Uninspired choices

It remains difficult to get excited by the impending election in the UK which seems to be more of a low-key event than in 2017. One reason for this is that the majority of voters are suffering from election fatigue, with this being the fourth major plebiscite in just over four years (or five in just over five years if you live in Scotland). Nor is the electorate particularly enamoured of the choices on offer: Boris Johnson is widely expected to win a parliamentary majority only because voters have an even lower opinion of Jeremy Corbyn. It is an unfortunate fact that politics is more about personalities than policies which is why, despite the Tories’ inability to deliver on the latter, Labour is doing even worse on the former.

I highlighted in my previous post the perils of taking opinion poll data at face value and this article in The Guardian illustrates why. The article reflects on 10 years of vox pops conducted around the country in a bid to get as far away from the Westminster bubble as possible and illustrates the extent to which dissatisfaction is still the predominant theme amongst voters. The overriding theme is the feeling of alienation amongst many of those living outside London – an issue which many of those in the capital perhaps fail to appreciate. One of the writers, John Harris, points to the “regular explosions of annoyance about audience members on BBC1’s Question Time” (one of the BBC’s flagship topical debating forums) as evidence of the dissonance in public debate.

A recent example of this was observed during a Question Time debate when an audience member refused to accept that his salary in excess of £80k per year put him in the top 5% of earners, and that it was unfair of a prospective Labour government to make him pay more tax. He is wrong on the first point as the evidence here on the distribution of pre-tax incomes makes clear. But it is less clear that he is wrong on his second point: The gentleman may earn significantly more than the average wage but he is not necessarily in the upper echelons of the wealth distribution, since according to ONS estimates, the wealth held by the top 10% of households is around five times greater than the wealth of the bottom half of all households combined. As Torsten Bell of the think-tank The Resolution Foundation has pointed out, the disparity between the ultra-rich and the well-off has widened in recent years with the result that someone in the top 5% of the income distribution has more in common with the median earner than with the ultra-rich.

Whilst it is easy to be dismissive of our man in the Question Time audience due to the irrationality of his argument in the face of the evidence, he is tapping into a bigger problem. A large swathe of the electorate is suffering from “squeezed middle syndrome.” Real average weekly earnings, for example, are still almost 3% below the 2007 peak. Productivity growth may have been lousy, having risen by only 3% over the past decade, but it is still outstripping real wage growth implying that someone else is reaping the benefits of whatever modest productivity gains have been made. This is not just a British phenomenon – the trend in the US has been even more pronounced over the past two decades (chart below). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that voters are dissatisfied.

Many people have the sense from the UK election campaign that politicians are not talking about issues that involve them. The Labour vision of an economy with a greater emphasis on welfare provision and the protection of workers right sounds good in theory but Brexit is (ironically) the most pressing issue for the electorate (chart below). Accordingly Boris Johnson’s slogan about “getting Brexit done” does tap into what voters want, even though anyone with any understanding of the issue realises that Brexit will not be “done” merely by the UK leaving the EU on 31 January. But this is not the only issue on the agenda and Labour’s refrain that the NHS is safe in their hands, rather than the Conservatives, remains their main angle of attack.

At a time when the electorate is confused and angry at politicians for failing to deliver any improvement in living standards over the past decade, the competing visions of what the main parties want the UK to be and what they can offer to the electorate, do nothing to pour oil on the waters of unrest. There is no sense of broader engagement between politicians and the electorate across a range of policy areas. Neither of the two extremes are what people really want and as a result we will end up with the prime minister who voters dislike the least rather than the one offering the most compelling vision. Inflicting Brexit on a divided country with the near certainty that it will impose short-term economic costs suggests that the malaise that has been hanging over the UK for the past three years is unlikely to lift soon.