How did it go so wrong for Britain’s Conservatives?
UK’s self-inflicted political meltdown explained
If you’re looking for electoral suspense, don’t look across the pond. Barring a polling error of world historic proportions, 14 years of Conservative rule will come to an end in the United Kingdom on July 4. The question isn’t whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party will lose, it’s whether anything will be left of them the day after. Just five years after the Conservatives won their own historic landslide, pollsters are warning that the party faces “electoral extinction”. The current forecast from the Economist predicts the opposition Labour Party will win around 431 seats in the 650-seat parliament, up from the 205 they currently hold. That would be the center-left party’s biggest majority of the post-war era, eclipsing the landslide 1997 election, when the Tony Blair-led party trounced John Major’s Conservatives, ending an 18-year period of Tory dominance. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are projected to fall from 344 seats to just 109. Constituencies that have been loyal Tory bastions for decades are in play. The party is likely in for a brutal internal battle over its future, with some right-wingers calling for a merger with Trumpian gadfly Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party. Some polls suggest Sunak might become the first ever sitting prime minister to lose his own seat. (Though, he fortunately has a $7.2 million mansion in Santa Monica, California, to fall back on, which presumably has many seats.)
By Joshua Keating
Journalist, author
The Conservatives ended up on the brink of a historic loss the way Hemmingway described going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly. The Tories have been underwater in the polls since late 2021, but Sunak only called this election in late May, likely sensing his party’s prospects were not likely to improve any time soon. That’s a swift, though not exactly painless, end to a political era that radically changed a country and its place in the world. The consensus view is that it has not changed for the better.
A forthcoming book, The Conservative Effect, 2010–2024: 14 Wasted Years?, co-edited by Anthony Seldon, a veteran chronicler and biographer of contemporary British prime ministers, attempts to take stock of the legacy of this period. Seldon is unsparing in his concluding essay, writing, “By 2024, Britain’s standing in the world was lower [compared to 2010], the union was less strong, the country less equal, the population less well protected, growth more sluggish with the outlook poor.” He concludes: “Overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.”
So how, exactly, did we get here?
14 years, five PMs, one Brexit
This 14-year period of Conservative rule is really two different periods: pre- and post-Brexit.
The first period began in 2010, when then-prime minister David Cameron, leading a coalition government consisting of the Conservatives and the centrist Liberal Democrats, moved into 10 Downing Street, ending 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and his dour successor Gordon Brown. Relatively youthful at 44, Cameron, a self-described “liberal conservative,” distinguished himself from previous generations of conservatives with stances like his calls for action on climate change.
But his economic policies were anything but moderate. Cameron’s government came into office in the wake of the global financial crisis facing a budget deficit of some $225 billion. In response, the government carried out a program of fiscal consolidation and budget cuts that the UK budget office has described as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programs seen in any advanced economy since World War II”. Public spending fell from around 41 percent of GDP to 35 percent, with deep cuts to social programs, infrastructure, and international diplomacy.
Heading into the 2015 election, Cameron was also coming under pressure from the insurgent UK Independence Party, led by Farage, and from his own party’s right-flank, to hold a referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union. Though Cameron personally opposed withdrawing from the EU, in part to respond to dissidents from his right, he vowed that if he won, he would attempt to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and then, hold an “in/out referendum” on whether Britain should stay.
As a short-term political move, it worked out great. The Conservatives won an overall majority in 2015, ending the coalition era. But Cameron was less successful in convincing Brussels to give Britain “special status” within the EU. Cameron won only minor concessions on sovereignty and immigration. There has always been an undercurrent of Euro-skepticism in British politics, but it grew stronger in the 2000s and 2010s. The financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone debt crisis that followed undermined the appeal of the EU as an economic union. The unprecedented number of migrants who attempted to reach Europe in 2015 reduced support for the EU’s open border policies.
In retrospect, it was a perfect storm for Brexit, but it was still stunning when the country voted 52 to 48 percent in 2016 to leave the EU. Cameron, who had campaigned for the “Remain” side, resigned as prime minister. He was replaced by Theresa May, previously the home secretary and a fellow Remainer, who had the unenviable task of negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU while simultaneously presiding over a civil war within her own party over how exactly Brexit should be implemented.
