James Kirkup

Over almost 30 years in and around Westminster, I’ve noted some persistent and essential differences in the culture and mindset of our two big political parties. Tories generally want to win elections, and are prepared to subordinate pretty much all else to that objective. How else to explain their regular mutation into a new form of political life every few years? Today’s hybrid with a right-populist body and a technocrat-centrist head is just the latest example. Labour, by contrast, always has an ambivalent attitude to winning. Buried in the party’s soul is the fear that winning means compromising on principles, and is therefore to be avoided. How else to explain those Labour people who still celebrate Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous leadership as a golden age for the party?

The Daily Telegraph, where I worked for a decade, has launched a campaign for the abolition of inheritance tax (IHT). It’s backed by at least 50 Conservative MPs, including one former prime minister, Liz Truss. That campaign, and its likely impact, reveal some noteworthy things about British politics, media and society. The influence of experts is often very limited This observation won’t surprise most readers here, but I think it’s still worth making. I like IHT and so do a lot of people like me: professional policy wonks and economists, who proliferate at Westminster and often get a lot of prominence in political debate – especially on Twitter.  My technocratic tribe largely regards inherited wealth as harmful to social mobility and economic efficiency.

Where to start with the net migration figures? As someone who has generally defended liberal immigration policies, I could just shout, yet again, about the economic benefits. That would no doubt annoy a few readers, get some angry clicks, and add precisely nothing to the conversation.   Or I could point out that this is what Britain voted for in 2016. The migration described in today’s figures is the result of the UK government implementing migration policies entirely of its own choosing. We took back control and this is what we did with it. This outcome is wholly legitimate: it was chosen by our democratically elected government.

It is widely observed that many Conservatives are preparing to lose power at the next general election.  The Conservative Democratic Organisation and National Conservatism meetings last week are generally regarded as preparation for the leadership battle that would likely follow Rishi Sunak’s departure from No. 10. Most (though not all) Tories appear to assume that Sunak could not remain leader after that exit, nor want to. Privately too, even the most optimistic Tories will concede that leaving government after 14 years – they’ve just beaten the New Labour tenure – has to be considered a real possibility. What would the Conservatives do in opposition? This is not a trivial question.

I’m writing this shortly after hosting Professor Tim Bale and David Gauke at the Social Market Foundation for a talk about Tim’s excellent book about the radicalisation of the Conservative party in recent years.   That discussion raised a very good question: is leaving the European Convention on Human Rights the next Brexit?  The immediate origins of this question lie in the small boats issue.  My view is that the Sunak government will fail to satisfy those voters who are unhappy about Channel crossings.  Stark-sounding political threats of deportation and the like won’t deter people desperate enough to travel across a continent in a metal box, then board a raft to cross 20-odd miles of choppy sea.

I recently wrote a column elsewhere about the junior doctors strike. As if often the way with this topic, it resulted in some strong and sometimes vituperative reactions.  It also led to many conversations with people in and around medicine.  Some of them thought I’d got things wrong. That’s a reasonable position to take, and it’s often useful to take criticism seriously. So I had a think about the column again, and concluded that there were indeed a few things I could have done better at.   Retention Of the various ‘you’ve got your facts wrong’ critiques of my column, the one I think that has most weight is that I overlook the importance of retention – rather than recruitment – in medicine.

Just over five years ago, I wrote an article here about sex and gender and the issues raised by policies and practices allowing people to self-identify in the gender of their choice. Then, the topic was obscure and marginal to a great many people: my decision to write about it was regarded by many friends and contacts as eccentric and perhaps self-harmingly misjudged. Today, with the sex/gender debate firmly established on the political agenda, I’ve largely left the conversation. Where once there weren’t enough people in politics paying attention, I sometimes think there are now too many. Would it really do any harm to ask a surrogate mother to affirm after birth that she wanted to go through with the surrogacy?

Governing means accepting and embracing trade-offs. Almost every public policy choice involves deciding how important one set of people are, or how to balance their interests with others. Covid mitigation measures were a case study in government-as-trade-off. Time and again, ministers had to weigh up public health, NHS capacity, economic and fiscal costs, human freedom and countless other factors. Covid choices were especially stark because they very visibly involved the sickness and death of some of those people. Choices were made to prioritise several interests ahead of those of children. None of those choices were easy or simple and you shouldn’t take seriously anyone who says they were.

Westminster is a place of consensus, orthodoxy and prevailing wisdom. At any given moment, there is the Narrative, the story that everyone – or close to everyone – believes, or pretends to. The Narrative can ignore objective facts, but also change quickly when finally confronted with realities too big to overlook.  I reckon the last big shift in the Narrative happened sometime on the Monday of Tory conference in October. In a few hours, it dawned on a lot of people that not only was the Liz Truss premiership doomed, but the Tories were very likely to lose the next election.  Since then, journalists, lobbyists, civil servants and even unworldly think-tankers have been treating Labour as a government-in-waiting.

Here are two facts about British healthcare that not enough people know.  First, GPs don’t work for the NHS. They are private contractors who sell services to the NHS via GP partnerships which are profit-making businesses owned by GPs.  Second, the British Medical Association is not a medical body. It’s a trade union for doctors, representing the financial interests of medics including GPs and their profit-making partnerships.  These two facts should be known by any voter thinking about politicians and health policy.  Yet many people appear unaware of them. That’s partly thanks to poor journalism. And it’s partly thanks to the success of general practitioners and the BMA in wrapping themselves in the NHS flag in order to conceal their true nature.

New year, old politicians.  Yesterday’s men will loom large in the politics of 2023.  British politics has a nostalgia problem, often to the benefit of our over-large population of former prime ministers. They may have disappointed in office, but the urge to rose-tint our memories means failure is no bar to a lucrative or influential post-premiership.  How else to explain the £2 million earned by Theresa May since the end of her painful, pedestrian premiership? Her reputation has also been enhanced through the power of hindsight: during the chaos of 2022’s politics, the history of her shambling, stumbling government was quietly rewritten and she became a 'grown-up' politician from a lost age of sensibleness.

Rishi Sunak’s latest promises on asylum and immigration suggest the PM has learned very little from his Tory forebears. Ken Clarke used to compare eurosceptic right-wing Tories to crocodiles circling the prime ministerial boat. Most Tory leaders chose to feed the crocodiles buns to keep them happy. But what happens when you run out of buns? David Cameron knows the answer to that one. Sunak is also offering buns. But when the buns run out – or simply don’t appear – his problems will only grow. The PM is vowing to crack down on illegal Channel crossings. He promises to clear the backlog of asylum cases. He promises to reject more claims from Albanians.

‘Only the higher-than-expected numbers of migrants coming to the UK under the post-Brexit migration regime adds materially to prospects for potential output growth over the coming five years relative to the assumptions that we made in March.’ That’s from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) assessment accompanying the Autumn Statement. It’s a pretty striking line: the state’s official analyst of the public finances says that the only good thing to happen to the UK economy since March is higher immigration.   How much higher? In March, the OBR produced an economic forecast that assumed net migration would run at around 130,000 a year for the next five years. Now it puts that figure at just over 200,000.  Why?

I wonder if the fall of Gavin Williamson is the latest evidence that British political parties are becoming harder to govern. It seems quite possible that his resignation is part of a story that will see Rishi Sunak struggle to command Conservative MPs to accept difficult choices on tax and spending. Any upset could even bother the bond market. Additionally, this story carries a warning for Keir Starmer.  Contrary to some of the media narratives visible today, the end of Williamson is more complicated than ‘Bad man who did bad things quits – Hoorah’.