Is Britain getting better? Only seven per cent of us think so, according to a recent poll by More in Common – and 70 per cent say the country is getting worse.
That is a stunning rebuke for the political class: the Labour Government, elected just last year on a mandate of “change”, is clearly not seen to be doing what it said on the tin. But the Conservatives are no more popular, after 14 years in office which ended in utter chaos.
You can’t accuse Sir Keir Starmer of not trying: every week sees a flurry of new announcements, new policies, new tough talk on how to solve the UK’s problems. But nothing seems to make a difference, just as Rishi Sunak found in his ill-fated stint in power.
Perhaps the answer is the poor calibre of today’s politicians? But Sunak is undeniably smart and ferociously hard-working, while Starmer has an impressive track record as a top barrister and public servant. His landslide election win suggests he has political chops too.
Yet look where we have ended up: both parties taking a battering at the local elections, punished by voters who are just fed up.
It’s no surprise that people are angry. Taxes are at a post-war high even as public services struggle to deliver. Immigration is through the roof, though our migration system seems cruel and unaffordable to many of those hoping to move here.
Politics is broken. We used to have trade-offs between lower taxes and better services, kinder migration rules and control on numbers. Now we have the worst of both worlds. Ministers complain that the policies they implement get stuck in the treacle of the Whitehall machine, or blocked in the courts – so nothing actually gets better, and the public gets even more furious.
“There is definitely an anti-politics vote,” one senior Conservative MP told me recently. “There are a lot of pissed-off people.” Most Tories would accept they must take at least part of the blame, given their own track record.
In Downing Street, the mood is a bit more defiant. Ministers point out that they can hardly be expected to turn the country around within less than a year, and insist things will improve by the next general election.
Told that voters are complaining about policies such as cuts to the winter fuel allowance and the national insurance hike, which are funding higher budgets for the NHS and schools, one Government aide explodes: “The bits they don’t like are the things we had to do, to do the things that they do like!”
Labour MPs are getting worried. Not just the usual suspects, the Corbynista diehards who never liked Starmer in the first place, but some of the most incisive (and generally loyal) members of the huge 2024 intake have started to grumble about the need to turn things around fast – not just cling on until the election.
“It would be helpful, come next year, if the Chancellor is able to start saying, ‘Because of a Labour Government, you are feeling better off,'” one up-and-coming backbencher tells me.
A colleague adds: “Voters elected us to make the country better. If they can’t see that happen then they will think ‘I’ve voted blue, I’ve voted red, and nothing seems to happen’ – and pull the Reform lever. Or the Green lever.”
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There’s the rub. Reform UK’s rise in the opinion polls – a number of surveys find the party on 30 per cent or more – is not due to the country becoming vastly more right-wing, or deciding en masse that Nigel Farage was right all along about Brexit.
Yes, Reform voters tend to lean to the right: but a quarter would back higher taxes to spend more on public services, and 18 per cent want to rejoin the EU, according to a BMG poll conducted last week. In fact, Reform is marginally more popular with people who voted Remain in the 2016 referendum than the Green Party is.
What unites them is not any particular policy programme, but an overwhelming feeling that the status quo is not working for them. To hold off the Reform surge, Labour and the Tories need to prove that they have concrete ideas to improve the everyday lives of ordinary people – and a way to implement them.
It’s certainly not easy. Some of the long-term reforms that policy wonks promote to make the country better off in decades to come, such as scrapping the state pension triple lock or replacing fuel duty with a pay-per-mile road tax, would be ferociously unpopular in the short run. They may be worth a try anyway: showing boldness in making big decisions for the greater good could be the only way for centrist politicians to prove they are more serious than the populists.
Because we can’t go on like this. If Starmer and Kemi Badenoch think business-as-usual is anywhere near enough, the big winner will be Farage.
Hugo Gye is political editor at The i Paper
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