Tom Tugendhat: prediction

Transcript context

…Putting aside any party loyalties, but does the thinness of those mandates make you more optimistic about liberalism, broadly construed, in the UK? Yes, it does. It makes me much more optimistic about it. The reason is because the only way you get these mandates is by appealing to a wide enough section of your own voting bloc, and by convincing those who are against you either to support you or to stay away. And they stay away when they’re not interested in supporting their own side, or they’re not too fearful of you. You’ll look at, for example, the 2019 election: The turnout was very, very high. It was very high because a lot of people either were extremely angry at one of the party leaders, or they were absolutely determined that their own party leader should win. And the combination of the two meant it generated very high turnouts on both sides, as it were. It also meant that the two major political parties got the bulk of the vote. Whereas in 2019, there’s a lot of people who were angry at us, the Conservatives, after 14 years in office. But there was no real enthusiasm for Keir Starmer, nor was there any great fear of Keir Starmer. That meant that you got, first of all, a very low turnout, but you also got a very low margin of victory in percentage terms, although you end up with a very large majority in electoral terms. That means that these things can change quickly. I think the important thing in a democracy is to be ready for change and to make sure that good ideas can cut through. That’s why I’m extremely optimistic for the next election, for example, because I think that the kind of economic reforms that we need to see, the Conservative revolution that we need to see, the back-to-service, back-to-leadership, and back-to-action that we need to see is something that can generate a real swing and a real momentum behind it relatively quickly, and certainly within four years. It’s a common view with outsiders that the mechanisms through which Brexit evolved and was achieved show there was some kind of defect in the UK system of government, that somehow you got stuck at a certain point and there weren’t enough moving parts in the system to budge you from that, either to getting the deal done or reversing it. Independent of whatever one thinks of Brexit, do you accept that criticism that somehow the system can get stuck due to the extreme sovereignty of Parliament?…

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