By Oliver Green
On 8th June 2017, Theresa May gained the democratic mandate she unwittingly asked for, she got 42.4% of the national vote share (the highest national vote share of any Conservative Government since the general election of 1983) and 318 seats, which is considerably more than the 307 seats David Cameron got when he was first elected as Prime Minister in 2010, but far from the working majority the Conservative Party had been enjoying since the 2015 general election, and a world away from the comfortable majority she was supposed to be securing when calling the election back in the April of 2017. But like all other political and major events throughout history, the outcome of this election was not determined by any single factor, but rather a culmination of them all aligning within a given period of time, all with varying degrees of significance.
Historically, unelected British Prime Ministers of modern political times have either not been as successful in winning general elections, or have had comparatively shorter periods in office.
Theresa May’s general election result was heavily influenced by the historical trend of unelected British Prime Ministers of modern political times, who have generally either not been as successful in winning general elections or have had comparatively shorter periods in office than their elected counterparts. I define the modern British political era as the period after the Liberals had ceased to be a credible electoral force in British politics capable of forming a government on their own and the present Conservative verses Labour Party rotating dynamic had asserted itself, specifically from the day after Stanley Baldwin won a majority in the 1924 general election, when the Liberals were drastically reduced to just 40 parliamentary seats. Going back any further than after the 1924 General Election provides inconclusive evidence, as throughout the early Edwardian period the national share of the vote was split fairly equally between, the declining, splitting and re-unifying Liberals, Conservative Party and the new ascending Labour Party, heavily influencing the parliamentary arithmetic after elections, regardless of whether the Prime Minster had been elected or unelected when fighting the election. So from 30th October 1924 to 6th May 2010, Britain had fifteen Prime Ministers, with eight of them having first taken office without a general election including, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas Home, James Callaghan, John Major and Gordon Brown. Only three of them managed to win parliamentary majorities in their first general elections, including Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and John Major and only two of them seeing out their full elected terms of office, the two being Harold Macmillan and John Major.
Harold Macmillan
Macmillan was by far the most successful of the three, having been appointed by the Queen to succeed Anthony Eden after his resignation over the Suez Crisis on 9th January 1957, having the support of Winston Churchill, the Marquees of Salisbury and all but two of the Cabinet. On taking office, Macmillan told the Queen that he could not guarantee his government would even survive “six weeks”. But after two years in office, Macmillan went on to win the 1959 general election by a landslide majority of 100 seats, probably being largely helped by Britain’s early post-war manufacturing export led/ economic boom, with Macmillan making the famous phrase “we’ve never had it so good”. Consequently, he ended up serving nearly seven years as Prime Minister before finally being forced into retirement over the Vassall and Profumo scandals, plummeting poll ratings and generally reaching the end of his political shelf-life.
John Major
John Major was the other relatively successful unelected British Prime Minister of the period in question, both in terms of his early electoral success and the length of his period in office. He took office on 28th November 1990 after winning the Conservative leadership contest to succeed Margaret Thatcher. He also served for nearly seven years, managing to win a 21 seat majority in the 1992 general election (his first general election), probably having been partly helped by his part in the successful liberation of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991, and of receiving the rather tenuous peace dividend of representing the Conservative Government which had helped to win the Cold War during the previous decade, which ended on his watch with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union taking place on 25th December 1991. But his election triumph was against all polling expectations at the time, which had been predicting either a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party, or a small Labour majority Government. However, all the rest of Britain’s unelected Prime Ministers of the modern period prior to Theresa May, either lost their first General Elections or had comparatively short periods in office.
