Wednesday 22 May 2024

Why Has Rishi Sunak Called an Election?

The day began with a peculiar news story. Enough to get the antennae of conspiracy theorists twitching, Oliver Dowden told the country to stock up in case of catastrophe. Or was it a message to Tory MPs and their support staff, knowing most will be out of a job from 5th July? Being prepared is a message Rishi Sunak should have taken on board as well. Defying weather forecasts and the evidence of his own senses, the Prime Minister eschewed the expensive Downing Street press room to stand in the rain, knowing his words would likely be drowned out by protestors. It was not the most auspicious of beginnings to an election campaign that spells doom for the Tories.

The announcement did catch the lobby on the hop. That was until the rumours started swirling this morning. Since the miserable showing in the locals and mayorals, it seemed Sunak, like Boris Johnson, was going to cling on for dear life in the hope that something might turn up. So why he change of mind? Whatever you think of Theresa May and Johnson, they had a plausible argument for going to the polls. The former argued she needed a healthy majority to deal with the job at hand. The latter was to break the Brexit logjam. Sunak doesn't have anywhere near as compelling a story. In his tediously overlong speech, he said inflation was back to normal levels and economic recovery was underway. There are some global dangers too, which is why we need a Conservative government at the helm. Not terribly convincing even for Tories, if the comments on Conservative Home are typical.

We've had the good reason, so what's the real reason? Snaking its way down the grapevine, it's because the Tories are in a poor state and it can only get worse. With two recent defections, chances are more pain was in store as other Tories fancied an afterlife as either a Labour MP or some very important hanger on. Not great for morale. More Channel boats and Rwanda frustrations couldn't be ruled out, nor could the possibility of Tory support sinking further. Still, there are those in the Tory camp who were counselling as late as Wednesday morning that going for a Summer election was a mistake. Yes, the argument went, things are definitely bad now but they might be a touch better come November. When the priority has to be salvaging as much as the party as possible, fortune favours the cautious, not the foolhardy. As such, The Spectator are now running an article called A summer election is suicide for the Tories. It couldn't happen to a nicer party.

There was an event earlier this week that was widely reported pointing to the essential context of going for an election now. True to form, its significance was passed over by the country's professional politics understanderers. Senior Tories forced Sunak to back down on his immigration plans. By counting overseas students as immigrants and then introducing restrictive visa requirements, he and the right of the party were hoping to demonstrate the toughness and efficacy of the Tories at driving the numbers down. This with the happy by-product of plunging universities into financial crisis and with it (hopefully) cutting students who graduate into a life-long habit of voting liberal-left. Unfortunately for Sunak, not only does the HE sector carry weight in terms of votes, the economies servicing universities - particularly the large amount of propertied capital tied up in student lets, residence schemes, and expanding/replacing HE estate - is a core component of the Tory class coalition. The rebellion in the Cabinet was the assertion of interests over a party that was in danger of again becoming disarticulated from them in pursuit of policy gimmicks. A smaller scale version of the disaster that Liz Truss brought on herself.

On top of this, how the mega rich are deserting the Tories and are now in bed with Labour cannot have escaped Sunak's notice. He knows the paralysis of his government, the harms done to Britain's soft power, the decrepitude of the state, its growing inability to discipline the workforce, its reckless approach to so-called business confidence (I.e. providing British capital a stable enough regulatory regime for accumulation), and complete lack of popular legitimacy in and of itself is a barrier to the smooth running of things. His own eyes, the reports of donations pouring into Labour, the feedback channelled to him from those Tories on the London restaurant/dinner party/City canapé circuit, and his own class interests as the country's richest politician set on forging an alliance between daddy-in-law's Indian IT business and the Californian tech bros are the economics concentrated in his political decision making. Sunak's bowing to inevitable defeat is because the pressure of settled bourgeois interest is against him, and doing so now means he personally can look forward to a soft landing. The same cannot be said for his party, as it drops from a great height onto the rocks of a hard political reckoning.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is your talk at UoB going to be rescheduled Phil? It would be a great one to have during the campaign period

Anonymous said...

Word on the street is, the actual trigger for this decision was the ruling on the infected blood scandal - the scale of the compensation means there’s no longer room for the government to offer tax breaks in the autumn statement.

Phil said...

Yes, the talk will be rescheduled - though sadly not until the Autumn.

