By any account this has been an utterly bizarre election. It all began with a very odd start, with the Conservatives bucking all expectations and calling a July election when all had (or were) advising either a May or November election. So odd was the calling of the election, that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the announcement in the pouring rain, and foreign secretary David Cameron was called back from a state visit to Albania before it really got started despite their lavish display of welcome.
Since then, almost nothing has gone right for the Tories. Be that Rishi’s diplomatic error over the D-Day landing anniversary, or the ongoing betting scandal, the Tory campaign has seen endless dramas and controversies which has done nothing to help their case. The entrance of Nigel Farage into the election as Reform party leader only added to their woes, with the boost to Reform’s polling seeing the Tories dropping into third place in some polls.
Labour have maintained their plan of letting the Tories trip over their own feet, announcing very few policies or plans that weren’t already known or expected. The Lib Dems have been off doing their own thing, with Ed Davey’s election plan all about cutting through the two-party narrative with an elaborate set of stunts based around having fun.
Perhaps most bizarrely, has been that despite all the election campaigning and shenanigans the entire election has seemed a foregone conclusion. The Labour lead was large when the election was called on the 22nd May, sitting at 25% in some polls, and though this has somewhat decreased down to a gap of 18% with the Tories in that same poll, this has not corresponded with a rise in the Tory vote share. Other polls have rarely seen the gap drop below 20%.
All of which goes to say that whatever the Tories have tried to do, whatever debates they have participated in, whatever policies they have announced, it has all done very little to affect the prevailing sentiment that Labour will win and win big. Again, depending on the polls you look at, some suggest the Tories may get as little as 108 or 99 seats, or according to some of the most dramatic predictions they may even get fewer than 70 seats.
As a result, the Tories tactics have been to pivot away from any pretence that they can win the upcoming election to warning against a Labour supermajority – in part to try and warn off the resurgent Reform party which though polling well, is unlikely to win many seats, but will sufficiently split the right wing vote enough to hand Labour and the Lib Dems a whole swathe of seats.
Indeed, we could be looking at a Labour party with up to 425, 462, or 450 seats. For context, at the end of the last Parliament Labour had only 206 MPs, so this would be a swing of more than 200 seats in their direction.
What makes all of this even more remarkable is that only five years ago in 2019 all the talk was of Labour being locked out of government for another 10 years. The Tories had just won 365 seats with 43.6% of the vote share, gaining 47 seats on their 2017 result and seen Labour lose 59 seats, leading some to proclaim it the worst Labour result since 1935! Now all the talk is of the Tories being out in the political wilderness for the next decade…
So, where has this groundswell of support for Labour come from? Or if you have a different framing, where did all the support for the Tories go? Both are legitimate questions much mulled over by the political commentariat.
In answer to the first, a compelling case is made that Starmer has transformed the Labour party from its Corbyn days, expelling many of the cranks that entered under Corbyn’s leadership, cracked down on the antisemitism scandal, and worked hard to once again appeal to big businesses and your average patriotic citizen.
The answer to the second question is also easy to come by. The 2020 Covid Pandemic smashed through any plans the Conservatives might have had for their time in office, before leading party figures were exposed in scandals ranging from PPE procurement, to partygate, and sexual harassment cases. After the slow drip-drip of scandals got too much, Boris Johnson was defenestrated and replaced by Liz Truss whose short time in office ignited an economic disaster leading to her downfall and replacement by Rishi Sunak, by which point the Tory party was already held in chronically low esteem. None of which has been helped by a disastrous penchant for infighting within the Parliamentary party and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis. And that is to say nothing of the longer-term structural issues that have been left unaddressed (or have actually been created) during the Tories 14 years in office.
But if you look a little beyond the surface-narrative, neither of these two angles quite tell the whole story. Perhaps what is most crucially bizarre about this election is that despite all the polls pointing to an overwhelming Labour victory, there is actually very little enthusiasm for Labour itself.
The UK stands on the precipice of ushering in a government with one of the largest majorities in recent decades without being particularly enamoured by its leadership, its policies, or its vision for the country.
When asked who would make the better Prime Minister, Keir Starmer tends to win (and win comprehensively), but when asked questions with regards to his own suitability for the job the answers are less positive. Only 33% of those surveyed have a favourable view of Keir Starmer and as of this month, Starmer has a net satisfaction level of -21.
When you look at the Labour Party as a whole you get a similar answer. They have a 37% favourability rating, which is more than 10% higher than the next best Green Party. Yet, when asked some slightly deeper questions the answers are fairly damning. Only 39% say the Labour Party understands the problems facing Britain, only 17% say the Labour Party keeps its promises, only 24% think the Labour Party has a good team of leaders, and only 31% think the Labour Party will look after the interests of people.
And you don’t want to place too much weight on anecdotal evidence, but this also seems to be reflected in the conversations people are having on the streets. For example, the Guardian headed to traditionally red Birmingham to see what voters were thinking there, and the resulting video presents a sorrowful mix of apathy, disenchantment, frustration, and cynicism towards the Labour Party and politics more generally.
