What happens when a populist leader misjudges the popular will?

At the very end of 2019 Boris Johnson won a general election. Because of the weirdness of the British electoral system compared to many others, he won a large parliamentary majority (80 seats) with “only” 43.6% of the popular vote. I say only in quotes, because this is the biggest share for decades, since before I was eligible to vote in fact.

We can argue, forever, about the factors that won Johnson the vote and such a big margin. The message of “getting Brexit done” almost certainly had something to do with it. The Labour Party in disarray under a leader who had become isolated and successfully attacked as an anti-Semite (I think it’s complicated but not entirely untrue) almost certainly helped as well.

But BoJo is also, in my opinion correctly, labelled as part of the right-wing populist movement that swept the electoral system in the late 20-teens. Trump, Boris and others of that ilk came to power, while Erdowan strengthened his grip. LePen ran off against Macron, the best the far right have done in France for ages. The list goes on. There is a message that varies by location but is depressingly similar. Where Trump had MAGA, we had allusions to “our great, imperial past.” While the British Empire undoubtedly did achieve many great things there was certainly no mention of the greater number of ills it caused in the world as well. Where Trump wanted to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out, ignoring the fact most of the people he actually wanted to keep out had travelled for thousands of miles just to reach Mexico - subtlety and facts are for losers, BoJo layered Little Englander xenophobia thinly on top of racism as he pandered to the far right in his party but tried to keep it somewhat acceptable to enough people to get him elected.

And therein lies part of the problem. America is barely society any longer - it is multiple tribes that barely intersect. Do you watch Fox or CBS? Where do you get your coffee? Have you had all your vaccine doses and boosters or not? In America, these things are, essentially, driven by your political allegiance. In Britain, we certainly have a proportion of people who act like that, but it’s relatively small. There’s an old adage about our voters that runs “If you don’t vote Labour when you’re young, you have no heart. If you don’t vote Tory when you’re old, you have no brain.” That’s not true of course, but like all adages, has some element of truth. UK voters have a really high proportion of floating voters, people who actually change their votes between one election and the next and back again. I’ve seen estimates that, although it’s obscured by a lot of people cancelling each other’s movements out, it’s as high at 50% who change from election to election. Depending on your definitions, I may be in that 50% - I’m not a true floating voter, I won’t vote for anyone, but I have moved my vote around. I’m what they are now calling a ‘Never-X’ voter, where my heart is usually Green and I will vote for them if I feel I can, but I will vote tactically for a range of other parties to make sure that the candidates I don’t want (Tory, UKIP) don’t get elected if it’s likely to matter. At the last election I voted Labour rather than Green because where I live was considered a Labour-UKIP marginal seat for example, and keeping UKIP out was more important to me than voting Green.

This is an example of why defining that nebulous “will of the British people” is almost impossible. “Britain is a nation of tea drinkers.” Possibly - I drink tea on more days than I drink coffee, but I have days when I drink coffee and not tea, days when I drink neither. The national consumption statistics show we drink more tea than coffee, but it’s getting really close. The latest figures say 165M cups of tea and 95M cups of coffee (per day) but tea consumption is falling, coffee consumption rising and at current rates, they’ll swap before 2030. “We hate the French.” If you look at the number of people who go to Provence and the Algarve, especially to retire, I think it’s clear that’s not universal. Next weekend everyone from Wales, Scotland and probably Ireland will be cheering the French on to beat England in the rugby, we certainly hate the English more than the French!

Now, to the current crisis. BoJo hasn’t actually survived Partygate. He is still under investigation by the police, and Sue Gray, either of those could prove terminal to his time as PM depending on what they find. But remember I said his government was elected partly on the basis of a thin veneer of xenophobia over a deeper layer of racism? If I approved of the xenophobia and racism I might applaud him for sticking to his principles, it’s something I generally like in politicians (as well as the general public). But since I think both are morally bankrupt, I’m not going to give him credit for having integrity around his xenophobia about not letting Ukrainian refugees into the country, or making it as hard as possible. At a time when Poland has let almost 1.5M refugees into the country, we’ve staggered up to nearly 300… several of those after massive, negative publicity campaigns across ALL the newspapers and TV news. When the Mirror and the Mail are carrying the same story under basically the same headline castigating the government you know hell has frozen over. (For any Americans, this would be like MSNBC and NewsMax agreeing on both the main story AND their reaction to it.) We have people in Warsaw being told they have to go back to Kyiv to do their biometric testing because that’s where they made the appointment before the invasion started. They can’t change the appointment, their only option is to restart the process. This is someone who is married to a UK national and has visited the UK many times, her biometric data is on file. Clearly a terrorist. Or the 87 year old who can barely walk. She too has visited relatives living and working in the UK many times. She reached Calais and was told she had to go back to Paris, but the next appointment is not until May. At the same time, the British public is fundraising, send food, blankets and whatever they can. Then they’re seeing this shitshow. And they’re reaching out to their MPs, angrily. Shadow ministers standing up and criticising the government is one thing - it is literally their job description. Opposition MPs standing up and reading out letters about how their constituents have relatives who are affected by this is less common but a government with a majority of 80 can shrug and go “so what?” When Tory backbencher after Tory backbencher stands up and joins in, accusing the Home Office of incompetence, not caring and demanding they get a grip on the situation - scores of them - suddenly it’s not a joke. Remember, if just 40 of them vote against the government, the government suddenly loses key votes.

