The establishment is a little elated. Even with the Conservatives unlikley to win the next election, the show is, it believes, set to remain firmly on the road. Jeremy Corbyn’s been kiboshed. Nicola Sturgeon’s stymied. A slew of MPs who have provided genuine opposition – Caroline Lucas, Mhari Black, Margaret Beckett – are standing down. Keir Starmer’s taken Labour by the throat and dragged it back to the right. Anti-protest and anti-union laws have made resistance increasingly difficult. Normality, as the establishment sees it, has returned; the waves of anti-system energy that have rocked the UK since 2008 have, it seems to think, dissipated.
But voters, or at least the few hundred I’ve interviewed this year, appear less thrilled. In 20 years of discussing politics with strangers in streets across the UK, Europe and the world, I’ve become used to cynicism and frustration. But in Uxbridge and Rutherglen, both of which have had by-elections in recent months, and Teesside and Newcastle, I witnessed a subtly different mood this summer. There was a definite whiff of despair in the air.
Some of this comes from what is euphemistically called ‘the cost of living crisis’ but is more accurately understood as the UK getting poorer. As with all major phenomena, our leaders have tried to depoliticise it, to make out that it’s caused by global and technocratic factors that they can’t control. They are rarely asked why the UK is forecast to have higher rates of inflation than any other G7 country this year and next.