Moderates wanted a “soft Brexit” that would preserve Britain’s access to Europe’s common market. Hardliners wanted a “hard Brexit” that would prioritize ditching EU regulations and controlling immigration. European negotiators in Brussels were not going to let the Brits have both. Further complicating the process was an issue that few anticipated before the referendum: the economic and political status of Northern Ireland — the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU. Finding a way to avoid a hard border across the island of Ireland — a key pillar of the Northern Irish peace process — while also removing the UK as a whole from the EU turned out to be excruciatingly difficult.
May stepped down in 2019, and after an internal party leadership election, was replaced by former London mayor and omnipresent media figure Boris Johnson. Johnson is not exactly known for holding consistent views.
In a 2014 interview for Slate, two years before the Brexit vote, he told me that when it came to the EU, “We may want to change our relationship a bit, but fundamentally we will remain within the European common market.” Just a few years later, he would be one of the most visible and enthusiastic campaigners for “Leave”.
A few months after taking office, Johnson called a national election, campaigning on a pledge to “get Brexit done” — and won a landslide victory. It didn’t hurt that Labour at the time was led by the veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, who had both failed to take a strong stance on Brexit and was beset by accusations of anti-semitism.
Armed with his new large majority, Johnson did something unusual for him: He did what he said he would do and indeed got Brexit done. Britain formally left the EU on January 31, 2020. Just two years later, however, Johnson left as well, forced to resign over a scandal over allegations that he misled parliament over parties held in his office during Covid-19 lockdowns.
That was followed by the 50-day reign of Prime Minister Liz Truss, which was the shortest in British history — so short, in fact, that she was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce. Truss is mainly remembered for a proposed set of tax cuts so extreme it triggered weeks of panic in global bond markets and the kind of upbraiding from the IMF normally reserved for failed states.
Truss was then replaced by Sunak, who made history as the first prime minister of Asian descent, as well as the youngest one since William Pitt (the Younger, of course) in 1783. Under Sunak, the lingering effects of the pandemic and the shock to energy markets caused by the war in Ukraine have contributed to a cost-of-living crisis that has disproportionately impacted the poorest Britons. Sunak has tried to make the case that the UK economy is turning the corner — and indeed inflation is now starting to ease — but it’s almost certainly too little too late.
The aftermath
To some extent, Sunak’s biggest crime is simply to be in office during a widespread anti-incumbent trend throughout the Western democratic world. He’s deeply unpopular but not significantly more so than G7 counterparts like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz.
Defenders of the Conservatives’ time in office will point to the external shocks the party had to contend with, including the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the economic impact of the war in Ukraine. But every major economy had to deal with those shocks. Only one country — and one party — chose Brexit.
Disentangling the effects of the withdrawal from other post-2020 shocks isn’t easy, but a recent study from Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), an independent think tank, estimated that the UK’s real GDP is about two to three percent lower today, compared to a scenario where it stayed in the union. Real income is about eight to nine percent lower.
According to the government’s own figures, Britain’s GDP today is only about 1.7 percent higher than it was pre-pandemic, compared to 3.7 percent for the Eurozone and 8.7 percent for the United States.
Ironically, Brexit didn’t even accomplish the goal that motivated many of its supporters to vote for it: Net migration to the UK has actually increased since the withdrawal. Much of the debate around immigration policy has focused on the government’s bizarre and inhumane plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed, as a means of deterring them from trying. But asylum seekers are only about 11 percent of the UK’s immigrants, and half of those are Ukrainians who entered under a specially tailored system and significantly more public support.
The real driver of migration is economic — including the economic needs of Britain itself. As migration researcher Hein de Haas has written, while “Brexit successfully curtailed free inflows of EU workers, it did not eliminate labor shortages that had been driving increasing migration to the UK ever since the 1990s.” Some jobs staffing Britain’s stores and its much-beloved National Health Service have been filled by non-EU migrants instead of European ones; some European migrants who previously traveled back and forth between the UK and the continent have stayed put.
