Joe Biden’s sad story shows why we should quit before we embarrass ourselves so, though I’ll still be writing for The Times, this will be my last Saturday column. Perhaps, then, readers will indulge me if, rather than pore over the entrails of Thursday’s general election, I take a broader look: at a dilemma for 21st-century democracy that this election throws up, both for our country and the other old economies of Europe and America. How in a democracy do we keep the trust of electorates when politicians can no longer honestly promise strong economic growth?
Labour’s pitch to voters has been exactly that promise. “Growth” is how they say they can finance their other pledges. If (as is likely) such growth eludes us and pledges are dishonoured, will Labour too be booted out within five years, as opposition parties ride the very fury that has just ejected the Tories? This weekend, supporters cheer as Sir Keir Starmer climbs aboard the painted carousel. How long before the carousel delivers him back to us for the same kicking we gave Rishi Sunak?
• Keir Starmer holds first Labour cabinet meeting — follow live
“Ah,” you say, “but we sacked the Tories because they were useless/stupid/dishonest/corrupt.” My response may perplex you. I believe the electorate’s rage at what they saw as crassly incompetent Conservative government was an epiphenomenon.
An epiphenomenon is something that occurs alongside the occurrence of something else but does not (whatever appearances may suggest) result from it. Hair dye and cancer, high tension power lines and leukaemia, are pairs like this. The farce of Tory government, and voter rage, are another such pair. What voters really cannot forgive, despite what they tell even themselves, is the fact that Conservative government hasn’t made us richer.
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• Who could replace Rishi Sunak? The potential Tory successors
David Cameron could have been another Pitt; Theresa May another Thatcher; Boris Johnson a saint; Rishi Sunak cannier even than Disraeli; but unless we felt better off we’d still have chucked the Tories out this week. People hate to admit it’s about money, but missing prosperity is what has unconsciously fuelled our national rage: a sense of being cheated of our entitlement. Entitlement to have the lid kept on taxation while taking the lid off the provision of public services: a coupling that our sluggish economy cannot supply. We won’t, however, forgive governments’ failure to supply it. We do want taxation restrained, we do want potholes filled and we do want waiting lists abolished, so we’ll take it out on whomever fails to deliver all three.
This is far from being a uniquely British problem. Our voter rage resembles Germany’s. France is throwing a fit. Both struggle, like us, to grow their economies. Does democracy depend upon strong and endless economic growth? This is being tested right across the old-world economies. In peacetime any system of government will meet popular acceptance while it rides a rising tide of prosperity; in war, any system of government can rally the masses. But can democracy in peacetime survive permanently low growth or stagnation without light at the end of the tunnel? I’m unsure.
• Who is in Keir Starmer’s new cabinet and what will they do?
What if we’re a gently declining power in a gently declining West, while the East — working harder, expecting less and unburdened by our own sense of entitlement — races ahead? Are we, like once-rich Argentina ever since the money ran out, condemned to sack successive governments with mounting rage? Have we the patience to wait even five years?
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Fantasy-land Tory promises stung Starmer and Rachel Reeves into matching them. A new government is launched amid a welter of silly pledges about tax, borrowing and public services that economists are deriding even before Starmer assembles his first cabinet. His media supporters call his pledges not to hike taxes “cautious”. They are reckless. So here we go again: promise (during the campaign); hope (this weekend); disappointment (the next budget presumably)… and in time, rage.
• The real Rachel Reeves — and the moment she won over Keir Starmer
Across Europe and America, often bumpy but over time strongly growing economies have kept democracy afloat. Even in the 1930s depressions there was hope. The Second World War rallied our populations: war is good for democracy. The 1950s felt optimistic. War (in the South Atlantic) rescued Margaret Thatcher. John Major left the money to launch Tony Blair’s high-flying and high-spending government, and bought New Labour’s continuing popularity. Gordon Brown was no charmer but his achievement in the global financial crisis was real. It was economic downturn, not trivial things like being caught on mic calling someone a bigot, that pulled him down.
A Tory government followed his own into the coconut shy. Lucky in Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, it still did well to hang on for 14 years. Johnson’s extravagant promises about our “world-class” future kept hope of better days alive but have turned sour. Sunak has tried to renew the Johnsonian optimism with desperate promises about tax cuts but has not been believed. And now new promises of growth come from Labour.
Across the western world the doom-loop I fear is this: electorates shout “what are you going to give us?”, panicking politicians promise the impossible and so fail to deliver; electorates shout “Liar! Liar!”, and amid an atmosphere of declining popular trust the next set of politicians try even bigger promises; and the shout of “liars!” grows louder, whereupon “plague-on-both-your-houses” populists of right and left, growing fat on public indignation, are condemned to disappoint. In France, Marine le Pen must. Here, both Reform and the Liberal Democrats would stumble if their turn ever came. Thus, spraying out silly pledges and fending off the rotten fruit, democracy loses anchorage in public trust.
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If I’m right, there are only two ways for democratic institutions to survive. One would be to keep feeding the voters’ hunger for miracles of economic growth. Is this even possible? There must be limits to growth or we humans will destroy our own planet; and anyway the world’s tiger economies will finally generate their own internal resistances, as our old European economies have.
There’s another possible answer: that we the voters get real and accept that growth is levelling off. Whether such maturity can be induced we can discover only by experiment. Is any mainstream politician prepared to shrink rather than puff the electorate’s sense of entitlement, and see if they can win our trust?
I’m not hopeful. Starmer and Reeves missed their chance. But in the dispiriting politics that lie ahead I can hear the sound of my own Tory voice every Saturday, carping and sneering at the failure of the left. I dislike the sound. “Somebody’s boring me,” Dylan Thomas once remarked, “and I think it’s me.” Time then, after so many years, to fall silent and hope I’m wrong.
