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What this election could do to Britain?

The Conservative dead end is obvious. Unless the pollsters are horrendously wrong the Tories are in for a very heavy defeat with several of their big beats banished to the depths of the political jungle from which they may never emerge … writes Mihir Bose

Elections are always turning points or so goes the common belief. If that be so this British election could see both parties find the road ahead is a cul de sac. The Conservative dead end is obvious. Unless the pollsters are horrendously wrong the Tories are in for a very heavy defeat with several of their big beats banished to the depths of the political jungle from which they may never emerge.

Back in 1997 John Major on losing to Tony Blair  left No 10 and went to watch cricket at the Oval. This time on the Friday after the election Sunak may be heading for Heathrow and a  flight to Los Angeles. The Tories will have to find a leader and, as always happens in such circumstances, there will be a lot of internal battles before one emerges. If that be the case they should learn from 1997. Then they went for William Hague who was duly mauled by Tony Blair in the next election. This meant wasting a leader who might have been good and then having two others before finding one in David Cameron who led them out of the wilderness. So, expect a sacrificial lamb should the horror show take place.

Where this election is like 1997 is that many in the media are supporting Labour. The Sunday Times, the FT, Economist, Guardian and my old editor at the Daily Telegraph Max Hastings are all saying vote Labour.  How much this will influence the election is hard to say but it disproves the common Labour belief that the press is always supporting the Tories.

However, I am not sure there will be a horror show for the Tories. Defeat yes. But not destroyed. I am always sceptical about opinion polls, and this goes back to the first ever election I saw in this country in 1970. I can recall two other elections , 1962 and 1967 in India. Indian elections are very different to British elections. They reflect the country. They are chaotic, very colourful, full of what Indians  call tamasha, fun, frolic, excitement, awaaz, noise, colour, processions of supporters of various parties filling the streets and an exuberance. With such a large proportion of the electorate being illiterate there are party symbols which are often very wonderfully designed. Also, what is significant is that the poor and the downtrodden always vote. For them election day makes them ek din ka sultan, king for a day and gives them a sense of power. They are aware the well off can always buy their way to power. In this country, and in much of the developed world, the people who  live in ghettos, and the less well-off sections of the population, often do not vote. They cannot see elections changing  things.

Elections in Britain are also very structured, and I was struck by this in 1970. The election took place against a background of an international football tournament as this one is. Then it was the World Cup in Mexico. It was a hot summer. Most people were staying up late to watch the matches televised from Mexico. On the Sunday before polling day England played in the quarter final of the World Cup in Mexico against West Germany.  England were the defending champions, having won it in 1966  at Wembley against Germany, the only time they have won the competition. They were leading 2-0 when Franz Beckenbauer had, as he would later tell me, a speculative shot, Bonetti, the England goalkeeper, dived over the ball. That turned the match and Germany won 3-2, the first time in a competitive match they had beaten England.

Until then nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the election. Harold Wilson, Labour’s Prime Minister, seemed odds on to win But the defeat seemed to wake the country up and four days later to the surprise of everyone Ted Heath was in power.

This time England again played a match four days before the election and were 86 seconds from defeat against Slovakia but thanks to goals by Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane they won, in effect doing what Germany had done to them in 1970. So, will Sunak rise from the dead and win? I do not think so. My impression of this election is that people are fed up with the Tories but, and this is a big but, they are not enthusiastic for Labour. They want to end 14 years of Tory rule but are not flocking to Labour.

Let me give you one example. I have been speaking to what politicians call  real people as opposed to fake people like us hacks. One of them lives in Sunderland but comes down to London to fit plaques. He voted to leave the EU but now regrets it. He voted for Boris Johnson but will not vote for the Tories but has no enthusiasm for Labour and may not vote. My impression is there are a lot of undecided voters, many who voted Tory. How will they vote?  Back in 1992 when John Major unexpectedly won and proved the pollsters wrong there was a lot of talk of shy Tories. I do not get the impression  that the undecided are shy Tories who are not telling the truth to the pollsters. They are genuinely unhappy with the Tories and that is putting it mildly. But Labour has not done enough to make them switch. It is possible they may not vote.

There are also Labour supporters, and these are younger voters, who think Keit Starmer has gone too far to the centre and may vote green. I must say I have found this the most boring of all the elections I have seen in this country. Sunak can certainly debate and very ferociously  As for Starmer everyone says he is like a man carrying a Ming vase worried he might drop it. He looks more like a man programmed by the Labour hierarchy  to respond in a particular staccato style to every question. I  cannot wait for this election to end.

