All change

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All change

If my dentist told me I could have a particularly vicious root canal done in November, or he could drill in early July, I’d choose the nearer date every time. I imagine that was Rishi Sunak’s thinking when he chose 4 July for the General Election. It also stymies a summer of plotting by his Cabinet colleagues and backbenchers. Wrongfooting your foes is a small but intense satisfaction for those clinging to power. Then there’s the fact that students – who generally lean left – will be on holiday, so those registered to vote from their university towns are unlikely to do so, while others will be abroad. 

My gut reaction to the news was to bang out the following lines on twitter: “Wow, this is a tough choice. Between a party who have taken this country, in twelve years, from having a relatively-functioning economy and public services to being on its knees, with infrastructure in collapse and soaring inequality. And… Puts big cross by other party.” Leading to an exchange with Peter Hitchens, who asked, “What if the other option is even worse?” Which sums up how far too many UK voters, of all stripes, see the political landscape at the moment: Bad vs Worse. It is a soul-sapping way to go to the ballot box and many predict this election will see one of the lowest turnouts for decades. Meanwhile, the UK’s women may feel grumpy that the four biggest political parties are all led by blokes (worth rereading Simon Heffer’s excellent piece).

As one of life’s stubborn liberals, I lurk somewhere in the marshy turf between political tribes. Two factors will likely guide me as I step out on 4 July for the church hall in Cambridge where I cast my vote. One will be my reply to Hitchens that “I vehemently disapprove of rewarding failure, despite this country’s fondness for doing just that.” Voting out unsatisfactory governments is democracy’s key way of ensuring politicians remain accountable to the public. The other will be the fact that our sitting Labour MP, Daniel Zeichner, is a decent, hardworking local politician. None of this makes the blood surge, just as Starmer ain’t Henry V on St Crispin’s Day. But in cunningly campaigning on just one word, “Change”, the Labour leader is channelling the mood of the nation. 

Love’s labour lost

Talking of Shakespeare, I found rereading Romeo and Juliet, to help my younger son muddle through his GCSE English Literature exam, rather heavier going than I expected. It’s hard enough to explain a Benny Hill joke to today’s teens, let alone a bawdy Elizabethan one. Try getting your average sixteen-year-old to accept that Mercutio is being totally hil-ar-i-ous when he ribs Romeo about his fleeting obsession with Rosaline, saying, “O Romeo that she were, O, that she were/ An open-arse, thou a poperin pear!” Finding out that an “open-arse” was a slang word back then for a fruit often compared to a vagina doesn’t make that any more side-splitting on the page. I felt equally unconvincing when telling my son that the Nurse was beside herself with grief when finding Juliet’s dead body and that you could tell this by her use of a “tricolon” for emphasis: “O day O day, O hateful day.” Most of all, I found myself increasingly irate with Shakespeare for offering up a double teenage suicide as theatrical entertainment. Aged 56 and weary of heartbreak, I just want the young lovers to ride off into the sunset, live together for three months, have a big argument, sulk, and then return home. Like normal young people. So, I won’t be queueing up to see movie star Tom Holland, aka Spider-Man, play Romeo at London’s Duke of York’s theatre. If I want to see young love up close, I can gate-crash my son’s prom. And if I want a good cry I can simply watch a news report. It’s also worth remembering that midlife love can be every bit as eye-boggling as the teen variety, as this riveting piece by Anouchka Grose entitled “Fuckboys have feelings too” reminded me. Perhaps no one ever grows up when it comes to matters of the heart.

Tyranny of the minority

Perhaps, in choosing 4 July as an election date, Rishi Sunak is hoping to inspire fireworks from his Conservative MPs. Some have suggested that this choice – the first time since 1945 that a general election will be held in July – was a canny move to slow Labour down in Scotland, where school holidays will have begun (inevitably reducing turnout); others that he’s grasping at the smidgen of good economic data (marginally positive economic growth and falling inflation) while it lasts. What’s for sure – likely though it is the Tories get a well-earned kicking in just under six weeks’ time – is that this will be no Independence Day-style celebration of democracy.

Consider this – the last time a single political party governed at Westminster with overall majority support of the voting public was 1935. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 garnered 59 per cent of the vote between them, but that’s my point – if we’re to have governments that truly reflect the make-up and will of the majority, then coalitions should be the norm here, just as they are in most of Europe. The reason they are not is because of our almost unique first-past-the-post voting system. I say “almost” because that other renowned democracy, Belarus, uses FPTP too. This system awards victory to the party or candidate with the highest number of votes, even if that is well below 50 per cent. That means, for example, that in 2019 Boris Johnson received his “stonking” 80-seat majority in the Commons with under 44 per cent of votes cast. When you consider that just over 67 per cent of eligible voters participated in the election, then the Tories romped home with the support of just 29 per cent of the voting public. The system’s iniquities don’t stop there. In that election the Liberal Democrats received over eleven per cent of the overall vote and were rewarded with just eleven seats; the SNP, on the other hand, won 48 seats with less than four per cent of the vote.