Neville Chamberlain
When Stanley Baldwin retired from his Premiership in May 1937, the 68 year old Neville Chamberlain was appointed his successor, becoming the second oldest person to hold the office during the 20th Century up to that point (Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman having been the oldest). Chamberlain was put in place as a caretaker Prime Minister until such time as a much younger man like Anthony Eden would be ready to take over. However, Chamberlain saw this as his crowning achievement and big chance to leave his mark, but proved totally incapable and ineffective in rising to the challenge of a resurgent and aggressive Germany, instead wanting to focus on his domestic agenda of improving working conditions for factory and industrial workers, viewing foreign affairs as an unwelcome distraction. Furthermore, his infamous Appeasement Policy did nothing to stem the German annexation of much of Europe, and to some extent even encouraged Hitler to become bolder in his near term territorial ambitions, smelling the weakness of Chamberlain and his French counter-part in doing nothing to stop him. Then, as the low countries of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg fell under Nazi Occupation and the Narvik campaign failed to forestall Hitler’s occupation of Norway, Chamberlain no longer had the support or confidence of the House necessary to form and take forward the new national government that would be required to carry Britain through the duration of another World War.
Winston Churchill
So, on 10th May 1940, Chamberlain tended his resignation and under advisement recommended that the King send for Winston Churchill, who would prove to be just the man capable of rising to the challenge of saving Britain and rest of western civilisation from Fascist tyranny, as well as being the next unelected British Prime Minister to take office. But in his first general election of 1945 after leading Britain through five years of war, Churchill was defeated by a landslide 146 seat Labour majority, being seen purely as a war leader, only managing to get elected to office six years later in the 1951 general election with a slender majority of 17 seats.
Anthony Eden
Anthony Eden on the other hand called for an early election one month after his appointment to replace Churchill, who finally went into retirement in April 1955. Eden comfortably won his first General Election as an unelected Prime Minister with a 60 seat majority, but was found wanting the following year in his response, intervention and handling of the Sinai Arab-Israeli War and resulting Suez Crisis of 1956, culminating in his resignation and Cabinet push for Macmillan to take over.
Alec Douglas-Home
Then in October 1963 after nearly seven years in office, Macmillan himself went into retirement as a result of the disastrous Profumo Affair, a Government increasingly in decline and out of touch, and Macmillan himself reaching the natural end of his political shelf-life. Consequently, Lord Alec Douglas-Home was then selected and appointed to succeed him. But sitting in the House of Lords, had to renounce his earldom and stand in a by-election to the House of Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Nonetheless he was a very controversial appointment to say the least and was in office by default, with two of Macmillan’s cabinet ministers refusing to take office under an aristocrat, who was effectively out of touch with the problems of everyday people across the country, further exacerbating the image of an out of touch and clapped out Government in terminal decline. He also came over as stuffy on television, in stark contrast to the new Labour leader Harold Wilson. In addition, Home’s grasp of economics was extremely vague, forcing him to give his Chancellor Reginald Maudling total discretion of all economic policy, and was inevitably defeated in his first general election of 1964, although surprisingly narrowly to a Labour majority of just 4 seats.
James Callaghan
On 16th March 1976, Wilson announced his resignation and retirement from his second stint as Prime Minister, taking effect on 5th April 1976, stating that he’d always planned to retire at the age of 60 and citing mental exhaustion. James Callaghan then became his successor as Britain’s next unelected Prime Minister. Callaghan was the only British Premier to have held all three other main offices of state before taking office, including Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. But throughout the 1970’s, inflation was routinely in double digits, becoming a particularly acute problem by 1978 when unemployment had reached 1.5 million. Callaghan’s response was to continue with the public sector pay restraint of the previous four years, and also took the decision not to call a general election that year, banking on the idea that a further year would allow time for his fiscal measures and wider cyclical factors to improve the economy, getting him elected at the end of the parliament in 1979.
However, the trade unions decided they’d had enough and rejected continued pay restraint with a succession of strikes over the winter of 1978–79 during the “Winter of Discontent”. This industrial unrest made the Callaghan government massively unpopular, and Callaghan’s own response to an interview question made it even more so, as on his return from an economic summit in early 1979, he was asked, “What is your general approach, in view of the mounting chaos in the country at the moment?” to which Callaghan replied, “Well, that’s a judgement that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you’re taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.” This reply was subsequently printed on the front page of the Sun entitled “Crisis? What crisis?” Finally, on 28th March 1979, the House of Commons passed a “Motion of No Confidence” by one vote of 311 to 310, forcing Callaghan to call a general election which was held on 3rd May 1979, resulting in Margaret Thatcher winning a comfortable 43 seat majority.
