The wise heads making careful analyses of when the general election might be, plotting hypothetical growth against likely drops in inflation and interest rates, splicing in the weather and the vibes, are missing something about the current government. It doesn’t really make decisions; decisions are forced on it, by crises it didn’t see coming because it was too busy trying to create chaos elsewhere. We will save ourselves a lot of time if we just assume the election is tomorrow. What would a great run-up look like, for those of us who, ideally, would like to see the Conservatives defeated? How could a challenger candidate, who for the sake of argument we will call Keir Starmer, put hope in our hearts and engender a sense that something different, something constructive, something meaningful might come out of Downing Street?
It would be great to see Starmer start with a presumption of love. Certainly since the start of the coalition government, arguably since David Cameron became Conservative leader, the drumbeat has been to punish the out-group. Benefit claimants and disabled people – remember when they crashed the economy? Then public sector workers, then migrants, then the metropolitan elite, then migrants again, then the wokerati, then lawyers, then trans kids, then refugees, then the civil service, then (checking notes, as it hardly seems possible) homeless people, then migrants again. The rhetoric might jump around from lordly censure to outright hatred but it all has the same lacuna where the engine of society should sit.