As election day looms, the prevailing political winds are negative, and in some quarters quite dark. This is an election campaign dominated not by what could be, but by punishing what is. We are witnessing a campaign which is driven not by belief in any great idea or vision but by a relentless quest for blood. The only thing voters seem able to belief in or agree on is that the Conservative government does not deserve to be re-elected (67%).
Many voters think politicians are all pretty much the same be they left or right – only 29% and 30% respectively believe Labour or the Tories to be different from other parties. Most voters believe politicians will say anything to get elected (68% say this is true of the Tory party, and 59% of Labour).
So, the question is, where does that leave us? Britain is about to have a government with a stonking majority without any real support for its policies or way of looking at the world. Perhaps worse, we are about to have an election in which voters believe there is very little choice, in which all politicians are the same, and in which nothing they say can be trusted.
This, I would argue, puts democracy in a perilous position. Of course, Labour may turn things around. A successful spell in government in which they are able to win back voters trust and deliver meaningful and tangible change may alter the political undercurrents. But say they can’t and they don’t. What happens then? What happens when both of the two main parties are deemed to have failed in the eyes of the electorate? What happens when not only the parties themselves, but belief in the system that produced them is declared bankrupt?
Now if you’re an optimist you may see seeds of hope in those questions, a pessimist, seeds of fear. As Christians, I would argue we should balance the tightrope walk between the two – placing neither undue hope in politics as we know it, for things could be better (and Jesus is King!), nor naïve utopianism about what could come next, for what comes next might be worse (and no human scheme offers true redemption).
Should we end up in this place, believers will need to urgently and passionately rediscover the hope of the early church that rests in the new kingdom, a heavenly citizenship, and a new King, the one they call Jesus. Should politics as we know it begin to fall apart at the seams, our nation will need a people of hope, rooted and realistic, to help build whatever comes next in a positive, not a negative direction.
For the danger is, in times of crisis fear rules the day, and a politics governed by the emotions of anger, hatred, disillusionment, selfishness, greed, and self-protectionism will create a quite ugly thing indeed.
In the meantime, there are lessons to be learnt from this bizarre election.
- Our political imagination is stunted. We need a fresh vision.
What has perhaps been one of the most striking things about the various parties’ election campaigns over the past five weeks or so is the distinct lack of political imagination and the failure to adequately communicate a vision for our nation. What has been announced has been laughably detached from the real concerns of voters, such as National Service, or concerningly light on detail, such as pretty much every party’s economic plans, which represent a mere tinkering around whether money goes in this pot or that without even considering whether the pots we have are any good.
No one has presented a clear story that makes sense of the mess and malaise people everywhere know to be the true state of affairs. No one has developed a narrative that calls on citizens to lift their gaze higher, to buy into a direction of travel, and to strive to come together in pursuit of a common aim and mutual flourishing. Who are we as a people? What is this nation called Britain? What is our place in the world? What should we expect from the government, from our neighbour? What part do we have to play in this land that we call home? What do we have to work for?
- Politicians need to promise less and deliver more.
This might sound counterintuitive after my last point, but whilst politicians need to win back voters to a common story that makes sense of life, they need to be mindful that glib promises to fix huge systemic issues only paves the way for further disillusionment and anger down the line.
Immigration, productivity and growth, the future of healthcare, the existential challenges facing our welfare system, and the uncertain international geopolitical scene are all complex issues that require wisdom, expertise, patience, hard work and sacrifice to navigate.
Grandiose promises that can’t be delivered on simply exacerbate the issue. Instead, parties should commit to delivering meaningful and tangible change that voters can see and experience. At one level, the public need far less conferences and policy papers and newspaper columns and far more attention on actually delivering the task of governing.
- Voters need to accept the reality of difficult choices
This demands that voters act beyond narrow self-interest and accept a certain degree of sacrifice or commonality to make it possible for the government of the day to address the challenges before them. It is no secret that social care is in a mess in this country, and whilst Theresa May’s plan of 2017 was perhaps not the right one, and perhaps not communicated as well as it could have been, the weaponisation of her wish to level with voters the difficult choices necessary to address that issue, has put off anyone from touching it with a barge pole.
If we want a better politics, we need to recognise that difficult trade-offs need to be made, and we need to be mature enough to allow our politicians to discuss and propose solutions without whipping up a storm at every turn.
For many, they already live on the hard end of some of those trade-offs and difficult choices each and every day, and politicians need to work to ensure these are equitably made and mindful of the most vulnerable. Yet for those with power, wealth, and opportunities, there needs to be a willingness to lay down self-interest in pursuit of the public good.
Conclusion
We live in bizarre times, and this is a bizarre election, and whilst there might not be much in what I’ve said that elicits joy or hope, the Christian message, in which our King lays down his rights for the least of us, in which there is security in the sovereignty of our God, and in which there is a picture of justice more powerful and beautiful than anything dreamt up this election, can motivate us to build towards something better.
