2023: the omens aren’t good

What happens next? I have no illusions that I am any kind of superforecaster, but it’s good to keep a record of my expectations. As it happens, my recent track record is ok, but I’m self-aware enough to know that there’s an element of luck about that. Let’s see whether I can do as well or better for the coming year.

The present

In order to work out where we’re going, we first need to work out where we are right now. A lot of this will seem obvious, but that’s the point.

1. The British economy is in awful shape.

Britain is entering what is expected to be an exceptionally long recession. Living standards are expected to decline for two years in a row in 2022 and 2023, something unprecedented in living memory. Inflation is above 10% and doesn’t look like falling soon. The government’s deficit has ballooned. The country is being dragged down by public sector strikes. Need I go on? The position is wretched.

2. The world economy is in awful shape.

This is something not unique to the UK. The rest of Europe is struggling as well with very similar problems. Britain’s may be the most intense (it’s expected to be the worst-performing economy in the G20 other than Russia’s next year), but no one is exactly in easy street. The USA, which is doing relatively well, has been wrestling with high inflation too, though that looks to have peaked, while China has been laid low by the consequences of its now-abandoned zero Covid policy.

3. The war in Ukraine has a way to go yet.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the general expectation was that Ukraine would be overrun in a few days. Confounding expectations, Ukraine not only did not buckle but has spent the second half of the year, with Western weapons, pushing Russia back. Russia is visibly losing at present, Kherson being the most spectacular evidence of this. It has not yet, however, lost and it presumably hopes in the spring to launch a fresh offensive with the troops that it mobilised. Meanwhile, Ukraine have signalled that their next move will be to attack towards Melitopol. It already seems to be starting the same slow process of attrition that it used so effectively in Kherson.

4. The Conservative party is de facto a coalition, and the different parties don’t like each other.

Back in the UK, the government has in the last year looked utterly chaotic. Part of this has been straightforward incompetence, usually from wildly-overpromoted ciphers. At least as much, however, has arisen from personalised factional fighting. At the end of the year, the Conservative party has a Prime Minister who had been explicitly rejected by his party not three months ago. His Cabinet is brokered, meaning that he can exercise only limited control over it. It’s hard to imagine either Suella Braverman or Dominic Raab would still hold their jobs if Rishi Sunak had the usual authority of a new Prime Minister.

On the backbenches, the former Prime Minister squats like a giant toad, casting a shadow over the front bench. He showed when he got 100 MPs to support his campaign to be returned to Downing Street that he still commands a substantial body of support. His acolytes are already making noises. Priti Patel has lent her name to an attempt to reform party machinery to give more control to members, who have shown themselves to be far more supportive of Boris Johnson than the MPs were. His support base put down a motion for Britain to leave the ECHR. They are going to be restive.

Rishi Sunak has already been forced into a series of climbdowns on matters as disparate as onshore windfarms and mandatory house-building targets, given he lacks the support in Parliament to force them through, even with a majority of nearly 80. More climbdowns are likely. Sir Keir Starmer’s charge that he is weak looks likely to stick.

5. The Conservatives are far behind in the polls (though there are signs that they are off their Liz Truss-induced record lows).

Conservative poll shares in 2022 declined down a gentle slope for much of the year, plummeted vertiginously in September and October, then stabilised at a level higher than in September/October but still much lower than before the drop. Labour vote shares have taken a more or less mirror course. At the time of writing, Labour are polling something like 45–47% and the Conservatives are polling something like 27–29%. (Other pollsters will provide different answers if you particularly want them to.)

One thing that should worry the Conservatives enormously is the virtual disappearance of support for them among anyone under age 50. In one recent YouGov poll (YouGov notably have the Conservatives lower, but the general point applies to other polling), just 1 in 8 voters under that age were planning to support them. They’re not doing all that much better with 50–64 year olds. This — large — age group is becoming a demographic Liverpool or Scotland.

To put this in context, 16% of the public think that the moon landings were probably faked. If we take that as a reasonable benchmark of weirdness, supporting the Conservatives if you are under age 50 is weird. How are the Conservatives going to reach a group in which they are so far outside the normal discourse?

6. Labour is beige made flesh.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t get members of the public singing his name. David Bowie’s “Starman” offers suitable opportunities should you feel so inclined, but expect odd looks if you try. In a word cloud from September, the word most associated with him was “Labour”. Other prominent words included “weak”, “useless”, “boring”, “bland” and “twat”. Nevertheless, his popularity ratings are holding up well for a leader of the Opposition who has been in office for nearly three years, so he probably has made his peace with that.

