The Decibel - Why Brits are so tired of the Conservative Party

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

The U.K.’s Conservative Party is in deep trouble. Britons are heading for a general election on July 4 and polls indicate the ruling Tories are headed for electoral disaster. From Brexit, to COVID a...nd betting scandals, financial panic, and a nation-wide joke involving a head of lettuce – voters appear ready to oust the deeply unpopular party led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.Paul Waldie, The Globe’s Europe correspondent, explains the stakes of the U.K. election and why a seismic change is looking likely in British politics.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at thedecibel@globeandmail.com

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Earlier today, I spoke with His Majesty the King to request the dissolution of Parliament. The King has granted this request and we will have a general election on the 4th of July. At the end of May, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the country was heading into a general election. Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future. To decide whether we want to build on the progress we have made or risk going back to square one with no plan and no certainty. This election got off to a bizarre start. Rishi Sunak announced it outside of Downing Street as per tradition. Paul Waldie is a Globe's Europe correspondent.
Starting point is 00:00:41 There was a pouring rainstorm when he did that and there was a protester screaming and playing loud music, so he was drowned out. So while he was trying to hold tradition, it ended up being probably the worst launch to a campaign we've ever seen. The timing of this election came as a surprise to a lot of people, because it's a gamble for the ruling Conservative Party. A gamble that might not pay off. I don't think there's a campaign in world history that's gone worse for a political party
Starting point is 00:01:09 than this one has for them. Today, Paul is on the show to explain why so many in the UK are tired of the Tories and how this election could be a seismic shift for British politics. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Paul, thanks so much for being here today.
Starting point is 00:01:33 Glad to. So, Paul, why did Prime Minister Rishi Sunak call this election in the first place? What happened? That's the big question. You know, everybody had been expecting him to wait until the fall to call an election. Now, he had to call a vote by January 2025. So in some sense, he was running out of time. But what he had been telling people for months was he envisioned an election in the second half of 2024. And everybody took that to mean the fall. That would give the economy some time to recover. That would give inflation more time to start falling, which are the two things that he
Starting point is 00:02:05 really wanted to campaign on. So he surprised everybody by announcing towards the end of May that the election would be on July 4th. He claims he did this because the economy was showing signs of turning around and he wanted to go to the people and show them that his government could continue that recovery. But boy, a lot of people were totally caught off guard and including in his own party. Yeah, you mentioned the word surprise there. And maybe partly because the economy is the reason why they called this election. But can you give me a sense, like,
Starting point is 00:02:35 do we know about the thinking behind this decision, given that it was so surprising? We don't. And in fact, clearly, he caught even his cabinet off guard you know he only announced it to them hours before calling the election there were no leaks and westminster's notorious for leaking everything none of this ever came out beforehand so it really must have been his decision there had been some suggestion months ago that maybe he would try and catch particularly the reform party off guard by calling an early election, maybe catch the opposition off guard. But it was a huge roll of the dice. Okay. And you mentioned that this election will be held July 4th, which is right around the corner. Broadly here, what's at stake in this election? Like how significant is it for the UK and beyond?
Starting point is 00:03:21 Well, I think for the UK, it's real significant, more to the fact that the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years. They've gone through three leaders in the last couple of years. So time has really run out on them. So I think all the polls are showing there's going to be a change in government. That's going to be significant because the Labour Party, which is almost certain to win this election, has not been in power since the Tony Blair era, and in fact, has only been in power a handful of times in the last century. So they're not accustomed to winning elections at all. So it's going to mark a pretty significant change from a party that has been in power for quite a while to a fairly new crew of ministers and a whole bunch of people that really
Starting point is 00:04:01 don't have a lot of experience in government. So I think that's going to be a big change. I don't think from a policy angle, there's an awful lot to separate the conservatives from the Labour Party. Keir Starmer has really tried to bring his party into the more middle ground, but there's going to be new people in charge, and that's going to be significant. And as you mentioned, Tony Blair was PM from the late 90s until 2007. So just to give us an idea of how long that's been. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has only been in power since October 2022. Can you just remind us who he is and how people perceive him as a leader? Well, yeah, Rishi Sunak is he's been in the Conservative Party for a little while, not a long time. He's not one of these sort of long time veterans. He was a leave supporter during the referendum on Brexit, which sort of sat him well with a big sort of the right-wing faction of the
Starting point is 00:04:49 party. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer during the pandemic. He ran for the leadership after basically helping to oust Boris Johnson. And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. But them's the brakes. He was one of the orchestrators for Boris Johnson being kicked out as leader. Then he ran for the leadership in the summer of 2022. He lost to Liz Truss. Liz Truss was only prime minister for about 45 days before the party got rid of her after her mid-budget caused chaos in the financial markets. And then they just turned to Richie Sunak and put him in place, even though he'd come second.
