With Labour's first Budget in 14 years having gone so well (!) and with Kemi Badenoch the freshly minted new leader of the Tory party, UK politics has changed quite dramatically in a very short space of time. In simple terms, we can now see clearly what the next few years of politics looks like, and it is both different and intriguing.
Starmer and Reeves are taking us back to the 1970s, tax and spend, war on the rich and business, class war fights all over the place. Meanwhile Badenoch is positioning herself as the next Thatcher in waiting. It really is just like the 1970s all over again.
Both parties have their challenges:
For Labour, the Budget has well and truly taken the gloss off its anaemic General Election win and it is quite possible that poll doom beckons. As Sir John Curtice, doyen of the polling industry, ruminated quite recently, poll-wise Labour is in Prince Harry territory: formerly popular, now unpopular, but in theory it's recoverable. It may well be however that it is about to enter Prince Andrew territory: also known as ‘unrecoverable’. And that presents a problem because how does a government behave with a massive parliamentary majority but with increasing unpopularity after less than four months which it may well struggle to ever turn around? For four and a half more years! We are in unprecedented territory, as is Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.
For the Tories, Badenoch has one simple mission: kill Reform. It is as stark as that. If she does not kill Reform and they keep taking chunks out of the Tory Party vote, then the Tories have an existential crisis on their hands. And to achieve that she must tack Right and become a traditional Centre Right political party. Which is interesting as these days anything to the Right of Tony Blair is written up as ‘Far Right’, but that's our mainstream media for you.
So we have two interesting battles for survival ahead of us. The Labour Party trying to arrest a precipitous fall in their already weak popularity since their lacklustre election win. And the Tory Party wrestling to kill Reform by shifting their policy back to the Right. Could be fun to watch.
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