Jeremy Corbyn did get his supporters’ pulses racing but he also got an adrenaline response from his far more numerous opponents. Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t frighten people in the same way. The worst that people fear from him is a dreary political correctness and lack of answers.

Sir Keir Starmer has still yet to define what his Labour party is for, rather than what it is against. This is something he needs to start to do at some point. If he wants to govern, he will want authority to push through the policies he’s governing with. He has an object lesson opposite him when a leader fails to use the last manifesto as a touchstone for authority. The incredible thinness of the 2019 Conservative manifesto is central to their problems. Surely Sir Keir Starmer is not going to make the same mistake?

7. Brexit is now generally understood to have been a disaster in practice.

This time last year, support for the decision to leave the EU in the long-running YouGov series was hovering just below the 40% mark. It now hovers below 35%. An absolute majority think it was the wrong decision. Excluding Don’t Knows, the public breaks 60:40 against Brexit now.

Whatever the public’s views now about the idea of Brexit, there is still clearer consensus about how it is going in practice. In the most recent YouGov poll on the subject, just 24% think it is going well.

There is now no one seriously advocating that Brexit is going well. True believers like Allister Heath admit Brexit has been disastrously mishandled. In his view:

“Massive reforms should have been made as soon as we left to show poorer and northern voters that leaving the EU would work for them, to thank centre-Right, southern Eurosceptics for their support, and to show the Remainer classes that Britain could flourish outside the EU. Yet the Tories have delivered nothing: working-class Brexiteers believe they have been lied to; the centre-Right has been hammered by Left-wing, EU-style policies; and the Remainers feel that they were right all along. Sunak certainly can’t afford to lose any votes to a new radical populist party.”

(His inability to detail what the “massive reforms” should be is central to why Brexit is failing. There is no detail, and as soon as any detail is articulated, it meets forceful opposition from many, including many Leave supporters.)

Equally, no one is advocating a much closer relationship with the EU at present. This has caused much frustration on the left with Sir Keir Starmer, who is making a great show of accepting the fact of Brexit. I expect he takes the view that there’s no point kicking dead dogs. The hand of history will rest on his shoulder and point him in a direction of a closer relationship with Europe. There’s no point giving specific hostages to fortune about exactly how when he doesn’t yet know what’s going to be possible.

Rishi Sunak is trying to improve the relationship with the EU, if not make it closer. His government have made a lot of encouraging noises about reaching agreement with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol. He seems to recognise that Brexit’s failure needs to be addressed and at least stabilised.

That’s a long preamble, but a necessary one. With that in mind, here’s my baseline expectation for the coming year.

The future

1. Rishi Sunak’s current relative popularity will subside to join the Conservative party’s own awful ratings

Warren Buffett once noted that “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” I expect the same to happen here. The Conservative party is structurally in a parlous condition. Rishi Sunak won’t be able to change that by himself, and right now not enough other Conservatives look willing even to try.

2. The government will try to put together a 35% strategy for the next election. It won’t have worked by the end of 2023.

You can see already what the government is trying to do. It is not looking to build an majority-winning coalition but a coalition that is big enough to make the Conservative party the largest party on a good day. It will look to gather together knee-jerk Conservatives, spiritual Leavers, those who don’t like unions and those who really don’t like immigrants. Each of these positions are minority positions but they might between them get 35% of the voting public to vote for it.

It doesn’t look likely to work in the coming year. The British economy will feel awful throughout 2023. There will continue to be strikes, inflation, recession and a general feeling of things not working. The government will be blamed for that. The government will continue to look weak and divided (of which more below). The public is likely to remain strongly resistant to the charms of the government.

3. Boris Johnson will be censured by the Privileges Committee, its recommendations will be upheld, he will face a by-election and leave Parliament, for now at least.

Boris Johnson evidently fancies a return to the top job at some point. After his great renunciation in October, supposedly for the sake of party unity, he has been fomenting his coterie to remind the government it exists.

His chances of a renaissance, however, depend on him not running into trouble with the Privileges Committee. And here, I am afraid, Boris Johnson looks to be in deep trouble. His big problem, as I have pointed out before, is that he needs to be able to credibly argue that when he gave Parliament assurances that all guidance was followed completely in Number 10 he didn’t know what the Covid laws and guidance were or about the social gatherings in Downing Street. That’s a question which it is very hard to give the former PM the benefit of the doubt on, given they were laws and guidance that he had promulgated and promoted and given that he was well aware of many of the social gatherings.

