Could a return to its ‘nasty party’ roots save the Tories?

Next year’s general election could either be a 1992 or a 1997, commentators have speculated: a slender Tory win or a Labour landslide.

Last weekend David Blunkett suggested it is more likely to be a 1964 – the narrowest of Labour wins leading to a much bigger majority in another election called a couple of years later.

I’m afraid things are shaping up more grimly than that. The most likely outcome may be a 1974, a year which saw the replacement of a failed regime that had lost its nerve with another that proved to have no answers to a profound national malaise.

Few would dispute that Britain is in the doldrums once again – maybe not quite as broke and broken as in the mid-1970s but not far off. The overall situation is, to put it in the celebrated prose style of Sir Gavin Williamson, ‘very shit’.

Living standards are stuck where they were 15 years ago; public services and infrastructure are visibly crumbling; public sector productivity is going backwards in the era of ‘working from home’; there is an acute housing crisis that saps ambition from young adults; everyday policing barely exists; shared public spaces have become uncivil and threatening as a consequence; cohesion-sapping rates of immigration are exacerbating this social recession; the percentage of working-age people languishing on incapacity benefits has quadrupled since 1980 and higher rate taxation kicks in at such a low earnings threshold that it is a wonder anyone at all applies for promotion.

Other newly-restored relics from the seventies include destabilising rates of inflation and politically-motivated trade union militancy.

In such circumstances, the electorate is surely entitled to expect political leaders who will level with it about the causes of these ills and set out a radical plan of action to eradicate them. No such luck. Both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are incrementalists in an era crying out for fundamental change.

The modest scale of the ambitions Sunak has set for himself was tellingly revealed in Prime Minister’s Questions this week when – comically, tragically – he cited his small boats policy as an example of success because crossings are down on last year. That we are headed for easily the second worst annual figures ever recorded some eight months after he promised to ‘stop the boats’ seemed to escape his data nerd brain. 

Steady-as-she-goes economics – and my, she goes slowly – is also a part of the Sunak mix. His pledge to sit around and watch the Bank of England try to get inflation down to five point something per cent by Christmas encompasses about as much dynamism as watching paint dry.

Fence-sitting Starmer for his part possibly even out-dulls Sunak with the under-powered nature of his proposals. Any policy suggestions that prompt even the slightest flurry of disquiet among target voters are swiftly dumped as he seeks to get to Downing Street on the back of just not being the Tories.

A low turnout election seems guaranteed but really, what mandate and what majority will he have to turn him into a premier capable of enacting beneficial reform? As Charles Moore puts it in this week’s magazine: ‘The Tories now deserve to lose, but… Labour does not deserve to win.’

That takes us back to February 1974 and then to October of the same year when a minority Wilson administration crawled to a majority of three at a second election. Epoch-making stuff it very much wasn’t as Labour went on to be overwhelmed by all the same problems that had got the better of Edward Heath.

Five more years at least of failure and marking time seem likely to lie ahead before the crises of the modern era become so acute that tackling them can no longer be postponed. Only the kind of regime that Theresa May would regard as ‘nasty’ will be capable of shaking the country out of this torpor. I cannot be alone in yearning for a leader who will just identify the vested interests needing to be tamed and then smash them to smithereens. 

Perhaps we should just write the next election off as neither of the incumbent leaders has got what it takes. It’s the election after next that should excite us. Because that one is going to be a 1979.