I do not believe the opinion polls are right of a massive Labour majority. I think Labour will win but with a small majority. Much is being made of how this election is like 1997. But here history is being rewritten. In the run-up to 1997 it was not obvious Labour would win. I remember Michael Heseltine going on radio saying Conservatives are gaining strength and there was fear in Labour that it could turn out to be 1992 when John Major ambushed them.

Where this election is like 1997 is that many in the media are supporting Labour. The Sunday Times, the FT, Economist, Guardian and my old editor at the Daily Telegraph Max Hastings are all saying vote Labour.  How much this will influence the election is hard to say but it disproves the common Labour belief that the press is always supporting the Tories.

As a country we face great choices, funding for NHS, public services, immigration, the need for houses. Yet in this election I cannot see any great idea. Or any real divide, clear blue water, between the two parties. Both parties want growth, both say they will not put up taxes but it is not that easy to stoke the engines of growth.

We have had scarce tactics in this election . Nothing new in that. In 1945 Churchill during the general election campaign made what has gone down as his famous “Gestapo” speech in which he warned that a socialist Labour government would lead to the erosion of freedom. Atlee very skilfully turned it round saying that in the past officials made peoples’ lives impossible, of how employers were free to work little children for sixteen hours a day, people were free to neglect sanitation so that thousands died of preventable diseases. It was freedom for the rich and slavery for the poor. Now Sunak says within the first 100 days Labour will ruin Britain raising taxes, country swarming with immigrants, warnings which have featured on the front pages of right wing newspapers. But, unlike Atlee, Starmer has not made an effective response. Nor has he responded strongly to Conservative claims about the dangers of Labour getting a supermajority. What Starmer should have done is remind people that back in 1983 it was a Conservative politician who warned that giving large majorities to political parties would not lead to good government. That politician was Francis Pym and Mrs Thatcher, who was heading for a landslide, immediately sacked him.

What is new in this election is race becoming an issue with Sunak being called a Paki, a word I am very familiar with as I have often been called that. This election has also seen religion being mentioned. Sunak has spoken of his Hindu faith, which is unusual as politicians in this country, as opposed to America, do not talk of their religion. But then we have never had a non-Christian Prime Minister.

What will be interesting is to see the effect of the Reform Party on the Conservative vote and whether Nigel Farage will make sure the Reform Party gets a platform in this country. Nigel Farage and his Reform party pose a challenge the like of which the Tories have never faced before. Farage is a politician who the Tories have been struggling to contain. His rise will mark a very fundamental shift in the politics of this country.

(Mr Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British)

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The World That Will Shape Up

Economic forecasts are a mug’s game but while there are no signs of the green shoots of recovery if people do not feel that their pockets are lighter compared to five years ago they may not want to make Rishi wish he had kept his American green card … writes Mihir Bose @mihirbose

I doubt if anyone could have predicted how 2022 would turn up. I did begin my 2022 piece for Asian Lite by saying a lot will depend on how the Russia-China relations shape up but I didn’t think President Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine claiming it always belonged to Russia, all part of his longed for desire to see the return of the Russian empire, if not that ruled by Stalin certainly that by the Tsars.

Nor I must confess did I see Boris Johnson’s fall, let alone Britain suddenly transformed in a few months of the summer into more like a banana republic where three Prime Ministers waltzed in and out of No 10 Downing Street. Or should we say a case of that old Hindi saying Aya Ram, Gaya Ram. Ram Comes and Ram Goes.

The dance the Conservatives performed over who should lead them was not so much a waltz but more like the frenzied dance we used to do on Saturday nights at university gyrating to a little-known pop group hoping to emulate the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in the hope by the end of the evening we would find a partner. That a party, which has always claimed to be the most successful political party in the world, so adept at crafting election successes, should have so suddenly lost its ability to hold on to power was astonishing.

So, can Dishy Rishi do the trick and lead them to victory when the election comes in 2024? I believe he can. My reason for saying so is that there are signs that the economy may provide us not with gloom and doom but with pleasant surprises. Already it seems the recession may not prove to be as deep, and inflation is coming down. Economic forecasts are a mug’s game but while there are no signs of the green shoots of recovery if people do not feel that their pockets are lighter compared to five years ago they may not want to make Rishi wish he had kept his American green card.

It is a common belief that elections are won or lost on how well the economy is doing. Reagan’s election-winning slogan against Carter in 1980 was, “Are you better off?”. Clinton’s election campaign had a notice up saying, “It’s the economy, stupid”. However, 1997 shows that even when the economy is doing well people may not vote for the government responsible for it. Then the Conservatives under John Major had turned the economy around but could not get away from the huge shadow cast by Black Wednesday.