BoJo and his cronies have really misjudged the way the British public feel. They don’t care about Pritti’s “we need visas to make sure there’s no security risk” knee-jerk racism. They’re looking at pictures of grannies, young mothers and kids being displaced within Europe and wondering exactly which of them are the dangerous terrorists and spies?

This particular refugee crisis might be a perfect storm in another way.

Although voting “yes” for Brexit had many factors, I’m at about the tipping point. Younger than me, more than half of people voted stay, older more than half voted leave. The leave vote just won because people my age and older were also more likely to vote than people younger than me. But, one of the factors in being more likely to vote to stay independent of age, was living in a big city - exposure to multicultural Britain makes you more likely to value it rather than distrust it. From this, we can suggest that people under 60, loosely, are probably more likely than not to be less xenophobic and to welcome refugees.

If we take the fall of the Berlin Wall as a marker of the end of the Cold War, that happened when I was 24. So anyone from roughly 50+ spent their childhood growing up with Russia as the “evil empire.” The older you are, loosely, the more likely you are to be xenophobic according to the Brexit voting trends, but the longer you had thinking of Russia as the enemy, so the easier it is to reach out and offer sympathy to those displaced by the actions of the latest Russian dictator, especially since he’s a former KGB officer, initials that still evoke far more fear than GRU, their direct successor in me. While it’s a sweeping generalisation, you might argue this group might not welcome all refugees, but are going to be more sympathetic to refugees from Russian aggression.

I think, as well, it’s easy to dismiss the older, potentially xenophobic people. Humans aren’t 100% consistent. As a group the British public might, in general, be more xenophobic than me, although I hope that’s changing. But, at the same time, there’s a widespread well of empathy. The great British public was far more willing to take more Syrian refugees than our xenophobic government. They might, in the abstract, dislike Syrians, many may be, to a greater or lesser extent, Islamophobic. But refugees? Yes, we'll step up and offer help, both by sending it to them and by offering them homes or space in our own homes.

You can certainly find counter-examples, I’m talking in sweeping generalisations here. But whether I’m right about the reasons or not, it’s clear that the government is out of touch, according to a survey I read a few days before posting this with about 90% of the populace. Populist governments, by their very nature - their very name in fact, gain traction by appeal to popular (if usually unstated) opinion. Trump, for the opposition to his views expressed by many (quite rightly in my opinion) was still the choice of over 74Mn voters, just over 46% over the electorate. While I might question their morals, sanity and critical thinking facilities, you can’t really claim that’s the return of an unpopular leader in the population as a whole - however much he mobilised certain sectors to get out and vote against him.

Because of the way our parliamentary system works BoJo is, of course, safe from an election, at least in principle until December 2024. But we have widespread council elections in May. I certainly hope that the war in Ukraine is over by then, for the sake of the refugees either way, although for the sake of global politics ideally with Putin thoroughly chastened and withdrawn, even deposed. But Boris? Boris has lurched from crisis to crisis of his own making for months now. Partygate has come, gone onto the back burner, and will come back, possibly with bang, possibly with a whimper. The refugee crisis has some from a variety of missteps, making things too bureaucratic and difficult, misjudging the sense of the population, being too slow and inflexible. These things may come and go, a week is a long time in politics and all that. But come April, we’ve got the rise in national insurance based on old, Cameron-era austerity dogma, and the rise in domestic energy charges coming through. This is going to hit people in the pay-packet just before they go out to vote… and even if “it’s the economy stupid” hammering people in the pay-packet just before they vote is not the way to do well in elections.

Boris, apparently, lacks a core of deep support within the party. His support comes because he is seen as a figure that is popular with enough of the electorate that he wins them elections. If that goes away… so does he. And screwing up on the refugee crisis so quickly after being caught out partying… the shine is really going quickly.