Inevitable Fate: The UK’s Conservative Party Faces Consequences on July 4th

London.

The next British general election will be held on the Fourth of July. The date means nothing in Britain. It isn’t a day of mourning for the loss of the American colonies. No one reflects on how King George III might have done it differently if he’d listened to Edmund Burke. No one suggests that Benedict Arnold deserves a statue in Whitehall. The Fourth of July will, however, mean something in Britain this year and, if the polls are right, from now on. Aptly, it looks set to be remembered for an epochal British defeat.

If Tom Cruise made a film about the Conservative Party, he could call it Died on the Fourth of July. The Conservatives are more than 20 points behind the Labour Party in the polls. They fell behind in late 2021, and since then, they have trended downhill like a skier in a blindfold: zigzagging about in search of the policies that will flatten the curve, bouncing off boulders, losing their grip. The only question now is whether they are crippled by a collision with a tree or whether they sail over a cliff, to be splattered on the rocks below.

No sensible leader would hurry to find out which of these outcomes the voters would prefer. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is nothing if not sensible. Yet on May 24, Sunak surprised everyone by calling the election early. Under British electoral law, Sunak had until January 2025. In practical terms, he had five months, until mid-December. Even his ministers were surprised. Instead of following the custom of telling his Cabinet and then seeking the crown’s permission to consult the plebs, Sunak slipped off to see King Charles III, then presented his decision as a fait accompli.

In a shocked Cabinet, David Cameron, the ex-prime minister who is Sunak’s foreign secretary, is said to have called the timing “bold.” As viewers of the comedy series Yes, Minister know, this is Whitehall-speak for “foolish.” Michael Gove, another experienced minister, is reported as saying, “Who dares wins.” It was not clear whether Gove was thinking of his original source, the motto of Britain’s SAS special forces, or its later popularization by a crooked Cockney market trader in another comedy series, Only Fools and Horses. Esther McVey, the minister for common sense — yes, this is now a Cabinet-level appointment — told Sunak that his decision fell far beyond the bounds of her remit.

When the news reached the Conservative members of Parliament, their anonymous responses to the media included “pissed off,” “numb,” “angry,” and “absolutely seething.” One Conservative MP mimed putting a gun to the head. Another accused Sunak of forcing the whole party to join him in committing “hari-kari.” People complain about the disconnect between the “Westminster bubble” and the electorate, but for once, Conservative MPs felt the same about their leaders as the voters do.

Things can only get wetter

In 2021, the Conservatives spent some $3 million of taxpayer money on a White House-style press room at 9 Downing Street. The plan was to conduct daily White House-style briefings so that the public could be fully misinformed. But Sunak announced the election from a lectern outside 10 Downing Street. This was how Cameron resigned in 2016 after being defeated in the Brexit referendum. It was how Boris Johnson resigned in 2022 after being defeated by his own sloppiness. You can see the pattern.

As this is England in early summer, it was raining when Sunak stepped outside. It was torrential by the time he started speaking. He had no umbrella, and none of his minions thought they should offer him one. A short man who wears handmade suits that are made for a shorter man, Sunak ordinarily resembles a schoolboy undergoing a growth spurt. The wetter he got, the tighter his suit got, until Sunak himself seemed to be shrinking. You could see the desperation in his eyes, when he wasn’t blinking away the rain.

It got worse. One of the many unintended consequences of Brexit is the elevation to prominence of Steve Bray. Bray was for Remain in 2016. A Remainer he shall remain, like one of those Japanese soldiers who never heard the war was over. He wears a circus ringmaster’s outfit in the blue and gold colors of the European Union and loiters on the doorstep of Parliament, there to hector Conservative MPs with his microphone and loudspeaker. As Sunak bleated his plea for the public’s mercy, Bray drowned him out by playing “Things Can Only Get Better,” the witless disco tune that was the unofficial theme of Tony Blair’s Labour when it routed the Conservatives in the 1997 elections.

Sunak squelched back to the door of 10 Downing Street to the sound of his predecessor’s humiliation, presumably to put on a dry but equally tight suit and then to start packing. That night, the number of Conservative MPs who had announced they would not be standing in the elections reached 78 — more than the number who threw in the towel before the 1997 disaster. Gove was among those who concluded that there was no point in daring if you weren’t going to win.