Gordon Brown
The last unelected British Prime Minister prior to Theresa May was Gordon Brown, who like Neville Chamberlain, Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan and John Major, had previously held the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. But he’d also been a very dominant figure in the New Labour Party and Government, having been the de-facto economic tsar of the New Labour project from 1997 to 2007, so much so that Tony Blair as Prime Minister did not have the political power or nerve to remove him from office. On taking office, Brown initially appeared to the general public as a refreshing “substance over style” change from the vacuous spin and vulgarity of the Blair years. However, this perception quickly faded as it became clear that he did not possess the qualities, charm or personality required of a Prime Minister. The ending of his brief honeymoon period was brought to ahead by his public flirtation and dithering over whether or not to call a general election, which he then eventually decided not to do. Furthermore, the reckless spending and borrowing decisions of the New Labour era were finally exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, resulting in massive bank bailouts and plummeting tax revenues, all contributing to his becoming one of the most unpopular British Prime Ministers of modern times. Consequently, Brown too lost his first general election as Prime Minister in 2010, although in this case to a hung parliament rather than an outright opposition majority government.
There are several factors why most (but not all) unelected British Prime Ministers of the eight decades in question generally performed poorer electorally or had comparatively shorter periods in office.
I’ve identified three main reasons for this trend. Firstly, unelected Premiers are always put into office to replace outgoing Prime Ministers of governing parties that have already been in office over an extended period of time, when the political cycle is already beginning to turn against them, with the replacement Prime Minister already being associated with the record of the government in office to one degree or another. This means that despite being new to the office, they do not normally represent any significant change of policy direction or government, but rather a slightly tweaked preservation and continuation of the status quo, usually taking office when the next general election is not too far off. Secondly, Prime Ministers not elected to office are either appointed by their parliamentary colleagues or through a poll of their party membership.
Consequently, they never have to build any rapport with the national electorate or spend time preparing and honing the skills of leadership in opposition prior to taking office. Instead they are still rather set in the sort of autocratic mind-set required when running a single government department of civil servants, such as the Treasury, Foreign Office or Home Office, but which is not enough when needing to build the wider consensus and leadership required to lead the nation and make the right judgments and decisions for the national interest, as well as for their own long term political survival. Lastly, unelected Prime Ministers are nearly always chosen hastily under pressing time constraints, often for the purpose of being stop gap caretaker holders of the office, to steady the ship in a crisis when nobody else really wants the job, or moreover are selected as “unity candidates”, meaning they are meant as a compromise to placate the majority of the government and parliamentary party, taking priority over them being overly congenial with the national electorate.
The British public (and probably all publics) don’t like unnecessary elections and were experiencing election fatigue.
Over the space of the previous three years there had been nail biting national polls every year, including the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, the General Election of 2015 and the EU Referendum of 2016. Historically, the national electorate don’t like to be second guessed, as Harold Wilson discovered when prematurely calling the general election of 1970, four months before it was expected. Because of his sizable poll lead at the time, Wilson decided to call it early and catch Edward Heath’s Conservatives off guard, getting the poll out of the way before his widely unpopular policy of currency decimalization would come to the public attention just prior to being introduced the following year. The result was a massive turnaround at the polls, with Wilson losing the election to a Conservative 30 seat majority government, which should have stood as a warning to Theresa May who was lucky to be able to form a government at all after June 8th 2017.
The Conservative 2017 General Election Campaign was one of the worst in British Political History.
Over the course of the campaign the Prime Minister made three strategic blunders, the first was deciding to make the campaign all about her with a presidential style campaign that depended far too much on her own personal campaign performance, cutting her off from the support apparatus and network of the Conservative Party machine, as well as influential parliamentary colleagues such as David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and Phillip Hammond, as well as many of her junior ministers, all of whom could have broadened her appeal and forged a wider national consensus for her and the party. The second was to make the campaign primarily about Brexit, assuming that she had all the UKIP voters in the bag and would sweep to victory in the Labour heartlands, something which David Cameron had decided in the 2010 and 2015 elections was impossible to achieve, which is why the -10.8% fall in the UKIP vote at the election was evenly dispersed between both Labour and Conservative parties, who were now both campaigning in favour of Brexit and committing to it, although Labour were promising a rather fantastical “have your cake and eat it” pledge of retaining all the existing benefits of the Single Market and Customs Union, whilst no longer being subject to them. Nonetheless, this was in stark contrast to the 2015 election when David Cameron was promising the referendum on EU membership and the then Labour Leader Ed Miliband was flatly refusing to grant one. It’s also why the Conservative Party failed to take Stoke-On-Trent from Labour in one of the by elections on 23rd February 2017, coming third behind UKIP despite being 20 points ahead of Labour.
