Political Certainty
Our politics has been moving faster than our trains. Is it about to slow down?
Relax: there’s not going to be a general election in the UK in May.
There probably won’t be one in June, either. Most likely, it will be held in the Autumn (personally, I’ve got October 10th circled in the calendar)1 but there’s always a chance Rishi Sunak waits and gives both MPs and the public what they really want: an Christmas campaign and an election in January.
Whenever it is held (and it has to be before the end of January 2025) it will be the first general election of the decade. In ordinary times, that wouldn’t be a noteworthy statement. But these aren’t ordinary times.
The last decade has been extraordinarily volatile, politically. Since 2016, the UK has had five prime ministers. Six chancellors. There have already been two general elections. The next election will be the fifth since 2010, on top of two nationwide referenda (EU membership in 2016 and voting reform in 2011). In the 20 years before the May 2010 election, there were only four elections.
Usually, in Slow Futures, we describe the trends that are moving slowly. In this edition, we’ll be describing a trend that has been moving absurdly quickly – but might be about to slow down.
So much democracy
We’ve had a lot of democracy lately. An unusual amount, by historical standards. The chart below shows the number of different prime ministers, elections and nationwide referenda, by decade, since 1900.
Between 2010 and 2019, the cumulative total is 10. Taken together, this quantity of ‘big political events’ is more than any other decade (other decades that come close to this total – the 1920s, the 1950s and the 1970s – are not remembered for their stability). This is an extraordinary amount of political volatility.
Not all of these ‘big political event’ things automatically equate to volatility. The 2011 alternative vote referendum, for example, didn’t rock the boat too much. No one except the Lib Dems has given it a second thought since. And a change in Prime Minister doesn’t necessarily mean that a government’s authority or ability to govern is compromised. In 1990, Major replaced Thatcher mid-term and went on to win the next election, in office for seven years in total. But the nature of our politics since 2016 has been absurdly volatile, with each of those big events destabilising the governing authority.
In many democracies, individual lawmakers (and in turn, parliaments and executives) are elected for a term of around 4-5 years because this strikes a balance between allowing the public to choose their leaders with reasonable frequency and those leaders having enough time, when elected, to see through the agenda they were voted in to deliver. But in the UK, things have been changing fast. Four elections, and six different prime ministers in a decade and a half is politics moving very quickly. Governments aren’t having the time to, you know, govern.
The result of the EU referendum resulted in an almost immediate change in Prime Minister. A haphazard snap election campaign a year later resulted in a government with a fragile majority in parliament, trying and failing to deliver epochal constitutional change that no one seemed to agree on. In 2020 a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe helped destabilise the only parliament since 2010 with a large majority. The first two prime ministers of this parliament also contributed heavily to their own downfall. And the Conservative Party’s curious leadership rules have ensured that most Conservative Party Leaders since the 1990s (and by extension, most Prime Ministers) have had the a job-life-expectancy of a mayfly.
With frequent changes in leadership, authority and direction, operational delivery is compromised. In Trajectory’s regular opinion polling, the issues most pressing to the public concern the economy, health, education and housing.
We are currently on our sixth chancellor since 2016. Our seventh health minister and eighth education secretary. Housing ministers currently have a life expectancy of eight months, roughly the amount of time it takes for a baby to learn to crawl (insert your own joke about political effectiveness here). Put another way, my son – who is four – is currently on his third prime minister. I was still on my third prime minister when I turned 20.
It wasn’t always like this. Between 2010 and 2015 we had just one chancellor, two education secretaries, two health secretaries and three housing ministers. That’s about the pattern in the decade before that, too.
This stuff has an impact. It affects us, a population that don’t trust politicians and generally want to be a bit less bothered by politics.
It affects our ability to reckon with the grand challenges of our time. In 2023, the government unveiled its new 10 year cancer plan. It did this four years (and three prime ministers, five health secretaries) after it published the previous 10 year cancer plan, in 2019.
