Sunak needs to wake up to political reality
IF Rishi Sunak is right, and we’re on course for a hung parliament and a Labourled ‘coalition of chaos’ after the General Election, any victory he claims will surely be strictly pyrrhic. In other words, the Conservative party he leads would hardly be covered in glory, and its MPs plunged into a situation at Westminster which will drag the entire UK further down the plughole.
Perhaps if ‘overlooked’ towns had been listened to properly, and before the local elections last week delivered a crushing reminder that people are angry, the Conservatives wouldn’t be in such a mess.
In October last year, my own hometown, Barnsley, was on the official 55-strong list Sunak announced would receive £20m each to improve high streets and tackle anti-social behaviour, plus others in our region, including Rotherham, Doncaster, Keighley and Scarborough. Too little, too late?
Although the cash will no doubt be welcome, the whole exercise felt like a token effort from a government woefully out of touch with the lives of millions of people, especially outside the confines of the capital.
Life for many people in these areas is grim; it’s not just tackling graffiti on boarded-up shops, it’s about endemic economic and social disadvantage, poor health, lack of engagement with education, inadequate public transport and a general feeling of hopelessness that money alone cannot solve.
Let’s not confuse the pro-Brexit support and the ‘red wall’ effect, which saw the Tories under Boris Johnson – and against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – pick up traditionally left-leaning voters.
Both phenomena came about for a complex variety of reasons that did not mitigate the fact that the Conservatives have never put the whole of the country first.
Sunak is making his audacious claim on the basis of research by election experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, suggesting that if last Thursday’s local election results were replicated in the general election, Labour would fall short of enough seats to win outright.
The theory does hold some water, especially if we compare the situation with 1996, when Sir John Major’s beleaguered Tories faced a similar local election wipeout. However, the big difference back then was that the Labour leader, Tony Blair, was further ahead in the opinion polls as a potential Prime Minister than Sir Keir Starmer today.
Voters, as Boris Johnson knew only too well, often more readily associate with a charismatic leader than their actual parliamentary candidates, who they won’t see on the telly, hear on the radio or read about much in the newspapers.
A key point to bear in mind is that this month’s pivotal local elections did not cover England and Wales in their entirety, and did not include Scotland at all.
He’s never been known for his emotional intelligence, but more than ever, Sunak needs to read the room instead of proclaiming ‘victory’ on the basis of cold, hard analysis alone.
He would do well to look beyond the local election results and consider two other fruitful psephological results from last week; the mayoral elections and the Blackpool South by-election.
Although Conservative Mayor Ben Houchen hung onto his post in Tees Valley, if the 16.7 per cent swing to Labour in this part of the North East was repeated at the general election, the party would win all five seats in this region, including Darlington, Hartlepool and Redcar.
It’s reported that in the final days of the mayoral campaign, Labour switched resources to focus heavily on making its presence felt in the West Midlands, where, in a shock win, their candidate Richard Parker, beat Conservative incumbent Andy Street by just over 1,500 votes.
Sunak should not underestimate the ruthlessness of Labour in this respect.
And neither should he underestimate the frustration of a motivated electorate.
In Blackpool South, which fell to the Tories in 2019, Labour stormed across the finishing line, enjoying the third-highest swing since the Second World War.
It’s also the fifth time in just 12 months that the party has lost a byelection with a direct swing to Labour of more than 20 per cent.
If the result was repeated nationally, there would be fewer than 100 Tory MPs after the general election.
Sunak promised us honesty, and an end to gaslighting and lies. Instead of performing double-think with questionable predictions for a hung parliament, perhaps he should look a little more closely at the actual figures in front of him, and consider what is really happening and why.