#WTH is going on with UK's Tories?
The WSJ's Gerry Baker joins us to talk the conservative implosion & lessons for the US
Three things from this week’s pod with Gerry Baker…
In some ways, Boris and Liz got what they deserved.
Post-Brexit Tories are like the post-Trump GOP — not your dad’s conservatives
The Tories may be terrible, but Labour is still worse
The fast moving dumpster fire that is British politics in 2022 has made for appalling spectacle. But the shenanigans behind the fire are even more ridiculous. With some of the most draconian Covid restrictions in the world, Boris Johnson thought pizza and drinks parties at Number 10 was cool. His successor, Liz Truss, believed that massive tax cuts and energy subsidies would be swell without discussing them with her party, or socializing voters to the idea.
Were the pizzas reason enough to offload Boris? The conservative ideas enough to dump Truss? Possibly not, in and of themselves. But the Tories have been in power for 12 years, and the honeymoon has been over… for a while. Perhaps the party has woken up, because after the Boris/pizza leadership and the Iron Lady/ Truss pantomime, the Tories are serving up some spinach — boring, reliable, no drama. That’s Rishi Sunak.
More interesting is the conundrum that faces the party post-Brexit. Tory voters are no longer the familiar, staid low-tax-small-government-strong-defense types. They’re more rural, less internationalist, suspicious of free trade, fine with big government and leery of big business. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s the challenge for the GOP. Who’s going to meld the old-school conservative wing of the conservatives with the new school populists? Good question. Could be Sunak. Here in the United States, it’s anyone’s guess.
HIGHLIGHTS
So… what the hell is going on?
Baker: The only rational and reasonable response to events that are unfolding in Britain is one of complete incomprehension and perplexity.
Is this all Boris’ fault?
Baker: It's astonishing to remember that Boris Johnson was elected with a huge majority just less than three years ago, a Conservative majority of more than 80 seats. That the largest majority for a Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher… So then what goes wrong? Well, first of all, obviously the pandemic happens and it all plunges all governments into a certain amount of chaos and uncertainty about how to respond. But in Boris Johnson's particular case, of course, Boris, for all his many, many political talents, is not a man who's known for particularly high standards of behavior in terms of his being trustworthy and in terms of his personal life… So they kicked him out.
OK, so what was wrong with Liz Truss?
Baker: I think what we've seen over the last few months is the fruit of picking someone who is so plainly and utterly incapable of high office really. This is someone whose grasp dramatically exceeded her reach and was just completely out of her depth. …Now, the deeper policy issue at stake is she comes in, she wants to do a radical policy change, which many of us conservatives would support and agree with in principle: cutting taxes, a massive cut in taxes, really bolstering the economy, trying to get the economy growing. The problem, Marc, is that the timing was terrible. She chose to do that at exactly the moment, A, when inflation is rampant in Britain... inflation is even higher in the UK than it is here... and, B, at a time and in a manner that gave no indication of any sort of understanding of any sort of fiscal prudence at all.
Then she did a completely 180 degree turn literally within a week, as she was required to, fired her Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then said she was going to preside over a policy which was the precise opposite of the policy that she said she'd been elected to lead… you could not get further from Margaret Thatcher, despite her ambitions to be another Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher was prudent. As well as being radical and, at times, ambition and bold, she was also prudent and pragmatic, and this was not pragmatism or prudence, it was just recklessness.
Truss is out, Sunak is in, but is the circus over?
Baker: Look, the larger picture here is of a party in shambles and a government in disarray, of a party that's kind of lost its way completely ideologically, politically, in terms of the leadership, in terms of the people who run it, in terms of the people who are there. It's been in power for 12 years, which is probably too long.
I do think Rishi Sunak will offer a degree of stability and at least consistency.
Lessons for the United States?
Baker: Here's the deeper issue that I was talking about and why it has, I think, such resonance and importance across the pond here in the United States. The fundamental problem underneath all this turmoil and the characters and the personalities and their various qualities or lack of qualities, the fundamental problem, Dany, is the party is continuing to deal with the implications of the Brexit referendum, in particular the implications of the populism that gave rise to Brexit.