The details are going to be coming out before the Privileges Committee in the New Year. They look likely to be excruciating for Boris Johnson. He has already thrown every obstacle he can in the way of the committee, including cod-legal analysis (paid for by the state). His old friend Owen Paterson has obligingly brought a case to the ECHR, to much derision, challenging the committee’s actions in relation to his own case. But ultimately it seems inevitable that the committee will hear Boris Johnson’s case soon and on what we have seen so far it seems almost inevitable that he will be given a suspension such as triggers the recall laws.

The House of Commons as a whole would have to vote on this and no doubt there would be appeals to Rishi Sunak to give Boris Johnson the government’s backing or at least get behind a lesser penalty. If he has any sense, he won’t. For starters, it’s far from clear that he could corral the Parliamentary Conservative party to excuse Boris Johnson.

So we look set to have a by-election in Uxbridge. Boris Johnson doesn’t have a long track record of fighting elections that won’t burnish his reputation, so I expect he’ll skedaddle. He might not be too unhappy: he can spend the time delivering recycled speeches for exorbitant sums and in due course alight on a safe constituency for 2024 if he so wishes. At that point, he may again act as ringmaster for the Conservative clown show.

All of this will play terribly for the Conservative party in the short term. It will also keep the commentariat completely absorbed. During this period, watch out for developments that would normally get much more coverage. Important stuff is likely to be missed.

4. There is a much higher chance of the government falling than is generally appreciated. The flashpoint may well be the Northern Ireland Protocol, if Sir Keir Starmer has the wit to support whatever amendments Rishi Sunak secures.

The Conservative party is in awful shape, a coalition in all but name. It resembles less a planet and more loosely-aligned space debris. Despite the government’s large majority, it is going to struggle to get even mildly controversial policies through.

One really controversial policy concerns the Northern Ireland Protocol. The UK government is under a lot of pressure from the US to sort this out before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and there are suggestions that progress is being made. However, the status of Northern Ireland in the UK ultimately brought down Theresa May’s government and there will always be a cohort of hardliners ready to condemn any compromise. Will the EU concede on enough to marginalise them? This seems inherently unlikely, from past observation of both the EU and the ERG.

So Rishi Sunak will have a choice to make. Does he make a deal that may split his party on the subject or does he give up on a deal, leaving Brexit unfinished and the UK in the deep freeze with the US and the EU? He may well opt for doing the deal. And then we’ll see whether the ERG has become more flexible with the passage of time.

A big difference from 2019 concerns the opposition. In 2019, Labour were opposed to Theresa May’s deal. Now, Sir Keir Starmer may well be able to offer Rishi Sunak support for a deal to get it through Parliament. The damage to the Conservative party would potentially be grievous.

Now, this is not the most likely outcome (I think no new deal is the most likely outcome, which is worse for Britain, but that’s nothing new). But it’s a timeline that is very plausible.

5. Ukraine may well have strategically defeated Russia before Russia is able to launch its second spring offensive.

Ukraine’s progress in recent months has been steady and not all that slow. Their plans have been telegraphed widely in advance. They have failed to make the progress near Svatove that they had hoped for after the recapture of the Russian-held parts of Kharkiv oblast, but the recapture of the city of Kherson last month was a spectacular success. Russia’s response has been to wage a complete war on Ukraine’s infrastructure. That awful campaign has had reasonable success but Ukraine seems to be enduring it.

Ukraine’s next apparent aim is to focus on the Melitopol area. If Ukraine were to break through there, Russia’s position in southern Ukraine and the Crimea would look desperate, with supply lines in chaos. That will not be straightforward for Ukraine, but their recent successes suggest that it is entirely possible.

That would probably make the end result of the war inevitable. It is unlikely that Russia would formally cede defeat or indeed stop its total war campaign on Ukraine’s infrastructure, to the extent that it was able to continue it. This would be a frozen conflict, were it not for all the heat.

The West would then need to think about what it did about a Russia that refused to accept defeat and was creating continual devastation without progress on the ground. It probably should have thought about that in Syria, but better late than never. I don’t expect the answer would be much to Russia’s liking.

6. If Ukraine indeed wins, the world economy should pick up a lot quicker than expected. However, Russia’s internal politics will only get worse, with the paranoia followed by defeat and a huge number of battle-hardened and pissed-off men returning home with grievances.

Ukraine winning would be good for the international rule of law and would presumably ungum the oil and gas markets. Both of these developments would lead to improved international confidence.

The impact on Russia itself, however, would in the short term be wholly negative. Hundreds of thousands of disaffected men, all with considerable experience with weaponry, would be returning home. Russia is a country the idea of which very much rests on it being militarily successful. Past military defeats, in Japan in 1905 and in the First World War in 1917, have led to revolutions. The rasping sound of beasts slouching towards Moscow can already be heard. The unrolling of that drama would not be pleasant at all.