“Things Can Only Get Wetter” went the headline. And they did. To tout his plans for business, Sunak flew to the shipyard in Northern Ireland where the Titanic was made, gifting the press with the traditional gags about rearranging the deck chairs and sinking without trace. He next visited one of the Morrisons supermarkets, where he posed before the Morrisons logo in the act of sniffing a freshly baked loaf of bread. Instead of forcing the usual expression of bliss, Sunak frowned and peered at the loaf as if it had just said something stupid. The image that most people saw had been altered by some digital comedian so that the logo said “Moron.”

Sunak is one of nature’s administrators. He is not a natural politician. His background is in tech and finance, not kissing babies and glad-handing loaves of bread. Perhaps this explains why Sunak called the election for the Fourth of July. Annual inflation, which peaked at 11.1% in October 2022, fell from 3.2% in March to 2.3% in April, close to Sunak’s target of 2%. The day before Sunak called the elections, the International Monetary Fund predicted a “soft landing” for Britain’s economy. Upgrading its 2024 growth prediction from 0.5% to 0.7%, the IMF foresaw GDP growth of 1.5% in 2025 — faster than any major European economy. It recommended that the Bank of England lower interest rates from 5.25% to 4.5% by the year’s end and to 3.5% in 2025.

The data allow Sunak to claim that his economic policies are being vindicated. The data also suggest some economic turbulence in the soft landing, with inflation possibly rising a little before dipping further and growth possibly slowing a little before rising further. Sunak is choosing to jump through a window of economic opportunity — but in which direction, who knows? The possibility that he is jumping before he was pushed cannot be discounted. There are rumors in Westminster of letters of no confidence being sent in and plots to swap him for a more appealing candidate. Overthrowing a third prime minister in less than two years would be kamikaze politics on the Conservatives’ part, so it’s not outlandish that they would try it.

Sunak’s calculations resemble those of the Biden campaign. Democrats point to the macro data, all distorted by the COVID-19 boom and bust, then wonder why people don’t see why the economy is doing great. The answer is that everything is still expensive and still undergoing price inflation. The middle class has less savings than it had in January 2020. Crime is up, and the border seems to be open to anyone. An unpopular candidate who attained high office as a party placeholder staggers on like a partially stunned sheep in a PETA video.

The November elections in the United States present a clear choice between candidates and parties, and this allows voters to hope that things might change. The British elections will not be decided by appeals to hope and change because the two leading parties resemble each other so closely. Nor will Sunak win by trumpeting the kind of economic growth that in any other era would be called stagflation. The result will be decided by the voters’ disgust at the Conservatives — and their fear of Labour.

In 2019, the Conservatives won a landslide through the personal charisma of Johnson and their promise to “Get Brexit Done,” with the bonus that Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a Jew-baiting Trotskyite. The result was that historically Labour seats in the postindustrial Midlands and Northern England flipped to the Conservatives. Like former President Donald Trump breaking the blue wall in 2016, Johnson broke this “red wall,” creating a new Conservative coalition.

None of this applies now. The Brexit deal came into effect on Jan. 1, 2021. Eighteen months later, Sunak’s colleagues in the parliamentary Conservative Party overthrew Johnson. Most of them never wanted Brexit, just as most congressional Republicans didn’t want Trump. Few of them liked Johnson, who was politically unreliable and far too popular with the public. While a parliamentary standards committee forced Johnson to resign as an MP before he was fired, Labour worked its way back to a simulacrum of centrism and expelled Corbyn, who is running in July as an independent.

Most congressional Republicans have learned to impersonate the necessary vulgarities of being a workers’ party since 2016. The Conservatives have governed as if nothing has changed. A lot has changed, however, in the immigration statistics. The Conservatives have let it happen. In 2010, when they took office in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the United Kingdom’s population was 62.77 million. By the end of 2023, the figure was 67.85 million, with immigration as the key driver of the rise. This figure reflects self-reporting in the national census. Not everyone fills out the census form or tells the truth if they do. The Pew Research Center estimated that in 2017, between 800,000 and 1.2 million people were living in Britain without a residence permit.

