Prof Aeron Davis
Professor of Political Communication and Director of the Bachelor and Masters Programmes in Communication at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Political Communication: An Introduction for Crisis Times, 2nd Edn., (Polity, 2024) and Bankruptcy, Bubbles and Bailouts (MUP, 2022).
Email: aeron.davis@vuw.ac.nz
UK Election 2024
Section 5: Policy and strategy
50. It’s the cost-of-living-crisis, stupid! (Prof Aeron Davis)
51. The last pre-war vote? Defence and foreign policy in the 2024 Election (Dr Russell Foster)
52. The 2024 UK general election and the absence of foreign policy (Dr Victoria Honeyman)
53. Fractious consensus: defence policy at the 2024 General Election (Dr Ben Jones)
54. The psycho-politics of climate denial in the 2024 UK election (Prof Candida Yates, Dr Jenny Alexander)
55. How will the Labour government fare and what should they do better? (Prof Rick Stafford and team)
56. Finding the environment: climate obstructionism and environmental movements on TikTok (Dr Abi Rhodes)
57. Irregular migration: ‘Stop the boats’ vs ‘Smash the Gangs’ (Prof Alex Balch)
58. The sleeping dog of ‘Europe: UK relations with the EU as a non-issue (Prof Simon Usherwood)
59. Labour: a very conservative housing manifesto (Prof Becky Tunstall)
60. Why the Labour Government must abolish the two-child benefit limit policy (Dr Yekaterina Chzhen)
61. Take the next right: mainstream parties’ positions on gender and LGBTQ+ equality issues (Dr Louise Luxton)
It wasn’t the campaign gaffes, the Covid parties or the cruel incompetence of the Tories that did for them. It was the economy or, more precisely, the cost-of-living crisis.
No doubt, as the Conservative Party looks to appoint its sixth leader in eight years, there will be widespread condemnation of Rishi Sunak’s early election gamble and gaffe-ridden campaign. However, campaigns and manifestos had little to do with the end result (Reform did play a key part though). The voting public had been waiting impatiently to eject the government since the Autumn of 2022. After one Downing Street party too many for Boris Johnson, and a trip down the blue pill rabbit hole for Liz Truss, the public had had enough. It was then that the poll gap between Labour and Conservative really opened up, averaging some 20% from that point until close to the election.
It would be nice to think that the voting public had finally seen through the narcissism, self-interest, cruelty and sheer incompetence of 14 years of Tory rule. Brexit, Covid cockups, Windrush, Grenfell, the collapsing NHS and utilities infrastructure … the list is a long one. But, in my mind, the key issue was the economy or rather, as I explain below, the cost-of-living crisis.
On the one hand, this was a consequence of the wider damage caused by post-Covid market breakdowns, rampant inflation, raised interest rates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Economies everywhere have suffered, and incumbent governments have paid the electoral price. On the other hand, Britain has suffered economically more than many and that’s on the Conservatives. Between the UK-specific impact of the great financial crisis (2007-08), years of austerity, and then an imposed hard Brexit, the UK economy was left badly floundering even before Covid.
Let’s be clear, when I say ‘economy’, I don’t mean the economy talked about by Party leaders, CEOs and the commentariat. That abstract economy creates narratives based on metrics like GDP growth, stock market figures, inward investment trends, employment rates, and other data used by political and financial elites. There have been many times in the last 14 years when Conservative Chancellors, from George Osborne to Jeremy Hunt, have hailed the positive trends in such data. Each was happy to signal that the economy was going in the right direction and Britain would soon be Great again.
But for most working- and middle-class voters, ‘the economy’ has little to do with such metrics and everything to do with whether they feel financially better off or not now. Thus, they are concerned with whether their incomes are rising faster than their bills and whether they can secure, reasonably paid long-term employment. Can they afford adequate housing, to heat those homes, feed their families, pay for daily and one-off expenditures and, hopefully, the odd treat? And, on those counts, a growing number in the UK have been answering ‘no’. The negative trends, from rising house/rental prices and personal debt to in-work poverty levels, were all discernible prior to Brexit and Covid. They continued apace after these events.
They then became starkly visible after Covid, hit by a combination of soaring inflation, rising interest rates and the deluded economic policies of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. By 2022, 22% of the population were officially in poverty, with 3.8 million people experiencing some form of destitution that year; double the figures of 2017. Food bank use doubledbetween 2018/19 and 2023/4 to more than 3 million people. Many middle-class people were not so badly affected but have still struggled. It was at this point the Tories lost their reputation for economic competence and voters turned towards Labour.
In this respect, 2024 mirrored 1997 and not just because Labour was following the Blair-Mandelson electoral playbook. As in 1997, after a similar period of economic turmoil, Labour similarly became more trusted on the economy than the Tories. The majority gained was equally impressive.
But there, unfortunately, the parallels end. For a start, the scale of Conservative decline covers over the fact that there was little great enthusiasm for Starmer’s centre-right Labour Party. The Labour landslide was achieved with just 33.7% of the vote and on a 60% turnout. No large post-war majority has been gained with such a low proportion of eligible voters (20%). Second, Reeves and Starmer have tightly hemmed themselves in, sticking to the same economic orthodoxy of recent decades and promising no great changes in taxation or expenditure. Third, public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP is roughly three times what it was in 1997. So much of what propelled the economy previously – the financial sector, a booming housing market, PFI (Private Finance Initiatives), the EU Single Market, Quantitative Easing – is either exhausted, nullified or discredited.
All of which suggests there will be little change to the economic prospects of many voters come the next election … and another likely lurch towards the populist far right beckons. Forget ‘the economy’ beloved of elite technocrats, policymakers and big CEOs. It was, is and will be for years to come, all about the cost-of-living crisis.
