Beginning to See the Light: A weak opposition may guide democracy on the road of dictatorship

 

 

‘We’re the members of the master race,

Got no style and we got no grace,’

 

If the polls are to be believed then Labour are in for another bad election night, even stalwart Hartlepool looks like turning blue. Polls suggest the Tories average 42% against Labour’s 35%, which given that they have been in power for 11-years history suggest they should expect heavy losses in mid-term votes.

 

But these are far from ordinary times, as we emerge from 14-months of Covid induced lockdowns and restrictions, many households are awash with cash having been able to save money through lockdown, and homeowners can revel in Rishi Sunak’s deliberately created house-price boom. The discontented minority are just ignored by this government.

As the events of recent weeks have shown this is a government mired in allegations of dishonesty, greed, and arrogance, from Greensill lobbying, ministerial codes flouted, gold wallpaper, Mustique holidays and claims that nannies were paid for by donors.

The PM is doing what he wishes dismissing any civil servant who dares disagree, and resists investigation that might bring his governments collective failures to account. Even the usual Tory-centric press have highlighted all of this.

 

‘many households are awash with cash having been able to save money through lockdown’

 

In opposition to this dictator is Keir Starmer and a collection of ‘electable, decent and honest alternative compared with the rogues’ gallery opposite’. What they are up against is a populist with a hyped-up culture war of English nationalism and Brexit tribalism, who is thriving on an ever more dangerously divided country.

Britain’s post-2008 economic situation was clear even pre-Covid, with economic growth benefitting the owners of assets, including homeowners. Numerous studies have shown that in the decade after this average real wages stopped rising for the first time in two centuries of industrial capitalism.

Despite wages stagnating the average British house price is now approximately 50% higher than it was in January 2009, and in London around double. While the economic crisis of 2007-9 was accompanied by a housing crash, the first year of Covid-19 saw a boom in property prices.

Even though the UK’s ratio of housing wealth to GDP now exceeds the level seen in Japan before its crash in 1991, there is no sign that the government plans to alter the place of housing wealth in the UK economy, or its dominating imprint on our politics.

Much of the blame for this lies with George Osborne who, a chancellor in 2010 ignored fiscal policy leaving the economy dependent on a monetary policy of historically low interest rates and quantitative easing, which resulted in even more money being poured into assets, further enriching asset-owners at the expense of everyone else.

Like all booms this will come to an end, likely a very messy one. However, what has gone unnoticed has been the impact on politics and society that this new model of capitalism has created.

What we are experiencing is a twisted growth model where the value of a home rises by C.5% p.a., but the value of an hour’s work stays static. In the post-war world the ideal was that everyone benefitted from economic growth, albeit some more than others. This has been replaced by a model that means that those without assets (predominantly the young) share none of that growth. Small wonder that those borne since 1990 see the appeal of socialism.

 

‘a model that means that those without assets (predominantly the young) share none of that growth’

 

Interestingly many of the beneficiaries also appear to be discontented. This new prosperity, based solely on house prices, appears to have engendered a paranoid and resentful mentality among asset-owners, meaning that all of social change is seen as a threat.

One reason for their discontent might be the disconnect between private and public ideals. Austerity policies devastated public services leading to a belief that there isn’t sufficient money to go around causing people to ‘cling on’ to what they already have.

For example, the new Tory voters in the so-called ‘red wall’ may have felt ignored by London, seen their high streets boarded up and their public services underfunded, but many of them still had large amounts of housing equity.

This twisted model of capitalism, in which house prices appreciate whilst peoples value stagnates, is a consequence of an ideology of home ownership that has been essential to the Tory policy agenda since Thatcher came to power, however exploitation if it is an innovation of Johnson’s ‘vote leave’ government. Remarkably, post-2008 the Tories have consistently grown their share of the vote while offering little that looks like growth or prosperity.

This explains the significance of ‘cultural’ factors. The Tories have become expert at overseeing and manipulating this twisted economy, where no attempt is made to help all in society, instead the state only intervenes to divert money toward those voters who deserve it and away from those who do not.

 

‘post-2008 the Tories have consistently grown their share of the vote while offering little that looks like growth or prosperity’

 

This has led to a moralistic opposition between the traditional home-owning family and ‘woke’ followers in a dysfunctional economy. Given the nature of their current coalition, I believe that even if the Tories had the option to end wage stagnation and deliver affordable housing, they wouldn’t take it.

However, in the eyes of this twisted government not all homeowners are equal, as parliament finally voted against protecting leaseholders from post-Grenfell fire safety costs that could run to £10bn.

This comes after weeks of debates in parliament in which the government rejected calls from Labour and about 30 rebel Tory MPs for them to meet the cost and recoup the money from property developers.

