We Are Wading Through The Politics Of The Interregnum
Our politics is still lost in the gap between a Pre Realignment past and a Post Realignment Future
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Why have I decided to join the increasingly packed space on political Substack? Hopefully this launch essay will discuss that in more detail.
In short (as a TL:DR), I think that British politics is in a period of volatility, uncertainty and transformation. Old loyalties are dramatically breaking down and people have consistently been demanding change, but our system has shown itself consistently unable or unwilling to deliver what people have been promised. Too much of politics is tactical, is stuck in a previous paradigm and has failed to develop a governing philosophy to match the needs of the moment.
Numerous elections and political events have made clear that we are living through a realignment moment. Voters have made clear that they want things to change, but politicians and too much of the SW1 eco-system continue to see politics and policy as “more of the same”. Politically, this leads to governments repeatedly failing to understand the public mood, against the economic backdrop of an economy with so many structural weaknesses that it governments are repeatedly being buffeted by market pressures.
Political parties have misunderstood the reasons that they have won and lost elections, with a failure to understand and deliver mandates leading to yet further volatility. Even this week, Labour’s tone-deaf response around the grooming gangs scandal shows that governments continue to misunderstand and misread the public mood.
The horse race of Westminster politics continues to consume attention that should be focused on developing cohesive political projects to get Britain out of a multi-dimensional rut.
This means we’re stuck in an interregnum between pre-realignment and post-realignment politics, with what Tom McTague and Helen Thompson described as a “hollowed out politics” being repeatedly unable to deliver the change demanded by an understandably angry electorate. This interregnum politics is one that so far seems unable to grapple with the historic challenges facing modern Britain - stagnating growth, stubbornly wide regional inequality, a decaying public realm and fraying social bonds. A moment for decisive government and big thinking has increasingly been dominated by unfulfilled slogans, politics by nostalgia and an increasingly disenchanted electorate.
This regular Substack will be my attempt to make sense of the realignment moment and to suggest how politics and policy must adapt to meet the enormous problems and challenges that the UK faces. I’ll argue that the post-realignment politics is still up for grabs and politics needs to break out of the tactical thinking that dominated the previous paradigm to embrace bold, strategic thinking that tackle the historic challenges the country faces.
Volatility and realigning elections
We’ve lived through some of the most astonishing political volatility in the past few years and all the evidence is that this electoral volatility is continuing. A collapse in traditional party loyalties has been a feature across the West in recent years, leading Piketty to talk about the rise of the Brahmin Left (of well-educated professionals) and the Brahmin Right (of the wealthy).
Parties of the left became dominated by middle class interests and social issues, with even an internal Labour Party report in 2018 describing the party as being dominated by “high status city dwellers.” In 1983, the Conservatives won the middle class vote by some 39 per cent, but in 2024, Labour won the AB vote by some ten per cent. Working class voters, who had once been the foundation of Labour made the opposite journey. The skilled working class(C2s in the marketing jargon) have always tended to “swing with the country” more than other voting groups. But it was the rest of the working class who swung to the Conservatives most dramatically. Labour once had a 40 per cent lead amongst this group, but in 2019 the Conservatives won this group as well.
The 2016 referendum was marked by people from working-class “post industrial” towns acting as the vanguard of the Leave vote - tired of years of their home towns and regions being deprived of economic opportunity or infrastructure. They demanded real change to the economic model and the way the UK was governed and this led to once solid red Labour constituencies, such as my home town of Consett voting Conservative for the first time, with promises of “managing immigration”, “Levelling Up” and “getting Brexit done.”
That phase of the realignment quickly collapsed as the Conservatives failed to deliver on any of the major promises made to their new voters. The failure of the Tories to make this phase of the realignment permanent could go down as a historic error. Indeed, between 2019 and 2024, they shifted rapidly from embracing the realignment to recoilng from it. A politics that sought to deliver a post-realignment settlement was rapidly replaced with libertarianism-by-numbers, followed by a managerialist austerity. Almost all of the fabled Red Wall seats left the Tory column. But many of the former Labour voters in these post industrial seats ended up abandoning the Tories for Reform, rather than back to Labour, meaning that Nigel Farage’s party are second to Labour in 89 seats. Indeed Reform’s share of the vote amongst working class voters in 2024 was only 3% behind the Tories. The Northern element of the realignment isn’t over, it’s just changing shape in response to Tory failure.
Meanwhile, in 2024 another wave of realignment fell into place. True Blue constituencies fell to Labour and the Liberal Democrats and the Home Counties and suburbs of London drifted further from the Tories and Conservatives further lost their foothold with professional and middle class voters. Just as Blyth and Consett turning Conservative in 2019 seemed like earth-shattering events, so the likes of Basingstoke voting Labour in 2024 indicated that the realignment is a two-way street.