The fact is, many Labour voters only switched to UKIP on the single issue of Europe and getting a referendum, whilst still regarding themselves as long term Labour voters when voting Leave in the referendum the previous year. But in the 2017 general election they were once again voting on a wide range of issues rather than solely for Brexit. Also, Jeremy Corbyn had managed to move the Labour party back to the sorts of policy positions which really cut through in the Labour heartland and heavy “Leave Voting” areas. Furthermore, people like Phillip Hammond and Greg Hands have since shared the reservations they’d had about the campaign, by emphasising that the Conservative Party always performs best in elections when campaigning on its greatest strength of economic stewardship and record in government, such as the delivery of jobs, sustainable growth and opportunity, none of which formed any of the major touchpoints of the 2017 campaign or manifesto.
The Conservative 2017 General Election Manifesto was probably one of the worst and hastily put together Manifestos in British Political History.
The Conservative 2017 general election manifesto was hastily put together without much (if any) input from Theresa May’s wider team of parliamentary colleagues or cabinet, leaving it vulnerable to not being properly thought through or effective in communicating or resonating with a wide enough electorate of floating voters. The biggest folly of the manifesto of course being the alienation of older voters who make up a significant proportion of the core Conservative vote, scaring many of them to stay at home. There were two parts to this alienation, the first being the pledge to means test winter fuel payments for the elderly. The second was to include a person’s house when means testing them for social care, subsequently being forced into a U-turn on it after it became labelled by the media as a “dementia tax”. Another rather divisive pledge was to re-introduce selective education and Grammar Schools, perceived by much of the public as a regressive step toward the quality of education being based on one’s family circumstances and ability to pay, rather than academic potential or ability.
It was a rather negative and autocratic election campaign of a Prime Minister who came across to much of the British public as having taken them for granted.
Due to being the latest in a long line of unelected Prime Ministers of incumbent governments, Theresa May was pressured into a defensive and aloof campaign, with seven years of Conservative led government and her own six years as Home Secretary to defend, which pushed her into avoiding the sorts of rallies and TV debates which Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and other opposition leaders took part in with ease, which subsequently backfired on her, allowing her opponents, the media and public to paint and view her as taking voters for granted, especially when Jeremy Corbyn decided to turn up at the last major TV debate, which allowed all the other party leaders to have a field day of apparent moral authority over her for not doing so. In addition, Theresa May ran a very American style personal attack tirade against Jeremy Corbyn, only serving to generate sympathy for him, as personal attacks are never well received by the British electorate, instead having the reverse effect of making them inclined to see the good in the person being attacked, in comparison to the one-sided portrayal of what’s being presented about them.
Both the Prime Minister and Conservative Central Office seriously underestimated Jeremy Corbyn and how his message and manifesto would resonate with large parts of the electorate tiring of austerity.
History has shown time and again that underestimating one’s opponents nearly always ends in significant reversals and outcomes not previously bargained for. History is full of supposed “underdogs” triumphing against the odds, with this election being the latest example of that trend which has held true since the dawn of civilisation, with other examples including the EU referendum and US election last year, along with the aforementioned British general election outcomes of 1974 and 1992. Firstly, Jeremy Corbyn has turned out to be the Bernie Sanders of British politics, with the added advantage of having already secured the leadership of his party, having not had any British Hillary Clinton to get in his way. Secondly, he is a seasoned campaigner who is well at ease with the electorate and was better at interacting with the sections of the public that Theresa May was expecting to have won over solely on the issue of Brexit.