Blissex said...

«Snaking its way down the grapevine, it's because the Tories are in a poor state and it can only get worse. [...] there are those in the Tory camp who were counselling as late as Wednesday morning that going for a Summer election was a mistake. Yes, the argument went, things are definitely bad now but they might be a touch better come November»

It is indeed a very strange decision: property prices have been not-booming since 2022, and since then tory voters have been protesting largely by abstaining, and since "official" inflation has been going down interest rates would be cut and as George Osborne said in his time “Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up” by the end of the year. The election could have even been scheduled for early January to wait for a solid resumption of property price increases.

The most obvious possible reason for setting it to July 4th is that Sunak expects interest rates to go up and thus mortgage rates to go up and property prices to do badly during and after the summer. That would be interesting because so far there is no reason why that should happen; in particular it would be very strange for USA interest rates to go up before the November presidential election, and it is USA interest rates that set the global standard.

The other possibilities are that there is an as yet unknown factor other than interest rates that is expected to happen later one, or it was a very big miscalculation, which is always possible.

Sometimes I think that the big as yet unknown factor is that the election is being thrown by "the establishment" to Starmer, who has been groomed as a reliable hard-right thatcherite, in order to have the occasion to purge the Conservatives of its tory-nationalist wing, in revenge for their purging of the tory-onenation and whig-globalist wings.

Blissex said...

«By counting overseas students as immigrants [...] the large amount of propertied capital tied up in student lets, residence schemes, and expanding/replacing HE estate - is a core component of the Tory class coalition.»

Sometimes I wonder whether some tory politicians start to believe their own propaganda and forget that most tory voters say they are for conservativism when instead they vote their wallet. That guy from Trier wrote very insightfully

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch03.htm
The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

Besides I reckon that most tory voters are delighted with mass immigration, as it greatly boosts property profits, and also pushes down a fair bit real wages, what they really object to is "uppity" immigrants that don't stay in their ghettos and cannot be thrown out at whim. That's why they were outraged that continental immigrants had civil and even some political rights.

Anonymous said...

Another word on the street: the frog-faced Surplus Elite poster child was committed to touring the US, handicapping his ability to interfere with Tory attempts at wooing back Reform voters. The rabid populist wing of the Tories must still believe they can do that (because if they can't, then where are they...?), and all of Sunak's grotesque posturing during his tenure suggests that they had the loudest whispers in his ear.

Zoltan Jorovic said...

Here's a thought. Could it be that property prices are not the one and only consideration when it comes to voting? Startling, right? Maybe, perhaps, possibly, people have a mixture of motives and influencing factors when it comes to which way they cast their vote, or if they bother at all.

Every vote is individual. The assemblage of multiple individual decisions in a given location produces a result. Circumstances for each person and for each location vary. Principles, values, even interests vary. There is no rigid, inflexible class interest such that every single person of a particular social group votes the same way. There are just tendencies, trends and probabilities.

Right now, the mood is not exactly upbeat. We all know that the future is unlikely to be an improvement on today if we carry on as is. So, change is in the air. Even a vapid, shuffling of deckchairs kind of change looks better than more of the same. And its all that is on offer. So, its likely that it will be taken. Reluctantly, unenthusiastically, and without much hope, but, its still better than the same old same old.

Aimit Palemglad said...

Why call the election now? Easy. Because Sunak came to the conclusion that the probable electoral outcome was unlikely to get more favourable if he waited, and most likely would get worse.

Why did he suddenly decide this? Perhaps the prospect of another 6 months of trying to hold back the slowly rising tide of despair lost its appeal. Being Chief among Liars, Leader of the Slimey Horde, Spin-Spitter and Story-Mangler, Herder of the Rabid Rats, Head Gloss-Putter, Conductor of the Tuneless Orhcestra, Lead Dancer of the One-legged Ballet became too much.

The chance of escape, of putting a big two fingers up to all the petty little backstabbers he was surrounded by, always demanding, complaining, snarking and snapping. You want decisive leadership - how's about this!

A fit of pique? Or a act of desperation? Or just an exasperated gamble? Who knows. Maybe he just thought, "we are doomed whenever I call it, so I'll take as many of those b*st*rds with me, and get if over with". "let them sort out the mess, if there is anyone left capable of it, and if not, let them fight among themsleves until the most ruthless and disgusting climbs atop the rotting corpse and declares victory".