Realignment meant volatility. Boris Johnson’s 2019 majority was seen as one that it would take Labour at least two elections to recover from (and historically it would), but five years later Labour won a historic landslide of their own, with almost half of the seats in the Commons changing hands. Only a few months later, an More In Common poll found that Labour would lose almost 200 seats if an election were held today. If anything, the volatility seems to be accelerating. As Compass point out, 131 Labour seats have a majority below 5,000 and could be deemed “marginal”.
Labour won a historic landslide with a historically low proportion of the vote and a historically low share of the vote for the two major parties. The Conservatives gained their lowest voting percentage of the vote since democratic suffrage. Liberal Democrats learnt how to use the FPTP electoral system to their advantage, with Greens and left-independents also snapping at Labour’s heels on their left. A series of opinion polls now have the two major parties now marooned in the 20s (which would have been catastrophic historically), followed closely by Reform.
Fragmentation and volatility are the defining characteristics of this phase of the realignment.
Politicians and SW1 professionals might crave for a return to politics as normal, but it is clear that we are in the interregnum between pre-realignment and post-realignment politics. The political parties who grasp this and grasp the reasons behind disengagement, volatility and realignment will be the ones who are better able to navigate the post-realignment settlement.
The Politics Of The Interregnum?
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci, 1930
Despite these dramatic changes in voting behaviour, electoral volatility and the state of the parties, too many seem happy to continue with business as usual. Repeatedly, political parties have misunderstood the public mood and misunderstood the reasons for historic landslides, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of failure of delivery and further volatility.
If we are stuck in the interregnum between the politics of pre and post realignment, plenty seem intent on sticking with the politics, policy and thinking of the ancien-regime.
The pre-realignment politics by slogan and talking points no longer resonates with voters who are determined not to get fooled again and want to see the change they have repeatedly demanded. Hyper-partisanship from established parties on traditional and social media is all well and good, but it’s playing to a rapidly diminishing crowd of engaged insiders, with voters stung by years of dashed expectations. And politicians should remember that voters have increasingly long memories - responsibility for your time in government doesn’t end when you enter opposition.
Voters have been angry for some time, feeling that the system wasn’t delivering for them or their communities. This led politicians to respond by promising to deliver improvement and each subsequent failure to deliver has merely increased the anger, increased the cynicism and increased the political volatility.
The politics of the realignment has, in part, emerged from decades of declining trust and a feeling that politics hasn’t been delivering. Deindustrialisation left too many towns and entire regions devoid of hope and hollowed out. The Iraq War diminished trust in government and the impact of the banking crash and its subsequent austerity led to continued declining trust and rising public anger. This was followed by a perception that governments failed to deliver on their promises.
Too much of recent years has seen politics being driven purely by a campaigning mentality, rather than making the realignment a philosophy of government. This is why Conservatives lost the trust of their new voters so quickly having promised to control immigration and “Level Up” before presiding over record immigration and a failure to Level Up.
Conservatives stuttered with the politics of the realignment because they saw it as a campaigning vehicle, rather a vehicle for delivering lasting change. Fundamentally, they lacked a plan and they lacked sufficient believers in the politics of the realignment.
Having long been described as a Tory heretic for pushing the politics and economics of the realignment in a party too often absorbed by Thatcherite nostalgia, it was enlivening to see reindustrialisation and tackling regional inequality being pushed to the front of the stage. But it rapidly became clear that this was a campaigning device, not a governing philosophy or a plan for government.
Once again, people voted for change but got more of the same. Indeed, when it came to immigration and industrial policy, the governments of Truss and Sunak actively pursued policies antithetical to what they had promised the voters.
The same is proving true with Labour. A clear lack of a plan for government that goes beyond “not being the Tories” or soft-left cliche is leading to rapid disenchantment and a failure to deliver on change. And they seem determined on giving up hard to recover political capital on nonsense like the Chagos Islands and binning the successful education reforms of recent Labour and Tory governments. Growth and better public services can’t just be wished into being, whilst politicians struggle with the statecraft needed to deliver governing change. Indeed this recent piece by Lord Blunkett suggests that there is already nervousness about Labour’s ability to deliver meaningful change.
Lasting change needs more than slogans and winning the news agenda.
Meanwhile, Reform seem committed to an economic model that has been found wanting (questionable economics and even more questionable politics) and any new ideas coming out of the emergent parties of the left seem equally lost in nostalgia and short of anything beyond vague generalities.
So, voters have repeatedly voted for a post realignment politics, but political parties remain rooted in the comforts of pre realignment certainties. This has resulted in voters repeatedly voting for change and politicians repeatedly failing to deliver.
This would be a concern if failure to deliver happened in a relatively benign environment. It’s catastrophic when the UK is facing the kind of multiple challenges that they haven’t faced for generations.
The need for a politics to match the challenges of the age
It’s all well and good for politicians to sing the familiar songs, but repeated electoral events have suggested that voters want and expect more than that. Promises of change need to be delivered. Transforming decades of decline and stagnation needs more than status quo ideas.
