In 15 years of on-the-ground political reporting, I don’t think I have ever experienced a more forlorn and frustrated public mood than the one that looks set to define this year. Some of people’s grievances are only too familiar: low pay, insecurity, a sense of being hopelessly cut off from power and influence. Others – inflation, impossible mortgage payments, rents, and the overlooked effects of the pandemic – have arrived comparatively recently.
What also seems new is the sheer reach of these problems, into parts of the population we might have previously considered to be relatively affluent. All this points to a question that now feels inescapable: what is the politics of complete exhaustion?
Last Tuesday, I recorded an episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast on the looming byelection in my adopted home of Frome in Somerset, a contest triggered by the belated resignation of the disgraced Tory MP David Warburton. The key party-political aspects of the story quickly became obvious: huge exasperation with the Conservatives, and a Liberal Democrat candidate who seems almost certain to win and yet completely unprepared for what she faces. But in a day spent talking to as many people as I could, what really burned through was a widespread sense of fatalistic hopelessness – focused not on politics, but the impossibility of everyday life.
From the outside, Frome is a somewhat fashionable town, usually stereotyped as the home turf of the kind of people who now work from home and pass their spare time in a blur of craft beer and organic food. But up close, it has much the same problems as more overlooked places.
Kylie, 33, told me about her job in a local care home for older people, where her pay has just gone up to £10.70 an hour. “I could get more working in Wetherspoon’s, but it’s the job I want to do, so I accept it,” she said. Through the worst of the Covid crisis, she told me, her working life had been trying beyond words, but there had been “no pay rises, no incentive to keep going … I still feel like we’re troubled by it. People like me worked through the pandemic, and now we’re struggling.
“I had my daughter when I was 25, and things were all right then – there was money left over at the end of every week,” she went on. “Now, we’re working just to live, aren’t we?” She paused. “My daughter says, ‘I can’t wait to grow up,’ and I say, ‘You really don’t want to – not right now.’” When I asked Kylie about politics, she shrugged, and expressed her only certainty: “If we have a Conservative government, it gets worse every year.”
A mile or so away, in one of the new-build developments that now ring the town, I met Zoe, a self-employed accountant. “We’re due to remortgage soon, and it’s terrifying,” she said. “You just don’t know where you stand any more.” Her family’s house had been on the market for the last year, she said, but moving home was currently an impossible prospect. “The future’s scary – more so for my children,” she said.
As a property owner, I suggested, she might not seem to be struggling to survive. “Of course,” she said. “I feel like you can have those things, but to move forward in life, or to move up the ladder – that’s the terrifying part. You’re grateful for what you’ve got, and happy to stay where you are, because it’s a lot safer.” Here, amid neat front gardens and the low hum of supermarket delivery vans, was the threadbare idea of “aspiration” apparently fading to nothing. And what of politics? “Everything is so out of your control … I feel like it doesn’t make much difference any more.”
This is where we are now, and the cold numbers in opinion polls cannot capture it. The current cliches and rituals of Westminster politics might pay lip service to our seemingly intractable national problems, but nothing really speaks to their gravity. Rishi Sunak’s endlessly parroted “pledges” – which include somehow halving inflation by Christmas – are trite and flimsy. Notwithstanding a lot of good intentions, Keir Starmer’s dogged attempts to pare back any policy or idea that might scare certain voters or vested interests means that he also fails to meet the moment: in delaying and shrinking his party’s green prosperity plan and citing “economic stability”, for example, he comes dangerously close to saying that treatment will have to be watered down because the disease is so bad. In the worst possible way, we are now all in this together: a hesitant and anxious public look to their supposed leaders and find the same hesitancy and anxiety reflected back.
There is another shortcoming of the current political mainstream, which is clearer than ever now that Boris Johnson has – temporarily? – left the public stage. While he trod basic probity into the dust, his time as prime minister also seems to have marked the death knell of optimism, an aspect of politics now so disgraced that no one seems to want to go near it. Sunak and Starmer operate in the wreckage of “Build back better”, levelling up and all of Johnson’s other nonsense. Neither is the kind of politician well-suited to storytelling and high-flown rhetoric, and for fear of anything that might suggest illusory sunlit uplands, they now take refuge in a style of politics that is almost apologetic: a basic political failure that is mind-boggling.
So-called core inflation is still rising. Signs of everyday decay – suddenly reduced postal services, the dependably dire state of public transport, local councils hitting the financial skids – are everywhere. Now, it seems, the Bank of England could soon tip the country into recession, in an attempt to somehow tame prices and interest rates. Does anyone seriously think that 15 years after the financial crash of 2008, the public might be in the market for another bout of “if it’s hurting, it’s working”? If that is the only narrative offered at the top, God help us.
In that context, the forthcoming byelections – in Somerton and Frome, Selby and Ainsty in Yorkshire, and Johnson’s former seat in outer London, Uxbridge and South Ruislip – are important but small events: a chance, perhaps, for politicians and journalists to sample the dire public mood, which also run the danger of momentarily obscuring our huge national problems amid shock local results, candidates’ gaffes and visits from national politicians. Against the backdrop of such extreme crisis, the usual political choreography of these events may well look absurd; there again, if they go some way to highlighting the emptiness of our current politics, that will be nothing but a good thing.
Here, I think, is the essence of the latest nightmare we may be slipping into. If any country knows what happens when fear and anxiety combine with a political vacuum, it is this one: 10 years ago, in the slipstream of a revival of the far right, it was exactly that combination that began our journey to Brexit and crises seemingly without end. Now, I hear echoes of the weariness and bafflement I used to associate with the post-industrial places whose furies took us out of the EU, but this time in our market towns and suburbs. I worry about that. I think we all should.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist