After a decade of austerity, frozen productivity, a sluggish economy, and a parliament paralysed by infighting, it’s fair enough that most British voters want something different, and think the country is on the wrong track.
For some, their idea of change took shape during the Brexit referendum. For a forgotten majority, desperate for a new politics, the referendum became the only avenue for their frustration. But those who claim 2019 will be ‘The Brexit Election’ miss the point.
Brexit dominates the news, but it doesn’t dominate people’s lives. In an attempt to harness the frustration, Britain’s politicians have looked too much at Brexit, and too little at the causes of Brexit. The referendum may not be the defining issue many believe it to be.
The Conservatives went into the 2017 election promising the hardest of European exits. They lost their majority. When voters went to the polls, they weren’t thinking about far away concepts of leave or remain. Instead their vote was determined by shorter waiting times at the hospital, higher pay and better conditions at work, and more police on the streets.
The issues that affect people’s lives are the issues they vote on. Brexit is important and divisive, but you can’t eat Brexit for dinner, you can’t pay your power bill with Brexit, and you can’t take your kids to Brexit when they’re sick.
Instead, Britain has been crying out for a revolution. Its people want stronger unions, more public investment and better social services. As a recent YouGov poll shows, they are happy to see the rich pay more through taxes on wealth and income, and for an industrialist state to back winners in the economy. They support nationalisation of key economic infrastructure, and new bold spending programmes to make people better off.
For all Boris Johnson attempts to cauterise the wound, he will never be the candidate to deliver the revolution. For every pound promised for police or hospitals, Labour can promise two. When it’s time to save the NHS, voters will never trust the party that opposed its creation. The Conservatives are too embedded in a flawed economic ideology to deliver what voters demand - in labour law, social services, tax policy and antitrust regulation. The revolution Britain is longing for can only be led by Labour.
But the tragedy for Labour is that Jeremy Corbyn is uniquely ill-equipped to deliver the revolution the British people seek. Where Brexit was about returning power to Britain, Corbyn and his allies have viewed the British state with distrust. He has spread doubt about a Russian terror attack on British soil last year, opposed NATO, and Britain’s nuclear deterrent. He doubts the international order built under Clement Attlee, Michael Joseph Savage, Harry Truman and other left-wing governments around the world. Worst of all, his movement has been plagued by systematic anti-Jewish racism, making him unpalatable to anti-racists.
Where the public longs for reinvestment in rural Britain, Corbyn’s leadership team is led by Islington intellectuals. Debates about neoliberalism play well in the world of academia, not the struggling middle class. Universalist programs like free university tuition and a £58 billion payout for middle class pensioners tell working people that a Corbyn government is more concerned with helping the well off. His is precisely the wrong voice to reclaim working Britain.
The change Britain wants is the change Labour is supposed to provide. The mood has shifted and there is public support for a programme of intervention far more radical than any since the post-war Attlee government. There is now only one obstacle: a Labour Party incapable of speaking to the working class.
Now could be the moment of a new, radical, economic agenda in Britain. Labour has been right to move on from the cautious incrementalism of prior decades, and toward a message of transformational economic change. But Corbyn doesn’t offer that. His world view misses what fundamentally cuts through to voters, and dilutes a message of working class restoration with petty fights about the liberal internationalism and soaking the rich.
Despite it all, Labour is still moving up in the polls. It still has a chance of dislodging the abysmal Tory government. When voters talk about healthcare, social services, and a shot at a better job, they know the government doesn’t speak for them. They just know the opposition doesn’t either.