Lurching from Crisis to Crisis

By 211 votes to 148, Boris Johnson has survived his long-promised no confidence vote. Speaking Monday afternoon, the ever-loyal Jacob Rees-Mogg said the Prime Minister would carry on even if the margin of victory was one vote. A margin of 63 then is more than enough. If we've learned anything about Johnson since he took office, he'll cling to power like a limpet. But this doesn't mean things won't stop getting more difficult. For six months, the polls have reported leads for Labour. Numbers reflecting the blight Johnson is inflicting on his party more than enthusiasm for whatever Keir Starmer is offering. These will not change. Nor will the inescapable fact that the Tories are now more divided than they were under Theresa May. Looking at her no confidence vote in late 2018, she won 200 votes to 117. In today's parliamentary money, that would be 229 to 134 - significantly better than what Johnson managed. This means problems for the legislative programme should Johnson whip for anything controversial, and plenty of hay-making for the opposition parties. More wounding still is what this does to the position of the Conservatives in the country. Polling is consistent with almost two-thirds saying Johnson should have resigned over PartyGate. 211 MPs have thumbed their nose at the public and told them their sacrifices didn't matter, and that obeying the law is an optional extra for the higher ups. It's a danger some, but not enough, Tory MPs are aware of. And by the same brush they too will be tarred.

Johnson limps on. He's not "fucked", as the never-right have pronounced. But he is wounded and the survival rates for Conservative leaders after a no confidence vote are not in Johnson's favour. How did we did we end up in this situation? Events, dear boy, events. You don't need me to recount how Johnson has played a most favourable political hand badly. There has been nothing stopping him, once the emergency moment of the pandemic eased, from storming ahead with his promises. But instead he's left his dangerous subordinates to run riot with stupid and ruinous policies while letting the good will of getting Brexit done and the vaccination campaign drain away. Thinking about the milestones of the last year that have done for him: the National Insurance rise, the effort to save Owen Paterson from the chop, and then the PartyGate debacle, one is struck by how they're unforced errors. But are they?

Long term tendencies work their way through the actions and activities of politicians. Sometimes they're conscious of it, but mostly they're oblivious. This is true of Johnson and his coterie as much as anyone else. On the conscious side of things, there has been the statecraft that revealed itself in the 2019 manifesto. Do nothing. That is talk up a good storm and let loose the faintest of breezes. Johnson was able to bulldoze through his Brexit as promised, but the rest? Instead of addressing this country's severe regional imbalances, nothing has been done. Even worse, once the pandemic got underway and the Tories had to step in to nationalise the UK's wage bill, abolish conditionalities for social security while bumping up payments, solve homelessness overnight, and offer billions in support for businesses big and small, they have done everything to row this back. Not just in terms of reversing these schemes, but clamping down on people's expectations. It's not enough to cut support for Johnson and friends, they want to cut the expectation of support. Going through the last two years, whether it's refusing to sack Dominic Cummings, refusing to act on free school meals, refusing to implement circuit-breaking lockdowns, refusing to support all the self-employed, refusing to help on energy bills, refusing to let Owen Paterson go, refusing to take responsibility for PartyGate, and even refusing to save Geronimo the bloody Alpaca, the Tories have tried simplifying politics by encouraging people not to expect anything from it. And doing nothing comes with costs, as polling and recent elections attest. If do-nothing statecraft is the game, it's a requirement Johnson is particularly well suited to.

Then there is the wider problem the Tories have, their long-term decline. There are two aspects of this complex process of immediate concern to us. The first is how Johnson was instrumental in building and holding together a voter coalition of mainly the old and the propertied. They're more susceptible to right wing, authoritarian politics, and they're not replacing themselves like-for-like as they pass on. Johnson's achievement was to consolidate what May mobilised, but the legacy he bequeaths his successor, whenever that may be, is that the Tories are boxed in to supporting this shrinking constituency with much weaker purchase outside it. The second symptom of Tory decline is a certain lack of rootedness. Historically, the Conservative Associations were, believe it or not, more likely to be the preserve of women than men, and these provided not just an army of activists but in-between elections they doubled up as semi-charitable and community-minded concerns. The typical Tory member was not quite the village busy-body, but they were rooted in place and kept the Conservative flame burning. The super safe shire and rural seats are the fruits of decades of this low-level activity. But today the party's body politic is not only much reduced, but it is more male, more inactive, much less community-minded, and tend toward privatised lives. The party's demographics therefore reflect a real enough trend in the wider population, but not one that allows for the Tories to have local presences beyond the efforts of activist leaflet drops.

This absence of rootedness doubles up in its relationship to British business. As argued here many times, the core Tory concern is the preservation of capitalist relations of production first, and the continued dominance of the City of London second (hence, it's helpful to see the Tory Brexit wars inflected by debates within the City about whether its interests were best served by remaining in the EU or being a financial and commercial clearing house outside its jurisdiction). The destruction of the ad hoc Keynesian arrangements of the post-war settlement, the eradication of huge quantities of industrial capital and the diversion of some into property and finance as increasingly important vectors of accumulation led to a looser relationship between the party and the class it serves. The superficial dynamism and strength of speculative capital characterised more transactional arrangements among the Conservatives and its well-heeled supporters. The donors expected bangs for their bucks, which the Tories were too happy to indulge. It meant, after Thatcher, a pattern of politics even more short-termist and myopic. Interestingly, this afforded the party more political autonomy as it flitted between individual money bags, leading it into self-immolating and counter-productive trajectories than one might expect. Structurally speaking the Conservatives were complacent. Decadent even. The do-nothing strategy of the Tories and the indolent figure of Johnson himself are best fits for a party running on the vapours of the past.

The problem for any institution with withering linkages is a propensity to crisis. As such, the Conservatives have long been a stranger to the stability it stands for, both in the party's internally fractious operations and the divisive damage it inflicts on the society it governs. The no confidence vote and Johnson's disastrous leadership are examples of both, and because the social position of the party hasn't changed there will be many more crises to come.

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