Incumbency bonus

Why, in campaigning terms, the Conservatives want Labour to be in charge

Peter Cook’s line about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War” is a useful reminder of the limits of satire. It rarely seems more appropriate than when rewatching Brass Eye, which would have dated horribly if it had changed anything. Even now Brass Eye, and its predecessors The Day Today and On The Hour, are still truer, and still closer to the bone, than they should be. It’s 27 years since Chris Morris opened Brass Eye’s Crime episode with “UK used to mean United Kingdom, but ask anyone today and they’ll tell you it stands for Unbelievable Krimewave”. And this week, the Tories put out this attack ad:

The funniest thing about this is that it’s the Tories’ second attempt at it, because the first one accidentally included footage of Penn Station in New York. The second funniest bit is where they call London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) “a tax on driving, forcing people to stay inside or go underground”¹, by which they presumably mean “or take the tube”.

Tonally, the ad is all over the place: its American-accented voiceover and some of the language (“London: a city steeped in history. But tonight its ancient streets bear witness to a different tale, a tale not of kings and queens, but of crime and desperation”)² conveys a consciously hyperbolic Batman-style portrayal of a fictional dystopia. But this is an attack ad: if it isn’t true it doesn’t work. And it isn’t true. London isn’t a crime-ridden hellhole terrorised by black-clad, masked ULEZ inspectors, or “a metropolis teetering on the brink of chaos”³ and, crucially, Sadiq Khan didn’t “seize power”, he just got elected a couple of times.

This isn’t just a London-focused attack ad; it is an attack ad that uses London as the frame for a wider attack on Labour nationally. The core part is the wider argument: that London “is a blueprint for how Labour intend to run the rest of the country - if you let them”.⁴ The bit at the end when they zoom out of London, via a black and white map of Britain, to a shot of the globe captioned “CRIME GOES UP JUSTICE GOES DOWN” just reminded me of the Harry Enfield “L IS FOR LABOUR, L IS FOR LICE” sketch, which presumably isn’t what they intended.⁵

In London, people are too well aware of not in fact being confined to their homes by masked, black-clad ULEZ inspectors to be able to be fooled into believing that they are. But in the rest of the country, and particularly the bits of the country that are still represented by Conservative politicians, London, and other Labour-held urban areas, might just be able to function as a symbol of the kind of place you wouldn’t want to visit, let alone live in, because of its knife crime or viable alternatives to car use or wokeness or whatever. The kind of place that is the way it is because Labour is in charge. The kind of place your own home town could become too, if Labour ran the country.

What the Tories are trying to do here, and in an associated “Life Under Labour” microsite, is to make Labour the incumbents and themselves the challengers. It’s best not to read the list of attacks the microsite carries too closely: they include both a complaint that Labour-run “Manchester has been branded ‘the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport’ – almost no electric shared cars, negligible electric buses, poor charging infrastructure and hardly anyone even has a pushbike”, and (in the accompanying email) that in Labour-run London “Sadiq Khan has… imposed a £12.50 daily charge on people wanting to drive their car”. Wait, do you want people moving away from the use of higher-emission vehicles or not? And they include a list of alleged failures by Labour Police and Crime Commissioners as well as a complaint that shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper wants to abolish them.⁶ Wait, if so many of them are rubbish, why do you want to keep them? Never mind the quality of the attacks, just feel the width.

Your mileage may vary on the extent to which you think it is plausible for a party that has been in office since 2010 to run with the argument “If you want to know what life in the UK would be like under Labour, visit the UK”. You may think that national government decisions have some bearing on the state of local services and on local government budgets, even in places where Labour runs the council. You may think it is relevant that crime is generally higher in cities, which also tend to be Labour-run, than in towns and rural areas which tend not to be, and wonder whether the causal link here really hinges on “voting Labour”. You may question the extent to which national government can take credit for national falls in crime while simultaneously asserting that any local crime increases are the responsibility of Police and Crime Commissioners when those Police and Crime Commissioners are Labour.⁷ But please don’t. You are not supposed to think about this too hard. You are just supposed to shudder, like this gif does, and then vote Conservative.

Incumbency, broadly speaking, is an electoral advantage: just look at how many more general elections have been won by the incumbent rather than a challenger party.⁸ Governments control the narrative far more than oppositions do. They get to do things, where oppositions only get to say things, which means that they also get to point at the results of what they did and show how the decisions they have made across their time in office have made things better.

There is a crucial caveat to this though: incumbency helps governments much, much more when the decisions they have made across their time in office have actually made things better, than when they haven’t. And this is the core of the Conservatives’ current problem, and why they are more comfortable pretending Labour are in charge.

You can see this flight from incumbency in Rishi Sunak’s call at his local election launch for voters to “send a message to Keir Starmer”. This is usually an opposition message. More than that, it is usually an opposition message for mid-term moments when oppositions are focusing more on the government’s failings than on their own plans for the future: a “send a message” message is not a “kick them out” or “put us in” message, so you usually see it in campaigns when kicking them out or putting us in is not an option. For an incumbent Prime Minister to call on voters to send a message to the Leader of the Opposition is to put himself in a weak position and make his opponent the main character, sacrificing the advantages he has from actually being the actual Prime Minister.

The Tories are campaigning like an opposition, and pretending that Labour is already in power, because incumbency isn’t working for them. It may well be the best option available to them at the moment. And if it doesn’t turn things around, at least it’s good practice for the next few years.

The latest episode of The Election Tricycle, a podcast about this year’s general elections in the UK, USA and India presented by Emily Tamkin, Rohan Venkat and me, focuses on how the seven-phase, 44-day (seven-phases! 44 days!) Indian general election actually works. You can listen and subscribe to it here, and you can also now subscribe to the premium version with some bonus features (potted profiles of key people! Listener questions! Other bits and bobs!) via this link.

1. This is a real quote from the voiceover. I am not making it up.

2. This is a real quote from the voiceover. I am not making it up.

3. This is a real quote from the voiceover. I am not making it up.

4. This is a real quote from the voiceover. I am not making it up.

5. My comedy references, like my music references, are from the 1990s. I’m old, ok?

6. The Tory claim here, incidentally, is that abolishing Police and Crime Commissioners would break “the historic principle of policing by consent”, an argument that only works if you think that the historic principle of policing by consent came into existence when the first Police and Crime Commissioners were elected in 2012.

7. This is in some ways similar to the Government’s argument that inflation has come down because of its plan to get inflation down, having previously gone up because, I don’t know, look, a squirrel.

8. OK, I’ll count them for you: of the last ten general elections, two have resulted in a change of government.