The Sunny Monday that followed did not do the trick. The Conservatives had lost their own big winning card which never fails to trump their opponents. That they are better managers of the economy than Labour.  

But in 1997 Labour had Tony Blair. This, the shrewdest British politician of the last two decades, had so remodelled Labour that it was unrecognisable from Labour governments that had proved so incompetent. Blair had also crafted slogans that resonated. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. Education, education, education. Keir Starmer is no Blair. He comes across as a competent apparatchik who can deliver a case on which he has been well briefed which, given he was head of the CPS, is no surprise. But Blair, also a lawyer, could write a brief. Starmer is yet to show he can do that. So far he is enjoying the fall-out from the mess the Conservatives have made. But under an election spotlight he may find it not that easy to answer the question both the Conservatives and the media will relentlessly ask him, “So, Sir Keir what will your government do?”. Just going on repeating that he is opposed to Tory policies will not work.

I appreciate it will not be easy to paint Labour as tax and spend as the Conservatives have traditionally done. After all, Tories have been Labour dressed in blue. The problem for Labour is on this issue they have little room for manoeuvre and cannot be further to the right of the Tories. And while Labour is 20 points ahead in the polls they also show that Sunak is more popular than Starmer and considered better able to manage the economy.

But where Sunak may come unstuck are two issues which few in this country are prepared to discuss. One is race and the other is wealth. There is no question the Conservatives have completely remodelled themselves on race with many of the leading Cabinet positions held by people of Asian and black origin. The Conservatives, having historically been anti-Hindu and pro-Muslim, have become very fond of Hindus and to have Diwali celebrated in No 10 tells us a lot of how the party has changed. But Labour cannot use the race card, at least not openly, more so when as a party it is still very a white party at least with those occupying senior positions.  

Even more than race what may cause Sunak greater problems is that he is rich, and his wife is even richer, the daughter of one of India’s richest men. Unlike America, where politicians can boast of their wealth and win votes as Trump did, however dubious his claim to wealth may have been, the British do not like their politicians to brag that they are wealthy. In fact, almost nobody in No 10 could do that.

Johnson was always moaning that being in Downing Street had impoverished him and he had to rely on the generosity of donors to get his Downing Street flat refurbished. Sunak has already had problems as a result of his wife’s non-dom status. He cannot go around saying that because of his wealth he will make everyone else wealthy. That would immediately make him a parvenu and a man who is not one of us. This combined with his Hindu status may mean defeat.

Of course, all this could change if Putin falls, Ukraine emerges victorious, and the energy crisis is over. Suddenly everyone is well-off and Sunak without saying he is rich could make people feel he will make them richer.

But this brings us to the great unknown. What will Putin do? The war in Ukraine, which Putin thought would last a few weeks and we hoped would be over in a few months looks like, if not quite Europe’s modern-day version of the hundred years’ war, going on long enough to cause a great deal of disruption. Sunak has limited ability to keep on saying it is not the Tories fault but the fault of Putin. Carter tried to use the energy crisis of the early 80s against Reagan but that failed. The only problem is Starmer is no Reagan. Unless he has virtues that he has kept hidden I can still see Sunak leading the Tories to another election triumph.

Mihir Bose’s latest book is Dreaming The Impossible: The Battle to Create A Non-Racial Sports World. His twitter sign is @mihirbose

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SPECIAL – Sunak Is No Obama – By Mihir Bose

Where the Sunak story also differs from Obama, and this is very significant, is that, unlike Obama, he has emerged from the right. It is an ace in the hands of the British Tories and they will play it ruthlessly when fighting Labour. It can point to the fact that it has prominent non-whites occupying high positions in the Cabinet, including three of the top jobs …. Writes Mihir Bose exclusively for London Daily

One of the things about race in this country is to always look at what happens in the US and link events here to those in the US. Some years ago, I applied for a job at London Weekend on a program they were going to have which would look at issues about race and immigration. The interview developed into an argument where the person interviewing me would not accept that the race situation in the US was totally  different to the one in the UK . He insisted on linking it reflecting the fact that this has a long history in this country, and something people, including prominent politicians, are constantly doing.

One of the events that shaped Enoch Powell’s infamous rivers of blood speech was what was happening in the US at that time with the civil rights agitation and how the racial situation had got inflamed. Powell’s speech in April 1968 was made weeks after Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, was assassinated at a Memphis hotel.