Furthermore, Corbyn is every bit a beneficiary of the populist wave sweeping the western world as Donald Trump in America or Emanuel Macron in France, proving that electorally effective populism is not the sole preserve of the right of politics, but of parties of the left as well, like Greece’s SYRIZA Party which grew in support over several elections, finally coming to power in the Greek Legislative election of January 2015 on its anti-austerity ticket. Clearly, another factor heavily influencing the result of this election was the something for everyone Socialist manifesto, which applied to many younger voters who had traditionally not turned out for elections, or had previously voted Liberal Democrat before they went into coalition government with the Conservative Party in 2010 and agreed to the increase in tuition fees. But this time more than 50% of 18 to 24 year olds turned out with 60% of them voting for Corbyn, motivated considerably by his pledge to scrap tuition fees.
However, paradoxically a greater proportion of the A, B and C1 middle class voters voted Labour than in 2015 and a higher proportion of working class voters went to the Conservatives after the collapse of UKIP. In addition, regardless of how reckless and unaffordable it would be to implement, the Labour Party manifesto’s broad appeal to many floating voters can be explained by its populist policy positions, such as increasing taxation on the top 1.2 million UK Citizens making over £80,000 a year, bringing the 45P tax threshold down from £150,000 to £80,000 annual income, increasing Corporation tax to 26% and bringing the nation’s railways back into public ownership, along with the capping of rail fares (which have skyrocketed since privatisation) along with the introduction of free Wi-Fi across the rail network. The Labour Manifesto also proposed bringing the energy market back into partial permanent public ownership, including central government control of the national grid and energy distribution, along with the creation of at least one publicly owned energy company in every region of the UK and an annual capping on average household duel fuel bills at £1000 a year.
Also, the promise to end the public sector pay freeze, especially in the health service was another irresistible pledge for millions of voters, as well as the rather inspiring idea to invest £250 Billion in the nation’s energy, transport and digital infrastructures over the next ten years, all of which sounded like music to an electorate tiring of austerity, (which despite having stabilised and saved the economy from the 2008 financial crisis and resulting recession) which had not tackled the issue of frozen wages and living standards, or still hadn’t reached the goal of reducing the budget deficit to a sustainable level for the long term, which was the single biggest justification for it in the first place. Consequently, Labour were able to sure up, galvanise and broaden their support with a 9.5% increase in their national share of the vote, despite coming from a very low base, just as Theresa May’s aloof and presidential style campaign stalled and failed to gain the traction and broader following it needed. As a result of his comparatively electrifying and conviction led campaign, Jeremy Corbyn injected the very passion and conviction needed to snowball his increase of support and to dominate social media in the same way the Leave Campaign did in the EU referendum.
Why Theresa May still won enough seats to form a relatively stable minority government, despite her flawed campaign and Jeremy Corbyn’s comparatively effective one.
Despite his comparatively effective campaign and performing much better than predicted, Jeremy Corbyn still lost the election for the very reasons given before the election took place. His hard left agenda simply doesn’t appeal to enough of those of “Middle-England” that want to get on and better their lifestyle and prospects, especially those with small businesses who need to know how business friendly and in tune with the times an incoming or potential government is going to be before giving them their vote. Furthermore, Corbyn and the Labour Party still hadn’t gained the public’s trust over responsible stewardship of the economy or of being committed whole heartedly to the nation’s defence and security, with many of those voting for Corbyn not viewing them as major issues. By contrast, the Conservative campaign predictably didn’t suffer from those drawbacks and was still successful in shoring up the core Conservative vote with its stance on Brexit and the economy, increasing the Conservatives national share of the vote at this election by 5.5% to 42.4%, more than any other party and the highest national vote share achieved by the Conservative Party since the general election of 1983.
But the biggest saving grace keeping Britain just about governable, was the fact of there being two other entirely separate and unrelated political cycles and election campaigns going on in other constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Firstly and most significantly of the two, was the entirely separate campaign going on in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party has been in power of the devolved Scottish Parliament in Holyrood since the 300th anniversary of the United Kingdom in 2007. They also won 56 Westminster MPs in the 2015 general election, after having lost their campaign for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom during the Scottish referendum on independence back in 2014, as a result of them having mobilised so much support for independence, despite losing by 45% to 55% in favour of remaining in the United Kingdom, which in turn caused former SNP Leader and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond to step down.