Blissex said...

«some tory politicians start to believe their own propaganda and forget that most tory voters say they are for conservativism when instead they vote their wallet.»

«Could it be that property prices are not the one and only consideration when it comes to voting? Startling, right?»

It does not seem startling to me: many workers care most about wages and social security and services and only secondarily about housing costs (wrongly: they take housing cost increases as given, while instead politically driven and currently they are a much bigger issue for workers than wages), and some rentiers feel so secure in their interests (correctly: they are backed by most of the establishment) that they vote on "fancy" ("values"). For an example of the latter a conversation that was reported on a blog just after the 2016 referendum:

“Friend: How did you vote then, Dad?
Dad: I voted Out.
Friend: Dad! Why did you do that? The economy will crash! It’ll cause chaos!
Dad: That won’t bother me hen, I’m retired.
Friend: But it’ll affect me! What about me?
Dad: (Long silence).”

Blissex said...

«possibly, people have a mixture of motives and influencing factors when it comes to which way they cast their vote. [...] The assemblage of multiple individual decisions in a given location produces a result»

That resembles the "spatial" theory of voting which has a particular political meaning: it is used by "centrists" to claim that since each individual or groups evaluate all the manifesto offerings of parties and choose the one least distant from their preferences, elections are won always from the "centre", the median position on everything, which in the UK happens to be globalist thatcherism (except that nowadays Starmer is positioning as a nationalist thatcherite as after 2016 that seems to be the "centre").

But the "vote-moving issue" theory of voting seems rather more reliable to me: voters have a single vote to cast, and usually they cast it on the most important issue to them, which is their material/class interest. So many astute politicians pursue big blocks of voters defined by a "vote-moving issue", because that means winning a lot of votes with one promise, and ideally there is a much smaller block that votes the opposite way. For example in many "western" countries politics has been dominated by women issues and people-of-color identity issues, because many women and people-of-color vote on identity issues, but much fewer men or whites vote on identity issues.

A prominent USA D politician has described the main voting blocks of her party as Wall Street, women, minorities, and a prominent USA R strategist has described those for his party as the rich, gun owners and religious people.

I will repeat the usual quotes from the latter to illustrate how "vote-moving issue" thinking works:

http://web01.prospect.org/article/world-according-grover
“Spending's a problem because spending's not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. Everybody around the room wishes you'd spend less money. Don't raise my taxes; please spend less. Don't take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles … no one walks out the door. So the temptation for a Republican is to let that one slide. And I don't have the answer as to how we fix that. But it does explain how could it possibly be that everyone in the room wants something and doesn't end up getting it because it's not a vote-moving issue.
But on the vote-moving primary issue, everybody's got their foot in the center and they're not in conflict on anything. The guy who wants to spend all day counting his money, the guy who wants to spend all day fondling his weaponry, and the guy who wants to go to church all day may look at each other and say, "That's pretty weird, that's not what I would do with my spare time, but that does not threaten my ability to go to church, have my guns, have my money, have my properties, run by my business, home-school my kids.”
“Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are skeptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.” He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?”

Eventually after Perot and Buchanan failed, more voters started to switch to those as their "vote-moving issue" and Trump got elected. "Vote-moving issues" change over time.

Zoltan Jorovic said...

Hi Bliss, so according to you a result is not due to the adding up of all the individual votes, each a result of an individual's decision on where to put their cross?

fascinating.

French philosopher Arnaud De Vrieze famously wrote "When the poor man makes his mark, he does so with his master's voice in his ear, the priest's sermon on his conscience, his Lord's admonition in his every bone, and the King's eye upon him".

The famous American political scientist, Nathan Bartlett, in his analysis of voting patterns across Appalachia, posited that the primary driver was peer group, followed by occupational solidarity. He added that "what inclines the voter to take his stance is the need to belong, and the wish to be part of a successful project. Undoubtedly, the sum of votes that scores the highest will deliver victory".

So there you have it.

Anonymous said...

And another conspiracy theory so obvious that I'm surprised I haven't seen it yet: he's been ordered to do so, to distract attention from the Rafah assault.

Biden is presumably in a bit of a pickle following Bibi's very public announcement that, actually, it's Israel which wears the trousers in their relationship.