UK conservatives jumping ship at prospect of Labour sweeping elections

[lizkat]

There's no date set for elections yet but the squeeze play is already on in UK politics: Conservatives are apparently rushing for the exits instead of planning to defend their seats as Labour gains traction with prospective voters. In polling, the Tories are also losing ground to the right-leaning Reform Party...

Tories Quitting UK Parliament at Fastest Pace Since Blair’s Rise (Bloomberg, free link expires April 4)

More UK Conservative Members of Parliament are standing down ahead of the looming general election than at any national vote since the party plunged to a landslide defeat in 1997.

Before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has even set a date for the election, some 63 members of his ruling Tories have already said they don’t plan to defend their seats — the most since 72 stood down in the run-up to the vote 27 years ago.

“It looks like rats fleeing a sinking ship,” said Robert Ford, Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. Ford said he expects twice as many Tories to lose their seats than to retain them in the general election.

YouGov’s poll of 2,037 people put Labour’s lead at 25 points. The right-wing Reform party, which many Tories fear is eroding their vote, logged a record 15%.

 

[SouprMatt]

The Tories have (inexplicably if you consider Brexit and Boris Johnson) been in power for 14 years! It’s way past time for a change in the UK I think.

 

[lizkat]

The Tories have (inexplicably if you consider Brexit and Boris Johnson) been in power for 14 years! It’s way past time for a change in the UK I think.

The New Yorker has a piece about the hits that services to ordinary UK residents have taken during those timeframes. Some of the stats mentioned are way past eyebrow raising, e.g. poverty rates among children, cuts to school facilities budgets etc. The piece was written by Sam Knight, a London-based staffer who was born there in 1980, stayed there and so has lived through the governments of the Tories under Thatcher, then Blair's New Labour, then back to the conservatives in 2010 in coalition with the Lib Dems, and after 2015 under the Tories alone. The piece is very long but a great read (and includes an embedded Apple+ produced audio version as well... it runs an hour and three minutes!).

The article is in the Reporter at Large section and it may be behind the paywall, not sure if the magazine has a number of pieces that can be read by non subscribers before the paywall kicks in.

What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted by constant drama. But the U.K. can’t move on from the Tories without facing up to the damage that has occurred.

www.newyorker.com

If some of this seems like the roadmap the US GOP has in mind for Americans, well... here's how that stuff works out. [bolding below is mine]

Beginning in 2005, Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, had modernized the Tories. The duo represented a new generation of Conservatives: deft and urbane, easy in their privilege. Osborne was the heir to a baronetcy; Cameron’s family descended from a mistress of William IV. Cameron embraced centrist causes, including the environment and prison reform. There was talk of a “post-bureaucratic age.” But the main aim was simpler. “Above all, it was trying to win,” Osborne told me recently.

In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” The speech was part of a successful campaign to associate Labour’s public spending with the global financial crash, to which Britain had been badly exposed. “The word ‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and David Cameron,” Osborne said. “Austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after the Second World War. “The word didn’t have the connotations then that it does now,” Osborne recalled. “It was, you know, a bit like prudence.”

“It was devastatingly politically effective,” Osborne told me, of austerity. It’s just that the effects were so horrendous. Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter. Officers stopped investigating burglaries. Only four per cent now end in prosecution. In 2021, the median time between a rape offense and the completion of a trial reached more than two and a half years. Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by forty-six per cent between 2009 and 2022.

Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said. Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle currently live below the poverty line.) But after a while Durcan and his colleagues stopped talking about the cuts, even though their budgets continued to fall. “There was a view—was it helpful? Were you risking losing confidence in the city?”

And so stupid things happened. Since 2010, forty-three per cent of the courts in England and Wales have closed. No one thinks that this was a good idea. For years, the Conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging longer jail times. “You kind of had a mismatch,” Gauke, who later served as the Justice Secretary, admitted. The number of adults sentenced to more than ten years in prison more than doubled—until the system caved in, overrun by violence, self-harm, drug use, and staff shortages.

And all that BEFORE came along the idea of pitching Brexit as a nifty way to blame the EU for everything gone wrong in the UK when the Tories had just about worn out blaming New Labour for having sensible ideas that even the Tories signed off on but that no one wanted to pay for. Now the question is whether the voters are so used to voting against their own interests out of habit for 14 years that they'll do it again sometime in the next six months.

It is unnerving to be heading into an election year in Britain with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel immeasurable. I put this to Hayes, the Tory M.P., when I went to see him in the House of Commons. “You’re arguing we have very vanilla-flavor politics, in a richly colored world. There’s something in that,” he said. Then he surprised me. “I think the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative,” he said. We were sitting in a bay window, overlooking the Thames. A waiter poured tea. Hayes seemed to relish the coming election. It was as if, after almost fourteen years of tortuous experiment, real conservatism might finally be at hand. “Outside metropolitan Britain and the university towns, it’s all up for grabs,” Hayes assured me. “Toryism must have its day again

Sigh. Sounds like USA Republicans arguing that the way to fix what's wrong with the US is to get to the right of RINOs from the Reagan era.