We pay a lot more for a lot less, and people know it. That’s why Sunak’s Tories were thrashed in these elections
Rishi Sunak congratulates Teesside’s mayor, Ben Houchen, on his re-election. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Late last Monday, I got home from a long day of political reporting to find a political leaflet produced by the Conservative party. It had nothing do with the local elections; where I live, the only contest was the rather underwhelming vote on a new police and crime commissioner. Instead, what it said looked ahead to the general election.
“Inflation down, wages up, taxes being cut – let’s stick with the plan that’s working,” it read. There were pithy paragraphs about “ensuring high-quality education and childcare for all children”, and “better transport for our community”. As with a lot of what we now hear from the ruling party, I read it as a sign that the government’s pitch to voters had decisively tipped into brazen self-satire. Its implied portrait of everyday life seemed to describe another country. Each promise and boast only highlighted yet another unmentioned failure.
That day, I had been in Thurrock in Essex: the patch of built-up sprawl just beyond the border of Greater London where, amid Thursday’s endless Conservative meltdown, the Tories would lose 10 council seats and Labour would gain eight, putting Keir Starmer’s party in charge. That change points to the likelihood of the Conservatives also losing Thurrock’s parliamentary seat – which, thanks partly to the local 72% vote for Brexit, they last won with a majority of 11,000. But I was there to explore a much murkier story, which amounts to a parable of the past 14 years – of a Tory-led council that thought it could avoid austerity by borrowing £1.5bn to invest in risky business ventures, and ended up bankrupt, with a deficit.
This disaster finally became clear two years ago. Now, people in such places as Tilbury, Grays and Stanford-le-Hope are faced with a great litany of cuts: cancelled road projects, hacked-down adult social care and transport for kids with special needs, drastically altered bin collections and, to cap it all, huge increases in council tax.
Among people I spoke to, there was biting resentment about the mess they had been led into. “If I did that in my job, I’d have been booted out,” said one woman. “And there’s been nothing.” When the conversation broadened out into Westminster politics, the responses I heard centred on an awful pessimism about the future (“Times are bleak at the minute, and there’s been nothing I’ve seen that’s going to make it better … I think things are going to be like this for 20-odd years ”), and a sharp sense of injustice. The fact that people in Thurrock were now paying far more for a lot less, in fact, sat at the heart of almost everything I heard.
The same imbalance, it seems to me, also explains why the Tories are now in political freefall. Beyond the kind of explanations beloved of political pundits – about Partygate, the Liz Truss disaster and the plain fact that Rishi Sunak cannot do politics – large swaths of the country are now characterised by a sort of low hum of injustice, and people feeling that they have simply been conned. Their taxes have risen, interest rates have rocketed, bills have hugely increased and inflation has soared – and, contrary to the message in that Tory leaflet, wages have failed to keep pace. Last week, the Financial Times published analysis of official data showing that over the past three years, UK households have drastically reduced their spending on beer, bread, meat, recreation, furniture and more. Paying more and getting less, it seems, is now the basic national condition.
Something similar applies to just about every aspect of the Tory record. For almost the entirety of the party’s time in office, millions of people have felt the effects of turbulence, shocks and disasters: austerity, the convulsions of Brexit, the weirdly overlooked trauma of the pandemic and all those lockdowns, and then the cost of living crisis. In response, the people supposedly in charge eventually succumbed to the mad dysfunction that has now pushed four Tory prime ministers out of Downing Street. From the proverbial street, all this invites an inevitable question: in return for all their suffering – and by way of justifying all the silliness at the top – what did people get in return?
The Conservatives, let us not forget, are traditionally the party that promises its voters material and financial advancement: a home to buy, a business to start, a nest egg to save for. None of that has materialised. In fact, millions of us are actually worse off.
Nothing – and in particular, the Tory flight into culture wars, perhaps seen most vividly in the campaign against Sadiq Khan – is going to shift that immovable fact, or dial down the shock of some of the last three days’ results, many of which remain overlooked. Ten out of the 11 elections for regional mayors were won by Labour politicians – which included not just the West Midlands, but a remarkable victory in York and North Yorkshire, which might recently have been understood as very hostile territory. Labour beat the Tories in – and read this slowly – the Tory redoubt of Rushmoor, the area of Hampshire that includes Aldershot and Farnborough. Equally remarkably, the Liberal Democrats won more seats across England than the Conservatives, something that has not happened in nearly 30 years.
And so, finally, to Keir Starmer. One of the most inescapable cliches of modern politics is that he and his Labour colleagues have failed to spark anything like the excited mood of 1997, and have yet to somehow “seal the deal”. To that, there are two answers. One is that some people’s memories of the early New Labour years are over-romanticised to the point of being delusional: millions of people voted for the end of a clapped-out Conservative government, but they were hardly walking around in Tony Blair T-shirts.
In a society as fragmented and politically complex as ours, moreover, there is actually no deal to be sealed. After everything they have been through, people are more wary of politicians than ever. Given a meaningful chance to vote for something beyond the usual Westminster duopoly, they will – something illustrated by big gains last week for the Green party, and support for independents. None of that, however, detracts from 2024’s fundamental political fact: that, for now at least, the Tories are completely finished.
In Thurrock, I picked up one more fascinating aspect of voters’ relationship with politics and politicians. People said they had no hope that things will improve, but a change of government will surely trigger exactly that expectation. Back in the 1990s, Blair and his allies famously chose a campaign anthem titled Things Can Only Get Better, which implied there was something inevitable about the national renewal they were promising. And now? The economy could easily carry on bumping along the bottom; things could conceivably become worse.
Watching Starmer over the weekend, touring the places where Labour had won and demanding a general election, he still seemed to carry a noticeable sense of stiffness and behind-the-eyes worry. That probably says something about his character and personality, but it also speaks to a huge truth: that however much euphoria our waking up from a 14-year nightmare may spark, all of us know how far we have fallen, and how much effort and ingenuity it will take to even begin to lift us up.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist