Why the Conservatives look set to lose the UK election

Rule, Britannia!

A little over 14 years ago, I was in school, revising for upcoming exams and only faintly aware of an impending UK election because my school made us run a "mock election".

The exercise revealed that kids voted in 1 of 3 ways: for the party that their parents liked, the party that had the most popular kid representing it as its fake leader, or the party that their parents specifically did not like, in a boring bit of teenage rebellion.

The Conservatives won that mock election. They also won the most seats in the actual 2010 election, the 2015 election, the 2017 election, and the 2019 election — a string of victories that resulted in 14 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule in Britain.

That period has seen the country emerge from the global financial crisis, hold a Scottish independence referendum, legalize same-sex marriage, host the Olympics, have a handful of royal scandals, put slogans on a bus, leave the European Union, navigate a pandemic, build zero globally-important tech companies, and mourn its longest-reigning monarch. For millions of people like me, their entire adult life has been spent under a Conservative government.

In 4 days time, that looks set to change.

With polls suggesting a 20%+ point lead for Labour, and Reform splitting the right-wing vote, the UK is on the brink of an election which — if some of the most extreme polls are accurate — could be the most one-sided in more than a century.

So, how did the UK get here?

From “Partygate” to last week’s betting scandal, there’s been much controversy to push voters to seek change in recent years. But two of the most substantive battlegrounds for this UK election have actually been old school issues: the economy and public services (most notably the NHS). On both of those measures, the data is damning.

People feel poorer

In the early 2000s, Britons got used to their pay packets becoming a little weightier as each year passed, with real wage growth allowing them to splash out or save a little more each month. The global financial crisis undid some of that work and British wages have stagnated ever since.

Indeed, since the financial crash and the Conservatives coming to power on the back of a 2010 manifesto that leaned heavily on promises to kickstart the economy, average weekly earnings in the UK have hardly budged. Data from the ONS reveals that average real UK weekly earnings were £515 in March 2008. Fast-forward 16 years and they are… £523. Had wages continued along the 2000-2007 trend, they would have reached £758. Had they tracked the 2000-2009 era (which accounts for the global financial crisis), they would have grown to more than £600 / week.

Not Healthy Signs

One surefire way to lose an election in the UK is to mess up the National Health Service — a British institution in which the population places much pride.

Founded over 75 years ago in the aftermath of WW2, the NHS was the first health system in any western country to offer free medical care to an entire population. Today, it stands as the largest employer in the UK, and one of the largest in the world, outranked only by behemoths like McDonald’s, Walmart, and the defense forces of global superpowers.

But on so many key measures, the NHS is under severe strain.

From the end of 2009 to the end of 2019, the number of people on NHS waiting lists for hospital treatment in England rose 87%. Then COVID hit, and — understandably — the health service was put under remarkable stress that it’s never fully recovered from.

In the last 4 years, the waiting lists in England have grown another 71%, taking the total to more than 7.6 million people. That’s nearly 14% of the entire English population on a waiting list. Patients requiring emergency attention haven’t fared much better. While almost no-one waited more than 12 hours in A&E in the 2010s, this skyrocketed just shy 55K people at the end of 2022.

Furthermore, last September, only 74% of cancer patients with urgent referrals had a less-than-2-week wait to be seen by a consultant, despite that figure having stayed at ~90% for the whole decade up to 2020.

Doing more with less

It would be unfair to ignore two major factors at play. One is well-discussed: Covid. The other, demographics, less so. The stark reality is that Britain, like so many western countries, is getting older — and older citizens require far more resources to look after than younger ones.

Nevertheless, a series of funding cuts (in real terms), against the backdrop of a cost-of-living crisis, have not only exacerbated the overcrowding of clinics and wards, but led to doctors’ strikes over issues of insufficient pay and burnout.

Indeed, a survey published in February by the British Medical Association found that nearly 50% of junior doctors in the UK reported having to borrow money from family to get by.

Energy & finance forever

Although analysis is somewhat clouded by the pandemic, the UK economy has stagnated relative to its peers after the nation officially left the European Union in January 2020. Since the end of 2019, the country has notched the worst GDP growth of any member of the G7, failing to cash in on the tech boom of the last decade in any economic-needle-moving type of way.

Indeed, despite having so many of the ingredients that could have birthed a tech giant — a highly educated English-speaking workforce, a globally important financial sector, a useful timezone, and plenty of soft cultural power — the UK has been left behind in the global battle for tech supremacy.

No fact brings this failing to light better than last week’s headline: Nvidia is now worth more than the entire UK stock market.

In fairness, that headline also applies to the French and German stock markets, and Nvidia has since dropped back below that threshold, but just exploring the list of the largest British companies and industries, it’s hard to get wildly excited.

There are some phenomenal powerhouses in finance (HSBC), pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca), energy (Shell, BP), and consumer (Unilever), but there is a notable absence of tech. In fact, data provider FactSet tells me that the UK’s largest public “technology services” company is the London Stock Exchange Group. I.e. Britain’s largest technology company is a company that facilitates buying equity in other companies.

The changing of the guard?

For the last decade and a half, the UK has been keeping calm and carrying on. Could a Labour government help provide the answers to all of the country’s problems? I don’t know, but Britain seems keen to find out.