Brexit’s advocates had argued that the benefits of trade with Europe could be offset by a free trade agreement that a new “global Britain,” unshackled from the EU, could pursue. But other than new deals with Australia and New Zealand, progress has been slow on that front. Johnson and Truss both promised a new free trade deal with the United States as a benefit of Brexit but badly misjudged the changing mood in Washington, where both the Republicans and Democrats have taken a turn toward protectionism. (Credit where it’s due: Johnson did get the US to lift a ban on the imports of British lamb.)
More than 60 percent of British voters, including more than a third of “Leave” voters, now say Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. But the damage is done.
Not-so-global Britain
The reality is that far from broadening Britain’s horizons, Brexit has forced it to confront what it really is: a mid-sized country with a mid-sized economy that has a mid-sized influence on the world.
Asked what role foreign policy and national security have played in this election, Nick Witney, a former British diplomat and defense official now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox, “Not much because we don’t have much of a foreign or defense policy at the moment. And there’s going to be no money available to buy ourselves one for a number of years under new government.”
Indeed, for all Johnson’s talk of a “global Britain” recovering its “buccaneering” spirit, the UK cuts a more modest profile on the world stage today than it did when Conservatives took over. London has cut funding to the foreign office, foreign aid, and one of the country’s most significant soft power assets: the BBC. Defense spending has increased since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, but the size of the military in terms of manpower has shrunk. A last-ditch campaign proposal by Sunak to mandate national service for 18-year-olds did not go over well.
“No one talks about ‘global Britain’ anymore,” said Witney. “It’s extraordinary how our horizons have shrunk. If you go back 20 years, there was practically not a sparrow that fell anywhere around the globe where the British didn’t feel they would have something to say about it. Nowadays, we are an impoverished and ultimately less ambitious country.”
One very notable exception has been the war in Ukraine, where the UK has been a significant provider of military aid, training, and economic support — often taking a more aggressive stance than the US on providing new weapons systems and capabilities to the Ukrainians. Johnson may be persona non grata in British politics right now, but there are streets named after him in Ukraine.
What’s next?
Probably due in part to the fact that the result hasn’t really been in doubt, the election itself has been heavily dominated by gaffes and scandals, including Sunak’s ill-advised decision to leave D-Day commemorations in France early and the revelations that candidates in both parties have been betting on the election.
It’s also true that compared to figures like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or even David Cameron — all of whom came into power in landscape-shifting change elections — current Labour leader Keir Starmer isn’t exactly promising radical change. Starmer has managed to stabilize his party after the politically disastrous Corbyn years, and — perhaps not surprisingly given that he entered the race with a huge lead — has run on a relatively modest policy platform. It’s too modest for some allies, who accuse him of “limping into No. 10,” while the party has also angered progressives by barring several left-wing candidates, including two women of color, in the run-up to the election.
Though the party opposed Brexit during the referendum, Labour does not plan to try to rejoin the European Union. Ahmet Kaya, an economist with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, told Vox that wouldn’t really be practical in the near term anyway, and that the focus should be on negotiations with Europe aimed at “reducing the barriers on trade and facilitating some of the free movement of people,” particularly students. Steps like these, he said, could “reduce the overall negative impact of Brexit”.
There won’t be a huge shift in foreign policy either. Unlike in the US, support for Ukraine is pretty bipartisan in the UK. In the wake of the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil in 2018 as well a flurry of coverage of how Russian oligarchs have manipulated the British financial system, there’s little pro-Russian sympathy in the UK, though Farage recently caused a media uproar with remarks suggesting NATO was partly to blame for the war in Ukraine. Starmer has also taken some criticism from Muslim Labour supporters over being slow to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. This hasn’t mattered much for his election chances, but his choices on this and other contentious issues are going to get a lot tougher when he’s actually in power.
Above all else, Starmer will face the challenge of overcoming the perceptions built up during the past decade. “Brexit has kind of defined how the UK is perceived internationally by many of our partners,” Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group, told Vox. “We’re seen as a more isolated nation than we were prior to Brexit.”
There are some parallels here with the Biden administration, which came into office promising allies that “America is back” following the isolation of the Trump years. As with the Democrats in 2020, Labour has gone with a broadly popular — if somewhat dull — candidate, whose promise is that he can turn down the political temperature after a period of chaos and upheaval. It may not be enough to get them another 13- or 14-year stint in power, but it’s almost certainly enough to turn the page on July 4.
The article first appeared on Vox.