The realignment has, in part, risen because of the sheer scale of the challenges facing the country and the failure of politics to come close to addressing those challenges.
Economic growth, productivity growth and real wages have been stagnating since before the Great Financial Crisis and our politics is lacking any substantial ideas about how to address this decline and stagnation. Britain faces sliding down the growth league table of nations, reducing money to spend on the public services needed in an ageing society. This is happening just at the time that many elements of public services have been clearly stretched.
Fundamental elements of future growth are also lacking. We have consistently failed to build the infrastructure needed to rocket-boost growth, most recently evidenced by the depressing capitulation over HS2. The startling success of the Elizabeth Line is a reminder of the difference infrastructure can make if only we overcome our national reluctance to build almost anything.
The number of new startups are at a six year low. UK venture capital isn’t sufficient to provide enough risk-bearing capital, particularly to those areas that need it the most, with UK start-ups much less likely to scale up than their US equivalents. As Monzo founder, Tom Blomfield, noted the UK also has much less of a risk-friendly mentality than the United States. We have historically been unable to translate research excellence to economic application and this continues to be a hindrance on growth. Private and state driven R&D (often a great driver of productivity) trails countries like the United States, Korea and Germany. The chart below shows how the UK leads the world in research but falls behind other countries during the “value creation” development phase:
As Blomfield notes:
British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10… it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers. Oxford is ranked 50th in the world, while Cambridge is 61st. Imperial just makes the list at #100… I think it’s something more deep-rooted - in the UK, the ideas of taking risk and of brazen, commercial ambition are seen as negatives.
The UK is also the most regionally unequal country in Europe, with the lack of economic dynamism in many parts of the country hindering our ability to grow. And these regional inequalities go beyond economics - health and educational outcomes. Britain’s skills system is still not adequate to producing young people with the skills to prosper in a high-tech economy and we’re still not thinking enough about how these skills will need to develop further in the future.
Our past sin when we made the flawed choice to deindustrialise more than any other major economy has also caught up with us, meaning that we don’t produce enough as an economy, don’t benefit from the productivity and R&D boost of a large manufacturing sector and lack essential resilience. The scale of our deindustrialisation has also worsened our inability to turn scientific discovery into economic value. Andy Grove famously said that outsourcing of manufacturing leads to an eventual loss of the benefits of economic innovation.
This growth crisis is also compounded other severe challenges - notably the fading of the social contract. Crime and anti-social behaviour is rife in too many places, with crimes such as shoplifting effectively being decriminalised. Social bonds and the social fabric also seem to be weakening, with social norms seemingly fraying, with streets scarred by seemingly small things like litter, spitting and boarded up buildings and the declining social norms being emphasised by the playing of loud music on public transport. See this great piece on the topic by my old colleague, Neil O’Brien, on the topic.
Years of well-meaning but catastrophic policy, emphasising differences, not what brings us together, have been compounded by record waves of mass immigration in recent years, straining social bonds, but also putting pressure on housing and public services. All, it must be stressed, without public consent.
Crucially, as a nation we still haven’t considered how the UK can harness the technological revolution to our advantage. Yes, we have world class research institutions, have produced extraordinary AI labs like Deepmind and are European leaders in AI start-ups. But how are we going to convert this to improving national prosperity in the future? How will we ensure that AI and quantum knowledge leads to the UK bucking its failure to develop a trillion pound tech firm? Beyond broad generalities, how do we ensure that British young people have the skills to succeed in technologies that will dominate in five and ten years time? And how can we ensure our workforce constantly update their skills to be world-leading? There’s too little evidence that our politics is taking these questions seriously - instead seeing tech as something to regulate and innovation as something to fear.
Breaking out of the interregnum
Despite occasional rhetorical flourishes, British politics seems paralysed by the gravity of the moment. It’s too distracted by trivialities and peripheral issues, with a lack of focus on addressing the issues contributing to national stagnation and decline. British voters deserve a politics that goes beyond trivia, extravagant promises and tactical shifts. Rather than a “narrative”, Britain needs policies and a governing plan to break out of the cycle of decline.
To break out of the interregnum period, politicians need to develop a coherent project that is explicitly focused on reversing decline. It would be a project that seeks reindustrialisation, a more vibrant and geographically dispersed private sector and takes tangible steps to rebuild social capital. I’ve set out some of these steps in Little Platoons and The New Snobbery and will be setting out more on here in the months to come.
The potential to develop such a project is there for all major parties. Sadly, all major parties seem to have lost interest in how to genuinely create growth, how to tackle regional inequality, how to restore social cohesion and how to reindustrialise (arguably an obsession with net zero is further deindustrialising the economy).
We’re still wading through the interregnum between the pre realignment politics and what might emerge as the post realignment settlement. This newsletter will aim to keep focus on issues that drove the realignment, consider what that means for politics and policy and propose what needs to be done to break out of that interregnum and properly face the major challenges the country faces.
I hope that you keep reading and spread the word. Please also email me with any thoughts and suggestions.