So long UK Conservatives, and thanks for all the memes

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Greeting from London, where democracy is currently doing its thing.

After 14 years of rule, the UK’s Conservatives, the most successful political party in the democratic world (measured by years in power over the past 150 years) are about to be turfed out.

The scale of the defeat will not be known until mid-Friday morning, Australian time, but if the polls are to be believed it will be an almighty drubbing.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party is headed for a drubbing in the UK elections.Credit: AP

If one were being kind, you’d say that a reason the Tories are heading to such a bruising defeat is simply that voters are ready for a change. No British political party has ever won a fifth successive term in office.

British politics in the modern era has tended to work in cycles, with the two main parties usually getting a run of several years before the public votes in the opposition. The Tories ruled from 1979 to 1997, Labour from 1997 to 2010, and the Tories since then.

But for anyone who has lived or holidayed in Britain, or simply observed the place over the past few years, a change in government will come as no surprise after a merry-go-round of five leaders and four elections in nine years.

The country is in so many ways broken. Trains, hospitals, doctor’s appointments, the legal system and just about any interaction with the bureaucracy.

Under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, real wages have fallen off the back of Brexit, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which caused energy prices and inflation to skyrocket. For the first time since records began in 1955, British households are, on average, poorer than they were five years ago when income is adjusted for inflation.

Productivity, a measure of economic output for every hour worked, was growing at about 2 per cent per year in the decade before the global financial crisis. Since the Conservatives took power, it has grown by only about 0.5 per cent a year.

As various commentators point out, immigration has surged to record levels. There are 7.5 million people waiting for treatment in the National Health Service. And while inflation has come down from 11 to 2 per cent, interest rates have yet to be meaningfully cut.

These past few years at least have been so full of calamity and chaos it’s hard to identify any positives. The Tories do deserve some credit for unemployment having roughly halved since 2010, when the UK was just emerging from recession.

People argue about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, but all can at least agree that the bitter social divisions under her leadership in the 1980s sparked an angry musical and literary outpouring.

This latest generation of Conservatives has only really been good for comedy and memes.

Anyone who’s seen that wonderful film The Third Man will remember the famous monologue by Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime.

“Don’t be so gloomy,” he told his pal Holly. “After all it’s not that awful ... in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Musician Billy Bragg was a member of the 1980s Red Wedge movement that campaigned against Thatcher and the Conservatives, and for the Labour Party. One of Thatcher’s most vocal opponents, he said in 2009: “Truth is, before she came into my life, I was just your run-of-the-mill singer-songwriter.”

The social division of the Thatcher years inspired an outpouring of song by the likes of Billy Bragg.Credit: Tony Mott

“Whenever I’m asked to name my greatest inspiration, I always answer ‘Margaret Thatcher’.”

Thatcher also made appearances in several novels written or set in the 1980s. In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, she was “Mrs. Torture”. (Despite his political opposition to her, the author remembered Thatcher on her death in 2013 as a “considerate” woman who had offered him police protection after the novel brought a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.)

Of course this is not to say what is coming next will be any better than what has gone before in UK politics. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will face huge expectations and will more than likely not meet them.

If we have learned anything about politics, we know that few governments ever live up to the hype, and ultimately, we are all left disappointed.

But who will write and sing about this Conservative era? Perhaps it’s best forgotten.

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