Starting point is 00:05:28 They had no leadership vote, nothing. So he came into office in October 2022. He's tried to present himself as a new chapter in the conservative party. But after the Liz Trust debacle and salad with 14 years of government, it has been very, very difficult for him to get out from under that. And then when you see the way he's conducted this campaign, it really makes you question his political smarts at all, period. He may be a fine administrator and operator, but he's been a hopeless campaigner. And that could be a reflection also of his background.
Starting point is 00:06:00 He, before entering politics, he was in wealth management. He worked at Goldman Sachs. He's very wealthy. His wife- Richard and the King king, I hear he's very, very, very wealthy. He's the wealthiest prime minister in British history. You know, but he does try and come across as an ordinary man. He doesn't hide away from the fact that he did attend elite schools and he did go to Stanford and he did work for Goldman Sachs. He tries to turn that around and say, you know, look, me and my parents worked hard and were successful and other people can do the same. So in a sense, he's embraced it as best he can. I don't think he's a he's not exactly the most personable person in the world, but he
Starting point is 00:06:32 is earnest and tries hard and again, is a good administrator, but he is a hopeless politician. There was also this interview that Sunak did on ITV News where he was asked about his wealth and how he relates to voters. What happened there? Well, I mean, he's been asked in the past, and he's kind of, there's been all kinds of clips of him saying he doesn't really have any working class friends. And when I've talked to voters here, in different writings I've gone to, you know, they do say it's very hard for them to feel that he really appreciates what people are feeling here. Because like Canada, the UK is going through a cost of living crisis. People are seeing their price of everything they buy go up,
Starting point is 00:07:09 even though inflation has gone down. That just means the price rises aren't as fast as they were before. But everything is still expensive. People are finding it really difficult to make ends meet. And they look at him and go, well, can you really relate to us? And I think that's been a big hurdle for him. But really, there's been so many other factors that he just has been unable, A, to control, or B, has just made a mess of that have just made things worse for him. I think in the interview also, he kind of mentioned that, you know, he also had things that he didn't have in childhood. Like he didn't have Sky TV.
Starting point is 00:07:38 He was basically asked, had he ever gone without anything in his childhood? And of course, he said, oh, yes, I have. I didn't have Sky TV, which sounded like television. So what sort of things had to be sacrificed? Lots of things. All sorts of things. Like lots of people, there'll be all sorts of things that I would have wanted as a kid that I couldn't have, right? Famously, Sky TV. That was something that we never had growing up, actually. Which caused an awful lot of mocking. I mean, again, I think some of that criticism has been a little bit unfair because, yes, you know, his parents were, his mother was a nurse, his father was a doctor, and he did really
Starting point is 00:08:14 well. You know, let's face it, he went to Stanford, he got himself a postgraduate degree, he got into the financial world, and he did well for himself. And I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's made it difficult for him to present himself as kind of a common man, which he has tried to do. And it looks pretty awkward. How would you describe what his campaign has been like? Horrendous. It's been a disaster and it's been self-inflicted, you know, so he calls the election in a rainstorm, which was bad enough. And of course, all of the images were, you know, Rishi Sunak in a drenched suit calling the election. It's not the way you want to start an election campaign. Then on D-Day, he skipped out of the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy early to go back for a television interview. And
Starting point is 00:08:56 that caused a huge uproar because D-Day in the UK is a very, very special, sacred event. And you don't walk out here. Stammer stayed, you know, and Sunak left when all of the world leaders were gathering. It was a massive screw up. He had to apologize. And that lingered for days in the press. Then he went to Wales and he said, you know, he was at a factory and he asked the workers if they're really excited about the Euro Cup in Germany. And of course, Wales didn't qualify.
Starting point is 00:09:23 So nobody was very thrilled to hear him say that. Then now the party is embroiled in a huge betting scandal. Two conservative candidates, two senior party officials are being investigated for placing bets on when the election would be called. The allegation is that they knew a couple of days before Rishi Sunak made the surprise announcement that it would be July 4th. They put some bets on that. And of course, at that time, you wouldn't want a lot of money because nobody would have bet the election being called for July 4th. So he has distanced himself from the two candidates and said that the party will no longer support them. But it has just been a disaster, one disaster after another. And these two scandals, D-Day and the betting scandal, have just gone on for days and days and days.
Starting point is 00:10:08 Sunak has also made some controversial campaign promises. Can you tell me about those? Well, I mean, one of the promises he's made was this national service thing that's gone over like a lead balloon. What he kind of announced very early in the campaign was this idea that teenagers, 18 year olds, would have to either spend a year in the military or do weekends of volunteer work. And he thought this would be a way of sort of showing, you know, that they're being tough on these, you know, woke kids that aren't working or just kind of lazy. But in fact, it's been turned around against him by many people who said, look, you know, our children need to work. They need to do other things. They can't really be spending a lot of time doing this. The military said it won't work. They don't have the resources to handle a whole bunch of 18 year olds coming in for military service for a year. So and then, of course, he got into this whole issue of, well, what happens if they don't show up? What are you going to do? And then he started talking about revoking driving licenses and revoking student loans. And that caused a
Starting point is 00:10:55 whole other kerfuffle. So it wasn't really thought out very carefully. Maybe it was a good idea on paper, but it hasn't been the best sort of campaign kickoff policy announcement. So things are not looking good for the Conservative Party overall. They have 365 seats right now. Do we have any sense of what the seats will be after the election? Are there any predictions here? Oh, yeah, there's lots. They do a lot of modeling here. And some of the models have been pretty bleak. A couple of them, they call them MRP models. What they do is they take a whole bunch of polling data, thousands and thousands and thousands of voters, and then they map out what that would translate to into seats. And some of them project the Conservatives falling to something in the order
Starting point is 00:11:37 of 50 seats, maybe 100 seats max, Labour getting 400 plus seats, maybe even 500 seats. It'll be, could be one of the biggest majorities ever in British history. The Reform Party probably is not going to win more than one or two or three or four seats simply because their vote is spread too thin. But nonetheless, you know, the Conservatives could be vying with the Liberal Democrats for second place. They are expected to get about 50 odd seats, which, again, are going to come directly out of some of these conservative writings in southern England. So yeah, the conservatives are looking at almost a 1993 Canada style debacle with Kim Campbell, not quite as bad, but certainly in British terms, almost as bad. What about the voters here, especially the ones in conservative writings? How are they feeling about all of this? They are feeling confused, lost, disillusioned. I mean, as much
Starting point is 00:12:26 as Labour is ahead in the polls, it's a tenuous lead because if when you talk to a lot of voters, and I've been out here talking to voters and Liz Truss's riding and some other strong conservative ridings, the conservatives will tell you they don't want to vote conservative this time, but they don't know who to vote for. And even people who are not that sold on the conservatives anyway aren't that sure who to vote for. And there's kind of an overall disillusionment with all political parties and certainly the two established parties. So it's not necessarily a given that Labour is going to get all the support. Some people are going to reform because they just want to protest. Some people are looking at Green, looking at independents, looking at other
Starting point is 00:13:02 candidates. So there is a huge amount of discontent out there. And I'm not sure Labour has tapped into all of it, but the Conservatives are feeling the brunt of it by far. We'll be right back. There have been four Conservative prime ministers in the last five years, and of course there have been also a ton of scandals. Can you just kind of give us a bit of a recap of what happened in that time? Oh wow, where do you start, right?
Starting point is 00:13:34 So you go back to David Cameron, 2016 in the Brexit referendum. So he rolled the dice and called a referendum on Brexit and lost, and then he quit. I expect to go to the palace and offer my resignation. So we'll have a new prime minister in that building behind me by Wednesday evening. Then Theresa May came in and could not manage Brexit, how to get it done, how to get it finished and she had an election in 2017 and barely won a minority government so they got rid of her. I do so with no ill will but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love. Brought in Boris Johnson, he tried to ram Brexit through Parliament in a deal and it turned into a total fiasco. But he called a snap election in 2019 and won a huge majority basically by telling people, look, we've had enough of this.