There are many, many differences between the UK and the United States, but there was this very important similarity between Brexit and Donald Trump, which is that the instinct of people who voted for Brexit and the type of people who voted for Brexit was not dissimilar to the type of people who voted for Donald Trump. That is, they were not traditional Conservative voters, just as not that many Trump voters were not traditional Republican voters.
What happened with Brexit was you had a lot of working class voters who very strongly supported the idea of cultural nationalism, who liked the idea of an independent United Kingdom, who wanted control over immigration. They were furious about the uncontrolled immigration that was coming in from the European Union. They wanted to restore the nation's borders. They wanted to assert national sovereignty, and they wanted to leave the European Union. Very significant echoes there with Trump voters in the United States, both in terms of their social and cultural interests, and over policies like trade and immigration and things like that.
So Johnson pulled a Trump in the UK three years ago?
Baker: Johnson, who was able to deliver Brexit, won that election [and] got that big majority in large part because he got the support of so many of those kind of voters, people who had never voted Conservative in their lives but who saw the Conservative Party as the party that was delivering Brexit, was getting Britain out of the EU, was going to take control of immigration, was going to take a tougher line in international trade and things like this. This is what they wanted. They wanted a populist nationalism and the Conservative Party stood for it.
Then the Conservatives had to somehow marry that with their traditional, as you'd described it, quite right, their traditional belief in smaller government, tax cutting, open markets, free trade, all of those things that Conservatives had long stood for on both sides of the Atlantic.
So conservatism is gone?
Baker: The Liz Trusses of the world, backed by many people again of your philosophy, said, "Well, this isn't very Conservative. We're expanding government. We're expanding taxes." Obviously it was exacerbated by the pandemic. "This is ridiculous. This isn't Conservatism. This is something completely different. We want a radical, deregulated, low tax, Singapore-on-Thames,"
So what is Sunak’s job #1?
Baker: I think the first thing to do to grow the economy is to just get inflation under control. Right now, the UK has, and in the next year I think the US will have stagflation, I don't think it will thankfully be on the 1970s scale. But the UK economy almost certainly contracted in this current course, in the last quarter, and probably in this quarter too, and the UK inflation rate is over 10 percent.
Is it Labour’s turn?
Baker: I think the answer's no, because again, I think letting Labour in right now... Labour would win in a landslide, and in a way that would not only be a landslide and enable labor to do anything it wants, but actually would also probably mean at least 10 years of Labour government. And again, Labour is thank God not the party that it was under Jeremy Corbyn, but it's still a progressive party subscribing to all the woke nostrums of our time and, you know, committed to huge increases in public spending and some nationalization and all that kind of stuff. So I think that would just be a disaster for the country.
I'd rather incompetent conservative than competent socialist.
Full transcript here!
SHOWNOTES
How Tumultuous Forces of Brexit Divided U.K.’s Conservative Party (New York Times, October 22, 2022)
Can Britain’s Economy Be Saved? (Foreign Policy, October 21, 2022)
Boris Johnson drops bid to return to power in U.K. leaving Rishi Sunak with strong lead (Washington Post, October 23, 2022)
What Happened to Liz Truss Can’t Happen Here (The Atlantic, October 20, 2022)
What is the future of the Conservative Party? (Verso Books, October 20, 2022)
New Premier Sunak Warns UK Faces ‘Profound Economic Challenge’ (Bloomberg, October 24, 2022)
Rishi Sunak to become Britain’s next prime minister (AP, October 24, 2022)
Rishi Sunak Wins Vote to Become U.K.’s Next Prime Minister After Liz Truss Resigns (The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2022)
Richer than the royals: Win puts Rishi Sunak’s wealth in the spotlight (The Washington Post, October 24, 2022)
Opinion: Britain has a new prime minister – that no one in Britain voted for (CNN, October 24, 2022)
Investors calm as Rishi Sunak wins race for prime minister (BBC, October 24, 2022)
How the UK political crisis affects the opposition Labour party? (Aljazeera, October 24, 2022)
Keir Starmer twitter:
· “After 12 years of Tory failure, the British people deserve so much better than this revolving door of chaos.”
Liz Truss’s Tax-Cut Plan Meets the Big-Government Ratchet (WSJ, Gerry Baker, October 3, 2022)payroll-tax increase and a planned corporate tax increase, and elimination of a 45% income tax rate – all reducing the top bracket to 40%