On what proved to be a decidedly weird election night, one line from the BBC leapt out: “safe Conservative seats becoming safe Labour seats”.
It sums up the scale of the rout, which in light of the truly horrifying forecasts put out by some of the pollsters we Tories might at moments be at risk of forgetting. Yes, we’re in triple figures and Sir Ed Davey is not about to lead His Majesty’s Opposition; those are incredibly low bars, and this is still the worst result in our party’s history.
But it also suggests we might need a new definition, in this context, of the word ‘safe’. Boris Johnson’s 2019 majority turned out to be built on sand; there is no reason to think that Sir Keir Starmer’s, vastly broader and, one suspects, no less unwieldy, could not go the same way (albeit not, perhaps, in one parliament).
That means our party cannot waste any time. The long, difficult work of rebuilding ourselves as a plausible contender for office must start at once – and start with an honest, painful reckoning with how we got here. The reflex to fall back on fairytales – of which both left and right are equally culpable – must be conquered.
Perhaps the most telling explanation for why Rishi Sunak made his bizarre decision to call the snap election now is the prisons crisis, and few issues better encapsulate how we have set and primed this political timebomb over the past 14 years.
Since 2010 we have closed 17 prisons. Four of these are currently tourist attractions, as prisons. One of those, HMP Lancaster, was at the time of closure the second-best performing prison, in terms of recidivism rates, in the entire country. It was shut for no better reason than that Ken Clarke had wanted to close it in the 1990s, and didn’t think it appropriate to have a jail in a castle.
This programme has been pursued despite the abject failure to build even replacements for the cells we were shutting. The scale of the failure of the prisons programme actually boggles the mind:
“A 2015 commitment to invest “£1.3 billion to create 10,000 new prison places by 2020” has, according to the Public Accounts Committee, produced just 206 (with 3,500 on the way in some form).”
Why was it so difficult? You guessed it: chronic refusal to bulldoze new jails through our insane planning system, and even the sternest of law-and-order Tory MPs shouting their heads off if ever it was proposed to open a new one in their constituency.
It’s the same everywhere. Why do we have endless stories about putting asylum seekers in hotels? The failure to build a purpose-built asylum estate. London swiftly becoming a Tory-free zone, and radiating angry voters out into the Home Counties? Fourteen years failing to force through new housing in the capital (take a bow, Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa Villiers).
None of this is to deprecate everything that has happened since 2016. But even everyone’s go-to example – Liz Truss’s calamitous mini-budget – stands in many important respects in a dire tradition that long precedes it. It fell apart because she tried to offer tax cuts without any honest reckoning with the implications for spending.
That, in turn, was an effort to try and jump-start economic growth without facing up to the fact that much of the “anti-growth coalition” sat behind her on the green benches. No showdown with business over unlimited cheap labour, no showdown with Tory backbenchers on housing or infrastructure.
In that, there’s a clear line back to David Cameron, serially promising to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands even as it climbed higher and higher, and pumping credit into a shortage via insane programmes such as Help to Buy as the cost of essentials such as housing and childcare climbed into the luxury goods bracket.
If there is one thread that unites all the governments and prime ministers we have had over the past 14 years, it is postponing difficult decisions and taking the easy way out, be that trying to do austerity without making any decisions, resulting in what our columnist John Oxley dubbed “Sh*t State Toryism”, to Boris Johnson using the post-Brexit, points-based system to raise net immigration to unprecedented levels, tickling the tummies of the Treasury and the Department for Education at the expense of demolishing the Party’s credibility on yet another core issue for our voters.
Happily for our Party, if not for the nation, there is no sign that Labour is going to be any different. Starmer and Rachel Reeves talk about getting immigration under control, raising living standards, and building infrastructure. But there’s no indication in their manifesto of even the vaguest plan to do it, and as David Willetts noted this week, any push for growth will cut deeply against Labour’s instincts in all sorts of ways.
Doubtless it will be gratifying as and when the Starmer Government hits the buffers; certainly we will be chronicling every shocking collision with reality here at ConservativeHome. But the Conservatives cannot and must not take that as a cue to sit back and wait for events to deliver power back to us.
For if we are not ready as and when Labour does finally run out of steam, none of us might like the force that emerges to fill that gap.