The Conservative Government is presumably about to be ejected from office. This is being treated as a judgment on their record of 14 years in power, their general incompetence and their failure to deliver what voters believe is needed.
Because the discussion of electoral politics tends to be conducted in parochial terms, the expected defeat of the sitting Government is being assessed as if it were unique to this country and these particular political leaders. Hardly anyone seems to notice that almost all the European governing parties or coalitions which held power during the pandemic have been rejected outright or had their authority seriously undermined – sometimes with shocking results.
This effect has not been confined to notoriously volatile countries like Italy, whose government was one of the first to go. Germany, which has relied on moderate consensus for generations in its determination to atone for a terrible historical legacy, is now seeing the rise of an extreme Right which was believed to have been extinguished. A country regarded, until very recently, as stable and socially liberal, the Netherlands, has elected a populist rabble rouser whose rhetoric is so incendiary that it has taken months to form a workable coalition. In France, Emmanuel Macron holds onto power without a majority.
So this is clearly not just a phenomenon peculiar to the circumstances of each of these countries and its own distinctive political class. It looks more like a crisis of confidence in democracy itself – or, at least, the complacent, consensual version of it which is the dominant model. Voters in one country after another are not simply turning to traditional opposition parties out of conventional dissatisfaction with the status quo. They are supporting, often in startling numbers, much more visceral messages that appeal to atavistic emotions which were thought to be long buried.
Perhaps it is time to examine just how much damage was done during the pandemic years – not just in economic terms but on a much wider scale to the psyche of populations as a whole. Maybe what we are seeing is some sort of mass nervous breakdown: a furious rejection of virtually everyone who was in charge during that bizarre period in which the most socially sophisticated peoples of the world were subjected to a form of deranging isolation from which they are struggling to recover. Perhaps, to put it bluntly, quite a lot of people went quietly crazy and a lot more became disoriented in ways that no thriving, active, urban society had anticipated.
Might it be that the widespread syndrome of “anxiety and depression”, which is often assumed to be a pretext for failing to seek employment, is actually a genuine phenomenon: a form of mass agoraphobia that was induced in susceptible people by the unnatural conditions imposed on them at what might have been a sensitive point in their lives?
There is much talk about the damage to school age children in formal educational terms, but what about the loss they suffered in psychological development: the emotional initiation that is a feature of those critical years between childhood and adult life? What happens when you miss out on that?
And even before adolescence, when social interaction is so obviously crucial, there is the wider contact that should be part of the daily lives of very young children and infants. A few weeks after the face mask mandate on public transport was lifted, a woman carrying a baby sat down opposite me on the train. The baby’s gaze locked on to mine. I smiled and the baby giggled.
It was one of those moments of social interaction between an infant and a stranger that had been, for most of the previous two years, made illegal. What sort of price was paid for that? What if children have essential developmental stages, and missing them causes irreparable damage?
The inchoate anger and recklessness of so many electorates seems somehow disproportionate to the problems their countries are facing. Certainly, there are serious difficulties, economically and culturally, but they are not insoluble. Germans are not wheeling around barrows full of worthless currency as they were in the 1930s. Italians are not subject to the whims of corrupt mafia-led governments. The British may be enduring a cost of living crisis and a housing shortage but we have survived – and laughed – through much worse.
Somehow the old assumptions that have underpinned political behaviour – however cynical they may have been – have been profoundly destabilised. In most of Europe, this mood of almost nihilistic rejection is taking down parties of the Left or centrist coalitions because they are the ones that happened to be in power at the time when the world went mad. Here, it is a centre-Right party that will bear the brunt.
But this is not a matter of political orientation. It is a rejection of government itself – because it stole from people’s lives much of what made them worth living. Who would have thought that free societies would be debating whether children should be allowed to hug their grandparents? Or whether it should be illegal to have a sexual relationship with someone from outside your own household? All these years after the end of the Cold War, we were bringing in repressive laws that went beyond anything the East German Stasi ever dreamt of.
So let me suggest a theme that Rishi Sunak might explore as he tries to come to terms with this extraordinary historical moment. How about a speech that tells the truth.
“We have just been through an unprecedented period in our history. You, as a people, accepted restrictions and prohibitions on the most personal aspects of your lives that would once have been unthinkable and we in government were grateful for your courage and self-sacrifice. Some of our decisions, taken in good faith, were mistaken and we accept responsibility for the damage that was done. Now I ask you to join us in renewing our commitment to a hopeful future.”
What about that? Even if his party lost, it would go down with honesty and humility.