Politics: Putin the saviour?

By Richard North - May 18, 2024

In a pollical review of the week, The Times concludes a rather tedious piece with a comment from an anonymous cabinet minister on the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects.

“In policy terms”, this minister says, “I think we’re in exactly the right place. We are where the public are on issues like immigration, net zero and defence. But the reality is that is not going to be enough. People just want change. You saw that out campaigning [for the locals]. It is hard to get our message across”.

Yet, this “right place” embraces a train-wreck on immigration, with illegal immigration at record highs for the time of the year – and no expectations of the Rwanda policy making a serious dent in the numbers – net-zero continuing apace, and a defence policy that barely qualifies as a joke.

Thus, if this is really what a Tory cabinet minister thinks, it is not surprising that the party is in trouble and that it finds it hard to get the message across. The message that it seeks to convey is at odds with reality. It strains credibility that anyone could entertain a belief that it meets the expectation of potential Tory voters.

But what the local elections told us was more complex than just the simple message that the electorate wants change. It is certainly the case that the data told us that voters (the few who showed up) want rid of the Tories, but it also suggested that they weren’t particularly enthusiastic about Labour either.

My “take away” from the elections was that the vote is fragmenting and is split in so many ways that the outcome of the general election – despite Labour’s poll lead – is difficult to predict.

With six months left to go until the expected date of an election, though, there is plenty of time left for Macmillan’s “events, dear boy, events” to exert their influence and it may be the case that one of the factors which will determine the winner is the precise mix of issues which dominate the agenda at the time people go to the polls.

YouGov updated its tracker poll on the ranking of issues of concern on 13 May, so that’s about as good a guide as you’ll get on what people are most worried about at the moment.

However, a lot of the trends are fairly stable, so it does not matter too much that the data are not bang up-to-date, although sentiment usually starts to show signs of volatility once the general election campaign proper starts, and the politicians start pushing particular issues. But, even then, “events, dear boy, events”, can still have a powerful effect.

As it stands, the concern about the economy is declining sharply, scoring 49 percent, with health at 45 percent and fairly static. Immigration is rising to 41 percent, crime and housing are both on 23 percent and “environment” – the proxy for net-zero – weighs in at a mere 20 percent. Brexit barely features at 13 percent.

Although covering only April, the Ipsos poll largely confirms these findings, also putting the economy first and “health” (as concern about the NHS) in second place – although the categorisation is not identical.

For the moment, therefore, it is a safe bet that the rival politicians will prioritise on the economy in their campaigning, and we’ve already seen Starmer put “economic stability” on top of his list of six pledges.

From the Tory side, we had yesterday chancellor Jeremy Hunt kick off what Tom Peck in The Times calls the “unofficial election campaign”, predictably majoring on the economy.

Hunt’s theme was that he was going to cut taxes, while Labour was going to put them up. “Keir Starmer’s first step will be to help themselves to you and your family’s wallets”, he said, leaving Peck tartly to observe that for most people, they’re already empty.

Nevertheless, the Telegraph posits that the economy is sparking back to life, yielding a 0.6 percent growth in GDP in the first quarter of the year – better than almost anyone had expected.

With other economic indicators looking encouraging, writer Julian Jessop says that Britain’s economy is on the verge of a very good year, the sort of year that might make voters think twice about gambling on a high-tax, high-spend Labour government.

It’s exactly what Sunak needs before the election and, Jessop avers, Starmer will have a hard job persuading voters things can only get better if they’re already improving rapidly.

On the other hand, inflation has not been completely cleared out of the system and global instability could keep cost-of-living rises on the agenda, led by what Philip Pilkington in the Telegraph describes as a sizeable minority of people who are reading the newspaper headlines and connecting the dots,

These people, Pilkington suggests, may have concluded that there is a link between the global chaos we see all around us and their declining living standards and, ultimately, think that inflation will be much higher moving forward.

This, then, starts to link the bigger picture with UK electoral preoccupations, potentially creating the conditions for a “black swan” event which could drive all the other campaign issues off the agenda.

Such an idea was evidently what Hamish de Bretton-Gordon had in mind with the Ukraine conflict escalating into a full-blown war between the Nato allies and Russia.

Hamish returned to this theme yesterday, expressing his disappointment that Starmer hadn’t included defence as one of his six items on his list of pledges.

With Labour seemingly giving up on national defence, he wrote, we need a party or parties who are going to vow to prevent yet another dreadful war across Europe, adding that “Labour have made it clear they are not the ones”.

However, in making defence his priority, Hamish is very much in a minority. YouGov only gives “defence and security” 16 percent in its list of people’s concerns, while Ipsos has defence lumped in with foreign affairs and international terrorism, and only gets 13 percent, although it has risen in the rankings by four points.

That sort of scoring would not, on the face of it, be enough to make defence a high-profile election issue – unless, of course, we see dramatic events which generate prominent headlines which stoke up public concern.

For the moment, though, politicians seem intent on saturating the ether with clichés, provoking Matthew Parris to offer an all-purpose tool for both party leaders.

“Trust us, standing as we do at a crossroads, but with the ambition, the vision and a clear and robust plan, our bold reforms promise incredible change, marking an inflection point for this nation”, he suggests – text which means absolutely nothing and, therefore, eminently suitable for modern politics.

Over the next few months, this is what we seem doomed to have to suffer – a stultifying diet which, by November, will have blanketed us with the extremes of boredom to such an extent that we shall all be glad when the election is over.

Perversely, if there is any one thing that could restore a sense of urgency and dynamism into this election campaign, it is a national debate on the defence of this country, with a focus not only on Ukraine and Russia, but on wider arenas which take in the growing assertiveness of China.

Others might argue that, rather than focus on external wars, we should look to the emerging conflict within our nation, the result of uncontrolled immigration and failed multiculturalism.

Our immediate problem for the election campaign, though, is that the very last thing any of our politicians want to do is talk about anything substantive, in a meaningful way. They wear their clichés like suits of armour, to protect them from the demands of voters, for fear of being trapped into promises that they might actually have to keep.

In a bizarre sense, Putin may be the only man who can bring life to this upcoming election campaign.