An expiring Tory party lashing about for electoral resuscitation by doubling down on a small number of pugnacious policies. A Labour opposition that has straitjacketed its pledges and ambitions with its fears of blowing its strongest chance in years to gain power. That is the slim space that now defines Westminster, making the preoccupations and tones of our politicians seem more remote than ever.
The result is a widening gulf between people’s reality and what they are relentlessly told they actually believe in and care about. Take immigration – a topic that has for the past three decades been at the top of the political agenda, and is now firmly established as something many should have “concerns” about. But attitudes among the public are flexible, dependent on the type of immigration and the general political mood.
Whatever these attitudes are – hard, soft or indifferent – they have coexisted for a long time now with a large voluntary infrastructure of pro-immigrant and pro-refugee organisations. The latter have been working for so long that perhaps they, rather than the government, define the country’s position on immigration.
But no. It must all be deportations, detentions and a general asylum policy direction that is fully against international human rights law. Never mind that the UK has one of the most positive attitudes towards refugees in the world, according to an international poll. During the 12-month period in which the government escalated its rhetoric and made “stopping the boats” and deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda cornerstone policies, support for refugees actually increased.
The same inversely proportional trend applies to strikes and trade unionism. Within the same period when the government was introducing anti-strike laws, a Sky News poll showed that support for organised strike action rose instead of fell, even while media and government messaging savaged those on strike, and members of the public suffered disruption to schooling, public transport and healthcare. “The findings suggest,” the poll concludes, “that the government, which is refusing to deliver inflation-matched pay rises, may not be able to rely on waning support for strike action.”
Across the board on most of the urgent issues at the centre of politics, the story is the same. A government adopting the most extreme positions, the opposition endorsing them, or not pledging to repeal them, and a public moving in the other direction. The impulse of politicians seems to be to try to sniff out any hint of opposition to change, even hallucinating it, and then lean into it so heavily that change becomes impossible.
Labour’s loss in Uxbridge (after an epic swing towards the party), for example, has been translated into a belief that London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is what lost it, so Labour has called for Sadiq Khan to “reflect on” the policy. Rishi Sunak conjured up overnight a mythical noble cohort that he “stands behind”, that of “motorists” – a category representing voters whose real-life needs are more important than liberal moral posturing on virtuous policy. Buoyed by what he undoubtedly now sees as a precious wedge issue, he is proposing to ban councils from imposing new 20mph zones and has approved more than 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences.
But zoom out from wedge hunting, and the picture shows that Britons are more positive on green policies than their peers elsewhere, and that Conservative voters here hold positions that people on the centre left do in other countries, with 30% of them saying that they would be put off voting Tory if Sunak does not commit to net zero targets. “The British public,” concludes analysis by the Financial Times, “including Conservative voters – is fully behind ambitious green growth. Confident parties and leaders would channel those sentiments, not undermine them.”
This pattern is likely to be repeated in the future, with people increasingly diverging from conservative orthodoxy. Younger generations’ politics are being forged in the aftermath of the financial crisis, housing scarcity, wage stagnation and therefore more demand for public services and government support for high outgoings on needs such as childcare. These conditions all combine to make younger voters less likely to be economically conservative – they have little to conserve – and more supportive of redistribution.
Among generation Z, the diversion from stale retrenchment on everything from the climate crisis to culture is even more clear. That generation has come of age under the menace of an environmental catastrophe, and movements for racial and gender equality that to them seem like the norm, rather than the revolution.
They will join a wider public to whom politicians appear distant and mean. In his introduction to Peter Mair’s book Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, the political scholar Chris Bickerton says this relationship between citizens and politicians is marked by “a curious mixture of antagonism and indifference”. In our two-party system, that aloofness and hostility is partly a result of a first-past-the-post electoral system that worships the wedge, with each party terrified that one issue might catch fire and swing marginal seats away from victory.
In this regard, Brexit and the following 2019 landslide have reinforced both parties’ worst instincts. The Tories’ entire electoral strategy can now be summed up as finding, or even creating, that wedge issue. For Labour, the strategy is to prepare for all such wedge issues and be pre-emptively on the right side of them, rather than preventing their materialisation. The natural outcome is a convergence that leaves Labour vulnerable to the sort of attacks seen in the crucial byelection in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, where the SNP line is: Labour, Tory, they’re all the same. “The avenue of attack is that Labour is not progressive enough,” a Labour source close to the campaign told the Guardian. “It’s a cynical message and it’s not working. But there’s a lot of apathy out there; they’re saying there’s no real difference between [Labour and the Tories].”
David Klemperer, a former research fellow at the Constitution Society and author of a 2019 report on the failures of first past the post, summed up this boxing-in as a state where “rather than ensuring stable, cohesive politics, first past the post simply prevents parliament from reflecting the social and political divides of Britain today. Political debate now occurs as much within the main parties as between them, reducing their coherence, leading to unstable governments and depriving voters of a clear choice at general elections.” The result is a politics that doesn’t just fail to channel people’s evolving preferences for social and economic relations, but works actively to suppress them.
But the larger, sadder reality is that there simply is no incentive or reward, and therefore no political will, for any politician interested in power to spearhead redistribution, kindness to others or bold climate crisis policies. Taking a lead on any number of identity and industrial issues would bring on an almighty fight with powerful, enormously lopsided rightwing media, and the spooking of corporate and industrial interests. You can’t really help seeing how this concentration of harder-line views in politics mirrors another concentration – one of wealth and political influence.
It is often said that the UK is not a rich country, but a poor society with some very rich people. It is now similarly true that the UK is not a regressive country, but increasingly a progressive society with some very regressive people holding most of the power. And our economic and political system, in both cases, serves those two minorities. The rest of us slowly check out, and are told the problem isn’t the diminishing vision of what is possible, but our apathy.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