Starting point is 00:14:24 We're going to get it done. We're going to get a deal with the EU. We're going to get out of the EU. And that actually happened in 2020. So to Johnson's credit, he got the country out of out of the EU. He got a deal of some sort that's still not working great, but he got a deal. He got the country out. He got the celebration. But then COVID hit and he was the wrong prime minister to have during the COVID pandemic. Lots of scandals about parties at Downing Street. He was getting fines. Partygate.
Starting point is 00:14:50 Partygate scandals. This was, of course, as everyone remembers in the pandemic, there were all kinds of restrictions and no social gatherings of these kinds of things. And what happened was Downing Street, the prime minister's office, was having all kinds of parties and Boris Johnson was attending a bunch of them. And of course, this all came out and he received fines from the, you know, tickets from the police. So that didn't go well. They got rid of Boris Johnson. And then the members turned to Liz Truss because the Conservative Party membership is much more right wing than the Conservative Party caucus.
Starting point is 00:15:23 And they voted in Liz Truss and that turned into a huge disaster. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party. And then they installed Richard Sunak. But by then the damage was done. So once you had scandals and a financial meltdown under Liz Truss, it was very hard for Sunak to dig himself out of that hole. My memory of Liz Truss was the head of lettuce. That was a big thing, that she didn't last longer than a head of lettuce. This was, yeah, this was a tabloid paper
Starting point is 00:15:56 put a head of lettuce on a web camera and said who lasts longer than a head of lettuce and Truss and the lettuce lasted longer. Scandals aside though, how do people feel the conservatives have done with things like health care, infrastructure, cost of living? Bad, bad. I mean, you know, the health care, particularly the NHS. And now I'm not sure anyone in power could have done much better. But waiting lists here are very long. The health care system is coming out of the pandemic. Obviously, the health care system was going to be in crisis
Starting point is 00:16:23 and it's it's really gotten worse. So that's a big issue. Immigration is a huge issue here as well. The small boat crossings with asylum seekers from France is a big, big issue. Sunak has tried to take a tough stance on that by announcing a kind of a strange policy to send them off to Rwanda. Those two issues have kind of been front and center. And then, of course, you have the cost of living crisis and interest rates and everything else, which the government only has limited control over. But again, Sunak has to wear all of that and none of it has gone well. So he really can't point to anything other than inflation going down, which is great, but it doesn't really do a lot for you politically.
Starting point is 00:16:57 He can't really point to a lot of successes. You talked about how the Conservative Party was responsible for Brexit. David Cameron held the referendum. Boris Johnson got the deal through for the UK to leave the EU back in 2020. So four years out, though, has Brexit delivered what people in the UK hoped it would? You know, it's hard to say. I think economists are, you know, the jury's out on that simply because the pandemic worked everything.
Starting point is 00:17:21 It's very hard to get a handle on what is caused by that pandemic, what is caused by Brexit or what, you know, what's happened as a result because the pandemic sort of skewed things so much. I think, though, if you ask people who voted leave, they don't think Brexit has been delivered at all for them. It's one of the big challenges Rishi Sunak faces. A lot of people thought that Britain would get control over its borders and immigration would stop. And in fact, immigration levels have gone up. I think people on the remain side view Brexit as a disaster because it's been harder to trade with Europe. Certainly Northern Ireland still has issues in terms of trading with Ireland. So I think I'm not so sure that if you ran the referendum again,
Starting point is 00:17:58 the result would be astoundingly different, but maybe a slight change. That's interesting. And of course, one of the key figures behind Brexit is Nigel Farage. And he's back in this election. So can you remind us who he is and what his policies are? Because he is quite a controversial figure. He's a controversial, colorful figure who has certainly livened up this campaign. I give him that. Yeah, he's been around for 30 years. He led the charge against the EU for decades. I mean, he was, you know, 30 years ago championing to get Britain out of the EU. He got himself elected to the European Parliament where he joined the kind of far right group there and really agitated to get Britain out of the EU. So when Britain did vote in 2016 to leave, it was largely credited to Farage and the efforts he'd made over the years to bring
Starting point is 00:18:45 this debate to the forefront. He kind of stepped away from active politics in 2020 after, you know, Britain formally did leave the EU, went into broadcasting, became a big pal of Donald Trump. And then but he did still kind of dabble a little bit. He helped create this new party called the Reform Party, which is patterned after the Reform Party of Canada. He draws a lot of inspiration from the Reform Party of Canada and Preston Manning, and how it took over the Conservative Party back in the 1990s. He wants to do the same thing here. When the election was called, interestingly enough, he was not going to run. He said he didn't have time, he couldn't get his campaign organized, and he was half interested in working