Yet despite this, the subsequent SNP Leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her party refused to accept the result, continually threatening and searching for reasons to hold a second referendum on independence. So the SNP predictably decided to use Brexit that as the sufficient change in circumstances required to hold another, since voting to stay part of the UK in 2014 also meant staying part of the EU, which Scotland voted to remain in. Furthermore, the main opposition to the SNP and to the whole idea of another Scottish independence referendum became dominated by the Scottish Conservative Party, led by the elected and much more genial Ruth Davidson, who fought the very David Cameron style type of campaign which worked south of the boarder in the 2015 general election two years earlier. Even more significantly, she made the central theme of the campaign to send a message to Nicola Sturgeon that the Scottish people didn’t want another Scottish independence referendum and to respect the result of the UK wide vote on the EU, instead wanting Sturgeon to focus on actually running devolved Scotland and improving public services, whilst Theresa May also included a pledge in the Conservative manifesto to rule out any further independence referendum until Brexit was concluded, after which a further independence referendum would only take place if there was sufficient Scottish public support for it.
In addition, the SNP having been in power in Holyrood since 2007 had peaked in terms of their popularity, poll ratings and point on the political cycle, unlike the Scottish Conservatives who had stayed in opposition in stark contrast to having been in power in Westminster since 2010. In addition, the Scottish Conservatives had overtaken Labour as the main opposition and second most popular party in Scotland. Consequently, when the Scottish 2017 UK wide general election took place, the SNP lost 21 of the 56 Westminster MP’s it won in 2015 to the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties and Ruth Davidson was able to get by far the most, with an extra 13 Conservative MP’s elected, giving the Conservative Party its best performance in Scotland since the UK general election of 1983.
The other entirely separate and unrelated political cycle and campaign taking place in this election was in Northern Ireland, where neither the Conservative or Labour parties got or ever realistically expect to get any MP’s elected. Instead, the prevalent parties in contention there were Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance, Ulster Unionists and the Democratic Unionist Party who have long been natural ideological allies of the Conservative Party on a number of key areas, voting with them on many issues in parliament. It is a centre-right to right-wing and socially conservative party, being fairly closely aligned with the Conservative Party on issues of national security, the economy and Brexit, with a firm conviction in defending Britishness and the Ulster Protestant culture against Irish nationalism, as well as being wholly Eurosceptic and fully supporting Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.
By 2004, the DUP had overtaken the Ulster Unionists as the largest party in Northern Ireland and continued to rise, taking a record 10 Westminster parliamentary constituencies out of the mere 18 Northern Irish constituencies in total in the 2017 UK wide general election, a significant increase from the 8 it won in the 2015 UK wide general election. The major issues framing the Westminster election in Northern Ireland are, the Northern Irish relationship with the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, along with the domestic internal issues of Northern Ireland itself. Given that the DUP campaigned on the winning side in the EU referendum, it probably helped them in the subsequent general election. This of course enabled Theresa May and her Minority Conservative government to cut a confidence and supply deal with the DUP, in return for assurances on the Northern Irish boarder post-Brexit and a £1 Billion cash injection into Northern Ireland over the coming two years, increasing the number of MP’s loyal to the Conservative government from the 318 it won in the election to 328, just past the 326 out of the 650 Westminster MP’s needed for a bare majority of just 2.
Furthermore, Sinn Fein came second to the DUP winning a fairly impressive 7 Westminster seats, but being strongly opposed to Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom, always refuse to swear the oath of loyalty to the Queen, which is required of every MP entering Parliament prior to taking up their seats, and have no wish to legitimise what they regard as an illegal British occupation of Northern Ireland. However, because Sinn Fein always refuse to take their seats, the notional threshold required for a parliamentary majority is brought down further from 326 to just 319 seats. In addition, there are four MP’s who are elected by the House as Speakers, one being the Head Speaker and the other three being the Deputy Speakers, none of whom can vote on anything, bringing the threshold even further down to just 314 seats, providing a net majority to Theresa May’s government of 13 seats, with the Speaker John Bercow being elected to Parliament as a Conservative.
