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Good morning. Thanks so much for all your questions, some of which I have answered below, some of which I will tackle next week.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
How do you explain the results of the 2017 general election?
Tom, London
One of the things I love about this job is I feel like every election sharpens, and sometimes completely changes, my understanding of what happened at the ones before.
I think most voters are transactional and their vote is primarily shaped by how they feel about the condition of the country and the competence of the respective parties. I’m afraid I’m going to wheel out my favourite chart again:
I think the biggest single cause of the 2017 election was, on the one hand, discontent at the condition of the UK, its strained public services, tattered roads, and so forth. It absolutely was not about people “voting for Jeremy Corbyn because they thought he couldn’t win”. As the British Election Study showed, this was not really a motivating factor among Labour voters in 2017 at all:
But on the other hand, voters had real doubts about the competence and fitness for office of the Labour party and its then leader. This is why, while Jeremy Corbyn did very well when it came to winning votes, so did Theresa May, who in addition to winning even more votes than Corbyn did so in a much more efficient way.
Politics is a competition between two things — whether the government can deliver enough for people to think it is worth re-electing, and whether the opposition can make itself seem like an acceptable and viable alternative. When neither party can quite pull that off you get something like 2017, which yielded a hung parliament. I answered that question first because I think it leads naturally to this one:
Of the things that are realistic/possible, what do Labour need to achieve to go into the next election with confidence they will win?
Rob, Sussex
Labour needs to go into the next election with people feeling like the condition of the UK has improved on 2024. Indeed I keep meaning to do a newsletter on what I see as the “four Ps” that matter most at the next election: patients, policing, potholes and the purse. (OK, that last one is a stretch, but bear with me.)
Patients: new polling for Arden Strategies by JL Partners has surveyed Labour voters and found 86 per cent think the party should invest more in the NHS. The party’s own polling and focus groups show, similarly, that the NHS is its voters’ biggest priority. Whether it is getting your cervical screening or getting the right prescription or major surgery, or someone you know getting all of the above, our health service is the part of the British state that people most commonly interact with. Improving on this is vital.
Policing: as Tom Hamilton noted in his excellent (and free!) Substack, you can tell the story of why Labour won with a single sentence in its manifesto: “When you call the police, they should come.” This is frankly, a standard of public service provision that ought to be banal. That it wasn’t banal and was actually a potent dividing line is why the Conservatives did so badly.
Potholes: Whether you are a pedestrian or a motorist you notice these, they are a visible sign of a state that can’t do the basics. Along with rough sleeping, these are never going to be high up the list of voters’ concerns in polls but I think they both contribute to a mood of “the country is going to the dogs” which no incumbent government can withstand.
Purse: people should not feel poorer at the time of the next election. This one is the hardest for the government to control, but how they implement their ambitious workplace plans, their planning reform, and what taxes they choose to raise in order to help achieve the other three Ps will all contribute.
I’ll return to these four Ps a lot over the next four years, because I think that whether Labour can show progress on them is key to what will happen at the next election.
My two questions are whether you think Reform UK will gain more seats at the next election and if you believe Labour will get another term in office and if not, do you think the Tories will get back in power or a different party?
Harrison, Derbyshire
I don’t think politics has iron laws but I do think it generally has pretty reliable heuristics, rules of thumb that are right more often than they are wrong.
The two most reliable heuristics in British politics are, in this order 1) first-term governments are usually re-elected and 2) the Conservatives usually win. Now, of course, one of these usually reliable heuristics is going to be wrong next time. But my expectation as it stands is that the historical form book will continue to be a good guide to the future. So we should assume Labour will be given the benefit of the doubt/the Tory party will do what most first-term oppositions usually do.
As for Reform, again I think history has useful lessons here. Nigel Farage’s parties have a tendency to split. The seven members of the Ukip group elected to the Welsh Assembly in 2016 ended up in three different parties: the Brexit party, Abolish and as independents. Ukip’s members of the European parliament similarly ended up scattered to the five winds. My favourite example is the two Ukip politicians elected to the London Assembly in 2004, who by 2008 had cycled through three parties: Ukip, Veritas, and One London.
Although Reform’s novel structure is designed to avoid the problems that beset Nigel Farage’s earlier parties, it did not succeed in weeding out embarrassing candidates. My assumption is that Reform’s new parliamentary class has at least one split and at least one sub-par constituency MP in it, because that has been the case for Farage parties thus far.
Now try this
I had a lovely time at the Proms last night — it was a very strong performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, but the particular highlight was how they used the whole space for Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. You can listen to it via BBC Sounds for the next 51 days and I intend to do so several times.
However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend! We’ll be back on Tuesday.
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