James Forsyth James Forsyth

The age of volatility

Every year in British politics seems to be more surprising than the last. Few predicted in 2015 that the Conservatives would win a general election outright for the first time in 20-odd years. Fewer still realised that Theresa May would become the most popular Prime Minister since records began. And almost no one foresaw how the tide would turn against her so dramatically that the Tories would lose their majority, or that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour would make such significant gains.

How to make sense of it all? Tory MPs are being offered an explanation by Gavin Barwell, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who has been seeing them in groups (starting with the cabinet) to talk them through the party’s post-election polling. Perhaps the most striking point in his presentation is that we are experiencing political volatility on a scale not seen since after the Great Depression or first world war.

One MP believes this is the effect of the Brexit realignment, which has seen Tories making gains among working-class voters and university graduates swinging to Labour. But Brexit can’t be the only explanation as there was almost as much electoral churn in 2015 as there was in June. The volatility caused Brexit, not vice versa. The 2016 referendum may have made politics harder to predict, but it doesn’t explain why everything is in flux.

Any explanation has to go back ten years to the crash. The electoral reaction was not immediate: indeed, as one Tory laments,   political volatility in 2010 was ‘annoyingly low’ and not enough to give David Cameron a majority. Labour created a new regulatory system that spectacularly failed its first test and led to the banks having to be bailed out with public money; had this happened under the Tories, voters would have veered left.

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