declaration that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, she failed to persuade her party to vote for the compromise, losing several high-profile colleagues, the brazenly ambitious Boris Johnson, chief among them. Public frustration saw Farage’s newly-formed Brexit Party deliver the Tories a devastating defeat at the European elections, by which time May was on her tearful way out.

Boris Johnson: 2019-2022

Finally fulfilling his puerile dream of becoming ‘world king’ (or at least UK prime minister), Boris Johnson rode a tide of Tory desperation straight into Downing Street, where, helped by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, he set about seeing off Farage by promising to ‘get Brexit done’ – ‘by any means necessary’. After unlawfully proroguing parliament, ridding the party of Tory MPs who’d thwarted a no-deal Brexit, and agreeing to a customs border down the Irish Sea, he took his ‘oven ready deal’ to the country and (with a little help from Jeremy Corbyn, as well as some supposedly sincere promises on public spending) the Tories won a ‘stonking’ eighty-seat majority.

It quickly became apparent, however, that their populist leader had little interest in, or talent for, actually governing – a reality fatally exposed by his so mishandling the Covid crisis that the UK was left with one of the highest death tolls of any comparable country. N0 10 was also revealed to have hosted myriad illegal parties during lockdown. Notwithstanding his support for Ukraine, his endless references to the country’s successful ‘vaccine roll-out’ and his Cabinet colleagues’ ‘war on woke’, Johnson’s popularity (never as great as his fan-club imagined) evaporated, and a toxic combination of scandal, sheer incompetence, disastrous by-elections and plunging poll-ratings saw him railroaded out of Number Ten by his own MPs.

Trussonomics: 44 days in purgatory

Rather than move on rapidly, the Conservatives, wary of what happened when May won the crown without being tested on the proverbial campaign trail, staged a seemingly endless leadership contest. Ironically, however, the widespread animus felt toward front-runner Rishi Sunak for supposedly ‘stabbing Boris in the back’ delivered victory to Liz Truss – an awkward free market fundamentalist who was more than happy to tell party members whatever they wanted to hear, particularly on tax cuts.

Many expected her to pivot back to a rather more practical stance upon assuming office, not least because it was obvious that the government was going to have to spend billions protecting the public from fast-rising energy prices. But Truss, together with her ideological soulmate and chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and cheered on by Brexiteer ultras and ‘Tufton Street’ think tanks, was determined to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slash taxes and deregulate in the name of ‘growth, growth, growth’ – to hell with experts and ‘Treasury orthodoxy’.

The markets balked, and voters looked on aghast before stampeding toward Keir Starmer’s Labour party. Several excruciating media appearances, sackings and parliamentary chaos ensued in short order, and before we knew it, she too was gone – just a bad dream, or a nightmare that the Tories will find it impossible to escape?

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/22/austerity-brexit-and-44-days-in-purgatory-the-key-stages-of-tory-rule