The UK election has already failed
Britain in 2024 is facing huge, systemic problems. Few have been addressed in the campaign.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, soaked to the bone in a rainswept Downing Street, took the nation by surprise as he announced a snap poll. | Carl Court/Getty Images
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK
BY JACK BLANCHARD
Britain is gripped by crisis — though you wouldn’t know it from the election campaign that’s played out these past few weeks.
The 2024 U.K. general election has been anything but boring, from its shotgun beginnings — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, soaked to the bone in a rainswept Downing Street, taking the nation by surprise with a snap poll — through to its thrilling conclusion on July 4, with the opposition Labour Party appearing on course for a record-busting victory.
There have been scandals, with Sunak’s top aides suspended over an alleged betting scam, as well as gaffes — the PM’s decision to abandon a D-Day commemoration will live long in the memory — and outsized characters, in the form of Nigel Farage, back from the political dead.
The extraordinary backdrop to it all has been the sight of a once-unbeatable political party melting down in real time, the Conservatives hemorrhaging support in poll after poll as they plummet toward what insiders fear may be an extinction-level event.
For political nerds, there have been few campaigns like it.
But for the British public, detached from the political discourse and disenchanted — if not disgusted — with Westminster’s political class, this election has already failed.
Britain in 2024 is a nation with huge, systemic problems, few of which have been addressed in the five weeks of campaigning thus far.
The U.K. economy has been on life support for years, stuttering along with negligible or negative growth. At the same time, the nation’s debt interest payments have soared by tens of billions of pounds, choking off any real investment in neglected and crumbling public services. The government’s tax take is already at near-record levels.
For the public the cost of living has soared, fueled by the sky-high energy and commodity prices triggered by the war in Ukraine.
And a long-feared demographic timebomb is now exploding, with demands on Britain’s ailing National Health Service and crisis-hit adult social care sector both at record levels. Waiting lists for treatment and care have rarely been higher. Staff and funding are in desperately short supply.
Britain in 2024 has a housing crisis, a prisons crisis and a university funding crisis. Mental health services and special needs provision are on their knees. Welfare payments are through the roof.
And the nation is legally committed to a costly — if necessary — transition to net zero carbon emissions over the next 25 years.
But neither the Conservatives nor Labour have sought to address such issues in any meaningful way in their election manifestos, public documents which — supposedly — set out their alternative plans for government over the next parliament.
Aspirations are bold but vague. Rosy outcomes are promised, without any real plan for how to deliver. Brexit is barely discussed at all. And nobody wants to talk about the enormous black hole in the nation’s finances awaiting whomever takes power on July 4.
Launching a report Monday comparing the two parties’ manifestos, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) — Britain’s most respected non-partisan think tank — could not have been more scathing in its verdict.
“Raw facts are largely ignored by the two main parties,” said IFS Director Paul Johnson, a mild-mannered, bespectacled economist not normally prone to hyperbole.
He accused Labour and the Conservatives of a “conspiracy of silence” over Britain’s economic predicament, with neither party prepared to level with voters about what’s coming down the track.
“On the big issues over which governments have direct control — on how they will change tax, welfare, public spending — the manifestos of the main parties provide thin gruel indeed,” he said. “On July 4 we will be voting in a knowledge vacuum.”
The underlying reality is stark. Taxes will have to go up even further over the next parliament, Johnson said, unless already underfunded public services are to be cut back further. Both parties are already promising extra money for health and defense, he noted, though neither has a realistic plan for how this might be funded.
Economic plans rely heavily upon rapid growth, although how this will be achieved is far from clear.
“If better growth materializes in the next parliament — and it might — that will be largely due to good luck,” Johnson said. “We should hope it happens. But hoping for the best is not a strategy.”
It’s too late now for this campaign to change course. The main parties will spend its final days locked in attack and counterattack, Labour reheating lines about the last, chaotic years of Conservative rule; the Conservatives delivering shrill warnings about what Labour might do in power.
British voters will remain largely disengaged. Can anyone blame them, given what’s on offer?
“The [two main parties] have singularly failed even to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very long time,” Johnson said Monday.
“As the population ages, these choices will become harder, not easier. We cannot wish them away.”
Trouble is headed down the track for whichever party emerges victorious on July 4.
POLITICO