Britain’s population has risen by about 10%, perhaps more, under the Conservatives. The Conservatives have not increased state capacity to reflect this in housing, hospitals, schools, transport, or policing. The results are everywhere visible: a housing boom, waiting lists for basic medical treatment, increasing crime, out-of-control Islamist recruitment, a bad-tempered crush in classrooms and on trains and buses. The social and cultural impact is even greater when you consider that about 500,000 people, most of them indigenous, leave Britain every year. Some are retirees looking for sunshine. Some are joining the “brain drain” because salaries in Britain are low. Some are simply despairing.

The collapse in social cohesion is so blatant that Sunak’s first policy announcement after calling the election was to restore the draft for school leavers. Should this ever happen, most teenagers would perform a year of social work rather than join the military, which is of course underfunded. Meanwhile, the voters will judge Sunak on his record. He promised to push through Johnson’s plan to fly illegal immigrants to Rwanda. He promised to “Stop the Boats,” the trafficking of illegal immigrants across the English Channel. He achieved nothing because he feared facing down his own MPs and the courts. He said he would withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights to get the Rwanda flights off the ground, but he didn’t do it. He now admits that not one flight to Rwanda will take off before the elections. One reason he might have called the election so urgently is that as the weather in the channel improves, the boats are back.

The bipartisan breakdown

Sunak is losing middle-class votes to his left and working-class votes to his right. The Conservative line that Labour will raise your taxes and spend the country into bankruptcy is less effective when a Conservative government has raised taxes to their highest level since 1948 and driven debt as a share of GDP to 97.6%. Like the Republicans, the Conservatives are split between a base that wants limited government, low taxes, deregulation, and economic opportunity and elected representatives who form themselves after the machinery of government and its social ambience. They talk conservative, but they govern like liberal technocrats.

Unlike the Republicans, the Conservatives are able to ditch their leaders. In 2022, the party membership chose Liz Truss, a member of the Thatcherite minority of MPs, as Johnson’s heir. Her rushed attempt at jump-starting the economy by cutting taxes exposed her to uncertainty in the markets, particularly because the Bank of England distrusted her math. The parliamentary party exploited that uncertainty to overthrow her, with Sunak as its front man. Sunak insists he is a Thatcherite, but he campaigned against a Thatcherite revival.

Meanwhile, in the sticks, the red wall has collapsed through neglect. The new Conservative electors, the people who used to be the English working class, will not return to Labour. The English are patriots, and Labour’s grassroots organization is an alliance of all the people who hate England: Islamists, communists, environmentalists, college professors, social workers, vegans. Instead, red wall swing voters are moving further right, to Reform U.K. Founded in 2018, Reform is the heir to the U.K. Independence Party and the Brexit Party. Like those two parties, its presiding spirit is Nigel Farage. Like him, it is Thatcherite in policy and Trump-like in style.

Britain’s first-past-the-post system means that a vote for a small party is almost always a wasted vote. Farage isn’t running in July: Instead, he’s helping his friend Trump campaign. But there is nothing so satisfying as a protest vote. Reform is polling as high as 14%. In terms of support, this makes it Britain’s third-biggest party.

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Labour promises to “Stop the Chaos,” but it has yet to explain its policies. It doesn’t need to. Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer are two faces of the same coin, a right-wing social democrat and a left-wing social democrat. Neither has a plan for restoring growth, cutting taxes, controlling immigration and reviving social cohesion, fixing an incompetent bureaucracy, or even filling the potholes in the roads. That social-democratic coinage has been debased since Blair minted it in 1997. The Conservatives have soiled it further.

The Conservatives have reached the end of the road, and so has Labour. Two paths present themselves on the Fourth of July: one is a Labour landslide, the other a narrow Labour win — perhaps so narrow that Labour needs a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Neither path leads to multiterm Labour rule because Labour is also out of ideas. A Labour landslide would encourage the Conservatives to incorporate Reform and bounce back as a European-style populist party. In a hung Parliament, the conditions from the Liberal Democrats for power-sharing would include altering the first-past-the-post system. It is said that Labour and the Liberal Democrats have already discussed this. If that happens, Reform becomes a viable parliamentary party and perhaps does a reverse takeover of the remains of the Conservatives. Farage waits down both of those paths. In Britain as elsewhere, the political transformation that began in 2016 is taking years to develop. But it’s happening, come rain or shine.

Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.