It affects our ability to plan and build. In 2010, the coalition government put forward its plan for High Speed 2 (HS2) – a Y-shaped route, connecting London and Birmingham and then Birmingham to each of Leeds and Manchester. Thirteen years (five prime ministers, seven transport secretaries) later, the Leeds and Manchester legs were cancelled, the construction of the HS2 terminal at Euston was made dependent on private funding, and the number of trains per hour that HS2 could (theoretically) carry was halved.
Is our politics about to slow down?
It might be an understatement, but in the last decade our politics has been running faster than our trains. It is quite possible, however, that 2024 marks the year that it starts to slow down. The political equivalent of leaves on the line.
Voting intention polls are screaming to us that the next election will result in a Labour government, quite possibly with a very healthy majority. YouGov polling conducted after the recent budget identified no movement in the Conservative score – still an abysmal 20%. Labour remain in the forties. That’s landslide territory.
Of course, opinion polls are just a snapshot and not a prediction. A week is a long time in politics, but we’ll need a lot of political weeks for the likely result to change. But our central expectation for the next parliament should be a Labour government with a reasonable working majority – probably somewhere between the one that David Cameron achieved in 2015 (10 seat majority) and the one that Boris Johnson won in 2019 (80 seats). It remains quite possible that a 1997 style landslide is the result. A result of that nature would mean that a reversal in the next election – likely 2028 or 2029 – would be unlikely.
That kind of result, compounded by an exhausted Conservative Party looking for a new direction, would lead to a very different era in British politics. It might mean political certainty, of the kind enjoyed by Thatcher and Blair, for the first time since before the EU referendum in 2016 and quite possibly since before the financial crash of 2007-08.
There is no guarantee that a new administration, even one elected with a healthy majority, will last the course. Events (dear boy) do happen. Even in a stable government there’ll be reshuffles, scandals and changes of post. But a return to something like ‘normal’ is likely after the next election. That also means less volatility, and the return of slowness to politics.
What does this mean?
Operational certainty (whether you approve of the operation or not). Organisations, whether they approve of the government’s policies or not, could reasonably expect policy frameworks, even long term ones, to last. They can hope to build relationships with ministers and parliamentarians without the constant threat of a change of leadership, or without the sense (present for at least a year now) that investment in those relationships is time wasted – because a new broom is coming.
A calmer, gentler politics? Maybe, slightly. A change in government, specifically to one with a large mandate from the public would help draw a line under some of the psychodramas that have dogged political discourse for the last decade – Red Wall vs. Blue Wall, Sunak vs. Johnson, Remain vs. Leave and Blairites vs. Corbynites.
Better mood. Greater political certainty may drive a boost in consumer optimism – driven by an inherently more stable and certain period. It would also be likely to improve the UK’s economic prospects – with steadier politics encouraging a return in foreign investment to the UK.
Don’t worry, there’ll still be chaos. It isn’t just the EU referendum and political self-immolation that have made our politics move faster recently. The environment around politics – greater scrutiny, disintermediation between public and politicians, a broader and less deferential media, global uncertainty, grand challenges in demographics, technology and economics – also poses major challenges for individuals and administrations, potentially weakening them. Unless politics adapts to that environment, its capacity to slow will be inhibited.
More Than This
Sorry, no boring charts in this edition (at least by my standards; I appreciate other people may have a lower threshold for what makes a chart boring). Normal service will be resumed next time.
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There’s a few reasons for thinking Oct 10th will be the UK election date. It would be madness to let it clash with the US election (Nov 5th), from a security perspective as well as a comms one. I suspect the pressure on Sunak to call the election will be pretty interminable by the end of the summer recess and October 10th is one of the first dates available if called immediately after the summer. It would also allow them to try and have a big row about immigration (and small boat crossings in particular) in the summer as a launchpad for an election campaign that isn’t just about the economy and the NHS (I don’t think this will work, but I suspect it will be/is part of the thinking).
Fascinating! I’m now going to tell everyone it’s October 10th and look smart when it is.