The general election and the end of prozac politics?

For over a month we’ve watched the harlequinade of British politics return to the national stage for another farcical performance. This latest act of absurdist theatre has taken place against a backdrop of ever more precarious work, alarming levels of private household debt, dysfunctional public services, non-existent opportunities, poverty wages and a fractured society.

This is to be read in conjunction with its sister piece, here.

To those who feel bitterness at the prospect of another general election, I suggest emigration to one of the world’s many tyrannies.

Nobody wants to live in a Charles Dickens novel. The pain, poverty and inequality he portrayed in his desperately poignant stories were products of 19th century laissez-faire economic liberalism — and in most of the west we’ve been living under a partial revival of this ideology for nearly 40 years.

This election should have taken place months ago. As it was with the collapse of the post-war settlement during the 1970s, the consensus Margaret Thatcher ushered in after 1979 has now finally been accepted as unviable by the leaderships of both the dominant political parties. Regardless of whether a Corbyn or May government comes to power in June, the ruling economic orthodoxy of the last thirty-odd years is slowly dying. This has been described as Britain’s first genuine post-crash election, and it is.

People appear to have forgotten just how bad the 2015 result was for Labour. Keep in mind while reading on, based on the slim majorities in many Labour seats at the 2015GE, all things being equal, that:

• The Tories need only swing 5% of the national Labour vote to take 40–49 seats.
• The Tories need only win back half the vote share they lost to UKIP to wipe out 40-odd Labour MPs, there is little overlapping of these two numbers as UKIP are only standing in 377 seats, down from 624 in 2015.

Unless there is a massive increase in the under-24 vote, and a comparable decrease in the over-65 vote, then the undeniable implication of this brutal electoral possibility is that Labour stands on the brink of parliamentary irrelevance.

The destruction of Thatcherite orthodoxy at the top leaderships of the two main parties has left MPs at a loss. There is an ideas vacuum in British politics which none of the political programs on offer are up to the task of filling.

The Greens, broadening their narrowly focused policies of the past (which I have always voted for in vote-swapping schemes) but now with renewed devotion to the EU, will probably continue to be relevant only as an important environmentalist pressure group. The Liberal Democrats yearn for a return to the supposedly halcyon days before the Brexit vote, and to a status quo that has been dysfunctional since at least the 2008 global financial crisis. They have already become relics of an irretrievable past.

With their demands for a second Scottish independence referendum, the SNP offer nothing for Scotland. Arguing they need independence to protect the Scottish people from the Tories, they are living in a nationalist wet dream. If a SNP Scotland left the UK, it would need to reapply for EU membership — this would be vetoed by Spain and France, who can’t afford to encourage their own fast growing separatist movements in Catalonia and Corsica.

And despite a much celebrated uptick, oil prices remain just over half of what they were during the 2014 independence referendum, and are likely to stay down there due to Saudi failures to cut their oil production to OPEC targets and competition from US shale. An independent Scottish state would not be able to rely on North Sea oil revenues to fund expenditure. An independent Scotland would be a bankrupt Scotland. It is already tipping into recession. The prospect of another referendum alone could mean that many Scottish seats swing to Tory control.

UKIP, in a plot twist I can only describe as delicious, have become the biggest losers from Brexit before Brexit has even happened. They claim to speak for the working-classes, yet the economic policies they’ve advocated for the last two decades are simply more extreme versions of free-market policies we’ve had since the 80’s.

What little debris remains of this amateurish shambles of a party has scant chance of benefitting from the election. No matter what their leaders say about ensuring a ‘quick, clean Brexit,’ the party no longer has any business existing. Rebels without a cause, most likely they will fade away in white noise.

What the Tory manifesto touts is a rhetorical and ideological break with Thatcherism and an apparent return to paternalist Toryism. The fact that unintended consequences of Thatcherite economic policy have rendered this strand of conservatism unworkable as a political project is lost on the Tory leadership. It is one of the chief reasons Conservative party membership collapsed during the 80s and 90s and they remained unelectable for over a decade until the financial crisis. This fractious party is just as internally conflicted and ideologically riven as Labour, if not more so; they simply know better than to expose their divisions in a very public meltdown.

May’s Conservatives only partially do away with the Cameron government’s obsessive focus on the fiscal deficit and impossible pledges to not raise taxes. So far, Hammond’s budgets have been continuity Cameron. Most of the austerity program has come in the form of cuts and pay freezes, with increased general taxation only accounting for one fifth of deficit reduction. The human cost of Osborne’s austerity policies (the last of which are set to be implemented throughout the next parliament, no matter who is in power) may be incalculable. Even so, the May manifesto offers nothing in the way of cut reversals and keeps the working age benefit freeze — a key policy Labour want to reverse but haven’t even bothered to cost — in place. Leaving on course a trend consistent since 2008 which has left 4million children living in relative poverty — 66% of whom come from working households. Along with the industrial strategy they have in the works, the expressed Tory willingness to intervene in broken markets is perhaps the distinctively novel feature of this strange manifesto.

Aside from going ahead with further damaging cuts and a necessary, though too meagre shift (first proposed by Labour in 2009) in how adult social care is funded, the Tories pledge only cosmetic spending increases on the NHS and other public services as they currently are. The Tory manifesto is also one of the least costed, but you wouldn’t know that unless you read it.