Starting point is 00:19:22 on Donald Trump's campaign in the US. However, he changed his mind after a few days, and he's now running and causing no kinds of problems for the conservatives, because since he announced his decision to run and to campaign for reform across the country, their support has gone up sharply, and they are now closing in on the conservatives. So that's another kind of big miscalculation that Sunak made. A lot of people are saying, had Sunak waited until the fall, Farage would have been off helping Trump with his election, wouldn't have been here leading the Reform Party, wouldn't have been causing the kind of problems that he's causing the conservatives now. But he is here, he is running, and he's on TV every single night. And he really has added a lot of color and a lot of
Starting point is 00:20:05 life to this campaign. What about the other parties, Paul? Like, what are we seeing from them in the run up to this election? Yeah, I mean, you know, that's a good point. The Liberal Democrats, of course, they're kind of this middle of the road party really got wiped out in 2019. I think they went down to about eight seats or something. They have run a very shrewd, smart campaign. They concentrate their resources in a select number of ridings in southern england now these also are ridings held by the conservatives but these are riding sort of in wealthier areas where the threat isn't on the left these people aren't going to vote labor and they're probably not going to vote reform but they see the liberal democrats as a huge option so modeling is showing them picking up something like 50 54 seats which
Starting point is 00:20:41 would be a massive breakthrough for them you know they haven't really done that well since 2010 when they formed a coalition with David Cameron. And then, of course, it all imploded for them because they got blamed for everything that went wrong and really never recovered from that until now. So now they've been very smart, very sure they don't waste their resources campaigning in parts of the country they have no hope in. They're very concentrated and it could prove to be very effective. And what about labor? Because you mentioned that they're having a quiet campaign.
Starting point is 00:21:08 Extremely quiet campaign. They're not saying anything in there. Their party platform has been very short on specifics. In fact, nothing new. It's only stuff that they've already announced. They're playing an extraordinarily safe. Keir Starmer does maybe one or two events a day, and they're very scripted, very programmed. And, you know, beyond the sort of television debates, which there are plenty here, he's been kept on a very tight leash, and they're just crossing their fingers to get to the finish line. So bring it back where we started this conversation, it does seem like the conservatives are in for a very tough election. So what does that mean for the party if that does end up happening?
Starting point is 00:21:49 Well, that's going to be the huge question. You know, first of all, it'll be down to how many sort of potential leadership candidates are left, because clearly Rishi Sunak won't be able to stick around. There's questions about whether he'll even win his own seat. So they're going to descend into another leadership battle. But they do have big figures in the party, Sula Braverman, Kemi Badenak, who are on the right of the party and they want to push the party more to the right. They want to almost merge with reform. You know, Suela Braverman has talked about bringing Nigel Farage into the Conservative Party. Nigel Farage has talked about taking over the Conservative Party but he wants to see it more as the Conservatives becoming the Reform Party. So there's going to be a huge fight. There's also a
Starting point is 00:22:22 large section of the Conservative Party, what they call one nation, what we would call red Tories that have won nothing to do with Farage and won nothing to do with Sula Braverman. So they're going to be in a real fight over their soul and what they are and how they go forward. And I think a lot of this is going to depend on how many sort of right wingers win on July 4th and how many one nation conservatives win on July 4th. But yeah, they're going to have an awful, awful battle about who they are and identifying what they are going forward. Just lastly, Paul, is there a broader takeaway here if the Conservatives do end up losing so badly? I think there is. And I think there's real lessons here for Canada and for the Liberal Party. They need to look seriously at that by-election in Toronto, because that's exactly what happened to Sunak here in the UK.
Starting point is 00:23:06 He started losing by-elections in ridings that they'd held forever. And it was just a sure sign that the party's fortunes were really tanking. Now, unlike the Liberal Party in Canada, the Conservatives here tend to get rid of their leaders very quickly if they don't think they're going to win elections. So who knows what will happen there. But the parallels are very similar. Sunak began losing by-elections and is now facing potentially losing the whole thing. Paul, thank you so much for being here. This has been really interesting. Glad to. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our intern is Kelsey Arnett. Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer,
Starting point is 00:23:51 and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.

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