How to counteract and provide a credible and economical alternative to Labour’s populist policy positions of re-nationalisation & public ownership.
The first thing to do is to promote the economic achievements of the previous period in office from 2010 to 2017, namely of nearly halving unemployment from its crisis peak of 8% to just 4.5% by 2017, along with promoting the measures taken to achieve it, most notably the saving of Britain’s standing in international bond markets through renewed fiscal responsibility and consolidation, along with reductions in income and corporation taxes. Secondly, an inspiring and reassuring vision of future prosperity and security is required, as governments are not elected on what they have done, but rather on what they are going to do, as Churchill discovered in the general election of 1945. Middle England must be provided with the justification at every election to invest their vote in any prospective administration. Thankfully, George Osborne kick started this very vision during his time as Chancellor from 2010 to 2016, with the introduction of Local Enterprise Partnerships and a reintroduction of the Enterprise Zones of the 1980’s, spurring businesses to invest in local communities and produce substantial jobs and living standards going forward. This is what the public needed reminding of more than anything else during the 2017 general election campaign, most notably that 48 Enterprise Zones had been established since 2010, which had successfully channelled around £3.4 Billion worth of public money into successfully attracting hundreds of businesses and in turn thousands of jobs in areas such as Tech, IT, Services, Retail and Renewable Energy. But it also has to be spelt out and quantified to the public in terms of what it will continue to deliver, both for young people and local communities, with particular emphasis on the Northern Powerhouse and Midland Engine, which were particularly enterprising flagship initiatives of Cameron and Osborne.
Furthermore, the main factor behind growing public support for renationalisation is down to the one downside of privatisation, which is ever escalating ticket prices or tariffs for consumers, due to the utility and rail company’s prime concern of making money and delivering ever greater returns to their shareholders, along with the often monopolisation of the national energy sector and rail networks by a handful of providers, suppressing healthy competition and competitive prices, resulting in sustained market dysfunction. Fortunately, there are three ways of tackling this problem, which should all ideally be implemented simultaneously to have any substantial effect. Firstly, there needs to be proper statutory regulatory oversight of the energy and transport sectors to ensure consumers have the protections and representation they need against exorbitant prices or tariffs, some of which has already been implemented to force energy providers to pass on falling fuel/ gas prices on to consumers. Secondly, there needs to be a wholesale liberalisation of the utility and transport markets, by lowing barriers to entry, leading to the third, which is to form new enterprise partnerships between local authorities and entering market participants, so as to lower set up and running costs for start-up firms, whilst sharing the dividends between the firms and the public, especially where private investment is needed to modernise Britain’s rail networks outside of London and the south east, namely with high-speed rail.
A Positive, Patriotic & Inspiring Vision of Post-Brexit Britain needs to be set out and presented to the public and followed through on.
The British electorate need to be shown a clear and decisive vision of how the NHS and other public services are going to be funded and sustained going forward, and made fit for the 21st Century. They also need to be shown a forward looking and clear path toward the defeat of ISIS, rather than a reactionary one after each and every terror incident. Furthermore, due in part to having to prioritise Brexit and other budgetary pressures, Britain’s budget deficit had still not been close to elimination by the 2017 General election, causing many to question the purpose of deficit reduction when having to bear the strain of it. Clearly, a distinction needs to be made between the different types of debt. Namely, good debt and bad debt. Historically, Labour governments have always spent too much, while Conservative governments haven’t invested enough. The seven years of Conservative led administrations from 2010 to 2017 more or less remained true to the this tradition, by being mainly focused on eliminating the deficit/ bad debt, whilst largely neglecting the essential ingredient of embracing the sizable investment/ good debt required to grow fast enough to grow as well as cut out of debt. Eliminating the financial black holes of national economies after major economic shocks and fiscal recklessness, requires both the sustainability of fiscal restraint and consolidation, coupled with the speed and momentum delivered by the embrace of good debt, through investments in infrastructure and projects to produce returns, both in regards to the medium and long term structural capacities, sustainability and balancing of the economy.
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