Elections can sometimes make us crazy, even when they’re going on elsewhere – especially, perhaps, when they take place in the USA, where the results inevitably have more implications for the rest of us than do contests taking in smaller, supposedly less consequential countries to which our media pays far less attention.
Irrationally or otherwise, we often pick a side – normally the one that seems closest to the side we’ve picked at home. We follow – sometimes despite ourselves – the ups and downs of a campaign upon which we have no influence. And when the results come in, we not only celebrate or commiserate but immediately begin to read across to politics back home: what does it all mean, and what does it tell us about what our parties and our politicians should do and say next?
“Those of us who enjoy analysing politics already have a tendency to over-interpret elections, even when they take place on our side of the Atlantic.”
The political junky’s vice of over-interpreting
But we should slow down – and calm down. Those of us who enjoy analysing politics already have a tendency to over-interpret elections, even when they take place on our side of the Atlantic. We routinely insist, for example, that one-offs must be seen as more than that, carrying consequences that, we argue with all the portentousness at our command, will be with us for a very, very long time. In the wake of the “stonking majority” Boris Johnson won in 2019, for instance, plenty of gleeful commentators on the right (along with a fair few of their gloomier counterparts on the left) decided that the Conservative Party had constructed a new voter coalition that would endure, if not forever, than for at least a decade – only to discover that its victory owed more to rapidly-reversible contingency than to shifting tectonic plates.
No surprise, then, that Donald Trump’s successful bid for a second term, as well as the clean sweep that the Republicans have made of both houses of Congress, is already encouraging commentators on this side of the Atlantic to draw lessons for whichever party they themselves favour.
If that party’s Labour, then they will be pouncing on the dangers of often po-faced, overly-progressive politicians patronising the kind of “hero (for which read working class) voter” their party used to be able to take for granted. Or they will be pointing to the fact that parties can’t rely on particular minorities sticking with them anymore, especially when – like pro-life US Latinos deserting the Democrats and pro-Gaza British Muslims deserting Labour – they’re ideologically cross-pressured.
If it’s the Conservatives that a commentator favours, then the same stuff will come up; but, instead of being greeted with dismay, such developments will be welcomed. The Tories have already made serious inroads into some ethnic minority groups, detaching, for example, many Indian-origin Hindus, from what used to be seen as an amorphous south-Asian bloc that was frustratingly loyal to Labour. With Kemi Badenoch as leader, surely, some will argue, they can pull off the same trick with black voters of West African rather than Caribbean origin?
And just as the supposed excesses of “woke” and the failure to “tackle” immigration apparently put so many working-class Americans off a Democratic Party represented by a West Coast liberal, surely the Tories – now led, after all, by an out-and-out culture warrior like Badenoch – can ensure the self-same thing happens to a Labour Party that won’t “stop the boats” and for whom true north is now apparently metropolitan-elitist North London rather than salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffs?
“Nigel Farage will presumably be trying over the next four years to show that, just as Halloween seems to have edged out Bonfire Night in the British public’s imagination, the same can happen when it comes to Trump’s style of politics.”
The UK is not the US
Maybe. But maybe not. As anyone who’s lived and worked in the US quickly comes to realize, just as “Twitter is not Britain” (and X even less so) nor is America. Its ethos, its ethics, its emotions, and its economy are all very different – and far from subtly so. Indeed nowadays, even its language – or at least the hyperbolic and scatological vernacular used by Trump and his supporters – seems increasingly over the top: personally I don’t see Badenoch echoing Trump’s potty-mouthed view of Harris by denouncing Angela Rayner as a “shit Deputy Prime Minister” anytime soon.
That’s not to suggest that the kind of rage- and religiously-fuelled, hyper-populist, market-capitalist approach that worked for Trump this time round couldn’t gain any traction here. Nigel Farage (as long as he doesn’t grow too bored of sitting in the Commons as humdrum MP for Clacton) will presumably be trying over the next four years to show that, just as Halloween seems to have edged out Bonfire Night in the British public’s imagination, the same can happen when it comes to Trump’s style of politics. And there will be many Tories (even as, privately, they recoil from what he stands for) who will worry that if they don’t try and match him, blow-for-blow, pound for pound, then Reform UK will do even more damage to them than it did back in July.
“Plenty of those who voted for Trump and against Harris on 5 November seem to have done so mainly on economic grounds. If Kemi Badenoch insists on drawing quickfire lessons from a very different national context, then maybe that’s the one to pick.”
But this would be the continuation of the fool’s errand on which the Conservatives have been embarked for almost a decade-and-a-half. It wasn’t long after they finally made it back into government in 2010 that they began to worry about being outflanked by Farage and acted accordingly. They began with Brexit and tougher and tougher talk on migration before throwing in scepticism about net zero and trans-rights into what many of them knew full well was a devil’s bargain.
Yet they got both far less and far more than they bargained for when they made it: less in the sense that it got them nowhere or, more precisely, it eventually got them just 23.7 per cent of the vote and 121 seats; more in the sense that it toxified the Tory brand, helping to ensure that, while the party limited its defeats to Reform to just four seats, it lost 56 to the Lib Dems.
Polling repeatedly suggests that Brits – apart from Reform supporters (and a minority of current Tory supporters) – don’t think much of Trump, to put it mildly. It also suggests that they tend to be far more bothered about bread and butter issues like the cost of living and the state of the NHS than they are about the Conservatives’ culture war favourites: boats, bathrooms and boilers. And for what it’s worth, plenty of those who voted for Trump and against Harris on 5 November seem to have done so mainly on economic grounds. If Kemi Badenoch insists on drawing quickfire lessons from a very different national context, then maybe that’s the one to pick.
This piece was first published as a LSE British Politics and Policy blog.
