The Conservatives took another pasting in the local elections last week and lost London to Labour’s Sadiq Khan who was elected mayor for the third time. They also lost the West Midlands mayoralty, Andy Street losing narrowly to Richard Parker, a comparative unknown. Street seemed to be a decent man doing a reasonable job but was tainted by the party. I can’t find how he voted in 2016 but I suspect he was a remainer since he has openly said Brexit is bad for business and in 2018, he urged MPs to accept Theresa May’s deal.
Sunak said the results were "bitterly disappointing" but argued that he can make "progress" with voters before a general election. He would say that wouldn't he? Don't be fooled, it's far too late to do anything to change the mood in the country. Sunak is a terrible campaigner anyway. He’s like a broken record with his mantra of “the plan is working” when it plainly isn’t.
Some in the party are in a state of denial about the scale of the defeat to come while others are fatalistic or have already checked out politically and are looking at new careers. Who can blame them? Some polls have had the Tories as low as 18%, not that far from the 12-15% that Reform gets.
I am not even convinced that if Richard Tice decided not to run candidates in Tory-held seats it would save them from a catastrophic defeat.
I am old enough to remember the 1964 general election, the last one before I was able to vote, which I’ve done at every subsequent one. Harold Wilson’s three-word slogan (there’s nothing new in politics is there?) was “thirteen wasted years.” He was of course talking about the Tories who had been in power since 1951.
It won him a majority of four seats. Was the slogan justified? I'm not sure it was. Bear in mind the government had managed to build well north of 300,000 houses a year in the 1950s, reaching a high of 340,000 in 1954.
If I think back on the last fourteen years, the slogan is far more apposite. Can anyone remember anything positive being achieved in any area of life in Britain? The whole narrative of successive Tory administrations has been about cutting costs like a bunch of timid, low-level accountants worried about money. Will Hutton hit the nail on the head with this tweet:
The brute truth is that successive Tory attempts to run economy and society around reducing the state, cutting public investment and hollowing out public services has caused economic decline and acute social distress. Now deservedly they reap the whirlwind.
— Will Hutton (@williamnhutton) May 5, 2024
Brexit has not only occupied the party like some crazed psychodrama for the last nine years so that ministers and civil servants have had to spend vast amounts of time on useless rejigging of policies, but it has also hit trade and investment, reducing tax revenue and leading to more cuts. It has simply accelerated the spiral of decline.
And things are not going to get any better. The OECD have downgraded their forecasts for growth in the UK for 2024-25 making us the worst-performing economy in the G7 next year. They put this down to high interest rates, inflation in the services sector and, amazingly given the record levels of legal migration, shortages of skilled staff.
Would-be leader Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, toured the TV studios yesterday telling Suank to own the local election results and warning that Labour is a party of "hard-left maniacs" who would "undo Brexit" and thus, apparently unwittingly, boosting Starmer's chances even further. The majority in Britain do indeed want to "undo Brexit".
Watch Suella Braverman spit her dummy out."Keir Starmer has the charisma of a peanut... Labour is a party of hard left maniacs, who would undo brexit, who would open our borders & who would indoctrinated our institutions & schools with PC madness.. " #bbclaurak pic.twitter.com/DbMRCnPzxP— Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (@Haggis_UK) May 5, 2024
Starmer is about as far from a hard-left maniac as you can get, as some on the fringes of Labour often complain.
Braverman, Patel, Johnson, Gove and the rest are prime examples of the damage Brexit has inflicted on us. Incompetent chancers all.
One weird result from last week was the re-election of Lord Ben Houchen (Baron Houchen of High Leven) as Tees Valley mayor. He has been appearing regularly in the pages of Private Eye accused of draining millions of pounds from the public purse to enrich his cronies over the redevelopment of the former Redcar steelworks, now known as Teesworks.
A lot of what's being reported looks like corruption on a grand scale, yet the voters in the North East have elected him for a third term although he did have his majority reduced. What's wrong with them?
