Britain has had five Conservative prime ministers since 2010. It would have a sixth, but Conservative members of Parliament seem uncertain if it’s worth the trouble. There will be an election before the end of the year. After 14 years in government, the Conservatives are not so much squeezed by the polls as violently compressed, like a totaled car in a crusher. On their left flank, they are polling more than 20 points behind Labour. On their right, they have lost as much as 14% of the vote to Reform UK, a populist right-wing party.
In early March, the Ipsos polling group reported that support for the Conservatives was at its lowest since Ipsos began tracking voter opinion in 1978. Labour was at 47%. The Conservatives were at 20%, their lowest-ever rating. If an election were held today, the Conservatives would suffer the kind of defeat that sent them into the wilderness for a generation after 1997. They might even suffer something worse.
In 1993, Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party won 16% of the votes but retained only two of its 162 seats. The political scientists Anand Menon and Daniel Béland identify three reasons for this disaster. First, a failed regional policy led to a loss of support in a major province, Quebec. Second, the right-wing vote split with the rise of a rival regional party, also called Reform, whose members felt ignored by the metropolis. Third, economic growth was poor, taxes were high, and the economy still recovering from a recession.
The British Conservatives are in a similar position. First, they have lost the regions. They hold only six of Scotland’s 59 seats and 14 of Wales’s 40 seats. They hold none of Northern Ireland’s 18 seats, though their allies in the Democratic Unionist Party hold eight seats. Second, the right-wing vote is splitting where it counts most. In England, which has 533 of the House of Commons’s 650 seats, and 328 of the Conservatives’ 348 MPs, the regional insurgency of Reform UK is splitting the Conservative vote. Third, the economy went into recession in the last quarter of 2023, and taxes are at the highest level since 1948.
A protester near the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street, March 20, 2024. (Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Before the 1993 elections, Canada’s Progressive Conservatives appointed Kim Campbell, a new leader with strong personal ratings. Campbell went on to lose her seat. Britain’s Conservatives made the same gamble in October 2022 when they selected Rishi Sunak as prime minister. During the coronavirus pandemic, Sunak was Boris Johnson’s chancellor of the Exchequer. His largesse with the public finances bought him some of the highest poll ratings ever recorded and even secured him a small bounce when he took over as prime minister. Little over a year later, in December 2023, a YouGov poll found that his favorability rating was -49. In a Daily Telegraph-Savanta poll from mid-March, only 45% of Conservative voters wanted Sunak to lead the party in the coming general election.
Time is not just against the Conservatives because there must soon be an election. The long cycle of British politics is against them, too. Since 1945, the Conservatives and Labour have alternated long stints of roughly 13 or 14 years.
The Conservatives ruled from 1951 to 1964. Labour ruled from 1964 to 1979, with an unsteady Conservative interlude from 1970 to 1974. The Conservatives returned for 18 years, extending the cycle by changing prime minister in 1990 from Margaret Thatcher to John Major. Labour then achieved the statutory 13 years from 1997 to 2010, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown.
The Conservatives are now in their 14th year in office. They returned to power in 2010 under David Cameron, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. They shed the coalition in 2015, then shed Cameron after the Brexit referendum in 2016, then shed their unity, their principles, and three more prime ministers. They include Theresa May, who squandered Cameron’s 2015 victory by bungling the 2017 election; Boris Johnson, who in 2019 won the biggest Conservative victory since Thatcher in 1987 and then, like Thatcher, was knifed in the back by his own MPs three years later; and Liz Truss, who held office for only 49 days and who, though she never held power, nevertheless came close to crashing the economy.
An actor in a Rishi Sunak mask poses protests in London’s Parliament Square against the Safety of Rwanda bill, March 11, 2024. (Mark Kerrison / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Sunak promised to bring stability. He has overseen chaos. Not all of it is his fault. Like President Joe Biden, Sunak can blame exceptional challenges, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Like Biden, he can tout a rapid economic recovery and remind us that inflation is coming down and unemployment is low. And, like Biden, he finds that the public is not convinced. Personal debt went through the roof during the pandemic. Prices went similarly skyward afterward. For the first time in modern history, British households are predicted to be poorer at the end of a parliamentary session than when it started. As in the United States, in Britain, the voters are feeling it in the pocketbook.
