Britain’s political landscape is unenviable. Boris Johnson has emerged from the pandemic as exactly the prime minister his track record warned he would be: one that finds time to reference Churchill but gets bored with going to Cobra meetings. His cabinet, meanwhile, are ready to sink to any depths, be it lying at will or playing up to racists. They have little to be smug about. The UK can now boast the highest excess death rate of any country, and the worst forecast recession. All of this playing out against the backdrop of a social fabric so decayed that it takes a footballer to force ministers to ensure more than a million hungry children are actually fed.
Our government has never been more unfit for office, just as the official opposition couldn’t be further from a chance at power. Last week Labour released its investigation into its crushing 2019 election defeat. This document was not simply an autopsy of the past but an insight into the future: in order to form a majority government in 2024, Labour will have to increase the number of MPs it has by 60%. Watching events unfold, it feels as if we are in a uniquely powerless and dangerous state of affairs, in which the government can fail without redress, at a time when we could not be in greater need of good leadership.
Johnson is said to be set on a major cabinet reshuffle in September due to worries over sinking poll ratings, but the truth is that public opinion has been set against the Tories before and it has done them no harm. Anyone who thinks the horror of unnecessary Covid-19 deaths will be enough to dislodge the Conservatives from Downing Street should talk to the families of Windrush or Grenfell victims.
The Tories are Teflon, overseeing ministerial scandals, vast wastes of public funds, and crumbling public services, before being repeatedly voted back in – with an increased majority to boot. Neither lack of morality nor of competence can dissuade voters, no matter how much progressives wish it did. If it were enough to point the electorate towards dead benefits claimants, the Labour party would have been elected on a landslide. We are living in the democratic equivalent of a one-party state, and it just so happens that party is destroying the country.
How we go about challenging this is the most pressing matter in modern UK politics. Labour’s report gives solid advice on its long-term strategy: fixing organisational failings, a digital campaign that swaps preaching to the converted for targeting swing voters, and, above all, pitching a transformative economic agenda. But long-term strategies bring little comfort when there is such urgency for change. If a week is a long time in politics, four years is a lifetime, not least in an era where a pandemic is changing life – and politics – as we know it. Downing Street is currently stoking divisive culture wars to shore up support in its “red wall” seats, from curbing foreign aid to dumping trans self-ID plans. That a Tory MP felt the need to check parents couldn’t spend free school meal vouchers on booze and fags last week is an insight into how the party really feels about its new working-class base.
Coronavirus, politically speaking, is the unknown quantity in all this. As the months unfold, voters will face falling living standards and rising unemployment under a party that neither has the answers to help them nor any real desire to. A government overseeing an ever more pressured NHS and threadbare social care system, on top of an, at best, “hands off” approach to children’s education can only wriggle off the hook for so long. Anyone who lived through the 1980s and 90s knows seemingly unending Tory rule can be dramatically uprooted with sufficient public will.
The elements that could pull the country towards a deeper reckoning with its leaders, and with Conservatism, are falling into place. The opposition – for all its wounds – has an urgent task to give the public a bright alternative to Johnson’s decay. Britain’s one-party state cannot last, for all our sakes.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist.
• This article was amended on 26 June 2020. An earlier version said that no party has ever increased the number of MPs it has by 60% to form a majority Government, but in fact this has been achieved at a number of elections, including in 1945.
