If electoral disaster is coming, there's nothing that Rishi Sunak can do to stop it

His government is a prisoner of the right, the Brexit purists, the elderly and the Nimbys.

CREDIT:BBC

Jonn Elledge of the New Statesman has just asked a good question: why aren’t Conservatives panicking?  They ought to be panicking. They have been 20 points behind in the polls since the end of September. That dismal performance would scare the most placid of politicians.

Perhaps the UK’s Conservatives are staying calm because they believe voters will swing back to them. Other governments have recovered from mid-term unpopularity, after all, although rarely in British history has a government been as unpopular as our current administration.

And there are no whispers of a recovery to comfort it, only the polls pounding out a warning like the beat of a funeral march. It’s not extravagent to imagine the next election joining the great anti-Conservative uprisings of 1906, 1945 and 1997.

Any normal government would be trying to avert such a disaster. It would be panicking by now. Why isn’t this one? Condemn Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt as loudly as you like, but I don’t think they are too stupid to see what might befall them.

Instead, they are trapped for a reason Noam Chomsky explained. When someone made the vain boast that he “spoke truth to power,” Chomsky came out with a perfect response. Power already knows the truth, he said, and wants only to conceal it.

Tory power knows the truth. But like all ancien regimes heading for extinction it cannot act on what it knows.

At least a few Conservative politicians realise that the only plausible way to rebuild support is to increase the living standards of the broad mass of working and middle-class people.

As Writing from London repeats to the point of tedium, the UK’s crisis is a crisis of relative impoverishment. Since the banking crash of 2008, real wages have stagnated for most workers and fallen for a minority. Now they are falling for everyone except a lucky few.  The Office for Budget Responsibility now believes that average real wages will not return to their 2008 level until 2027.  “Had we not had an unprecedented 19-year downturn, they would be £292 a week – or £15,000 a year – higher.”

You cannot solely blame the Conservatives for the UK’s failure to keep up with other advanced countries. It’s not wholly the fault of a succession of failed prime ministers that Ireland, a nation the British once patronised as a rural backwater, has surpassed it.

But the Conservative party inflicted the disasters of austerity, Brexit and Truss all on its own, and hastened the UK’s decline.  

Competent politicians change course to win votes.  But Sunak and Hunt are stuck. They cannot raise living standards without alienating the right. To paraphrase the Irish playwright Brendan Behan‘s putdown of theatre critics, Conservative politicians “are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”

The fastest way to promote economic growth would be to soften Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit. The UK  might rejoin the single market and remove the trade barriers that are suffocating the economy. We would have to accept rules the UK had no say in making in return, but no nation can make a mistake as great as Brexit and not pay a price. Agreeing to freedom of movement would be one of the concessions, but as Brexit led to the replacement of EU citizens with migrants from the rest of the world, a return to the status quo ante Bedlam would make little difference.

In October the Sunday Times said that “senior government sources” wanted