In January 2023, Sunak made five pledges to the British people. “I fully expect you to hold my government and I to account on delivering those goals,” he said. The first was to halve the rate of inflation, then running at 10.7%. In mid-March 2024, the rate was down to 3.6%.
The second pledge was to “grow the economy.” This was vague, and Sunak and his advisers did not respond to requests for clarification. However you look at it, the economy did not grow in 2023. It scraped above recession in the first half of 2023, with quarterly GDP growth of 0.1% in the first quarter and 0.2% in the second. It contracted by 0.1% in the third quarter and 0.3% in the fourth. This is the technical definition of a recession.
Sunak’s defenders are reduced to nitpicking about whether, given the unnatural bust and boom of the COVID-19 economy and the low unemployment rate, this is a real recession or a kind of statistical hallucination. They note that in 2023, the government’s priority was economic growth, but the Bank of England’s priority was to control price rises. In the year to March 2023, British energy prices rose by 40.5%. Food prices rose 19.1%, the steepest rise since 1977. The Bank of England raised interest rates 14 times. This slowed the rise in prices, but it also slowed economic growth.
The Bank of England also played a role in unseating Truss by letting it be known that her sums didn’t add up and that the markets were not prepared to make up the difference.
Truss and her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a tax-cutting dash for growth. But the Bank of England was committed to contractionary, hawkish policies to contain inflation. As capital began to leave the City of London, several major pension funds neared collapsed and the bond market plummeted. The Bank of England was obliged to spend 19 billion pounds buying up government bonds. The monetary and fiscal mechanisms were not just out of sync: They were pulling in opposite directions.
Sunak has an unusually strong grasp of economics, so he knows better than to go against the Bank of England. But stable relations with the Bank of England have meant a low-growth, stagnant economy. The failure of Sunak’s second promise, to grow the economy, caused the failure of his third, to reduce the debt.
In 2019, when Johnson took office and Sunak took control of the public finances, the United Kingdom’s public sector debt was equivalent to 80% of GDP. By late 2020, when Sunak was subsidizing the suspended economy with COVID-19 cash, it was touching 100%. By October 2022, when Sunak became prime minister, it was 96%. By December 2023, it was 97.7%. The government argues that it’s too early to judge and that its goal is to bring the debt down by 2029. In the spring budget, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced that the debt is expected to rise from 97.6% this year to 98.8% in 2025, then fall to 94.3% in 2029.
This presumes the Conservatives will still be in office by then and that anyone believes what they say. No one believes Sunak’s fourth promise, to reduce the record-breaking waiting lists for treatment in the National Health Service. The number of people waiting for nonemergency treatment rose by roughly 600,000 from December 2022 to December 2023, from 7 million to 7.6 million people. The numbers waiting between 18 weeks to a year for treatment have quadrupled since late 2019. Though Sunak and his ministers promised to eliminate all waiting lists of 18 months or longer by April 2023, the number on those lists actually rose between July and August 2023.
The government blames a doctors’ strike. The NHS’s top-heavy management says it needs more money and plays on the public’s suspicion that the Conservatives would, if they could, privatize the NHS and send the poor to the workhouse. The truth is that this sequence of Conservative governments have all raised NHS expenditure, but NHS productivity has declined regardless. The post-COVID-19 surge in delayed cases only exacerbates this long-term failure. In his budget speech, Hunt called the NHS “rightly the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British.” He was rightly mocked for this. The NHS is a test case in bureaucratic waste and path dependency by public demand.
Sunak’s fifth promise was to “stop the boats,” deal with illegal immigration, and fix a broken immigration system (“Europe’s migrant crisis,” Nov. 3, 2023). The number of illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel fell from 45,755 in 2022 to 29,437 in 2023, which is much the same as 2021 levels. But the boats are only the most flagrant example of this Conservative government’s strange inability to police Britain’s borders. In 2019, net migration into the U.K. was 184,000. In 2022, the figure was 745,000, a record high. Just over half a million people left Britain that year, and 1.2 million arrived. Most of them (968,000) are from non-European Union countries. Most of those arrivals were students, who can bring family dependents with them. This migration added 1% to the U.K. population in a year, a rise not seen since the fecund years of the 1960s.