This election is unlikely to result in any fairer outcome, just a reversal of fortunes between Labour and Conservatives. According to the polls, Keir Starmer’s “changed” Labour party now commands roughly the same level of support as Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019. In round numbers, the average of all polls puts Labour on about 45 per cent, the Conservatives on just 23 per cent, Reform and the Lib Dems around ten per cent each, the Greens on six per cent, with the remaining five to six per cent for other parties. And yet, by most predictions, Labour are on target to achieve a majority similar to Tony Blair’s 179-seat margin in 1997, or even – depending on whether the swing to Labour is more pronounced in some areas than others – the largest majority in the Commons since the National Government landslide of 1931.

In nineteen of the last twenty elections, the majority of voters have chosen parties to the left-of-centre but ended up with a Conservative government two thirds of the time. Mindful of this reality, at its 2022 conference Labour overwhelmingly endorsed moving to a system of proportional representation, and PR is backed by many of the party’s big guns, like Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. Even Starmer himself is on record as saying that millions in safe seats across the country “feel their votes don’t count”. But what are the odds that when he arrives at Number 10 with his own stonking majority, Prime Minister Starmer decides that electoral reform is a cause that can wait? More than 50 per cent would be my guess.

Read more about how UK elections work:

Inflation lie

Mark Twain’s oft-quoted commonplace about “lies, damned lies and statistics” has never been truer than in the trumpeted announcement that inflation is, in Rishi Sunak’s words, “back to normal”. In fact – and it is surprising how few commentators have really grasped this – what will prove a relatively brief dip in the headline rate of inflation is surely the reason Sunak has gambled on an election now rather than waiting for the good news to start being felt by voters. He knows it won’t be.

Last month’s fall in the CPI was recorded as 2.3 per cent, less than expected but the lowest since July 2021, and close enough to the Bank of England’s targeted rate of 2.0 per cent for Sunak to make his claim of normalcy. Having previously been Chancellor, Sunak is no doubt aware that the only reason for the size of the fall is that the CPI is calculated on a twelve-month rolling basis, and therefore now excludes the very high levels reached in the first quarter of 2023. During the election campaign we will get further good news about the May figures, for the same reason. What we won’t be told is that in the next few months the rate will likely increase again as the low numbers that followed the high ones last year similarly slide out of the calculations. By the time this happens, the election will be over.

The CPI is largely dominated by volatile prices such as food and energy. The overall fall is largely down to the decline in global energy prices, about which the government can do little (apart from implementing caps to protect consumers). It is worth remembering that energy prices remain way above their pre-2022 levels. And the CPI does not include other prices that many of us are preoccupied with, such as the cost of owning, occupying and maintaining our own homes. If these are included, then the inflation number almost doubles to 4.4 per cent, and such costs considered on their own continue to rise sharply. Likewise, given our service-based economy, prices associated with services, around hospitality and culture for example, have a huge effect on people’s wallets. The rate of service inflation in April fell only marginally, from six per cent to 5.9 per cent. And remember, that rate has a compounded effect on price levels – this year’s rise comes on top of last year’s.

The only person likely to benefit from this blatant attempt to pull the wool over our eyes is whoever gets to take over what’s left of the Tory party in parliament, post-election. They will be able to claim that the economic recovery miraculously engineered by the Conservatives in Q2 of 2024 was snuffed out by the new Labour government by Christmas.

Book of the Week

Small Worlds 
By Caleb Azumah Nelson
(272pp, Penguin Viking, pb £9.99)
Reviewed by Belinda Bamber

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s first novel, Open Water (2021), launched him as a writer to watch, partly – for this reader, at least – because of the rare sensitivity with which he describes the age-old story of a young man falling in love with a woman; the protagonist’s passion, tenderness and sometimes paralysing self-doubt making him the very opposite of the “toxic male”. A second-generation Ghanaian writer from Peckham, the author’s next novel, Small Worlds (2023), has just come out in paperback and been awarded the prestigious £24,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

A coming-of-age story for eighteen-year-old Stephen, Small Worlds is set over the course of three summers, touching on his post-school travails, father-son difficulties, his closeness to his mother, and a transformative visit to Ghana. Awkward about expressing his love for Del, a woman he’s been close to since primary school, Stephen is frustrated with his own shortcomings, but cheered by friends and his love of dancing.

He feels better able to speak his truth with a jazz trumpet at his lips, and Azumah Nelson’s own love of music is palpable in the rhythm and cadence of his writing, which sometimes has an improvisatory quality, with key phrases that repeat and echo like refrains, sometimes poetically, sometimes slightly intrusively. The small worlds of the title are the refuges found in countless ways, such as watching his parents dance a two-step at church: he sees “that a world can be two people, occupying a space where they don’t have to explain.”

Stephen is idealistic, his reflections imbued with his mother’s values of trust, respect, family and integrity. (Notwithstanding a couple of meltdowns, he is a hero Jane Austen would approve of.) And if Stephen is sometimes Kind of Blue, like the oft-mentioned Miles Davis album, there are also flashes of joy, such as his enduring love for Del and the transformation of his relationship with his father. It’s a good book to reach for when you want to believe that “mistakes can be beautiful”, not just in jazz, but also in life.