Many homeowners say they now face financial ruin, and Labour estimates the crisis has left 1.3m flats unsellable because they would not qualify for a mortgage. So widespread is the crisis that the Bank of England has been examining lenders’ exposure to blocks that have fire safety concerns to determine whether the building safety crisis affects their stability. It currently thinks banks can absorb the risk.

This is a direct result of the 2017 Grenfell fire, which has found that thousands of blocks of flats have serious fire defects, including having similar cladding, but also missing fire breaks in wall cavities and combustible balconies. Many developers have been refusing to pay to fix the faults, leaving residents facing bills running into the tens of thousands each and additional running costs for fire wardens to patrol buildings.

 

‘As much as the government is gambling with our finances, it is also gambling with our lives’

 

End Our Cladding Scandal said: ‘As much as the government is gambling with our finances, it is also gambling with our lives. Nearly four years after Grenfell and thousands of buildings across the UK are still covered with combustible materials and structurally unable to withstand fire. The fear of going bankrupt is nothing in comparison to the real and ongoing terror many of us experience when we lay in bed at night, trying to sleep, hoping this nightmare will end one day.’

In February, Johnson, told parliament: ‘No leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing safety defects that they didn’t cause and are no fault of their own.’ Another lie.

MPs have calculated that the total bill could reach £15bn, to date the government has promised only £5bn to fund cladding repairs on buildings over 18 metres tall. It has offered loans on repairs on shorter properties, which it argues are less of a risk, but leaseholders say this leaves them with the same financial burden.

The government has estimated the cost to leaseholders of the legislation, which will now pass through the Commons on Thursday, could be up to £75,000 for each leaseholder.

One homeowner, 30-yrs old Jamie Robb, discovered he was facing a bill of up to £40,000 for fire safety repairs on his apartment in a Manchester high-rise. In November last year, his family wrote to the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, to a plea for help with fire remediation works. A response from Jenrick’s aide said, ‘the government is aware of the effect that ongoing building safety concerns may have on the mental health of residents … If you feel able to, you can discuss any difficulties with your GP who will be able to signpost you to suitable healthcare services, if appropriate. You can also access support from the Samaritans by calling freephone 116 123’.

The letter went on to reiterate the government’s position that building owners should ‘protect leaseholders where they can’ and that government loans will be available to works not covered by £5bn in grants already announced.

Of course, the truth of the matter is one of political expedience. Many of the homeowners in question will not be Tory voters, therefor in the grand scheme of maintaining their grip on power they aren’t the governments priority. They are simply collateral damage.

This is a government that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons, primarily its brazenness. Be it the regeneration funds crudely funneled towards Tory towns, the troublesome Brexit parliament illegally shut down, the pandemic as a business opportunity for Conservative cronies, the government is like a tank crushing and riding over all before it.

 

‘how do they continue to get away with this behaviour?’

 

The ongoing question is how do they continue to get away with this behaviour? Isn’t our political system is supposed to punish prime ministers whose divisiveness becomes too obvious? Even Margaret Thatcher was bought to account.

The explanation is simple; Johnson’s government outrageous behaviour has actually helped it. In 2019, shortly before Johnson became Tory leader, the Hansard Society found that 54% of the electorate believed Britain needed ‘a strong leader who is willing to break the rules’. All the current scandals and possible corruption, and callousness towards Covid victims has, to date, barely affected the Tories’ strong position in the polls.

Political behaviour has changed because the forces that used to challenge Tory administrations have been weakened. In the 1980s Thatcher faced a trade union movement stronger and larger than todays, a deep hostility from much of northern England, protest movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a BBC that was sufficiently independent to challenger her.

In addition, the forerunner of the Lib Dems was a significant centrist force, that provided a viable alternative should her policies become too extreme. This provided a sufficient check and balance that even flagship Thatcherite laws to reduce the power of unions and give council tenants the right to buy their homes were presented with great care. Presented as neutral-sounding measures to increase freedom and social mobility, rather than as the long-term moves against the left that they were.

Johnson has far more room for manoeuvre, the unions have lost their power, the BBC has been bought to heel, and the Lib Dems almost insignificant.

Labour is distracted by the new to rebuild, much of northern England now votes Tory, and protests neutered by Covid and legislation.

All of this has enabled Johnson to make divisiveness his main strategy, through culture wars against liberals and minorities, and openly favouring property owners and older voters. In turn the government openly discriminates against younger and poorer Britons, who tend to support other parties or don’t vote at all. This is an openly aggressive government, more so than many, if not all past administrations.

Whereas the Trump administration was an experiment that was terminated at the first opportunity, Johnson is seen as only the last incarnation of an endlessly regenerating Conservatism.

Whilst Johnson’s current popularity owes much to the success of the Covid vaccines and unsustainable Brexit dreams, he can prolong this was a never-ending list of opponents. As today’s shenanigans over fishing rights in Jersey highlight Brexit is gift that keeps giving, then there is woke and culture wars to keep the pot boiling.

