Who governs Britain (in 2029)?

The case for Robert Jenrick as Tory leader

The Starmer government’s popularity slide continues, and it’s an impressive achievement that, considering everything, they have managed to get the Tories back on level pegging in the polls after just three months. Labour came to power on a wave of non-enthusiasm, with a low vote share, and what little good will there was to start with has already disappeared.

Yet nothing in Britain happens in isolation from wider trends across the western world, where leaders are roundly hated everywhere, and this suggests something deeper and more profound occurring. As Janan Ganesh recently observed, electorates have turned against their elected leaders, and across the west ‘popular leaders are rare, and it would be some coincidence if it was their own incompetence at fault in each case’.

If politicians are disliked, it’s in part because western European countries are obviously governed badly, and quality of life is notably worse compared to the increasingly varied number of alternatives which mobile young professionals are aware of - from central European states like Poland to more authoritarian, but at least wealthy and safe, options like Singapore and Dubai. If liberal democracy is in crisis, it’s because the people running those democracies are obviously not delivering.

Our cities are overcome with squalor; crime is far higher than it needs to be; housing is an existential crisis; public services are in a dismal state; energy costs are too high and we are at the mercy of a planning system that immiserates us. It is obvious across western Europe that the status quo is not working, and we are at a 1970s moment of crisis.

For all these problems, immigration is probably the most existential question; indeed, not only are current levels unpopular but they fundamentally erode the legitimacy of democracy, which depends on the idea of a people who share a concrete sense of identity and history beyond the empty rhetoric of ‘values’. This crisis has crystalised in many minds since last October.

It is not making us richer, and it is certainly not making us safer. Promising to reduce migration in every manifesto, the last version of the Tory regime lost the faith of voters with a cynical policy of human quantitative easing. As a result, many people will not believe a word that the Tories say on this issue, and in order to win back that trust, they will need a fresh start with a leader plausibly distant from past mistakes. Probably the only person who could win back that trust is Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick has seen how the Home Office works (or doesn’t), mired by legal challenges and activism, and took the decision to resign over the issue. This gives him an advantage over other Tory politicians in winning back public trust.

As Daniel Hannan wrote in an endorsement, while many ministers saw how hard it was to beat the system, ‘Jenrick was alone in resigning from a government that he saw as being too timid – a view, it turned out, shared by the millions of former Tory voters who stayed home in July. He grasps that, after years of broken promises, credibility is everything.’

I suspect that, without that credibility returning, the Tory party will be outflanked, a trend of centre-right replacement that has taken place across Europe.

It is true that Tory-to-Reform switchers may be the hardest to win back, but it’s also a false premise to believe that the party has to choose between winning defectors from Reform or the Liberal Democrats. Immigration was also one of the major reasons that Tory voters switched to the Lib Dems, and those deserters are actually more socially conservative than the Tories who stayed. That might seem strange, when the Lib Dems are the most pro-migration and socially liberal party, but people’s voting choices often don’t match their worldview. (Even I’ve voted Lib Dem at a general election before).

Many blue wall former Tories are sceptical or hostile to Brexit – some would have been ‘eurosceptics’ in the old sense but still saw leaving as unwise and financially damaging. They dislike Nigel Farage because they view him and his party as too populist, and they also lost faith with the Tories because they feel them to be economically reckless. In many cases, they lack the social permission to vote for Right-leaning parties because they come across as too confrontational, or unsensible in their attitude to things like education, science or institutions. Tory red meat culture war discourse only feeds this.

But like millions of voters, they support what the media calls a ‘far-right’ policy on immigration, presented respectably, and would also happily welcome the end of the state’s anarcho-tyranny approach to policing. 

The shift on the issue is already happening on the continent, as immigration undergoes a respectability cascade and sensible-sounding politicians who look like they could appear in Borgen articulate views which were labelled as unthinkable a few years ago. Poland’s Blairite government has already temporarily suspended asylum, and it won’t be the last – once a taboo around an unpopular and dysfunctional pillar of the status quo starts to break, it’s gone.