I could not support a May government unless it reversed all welfare cuts and rolled back the decades-long program of public-service marketisation implemented by successive governments. To do this, government would need to remove the profit-motive entirely from public institutions, end private-sector provision of crucial state functions, such as social care, for example. And to stop flogging off state assets at fire-sale prices. As if. New NHS and public service spending commitments are futile if the funds don’t make it to the front lines but end up in the pockets of an already overpaid managerial class. Even so, the two main manifestos have never been more similar in my lifetime.

In what has now become a cliché, the Labour Party still looks set to be the single biggest loser from this general election. Despite the appearance of a ‘Corbyn surge,’ and the much lauded narrowing of the polling gap and that YouGov poll amongst a handful of others; the monthly polling averages and the accounts of many, many doorstep canvassers and party election officials paints a dire picture. Not to mention that Labour has historically been overrepresented in the polls. With a majority of the membership mostly hostile to the parliamentary wing, and the depth of its internal turmoil publicly aired during the premature attempt to oust Corbyn last June — Labour has no hope of shaking off its perception as an incompetent party in time to turn things around.

With a leader whom many of the public supposedly view as a joke, Labour’s reckoning will be blamed squarely on the national media. Ignoring that the diverse demographics which comprise Labour’s voter base now have diverging interests due to regional and generational economic imbalances and surging nationalisms in the UK’s constituent nations.

Labour can no longer triangulate its way to securing the votes of supposedly more socially conservative working-classes, a left-liberal metropolitan lower middle-class, and a basket of various hard-left ideologies embodied in uncompromising and utopian idealists. I discuss this electoral dilemma in greater detail here, although it now appears that Britain’s brief flirtation with multi-party politics is over for the short-term.

Corbyn’s national investment ambitions are attractive in that some fiscal stimulus is urgently needed and the multiplier effect of such policies would massively help rejuvenate economic activity. But Labour, like the Tories, are unable to set out a detailed rationale or investment strategy. This is to be expected, it is a daunting task no British government has attempted in decades. Yet Labour have committed a massive figure (£250bn) for state-led investment spending. The gritty detail of what amounts to a real-terms increase in year-on-year spending unseen since the 1970’s is nowhere to be found in the relevant section of the Labour manifesto. The actual amount of revenue Labour hopes their tax pledges can raise will remain nebulous until the policy has been implemented. I’m far from convinced about the truth of the Laffer Curve, yet it is undeniable that taxation policy changes behaviour.

The policy framework outlined by Corbyn’s formidable Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer on April 25th mirrors the government’s approach to Brexit negotiations in almost every respect; except in an emphasis on single market access and/or customs union membership, and, crucially, ruling out the prospect of no EU trade deal and a subsequent reversion to WTO rules. Yet, they believe they can simultaneously guarantee the rights of EU citizens currently living in the UK, and revoke non-resident EU citizens’ visa-free work access, doing away with the free-movement principle — which non-resident EU citizens hoping to live and work in the UK presently depend upon. How the latter is compatible with the EU’s uncompromising position on the ‘four freedoms’ is unknown. As the Brexit vote seemed to show, present immigration policies can no longer command democratic consent.

With unemployment rates so disastrously high in many EU countries, it is not in the interest of EU governments to have returning expats push them even higher. Like it or not (I certainly do not), the futures of these 3.2 million EU immigrants is one of the very few bargaining chips the UK has to take into Brexit negotiations. Many of the UK’s EU-based expats are retirees living off their pensions and propped up by Spanish welfare. To lose most of these would be a welcome relief for the imperilled welfare states of continental Europe.

In rightly rejecting the moronic ‘no deal is better…’ credo, Labour is simply being more honest. Britain, the second largest import-dependent economy, simply cannot afford to risk trading on WTO rules. ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ is an electoral stratagem, nothing more, nothing less. However, the UK must strike a deal which will allow it the freedom to negotiate its own bilateral trade deals with the US, China and India — the nations which will be shaping the world this century.

The EU’s line on negotiations has been remarkably consistent, transparent and honest, to the point that early statements made by EU leaders immediately after the Brexit vote are still valid. The May government has fully understood the EU’s position and so categorically ruled out single-market membership accordingly.

The EU is highly protectionist in its dealings with much of the wider world; after Brexit the UK could very well find itself on the outside of these tariff walls. Whoever wins this election, they will have to own Brexit; contrary to popular belief, the scale and uncertainty of the task means a Conservative landslide is no guarantee of another decade in power.

The staggering banality of the Conservative campaign has helped the Labour campaign immeasurably, for myself this is to be welcomed. Yet the labour manifesto does indeed amount to what has been lyrically summarised as ‘a cornucopia of delights.’ It may well be impossible for Corbyn to fulfil even half of his prospectus given the expansive reach and power global markets have in 2017 Britain, but at least the genuine intention will be there. I expect a lower turnout than the 2015 election. In the early hours of Friday morning I expect to see the hopes of a generation shattered. Regardless, I’ll vote Labour with gritted teeth and crossed fingers.

7 June 2017