People do engineer change, but it takes a series of events and even then the change they engineer may not necessarily be the radical transformation people expected. At least that is a lesson to be learnt from the British elections.
Politics everywhere is not the same. The conditions in the UK are different from those in Sri Lanka, and those in Sri Lanka are different from those in India, for instance. But does that mean that we are forbidden to look for pointers from what happened elsewhere? Even if the politics in two countries may be fundamentally different, isn’t the nature of democracy remarkably the same?
So how long does it take for voters to switch their allegiances substantially? A long time indeed, if we are to consider the Labour victory in the UK led by Sir Keir Starmer. His party trounced the Conservatives who for 14 years enjoyed being in office with different Prime Ministers.
Starmer and his party also bucked the trend as far as the general direction in Europe was considered. France was turning rightward, and Right-wing populism was gaining ground everywhere. (The far-Left subsequently fought a rear-guard in France, but the hard Right is still on the ascendent.) But in Britain a Centre-Left party was making a comeback, defeating what had become virtually a Far-Right populist party, the Conservatives, after 14 years.
The lessons we can learn perhaps are manifold. One is that there is no such thing as voting based on strict ideological trend-lines. There is no such thing as an ideological shift in any part of the world, based on, say, bad economic prospects or inflation coupled with an immigration problem, real or imagined.
DECADES
The only reason British people bucked the trend and sent the long serving Conservatives packing was that there were a series of events that made them heartily sick of the Tories, as the Conservatives are known for short in those parts. The Tories had, as a certain analyst observed, changed Prime Ministers every 15 minutes. They had made a right royal mess of Brexit, and were also enmeshed in serial scandals. Most importantly, though, the economy was not doing well under successive Tory Governments after Brexit.
But yet, even with so much stacked against them, Britain would have never voted Labour in such large numbers if Sir Starmer had not chosen to embrace Right-wing policies, and ‘triangulate’ as Labour had done once upon a time before him, under the Premiership of Tony Blair decades back. So in other words, what did it require for the Labour to form a Government after the Tories?
Ironically, it required them to look incredibly more like the Tories. Sir Starmer made it absolutely certain that the Labour Party would not be seen as welfarist, or robbing from the rich to make the poor better off. The truth is that the Labour left-wing was abandoned, nay, pro-actively subject to obliteration by Starmer.
Jeremy Corbyn who had taken Labour substantially leftward and had led the party to a disastrous election in which the Tories won a landslide majority under former London Mayor Boris Johnson, was sacked from the party. He had to contest as an Independent. Starmer was careful not to appear as a Remainer with regard to Brexit, and there was no doubt that he wanted to do all of this in order to appeal to the dejected Right-wing voters who hitherto had not voted Labour under any circumstances, characterizing them as a tax and spend party that was a disaster for the economy.
This means that if there is a voter sentiment hardened by years of commitment to a certain baseline policy, it would be extremely difficult to reverse that trend. In order to do so the Opposition would have to re-invent itself as Starmer did with Labour, by moving so decidedly rightward.
Does that mean that we could necessarily draw parallels? One reason the British people had moved away from Labour was a phobia concerning a Labour Government giving the lazy a free ride over the backs of the hardworking taxpayers. Apparently, this had happened long years ago before Blair’s Labour rule under Prime Ministers such as Harold Wilson.
Does this mean that people feel collectively scarred by past trauma and would not vote for parties that embody policies that could re-enact such past periods of hardship? Just as an example, do the Sri Lankan people harbour a phobia over violence wreaked by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), unless they are absolutely certain that the JVP has reformed itself and is not the trigger happy and radicalized gang of the past?
Or for example, does it mean that the Sinhala majority community voters would not vote decisively for a Government that could be swayed by minority parties, after the traumatic and long war waged against the LTTE?
There cannot be any definitive conclusions about any of the above. However, Sri Lankan voters could be extremely cautious with regard to rocking the boat too much the same way the British were about voting Labour, unless Labour proved beyond doubt that it is a far more right-wing Labour than it was under the likes of Harold Wilson, and of course in Opposition, under Corbyn.
Preferences
People, it does seem, have certain non-negotiables, and over time they have certain preferences. In Sri Lanka so far, the people have shown a preference for political parties that are in the conventional mould. Not once have they taken a chance on any radical party with either Left or Rightward leanings. This was despite the fact that there have been very few Governments that could be characterised as being successful in breaking the mould of being woefully under-achieving and uninspiring.
In Britain it has been seen that if the conditions are right, people would take a chance on the type of Government they usually spurn. That is why they preferred Labour this time over the usually blue-eyed Conservatives. But then, it has been said repeatedly that Sir Starmer was elected because the people were tired of putting up with the arrogance of the Conservatives and not because they were enthusiastic about Labour.
Even to obtain this reluctant protest vote, Starmer had to labour very hard indeed, no pun intended. This shows the degree to which voters can develop phobias over certain types of political proclivities. It shows that politicians have to work very hard to change ingrained systems and engineer what is seen as drastic and radical re-sets. Even after all that hard work, Britain is not in re-set mode as such. If that was the case, Starmer would not have had to move so carefully rightward to win, despite the Tories having messed up under successive Prime Ministers, particularly after Brexit became a harsh reality.
Also, it is interesting that the Conservatives have apparently been replaced in some voters’ minds by Hard-Right individuals such as UK Reform Leader and arch Brexiteer Nigel Farage. So it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Britain was moving further and further rightward under the Conservatives and here we have voters reposing confidence in a Far-Right extremist, even as they elect a Centrist Government after 14 long years.
This article began by stating that each country has a unique set of challenges and that the politics of one nation cannot be compared to that of another by making a surface level appraisal. But yet, in democracies there are certain recognisable patterns and if the recent elections in Britain are anything to go by, the answer to whether people really want change is a yes and a no, frustrating as that seems. It could apply to Sri Lanka as well.
Yes, people want change after a disastrous economic meltdown, the likes of which we had never seen before. But no, they may not want change that makes such drastic transformations that the country becomes largely unrecognizable to them. People, despite all their desire for better lives, are set in their ways, and sometimes do enjoy their comfort-zones. As the UK democratic model shows, even when they engineer change, they do so in a way that these comfort-zones are largely undisturbed and intact.
