'It's Not Just a Failed Ideology. They Are Also Incompetent.' - Cameron Hodgkinson

'It’s Not Just a Failed Ideology. They Are Also Incompetent.' - Cameron Hodgkinson

It is hard to fight the feeling that things in Britain are only getting worse. Booking a GP appointment, never a walk in the park a few years ago, has now become a weeks-long waiting game. Our rivers are full of sewage. Wages have stagnated and child poverty is starting to mount. Criminal barristers are on a permanent strike. It is hard to think of a single thing in this country that is going well. It has even led to the LSE branding the last few years as “Britain’s lost decade.”

I believe it to be a reasonable assumption that poor performance comes down to poor leadership. Of course, a lot of this is because our government is gripped by free market dogma exemplified in the recent leadership race, where it seems like the only solution offered to any problem was tax cuts. However, I think this belies some of the problem. It seems to me that the calibre of government ministers just seems to be lower than it has ever been. I mean, I have never seen a future Prime Minister fail to find the exit to their own campaign launch. It makes the prospect of meeting Liz Truss seem even worse, since she might not even be able to leave. Is there anything worse?

When you consider the last few years of government, cock-ups and basic mistakes are noy hard to come by. We had the Minister for Transport sign a contract with a ferry company that had no ferries.

Worse still, it appears this company copy-and-pasted a pizza delivery firm’s website. Then we had a former Chancellor who did not even know how to use contactless, and the Culture Minister unable to say whether she had talked to the Prime Minister while a lone calculator was the sole object occupying her bookshelves in the background. It is hard to conclude that these people should be in charge of a kettle, let alone the country.

This raises the question of how we ended up with such a sad set of talentless leaders. It seems like that there are three main causes which set the current bunch apart. The first is their background. As the rest of society is determined to expand the diversity of its leaders, it seems the top of the Tory party is drawn from a rather narrow social circle. Over 68% of the cabinet attended fee-paying schools, four from Eton alone. As the Sutton Trust remarked, this is the worse share since Major was in power. What is perhaps more concerning is not the fact that the cabinet seems to be drawn increasingly from the upper and upper-middle classes, but the complete exclusion of working-class people. According to analysis from the Guardian, less than one in one hundred have working-class backgrounds.

Here I am not trying to make the argument that people from more privileged backgrounds are necessarily going to be less competent. But to have all your leadership drawn from such narrow class backgrounds does encourage a form of groupthink and dogmatism that a diversity of life experiences helps to defeat. For instance, it would be harder for a Tory of any working-class background not to see the difference that adequately-funded public services can make to the lives of millions. The privilege of the current leadership allows them to cling to their fantasies.

Secondly, we have experienced some of the most fractious politics in the post-war period. It is worth acknowledging how strange this is. We have had the same party in power for the last 12 years, but we are coming onto the fourth Prime Minister in this period. The constant shift of power from leader to leader means that for a minister to survive, they cannot climb the greasy pole on their credentials and talent alone. Instead, as each Prime Minister has to maintain their own network of support, ministers are now selected for loyalty. Why else would Nadine Dorries be in the cabinet? It’s also worth noting that those ministers who have survived have had a remarkable ability to reflect whichever way the wind blows to appease the current Prime Minister. And so, these are not ministers with deep commitments to policy, but those with a desperate desire to do anything maintain their power.

Lastly, I think there is something to be said about the media environment. As ministers do not just have to govern, they must look and sound good on the morning media rounds. This means that leaders from all parties have something else to consider when selecting their frontbench. What is specific to the Conservative party is that most of the media takes a supportive editorial line. A friendly media means that ministers do not have to fear scrutiny for poor performance, and so have no incentive to improve. This is how we get a situation where PPE contracts for mates are not scrutinised but the Labour leader having a curry while campaigning is a three-month media storm.

This is all to say that there is something else dividing Labour from the Conservatives apart from who are they think: it is who they are. Labour’s frontbench has more people who attended state schools and simply has working class people included. The relative stability of Labour party leadership means that shadow ministers have been able to rise not just based on their ideological fidelity to the leader. Finally, the media has not been particularly friendly to any Labour leader. Such probing by journalist has forced the Labour leadership and cabinet minister to perform and clear up the party.

[Cameron Hodgkinson is a first year PPEist at Somerville College.]