Prof Barry Richards
Professor Emeritus of Political Psychology, Bournemouth University.
Barry’s publications on the psychology of politics date back to 1984. He is particularly interested in the emotional public sphere, social cohesion and polarisation, freedom of speech, and political violence.
Email: BRichards@bournemouth.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 1: Democracy and representation
1. Public anxiety and the electoral process (Prof Barry Richards)
2. How Nigel Farage opened the door to No. 10 for Keir Starmer (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. The performance of the electoral system (Prof Alan Renwick)
4. Tory downfall is democracy rectifying its mistakes (Prof Stephen Barber)
5. Votes at 16 and decent citizenship education could create a politically aware generation (Dr Ben Kisby, Dr Lee Jerome)
6. “An election about us but not for us”: the lack of communication for young people during GE2024 (Dr James Dennis)
7. Election timing: masterstroke or risky gamble? (Prof Sarah Birch)
8. The dog that didn’t bark? Electoral integrity and administration from voter ID to postal votes (Prof Alistair Clark)
9. A political gamble? How licit and illicit betting permeated the campaign (Dr Matthew Wall)
10. Ethnic diversity in politics is the new normal in Britain (Prof Maria Sobolewska)
11. Bullshit and Lies on the campaign trail: do party campaigns reflect the post-truth age? (Prof Darren Lilleker)
12. Stoking the culture wars: the risks of a more hostile form of polarised politics (Dr Jen Birks)
Between 2019 and 2024 Labour went from crushing defeat to colossal majority, notwithstanding that its share of the votes cast was, remarkably, much the same. Important though that constitutional issue is, here I’ll compare the two elections in some other respects. Firstly, there was a difference in the nature of their campaigns. In 2019, still in the wake of the Brexit referendum, the Conservative Prime Minister Johnson offered delivery of ‘Leave’, the rhetoric for which had offered Brexit as a panacea for anxieties about deteriorating public services, poverty, housing, and the loss of community. That approach triumphed over the Leftist programme offered by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. In 2024, however, shorn of both Corbynism and the confused and partly confected passions of ‘getting Brexit done’, the electoral competition was heavily technocratic in tone. Clear ideological differences between the major parties were marginal, despite Conservative attempts to invoke the big-state tax-predator image of Labour. On five issues of most concern to the British public, very similar solutions were offered – reform the NHS, grow the economy, relieve cost-of-living pressures, build more houses and reduce immigration.
So unlike 2019, the debate was largely about how much one or other of the parties would be able to deliver the broadly desired aims, rather than about basic value or policy differences. This return to a more ‘boring’ politics of competence was at one level a welcome contrast to the anger-provoking and anxiety-building politics of recent years: the dismal period of Johnsonian sleaze and chaos, and the hare-brained arrogance of the momentary Truss premiership. Both Labour and Conservatives stressed how they had rejected extremism (i.e. Corbyn and Truss), and how they would restore integrity.
Ideology still lived somewhere, restrained behind the parties’ deployment of technocratic centrism. Their promises of combining pragmatism and probity were strategic attempts to win public support with calm reassurance. This takes us to a core issue. While public anxiety, and how to manage it, is always an element in government-citizen relations, it has become more so as globalisation has increased our reasons to feel anxious. An underlying sense that we live in a very unsafe world has been building at least since the turn of the century. Perhaps it was longer thus, but the end of the Cold War and the global spread of democracy allowed that sense to fade in the 1990s. Since then, however, it has grown, fed from different sources for different people, including all the societal fears manipulated by the Leave campaign, and the civilisational focus of climate anxiety. Also, the pandemic brought the fear of death into everyday politics, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began to revive the fear of war, long absent in Great Britain. On top of all that, the manifest incompetence, irresponsibility, and perceived extremism of our own political class added another layer of fear: they are supposed to protect us from it all.
Hence the 2024 convergence of the parties on a pitch of safe moderation, purged of reckless extremism. But while different from 2019, this actually indicates an important similarity between the two elections. On both occasions the decisive shifts in voting were driven by public anxieties. In 2019, Labour failed (as did the 2016 Remain campaign) to address these, and so the field was left open for Brexiteers to echo the Leave campaign, to appropriate the widespread sense of insecurity and loss, and to express the wish for the delusional cure to be delivered. In 2024, despite their centrist campaigning, the Conservatives had no way back – after Truss – to a credible image of competence and responsibility, so half their 2019 voters fled in various directions in search of containment for their anxiety. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s reconstruction of Labour as a safe option enabled them to hold on to the same level of support which, for different reasons, they had in 2019.
So both elections have reflected the ‘postmodern’ departure from rationalistic politics based on stable inter-class tensions, and the turn to a more volatile and psychologically-driven contest, with trust at its heart. Yet there remains a crucial difference. In 2019, ‘Brexitism’ was electorally powerful because it manipulated public anxiety, misrepresenting it and conveying – falsely – that it had a single source which could be simply dealt with. In 2024, Starmer’s Labour claimed trustworthiness, while avoiding delusions, lies and offers of fake panaceas. From a moral and psychological point of view, this is a much better start, both for the effective containment of anxiety, rather than its manipulation, and (perhaps the same thing) for political success.
The Government’s technocratic campaign offerings will now need to be taken forward around an explicit set of substantive values that define its centrist, social democratic mission, and inform its policies, especially in relation to the most contentious political issues. Foremost amongst these are likely to be questions about our national identity and culture, which are presently ‘owned’ mainly by the five Reform and five independent MPs. Securing majority public support for answers to those questions (e.g. about the optimal level of legal immigration, and how to achieve it) will be as difficult as it is important.