Britain’s population growth between 1967 (54.8 million) and 1997 (58.25 million) was slow and manageable. In the late 1970s, the rate of population growth even dipped into negative territory. The Labour government of Blair relaxed immigration controls in order, the Labour adviser Andrew Neather said, to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” In Labour’s 14 years in power, the annual rate of population growth more than doubled, from 0.3% to 0.83%. By 2010, when Labour left office, the population was 62.76 million. The Conservatives have reduced the rate of growth to 1997 levels over the last 14 years, and it now stands at 0.34%. Detected illegal immigration quadrupled from 2018 to 2022, to over 50,000 attempted entries a year. The number of undetected entries is unknown.
The official population, meanwhile, has continued to grow and now stands at 67.74 million. The Office for National Statistics projects a population of 69.3 million by 2030. That is 20% higher than 1997 levels. The housing stock and the number of schools, hospitals, trains, and police have not grown to meet the demand, so the result is unaffordable housing, crowded schools, longer NHS waiting lists, and higher crime figures. Rather than rendering the Right’s arguments “out of date,” rubbing everyone’s noses in “diversity” has, for the first time since the deindustrialization of the 1960s, created an American-style culture war over immigration and cultural cohesion, not forgetting a rampant problem with Islamism.
The Conservatives, as the historic party of law and order, national identity, and generally conserving things as they were, should be natural beneficiaries of the voters’ backlash. Instead, they are its target. Like everything in England, it comes down to class.
The majority of Conservative MPs are social and economic liberals. They represent affluent seats in southern England, where the service economy is geared to London’s financial services economy. They opposed Brexit because they like frictionless exchanges, frictionless flights to Tuscany and the south of France in the summer, and a pool of low-wage foreigners to clean their houses and wipe their children’s backsides. The main threat to these MPs’ good life is the Liberal Democrats.
The rest of the Conservative MPs are the 2019 intake. They represent less affluent, deindustrialized seats in northern England, where the economy is more welfare-dependent. Their voters backed Brexit because they want protection from the cold winds of the global economy and because they cannot afford the social and economic cost of mass immigration. Charmed by Johnson, they flipped, some for the first time, from Labour to Conservative in 2019.
The Conservatives repaid them by ignoring them or, as with immigration and crime, making it worse. Sunak has staked what remains of his reputation on a sixth promise, to push through a proposal inherited from Johnson’s premiership in which illegal immigrants would not be returned to their place of origin but sent to Rwanda. The British government will pay 20,000 pounds per migrant to the Rwandan government on delivery and another 151,000 pounds over the following five years to cover each one’s expenses.
The Rwanda scheme is an insult to the intelligence, to human dignity, and to Rwanda. It is also unworkable because Britain is bound by the European Court of Human Rights, which doesn’t allow you to dump unwanted foreigners in the middle of Africa. Anyway, Sunak is a prisoner of the liberal wing of his own party and a bit of a coward. For both of these reasons, he fired Home Secretary Suella Braverman for calling the weekly festival of “pro-Palestine” Jew-baiting and Islamist recruitment “hate marches.” He now says he would prefer that the marchers refrained from lowering the tone but of course is too weak and sensible to make a seventh promise.
As Labour has, like the Democrats, become a party for white-collar liberals, public sector trough snufflers, welfare dependents, gender casualties, minority bloc voters, and college professors, disaffected northern English voters are not returning to Labour. They are, like their American equivalents, turning rightward and asking for protection and building up to issuing a massive protest vote that will sink the Conservatives — as they richly deserve.
Reform UK emerged from the Brexit Party, which emerged from the U.K. Independence Party, which, under Nigel Farage, forced Cameron to call the Brexit referendum in 2016. Farage is Reform UK’s honorary president.
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The crucial variable in the coming elections is not whether the Conservatives lose. It is whether Farage contests a seat for Reform UK or whether he waits until the Conservatives crash to an epochal defeat — and then whether he tries to take over the Conservatives or incorporates the Conservatives’ populist and Thatcherite minorities into his party.
In March, Lee Anderson, a 2019 Conservative from the north, defected and became Reform UK’s first MP. The resemblance to 2014, when Douglas Carswell defected from the Conservatives to UKIP, is heightened by Sunak’s recall of Cameron, refreshed by a stint in the House of Lords and some dubious consulting work for foreign governments. Like a ship with a broken rudder and a leak below the waterline, Britain is coming full circle as it sinks beneath the waves.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