I have always felt to draw comparisons between the two countries on the race issue is not very helpful, if anything likely to distort the whole situation. But once again it is happening with Rishi Sunak entering No 10 as Britain’s first non-white Prime Minister. The immediate response is this is Britain’s Barrack Obama moment. Nothing could be more absurd.

Obama’s election was white America’s attempt to pay back some of the dues it owes to the black community, which had accumulated for centuries, for its original sin of slavery. Not that such dues can be paid by a single black man entering the White House. And in any case there was a distortion here as Obama is only half black and his black ancestors were not slaves who had been brought to America in chains. His Kenyan father had migrated to America to study. But in the American story of race such an edited version of what had happened in history was necessary.    

Sunak’s story is a legacy of the British empire where attitudes to race was always very different. Not that the empire was not driven by the racial belief that white people were superior. It is worth noting that the British in their empire called themselves European. The institutions the British set up in India had the name European. The clubs that excluded Indians, as nearly all of them did, said they were for Europeans only. Even the cricket team was called European. Only people of pure European blood could be members of the team.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at No10 Downing Street. 10 Downing Street. Picture by Simon Walker/ No 10 Downing Street

But where Britain differed from America is, unlike America where the whites had a blanket ban on blacks, the British iron curtain on race could be opened on certain occasions allowing the browns and blacks to interact with whites. The best example of this provided in sport. The European team of pure blood did play cricket with the Indians. In America, in contrast, the blacks were not allowed to play major league baseball and had to form their own “Negro” leagues. It was only in 1947, the year India got independence, that the first black player, Jackie Robinson, played in major league baseball.

The King received The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP at Buckingham Palace today. His Majesty asked him to form a new Administration. Mr. Sunak accepted His Majesty’s offer and was appointed Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.

Where the Sunak story also differs from Obama, and this is very significant, is that, unlike Obama, he has emerged from the right. It is an ace in the hands of the British Tories and they will play it ruthlessly when fighting Labour. It can point to the fact that it has prominent non-whites occupying high positions in the Cabinet, including three of the top jobs, and Sunak having been chancellor already, while Labour is still stuck in its white groove. Also, the Tories have had three women prime ministers, whereas Labour is yet to have anyone who looks likely to become Prime Minister.

And Sunak, unlike Obama, has made it clear that he sees looking at colonial history, and how it is represented, as “woke”. During his losing campaign against Liz Truss at one Conservative rally he said that, “I want to take on this lefty woke culture that seems to want to cancel our history, our values and our women.”

It is also worth stressing that, unlike Obama who was elected by the American people in a general election, Sunak has got into No 10 on the vote of the Tory MPs. He has always enjoyed support among the MPs, even when he fought against Truss, but when the Conservative members voted he lost quite easily, and his defeat was never in doubt. This suggests that, while in Westminster he has appeal, how he plays out  the country remains to be seen.

And this is where he poses a challenge for Labour. When the election comes Labour, as the party of the left, cannot play the race card, or at least not openly. Yet they may find that the fact that Sunak is not-white has mileage. How it will resolve this contradiction will be interesting.

I have always thought that the row over his wife having a non-dom tax status was not only because she is immensely rich but also because there was an undercurrent of racism that dare not speak its name, that of a brown woman taking advantage of this country’s tax laws.

And here again the distinction with America needs to be drawn.

Race is not the only factor in this story. So is class. Class in America is not an issue and what is more to be rich is not a matter of shame as the rise of Trump, who has broadcast how rich is, shows. In Britain there is no getting away from class. And the feeling that the rich should be distrusted because they have largely inherited their wealth is a view shared by many. And there is no question Sunak’s wife wealth is inherited from her immensely rich father.

Where Labour may profit is that Sunak’s biggest task is to unite the Conservative party. His cabinet shows that he considers this is first job with the choice of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. She may have had to resign only days ago because of breaking the ministerial code but Sunak needs her because she is seen as the champion of the right and he cannot afford to alienate the right.

The fact is the Tory party in parliament has become like the Labour party of old, split into factions which hate each other. For decades Tory took advantage of such Labour splits to retain power. Now Sir Keir Starmer will have to try and profit from the Tory splits. How well Sunak can unite the party by the time election comes, and Starmer learns from how the Tories used the Labour splits to its advantage, could play a major part in the election. The common belief is parties that are divided do not win. Labour knows that to its cost. If Sunak cannot unite the party he may suffer the same fate as in the past Labour has done. Then the fact that he is brown will play no part.

(Mihir Bose’s latest book is Dreaming The Impossible, The Battle To Create a Non-Racial Sports World)   

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