Impatience: killer of governments

Explaining our electoral death spiral...

The most consequential outcomes of last week’s elections appear to be the fall of two administrations – the end of Welsh Labour’s 100-year rule, and Keir Starmer’s (significantly shorter) time in Downing Street.

We don’t know how quickly Starmer will fall, but his obituaries are already being written by dozens of ChatGPT-wielding Labour MPs. It’s difficult – nigh impossible – to see how he survives for any amount of time while almost 100 of his backbenchers, and reportedly several Cabinet ministers, want him gone.

However, while Streeting, Burnham and Rayner plot their Downing Street decorations – and Plaid Cymru storm the Senedd – they shouldn’t get too comfortable in their new surroundings.

To explain why, we only have to reach back into fairly recent political history.

Less than two years ago, Starmer strolled into office with a landslide majority. There was talk of Labour planning for at least two terms. That complacency quickly morphed into arrogance, which bred mistakes. The winter fuel allowance debacle was an act of unsurpassed self-sabotage. Starmer and Rachel Reeves thought they had banked enough political goodwill from the general election to pass an unpopular yet (in their eyes) necessary policy. They were badly mistaken.

Their performance in the polls in July 2024 blinded them to one of the laws of modern politics: voters hate politicians; they’re disillusioned and despondent with their rulers and will accept any excuse to turn against them.

I’m not in the habit of sympathising with politicians – my job is to scrutinise and investigate them – but I recognise they have an almost impossible job in current circumstances.

Namely, voters have exceptionally, historically high expectations of their leaders, are impatient for change after decades of economic stagnation, spiralling inequality and rolling corruption scandals, and are unwilling to give any politician the benefit of the doubt.

Their expectations have been set by major (and largely successful) government interventions that have shielded them from global crises. The decision to furlough people during Covid – alongside a raft of other protective measures – and to subsidise their energy bills during the onset of the Ukraine war, reframed how voters see the state.

After years of politicians telling people the country is broke, suddenly the government discovered not one but two magic money trees, shelling out billions to Brits – with few questions asked – to insulate them from hardship.

Voters consequently look at the problems engulfing them and their communities – stubbornly low wages, major health disparities, a dysfunctional social care system – and ask why this same fiscal wand can’t be waved in the direction of these daily blights.

Commentators often claim that voters are happy to elect the likes of Reform – a radical party that would shred the UK statute book – because of their overwhelming anger with the political establishment. The public is happy to burn it all down, the theory goes.

I think the reality is slightly different. People are enraged at successive generations of politicians who appear to have prioritised their own interests – and the profits of corporate predators – above the common good. But despite this, people think that fundamental public services will survive through wars, pandemics, and political convulsions. They believe the government will provide a backstop – a safety net – regardless of which party they vote for.

This has produced an electoral complacency – you may even call it a form of entitlement – among voters, which has driven them to support populist, slash-and-burn politicians. This is because they have made the calculation – the extremely risky calculation – that the arsonists will only set fire to the bits of the government that they dislike.

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This all means politicians are afforded a meagre grace period to implement their ideas – especially given the vast scale of the policy challenges confronting us – before voters condemn them as a lost cause and flee to political pastures new.

I’m not inclined to blame people for their choices at the ballot box. The condescension of Brexit voters was one of the ugliest features of the anti-Brexit movement, and I think working-class people in particular have been battered by Westminster for so long that I’m not surprised their heads are spinning. Political education in this country is also terrible, with people expected to learn about the complexities of democracy via some sort of cultural osmosis.

But there also needs to be a degree of collective responsibility for the country’s political decisions – especially when they repeatedly thrust us into further turmoil. After all, I imagine there are plenty of households across the land that are despairing at the chaos currently consuming the Labour Party, when those same voters turned against Starmer’s party last week.

I’m not saying they should have voted differently – Starmer has given plenty of reasons for Labour voters to change their colours – but we need to own our choices as a nation. We voted for chaos last Thursday, and we can’t complain when it engulfs our airwaves.

Britain needs to be more realistic about what politicians can and can’t achieve – and on what timescale. Jim Pickard from the Financial Times posted an illustrative example on Monday, noting: “it’s such [a] shibboleth of modern politics to blame politicians for failing town centres when the primary driver is – surely – all of us buying more and more stuff online.”

The “death of the high street” has become a motif of our national decline – and of Westminster’s inability to fix the problems of small town Britain. Yet the government is fighting against the immense headwind of our Amazon ordering habits.

Politicians of all stripes – not just populist parties – feed the self-defeating myth that they can fix everything, immediately. That narrative is a feature of opposition parties that have an incentive – particularly in the social media era, when simplistic trumps nuanced – to present the governing party as chronically incompetent.

But governments have also fed these illusions – including Starmer on Monday, who attempted to regain a semblance of political control by saying that “incremental change won’t cut it”.

By making this claim, Starmer is creating a rod not just for his own back, but every politician who follows in his wake. After five decades of upheaval – marked by Thatcherism, a financial crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid, Trump, and successive global conflicts – incremental change is the only viable option.

Even if the government chucked billions of pounds at a problem, 50 years of decay can’t be reversed overnight. Systemic change, of the sort demanded by voters, will take more than one election cycle – let alone two years in the job.

In this context, I’m unsure if it’s possible for any political party or leader to retain the support that carried them into office.

Governments seem to melt on impact, when their big promises – and the years-long programmes required to implement them – meet the all-consuming impatience of the British electorate.

For all his populist bombast, Farage won’t be able to escape this arithmetic if he becomes prime minister – especially given he’s already loathed by a broad cross-section of the British electorate.

More pressingly, it will be interesting to see if Plaid Cymru can retain its popularity with Reform yapping at its heels. In order to divert responsibility for a lack of urgent reform in Wales, I suspect incoming first minister Rhun ap Iorwerth will cast Westminster as the villain at every opportunity.

As former Welsh Labour representative Owain Williams wrote in the New Statesman over the weekend, Plaid will likely promote “a grievance narrative in which London gets the blame for everything”.

That particular trick isn’t available to the UK prime minister – especially in the post-Brexit era, when the country’s travails can no longer be blamed on EU bureaucrats (although The Telegraph does still give it a good go).

That leaves them in an unenviable – almost untenable – situation. As I’ve stated, Starmer has made plenty of mistakes. His leadership has been uninspiring at best. But the prime minister’s replacement will be confronted with the same public restlessness that has so quickly incapacitated his premiership.

And I’m doubtful, no matter how effective or charismatic they are, that his successor will be able to avoid the same fate.

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About me

I investigate the rich, populist and powerful – focused on Nigel Farage and his cronies. I’ve written for the likes of the New York Times, The Guardian, and New Statesman, have worked with Led By Donkeys, and have written two books on elitism and inequality.

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“A new and vital force in journalism, Bright’s well-crafted investigations and political scoops have already won him plaudits. His reports have forced government ministers on to the defensive and left the mainstream media trailing in his wake, playing desperate catch up.”

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