Those political anoraks of an appropriate vintage will recall the feeling ‘in the air’ as we bounced through the months leading up to the 1997 General Election. We knew that whatever came next, it was inevitable that it would be led by Blair.
I recall die-hard Conservatives at the time being convinced that things were in no way as bad as they seemed.
Whilst I genuinely believed that a hung parliament was the best anyone on the right could hope for, whatever the outcome, it was all too clear that the Major Government was on nothing but borrowed time.
The feeling many have today is that things are much the same. The polling reflects that way of thinking too.
But are things really the same? Have we really been here before? Is this just the end of classically British Political cycle? Or are we facing a different kind of world where nothing really is lining up in any way like it has before?
Whilst it could well be the case that Labour end up on the beneficial end of a landslide electoral reversal in 2024, the one truth that we be certain not to be entering the thinking of anyone wholly invested in the British Electoral system as it is now, is that the lie of what our politicians, the political classes and the establishment that underpins them are all about has, through their own actions, been exposed and brought into light.
This process of disclosure was always inevitable. But the Tory-led responses to Brexit, the Covid Pandemic and then the War in Ukraine – not to mention the cross-political push for public policy such as Net Zero, ULEZ, LTNs and the digitization of currency – that the Public has never knowingly given its endorsement to – have really opened up the Pandoras Box that had been so carefully hidden. The darkened contents of the British Political system are now exposed in full view.
Even the most sensible, upstanding and rational amongst us are finding themselves trying to rationalize with the question ‘Who really tells our Politicians what to do?’
Without being the incumbent government that we are culturally conditioned to blame for all that appears to happen on their watch, Labour and to a lesser degree The Liberal Democrats stand to gain from the way that a Political system that only offers different faces as an electoral alternative really functions.
All British politicians and the political parties they represent have become so ineffectual and Public policy so benign, when it comes to tackling the real issues of our day, that the truth that our Politicians are all the same cannot and will not remain hidden under the myth of government change.
The Labour-led government argument we can be sure to be rolled out for a long time after the next General Election will be ‘Give us a chance: it will take at least a couple of years for all of the great things we are going to do to reach you once we’ve sorted out the mess the Tories created’.
It is clear from the absence of any difference between the Policies of the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems and any other party policy that wants power, that beyond the words, the hand wringing and other political gestures, that whoever, whatever and wherever you are in the UK, the post General Election road map will certainly look different. But the outcome and the very undemocratic direction of travel and societal disintegration is very much set to remain the same.
We may well have a Keir Starmer-led government by the time that the self-destruction developed by generations of politicians from all sides for over fifty years, comes to its painful end.
The more pressing question and one that even those who label themselves as anti-establishment today don’t appear to be asking themselves or their followers is ‘What happens next?’
The answer could be one that we will now be falling over ourselves to find in perhaps as little as a couple of weeks.
What few will be ready for is that if they want a happy answer, it’s not going to be anyone or anything that they currently think.
Adam Tugwell 