 

‘It is a culture of divide and rule, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where young and old become implacable foes’

 

It is a culture of divide and rule, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where young and old become implacable foes. No matter what he does wrong his adoring fans love him. This will not change until we have a credible opposition, one that has moved on from the cautious, muted politics of the New Labour era, that Starmer still seems wedded to.

Whilst Starmer is right to hold the government to account over corruption, it feels like a trip down memory lane, trying to reignite the shock and horror that the word ‘sleaze’ induced 25-year ago.

This seems to be borne out by the lethargic reaction that Labour MPs and activists have been experiencing when canvassing for today’s local elections. Added to this is the ongoing perception in Labour’s former heartlands that the party has been captured by snooty metropolitans, and, or far-left fanatics, neither of which represent their views.

Labour traditionally depicts the Tories as a machine for servicing the rich at the expense of the needy. Policies such as ‘levelling up’ they predict will fail due to ideological rigidity. Added to this they cite the right-wing media, which has the knock-on effect of being seen to blaming the electorate for being too stupid to see past the headlines.

Labour keeps running the same old campaign against the same old Tories, when the reality is that they keep losing because Britain doesn’t have the same old politics, the same old voters, and only the Tories are recognising this.

Labour policy since 1945 as been a series of twists and turns, left and right. The shifts to the right have occurred in periods of solid growth, whereas its leftward turns have been responses to economic crisis.

For example, the post-war Attlee’s government faced an economy in ruins: loaded with debt, its private industrial companies weak and badly managed. In such conditions Labour’s structural economic reforms – nationalisation, industrial planning, financial and trade controls – were widely regarded as economically necessary.

The outlier to this pattern is the Labour’s winning manifestos in 1964, 1966 and 1974 led by Harold Wilson.

Whilst he is today regarded as being from the right-wing of the party, his electoral successes were all centred on a left-wing platform that promised further nationalisations, industrial intervention, and economic planning. And all were written when the British economy was in crisis and structural reform was therefore viewed as a necessity.

Like Attlee, Wilson won by offering the voters a radical and credible platform to repair a broken British economy, making what were left-wing policies seem common sense.

If Starmer needs and example he need only look across the Atlantic, Biden beat Trump by offering progressive policies for the benefit of all, not a privileged few.

 

‘You choose your leaders and you place your trust,

And their lies put you down and their promises rust.’

 

As votes continue to be counted around the country, the timing of Philip’s piece this week makes it all the more interesting; since the inception of his column, Philip’s predictions have been uncannily accurate.

However outlandish it may have sounded when he predicted a return to the politics of 1930s Germany, the sight of insurgents storming Capitol Hill will live long in the memory.

Philip has reported the ever increasing number of examples of sleaze and cronyism with incredulity along the lines of – ‘whaddyneedtodo to get fired around here; so with his thoughts about bodies piling up in the street in the public domain and stories of him spaffing £800 a roll on wallpaper, would the good burghers of Hartlepool – average wage £24k p.a. – really reward Boris with his predicted  42% vs 35% victory.

Well, no is the simple answer; having stayed resolutely red since the constituency was created in 1974, Hartlepool returned Conservative Jill Mortimer, its first female MP, with 52% vs Labour’s Paul Williams on 29%; Boris truly is looking bomb-proof.

Sir Keir says that he takes full responsibility for the fact that Labour has apparently disenfranchised its working class roots, and the party machine may well make him take that pledge to its ultimate conclusion; even though his cupboard marked ‘policies’ did seem conspicuously bare, the task of uniting the disaffected miners and a metropolitan elite should not be underestimated.

The way Philip weaves the role of the UK’s housing market into the picture offers a fascinating backdrop and one that once again frames that of intergenerational inequality and a government only playing to the big tippers; meanwhile Mr Johnson served up yet more examples of his opportunist shapeshifting by sending a couple of armed navy vessels down to remind the French fishermen not to mess with post-Brexit Britannia, whilst delaying the announcement that the Indian variant of Covid had been found in sufficient numbers to be ‘of interest’ until the returning officer was well on his way home.

Last week we considered what could prove the log on the line for Boris, and right on cue, Mr Cummings responded to being fingered for Dysongate with a waspish little tirade with more to come; however in a further development to Robert Jenrick’s inappropriate comments and the government’s ugly response to those sleeping with one eye open in worthless flats, two people were hospitalised after a fire today in an east London block with Grenfell cladding. News crews were quickly on scene and this may be less easy to airbrush away on the tide of electoral victory as the anger is palpable and mounting.

Two very apt tracks, and just for fun – the Dictators with ‘Master Race Rock’ and the Jam with ‘Going Underground’. Enjoy! 

 

 

Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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