How the Tories lost Britain
livemint.comBritain heads to the polls Thursday, and talk about another election gamble that hasn’t paid off. In the same way President Biden hoped Americans wouldn’t notice his age and Emmanuel Macron assumed the French would rebuff the insurgent right, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak thought—wrongly—that a summer election would focus voters on his virtues. In the event, voters still are trying to figure out what those virtues are supposed to be.
Opinion polls have tightened a bit, but the situation remains much as it’s been for most of the past 18 months with the center-left Labour Party running some 20 percentage points ahead of Mr. Sunak’s Conservatives. Winning would have been a tall order for the Tories since they’ve been in power for 14 years.
But the likely scale of their defeat wasn’t inevitable. Labour leader Keir Starmer is an uninspiring prospective Prime Minister. Labour is still riven by infighting between its leftist and centrist wings, and lingering problems with antisemitism have bubbled up since the Oct.
7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the anti-Israel protests that followed. Given this opposition, why are the Tories facing a wipeout instead of a respectable loss? Much of the answer rests with the economy. The Tories have spent their years in power oscillating wildly between free-market instincts and big-state conservatism.
Despite early attempts to rein in government spending after the 2008 global panic and ensuing recession, the Tories resisted major debates about reducing the role of the state in the economy. Apart from periodic gestures toward tax-rate cuts for some, in general the Tories have focused on squeezing ever more revenue out of the economy to fund the government they refuse to reform. Revenue as a share of
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