The moment of crisis goes beyond immigration, however, and the problems facing the British state are legion, as articulated by John Gray when he wrote:

It is hard to exaggerate the depth of state failure in this country. When some of the criminals released early due to prison overcrowding are returned to custody because they pose a risk to public safety, then released again by mistake, a functioning justice system has ceased to exist…

In crucial areas, the decisions of government cannot be implemented. Authority has been transferred to the courts, and policies are made by judges. Almost anything government does can be litigated and undone.  Declaring energy policies unlawful because they will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently, as the Supreme Court did in May this year, gives a spurious legitimacy to a particular – and politically driven – environmentalist agenda.

It is not that the state has simply become too large, as neo-Thatcherites like to say. Government has surrendered much of its authority to institutions it cannot control while losing a sense of the common good. This is the fundamental source of Britain’s malaise, which is obscured by stale debates about free markets and state intervention.

Gray warned that ‘The British state has defaulted on its core functions while attempting to remake society. Unless they elect a leader willing to challenge the progressive ideology that has produced this perverse combination, the Conservative Party will slip into irrelevance and oblivion. The task of opposition will fall to Reform, which from being the personal vehicle of a mercurial, charismatic leader, is turning itself into an organised and rapidly expanding party.’

Gray believes that Badenoch will best deliver that change, but I’m not so sure. While obviously a formidable character, my impression is that Badenoch sees the problem as being more down to culture, while Jenrick views the system itself as the issue. This in part explains why Badenoch is so willing to get engaged in disputes over issues of identity, such as her spat with Dr Who actor David Tennant. Her view that Labour ‘can’t portray her as prejudiced’ also suggests five more years of culture war talking points (in fact, they can and they will portray her as prejudiced), when I don’t think that sort of approach is helpful, or useful.

Contrary to what is often believed, culture can be downstream of politics. Change the system, and you change the culture, something the Tories failed to do over the course of 14 years; people respond to laws and incentives, and act accordingly. 

Central to this is Jenrick’s pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, without which it will be impossible to stop the arrival of unvetted illegal migrants, now coming in record numbers. The government has no means to stop this unprecedented migration, and has already signalled its failure by looking at more hotel capacity - they simply have no idea how to stop it. These numbers will continue to rise, as the developing world goes through a population bulge, a problem which will get worse for Britain as other European countries become ever stricter; as the old joke goes, they don’t have to outrun the lion, they only have to outrun us. 

It can’t be stopped because the rules currently make it impossible for politicians to run a system which earns the faith of the voters. Just recently, a murderer from Albania won the right to stay in Britain, but this is just one of numerous injustices. As an example of wider state failure, a man this month received just eight years in jail for pushing someone in front of a train, despite 13 previous convictions, six separate prison sentences and being in the country illegally in the first place. This common occurrence does much to explain the public’s failing faith in liberal democracy, something liberal democracy ought to be capable of adjusting.

Jenrick understands that the issue is existential, and while one might be sceptical about a Tory politician making promises about immigration, he does have form: as well as resigning his position, he has also co-written a paper on the issue, and has argued that we must force countries to take back their nationals; it is encouraging that Tony Smith, the former head of the Border Force, has given his endorsement.

The question of ‘who governs Britain’ is just as important as it was in the 1970s. The human rights debate is not, as one side would say, about simple questions of living ‘under the rule of law’ or not; it is a trade-off between the rights of citizens and non-citizens, as all positive rights are. But the ECHR is part of a wider debate about how ‘the Rule of Law’ and ‘Human Rights’ are a cover for specific political programmes. It is a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.

This is a political programme in which democratic question are depoliticised by being placed in the hands of arms-length bodies, and in which alternative answers are ruled impermissible - immoral, unworkable and quite possibly illegal. It does not make us freer - indeed it is a system in which our genuine rights are eroded, and in which people thrown in jail for private messages.

As William Atkinson has argued, Labour partisans will present any change to the status quo as ‘a leap into the dark’, because they understand that natural Tory voters are unnerved by the appearance of radical change, but they fail to appreciate that politics itself - and the world - has changed. The average British voter doesn’t want radical social upheaval: they want cheaper housing and energy costs, greater civility and less crime, better public services, and effective border controls - and they know that the current system isn’t delivering these things.