David Willetts is a member of the House of Lords and President of the Resolution Foundation.
The first anniversary of the last election is an opportunity to consider the extraordinary state of British politics. Both of the two main parties are in serious difficulties.
The decline of support for Labour is striking. The scale of the welfare rebellion and the increasing willingness of Labour MPs to speak out is an extraordinary contrast to their landslide victory.
For me, the nugget of information which stands out as helping to explain Starmer’s problems with his own party is that he has only voted seven times since the election. The under-estimated key to ministerial accountability to Parliament is being regularly in the division lobbies with colleagues who can tell you exactly what is bugging them and why – and that extends all the way up to the Prime Minister.
The inaccessibility of Starmer to his own backbenchers is a serious mistake. It is one reason why the Government is finding it hard to get its business through Parliament.
He is, by contrast, proving very adept at foreign policy, but perhaps they are taking up too much of his time.
All of us involved in domestic policy sometimes feel frustrated about prime ministerial time devoted to foreign affairs. Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher brings out how this increasingly dominated her time and energy.
When I was working for her I asked if she could possibly devote some more time to critical issues in health policy rather than going on some foreign trip. Her response to my naïve question made it all sound like the middle-class dinner party circuit: we had had the foreign leader over for an official visit, and now it was her turn to visit him.
Rishi Sunak’s disaster on VE day is a warning, but I wonder if perhaps occasionally delaying a foreign trip to do PMQs and meet some colleagues might be a good signal for Starmer to send to his restless troops.
Meanwhile the Conservative Party is not gaining from Labour’s problems; instead the Tory vote share is falling as fast as Labour’s. Conservative support is now above all people aged over 70, who own their own home, with modest educational qualifications, and voted for Brexit.
This is a terrible position for a centre-right party supposed to be about growth, opportunity, and mobility to have got into. Those older voters are the surviving beneficiaries of previous Tory promotion of the property-owning democracy; we nned urgently radical thinking on a similarly generous offer to the next generation.
Labour’s fall to 23 per cent support in the latest polls and Tory support down at 17 per cent adds up to 40 per cent, a historic low for the two main parties. Meanwhile the coalition-of-the-rest is a majority: minus 27 per cent for Reform, plus 15 per cent for Liberal Democrats, and plus 11 per cent for the Greens, making 53 per cent in total.
The classic role of both Labour and Conservative in first-past-the-post electoral system has been to build broad coalitions of support within the party. By contrast, in many continental PR systems the coalition is across different parties and created after the Election. Both main parties appear to be losing their skill at coalition-building; that may tell us something important about wider changes in British society.
Reform have gained an extraordinary influence on both main political parties’ politics. Labour is worried about losing what it sees as its core Red Wall voters. Many key government policies are tested first in focus groups to gauge the reaction of these (currently) Labour voters; measures which might upset them are dropped. That is another reason why this government, despite its large majority, is finding it hard to get things done.
But one of the key powers of government is to use its power to shape the national conversation to change people’s views and broaden the range of its acceptable policy options – and Reform is doing surprisingly well because neither Labour nor Conservatives are challenging Reform on the one decision where its record matters.
Reform is a Brexit party. They have sold the country one populist solution and it has proved to be a disaster. Indeed it is one of the main reasons for the very unhappiness they are now trying to exploit – stagnant wages and a surge in migration from outside Europe.
Why risk a second populist solution when the first one is doing so badly? But the Brexit trauma is so painful that neither party dares make this obvious point.
