These charts show how Britain’s Tory party lost its way
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AFTER 14 YEARS in power Britain’s Conservative Party is on the verge of losing it. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, and his party are polling 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party a few days before the election scheduled for July 4th. Our prediction model suggests that the Tories could end up with their lowest share of seats in history. Incumbents globally are having trouble winning elections (look at what just happened to Emmanuel Macron). But the Tories’ troubles look especially bad. Here is a data-driven guide to some of their most important policy missteps, plus a couple of cases in which they got things right.
No policy is more important to the Conservatives’ brand than prudent management of public finances. The Tories inherited an enormous deficit when they won power from the Labour government in 2010. The financial crisis of 2007-08 had pushed the gap between spending and receipts to 7% of GDP (see first chart). The pandemic that took hold in 2020 blew an even bigger hole in the budget. That was not the Tories’ fault. But they damaged their reputation for fiscal competence during the brief, disastrous premiership of Liz Truss, who proposed unfunded tax cuts in 2022. They have also enacted unpopular policies to restore fiscal stability. Cuts to government spending have degraded public services. Against the grain of their ideology they raised taxes to 36% of GDP, their highest level since the second world war.
The deficit has indeed come down. But that has not stopped debt from soaring to just below 100% of GDP, its highest level since the 1960s.
David Cameron and George Osborne, then chancellor of the exchequer, acknowledged in 2015 that productivity is a “long-standing weakness in the British economy”. Over the past 14 years the problem got worse. Productivity growth, measured by GDP per hour worked, rose by an average of 2% a year between 1980 and 2010. Since then the rate has slowed to just 0.5%. The cause of this malaise is debated and—in fairness to the Tories—is not confined to Britain. But the country has had one of the worst productivity growth rates among G7 countries in recent years. Trade barriers created by Britain’s exit from the EU have not helped matters. Stagnant productivity holds down living standards, and the growth of revenue that the government could use to improve public services.
The Tories sought to protect the National Health Service (NHS) from austerity. During their years in power spending on health care increased from 27% of all departmental spending to 29%. But that has not been enough to fix the ailing NHS. One symptom is the big rise in the number of patients awaiting treatment. Those waiting longer than 18 weeks for care have increased from 200,000 in 2010 to 3.2m today. Although Mr Sunak rightly claims that the figure is now falling, strike action by junior doctors over the past 18 months has prevented a faster decline.
Conservative prime ministers have long been fixated on reducing immigration. Even though net migration (outflows minus inflows) was steady for much of the 2010s many Britons thought it was too high. They voted for Brexit in part to give the government control over the numbers arriving from the EU.
That control has not stopped people coming: net migration jumped from 250,000 in 2016 to 760,000 in 2022, when the Tory party relaxed some restrictions on migration to deal with labour shortages created by the effects of Brexit and the pandemic. The outbreak of war in Ukraine and China’s clampdown on Hong Kong pushed arrivals in Britain higher still.
In 2019 Britain’s government was one of the first to establish by law an obligation to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. But not all Tory prime ministers have been very committed to it; most recently Mr Sunak weakened targets for electric vehicles and the adoption of heat pumps.
Nevertheless, Britain’s domestic greenhouse-gas emissions have fallen by 30% over the past 14 years. Its overall footprint (which includes the effect of trade) has decreased by a less impressive 12%.
Education reforms in 2012 gave all schools the ability to become “academies”, a status that frees them from local-government control. Around 80% of secondary schools now operate in this way. The results of PISA, an international test of schoolchildren, show that since 2018 England’s performance in mathematics has improved relative to both that of Scotland (which runs its own education policy) and to that of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. England still trails behind Singapore, the top performer.
If you were to ask any Conservative politician what changes from the past 14 years they are most proud of, they might well say education standards. On other policies their legacy is looking a lot more chequered.