Brexit is the only big legacy of the 2019-24 parliament

Rishi Sunak’s plan to introduce a phased ban on smoking always had the look of a last-ditch effort to secure a legacy. It was apposite, then, that in hurrying towards a snap election the prime minister accidentally stubbed out his own ground-breaking law (which could not be passed in the “wash-up” period after Mr Sunak announced the election on May 22nd and before Parliament dissolved). No matter. The lesson voters should take, Mr Sunak insisted brightly at a campaign event on May 27th, is that “I was the prime minister that put that bold policy on the table”.

What some might notice instead is that the Conservatives have achieved remarkably little since winning a landslide in the general election four-and-a-half years ago. Most governments that win big majorities of the sort that the Tories got in 2019 can point to a coherent set of laws that shape the country in their image, notes Dan Gover of Queen Mary University of London.

In the late 1990s and 2000s New Labour passed bills that introduced a minimum wage, established human rights in domestic law, overhauled Britain’s approach to discrimination and set the country’s course in cutting carbon emissions. The 2010-15 coalition government managed a set of reforms to legalise same-sex marriage in England and Wales, extend the academisation of schools and introduce universal credit, a new welfare system.

Hand future historians the statute book for 2019-2024, however, and they will be hard-pressed to discern much of a thread. Although a similar number of laws were passed compared with other recent parliaments, it is not clear that—with one glaring exception—many will amount to much. That exception, of course, is Brexit. Equipped with a fresh mandate, Boris Johnson’s government in 2020 passed the EU Withdrawal Agreement Act, a law that will be remembered as one of the most consequential in Britain’s post-war history. There is little prospect of it being overhauled soon.

Yet elsewhere the record is slim. The Tories’ main constitutional reform—a Bill of Rights, which would have reformed Britain’s relationship with European law and courts—was abandoned when its architect, Dominic Raab, was sacked. One bad by-election result, a loss to the Liberal Democrats in Chesham and Amersham in 2021, was enough to see off a tilt at reforming the planning system. Levelling up—the central promise of the 2019 victory—does at least have its own act, passed in 2023. But it is a sprawling one that few think will do much to shift regional inequalities.

The Conservatives were, in part, unlucky. Governments tend to get big reforms through early, when they have most political capital. Mr Johnson’s administration was hit by a pandemic two months after taking office. But ideological incoherence and constant turnover are also to blame; the average tenure of cabinet ministers has been under a year, compared with almost three in the 2010-15 parliament. A bill to improve online safety changed in focus multiple times. A clampdown on unhealthy foods was mostly abandoned. Rental reform was repeatedly promised and repeatedly delayed.

Mr Sunak is now trying to project himself as an energetic prime minister with bold ideas for the country. But under his premiership Parliament had fallen into a torpor. “You kept seeing lots of filler and then the adjournment debate would be at half-three in the afternoon”, says Alice Lilly of the Institute for Government, a think-tank. The smoking bill was not the only piece of legislation that was lost in the wash-up. But any sense of urgency had long since vanished. ■

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