Luck and Politics

Bagehot in The Economist

Monday june 19th was a typical day in British politics insofar as it involved a series of humiliations for the Conservative Party. mps approved a report on Boris Johnson condemning the former prime minister for lying to Parliament over lockdown-busting parties. Rishi Sunak skipped proceedings for a fortunately timed meeting with Sweden’s prime minister. On the same day, the invite emerged for an illegal “Jingle and Mingle” event at the party’s headquarters during the Christmas lockdown of 2020. A video of the event had already circulated, with one staffer overheard saying it was fine “as long as we don’t stream that we’re, like, bending the rules”. Labour, through no efforts of their own, had their reputation comparatively enhanced.

Luck is an overlooked part of politics. It is in the interests of both politicians and those who write about them to pretend it plays little role. Yet, as much as strategy or skill, luck determines success. “Fortune is the mistress of one half of our actions, and yet leaves the control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves,” wrote Machiavelli in “The Prince” in the 16th century. Some polls give Labour a 20-point lead. Partly this is because, under Sir Keir Starmer, they have jettisoned the baggage of the Jeremy Corbyn-era and painted a picture of unthreatening economic diligence. Mainly it is because they are damned lucky.

If Sir Keir does have a magic lamp, it has been buffed to a blinding sheen. After all, it is not just the behaviour of Mr Johnson that helps Labour. Britain is suffering from a bout of economic pain in a way that particularly hurts middle-class mortgage holders, who are crucial marginal voters. Even the timing helps. Rather than a single hit, the pain will be spread out until 2024, when the general election comes due. Each quarter next year, about 350,000 households will re-mortgage and become, on average, almost £3,000 ($3,830) per year worse off, according to the Resolution Foundation. Labour strategists could barely dream of a more helpful backdrop.

Political problems that once looked intractable for Labour have solved themselves. Scotland was supposed to be a Gordian knot. How could a unionist party such as Labour tempt left-wing voters of the nationalist Scottish National Party (snp)? The police have fixed that. Nicola Sturgeon, the most talented Scottish politician of her generation, found herself arrested and quizzed over an illicit £100,000 camper van and other matters to do with party funds. The snp’s poll rating has collapsed and another 25 seats are set to fall into the Labour leader’s lap thanks to pc McPlod and (at best) erratic book-keeping by the snp.

It is not the first time police have come to Sir Keir’s aid. He promised to quit in 2022 if police fined him for having a curry and beer with campaigners during lockdown-affected local elections in 2021. Labour’s advisers were adamant no rules were broken. But police forces were erratic in dishing out penalties, veering between lax and draconian. It was a risk. Sir Keir gambled and won.

Luck will always play a large role in a first-past-the-post system that generates big changes in electoral outcomes from small shifts in voting. Margins are often tiny. Mr Corbyn came, according to one very optimistic analysis, within 2,227 votes of scraping a majority in the 2017 general election, if they had fallen in the right places. Likewise, in 2021, Labour faced a by-election in Batley and Spen, in Yorkshire. A defeat would almost certainly have triggered a leadership challenge; Labour clung on, narrowly, and so did Sir Keir. If he enters Downing Street in 2024, he will have 323 voters just outside Leeds to thank.

Sir Keir is hardly the first leader to benefit from fortune’s favour. Good ones have always needed it. Sir Tony Blair reshaped Labour and won three general elections. But he only had the job because John Smith, his predecessor, dropped dead at 55. (“He’s fat, he’s 53, he’s had a heart attack and he’s taking on a stress-loaded job” the Sun had previously written, with unkind foresight.) Without the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher would have asked for re-election soon afterwards based on a few years of a faltering experiment with monetarism. Formidable political talent is nothing without a dash of luck.

Often the most consequential politicians are the luckiest. Nigel Farage has a good claim to be the most influential politician of the past 20 years. He should also be dead. The former leader of the uk Independence Party was run over in 1985. Then, in 1987, testicular cancer nearly killed him. In 2010, he survived a plane crash after a banner—“Vote for your country—Vote ukip”—became tangled around the plane. Smaller factors also played in Mr Farage’s favour: when he was a member of the European Parliament he was randomly allocated a seat next to the European Commission president, providing a perfect backdrop for viral speeches. (“They handed me the internet on a plate!” chortles Mr Farage.) Britain left the eu, in part, because Mr Farage is lucky.

Stop polishing that lamp, you’ll go blind

Too much good luck can be a bad thing. David Cameron gambled three times on referendums (on the country’s voting system, on Scottish independence and on Brexit). He won two heavily and lost one narrowly. Two out of three ain’t bad, but it is enough to condemn him as one of the worst prime ministers on record. “A Prince who rests wholly on fortune is ruined when she changes,” wrote Machivelli. It was right in 1516; it was right in 2016. Labour would do well to heed the lesson. It sometimes comes across as a party that expects the Conservatives to lose, rather than one thinking how best to win.

Fortune has left Labour in a commanding position. Arguments against a Labour majority rely on hope (perhaps inflation will come down sharply) not expectation. Good luck may power Labour to victory in 2024, but it will not help them govern. The last time Labour replaced the Conservatives, in 1997, the economy was flying. Now, debt is over 100% of gdp. Growth prospects are lacking, while public services are failing. It will be a horrible time to run the country. Bad luck.

The backlash against colonialism holds lessons in guilt and gratitude

 Descendants of conquerors and the conquered must move towards a universal account of history writes Mihir Bose in The FT 

In the tsunami of words on the poisonous legacy of slavery and empire generated by the death of George Floyd, an African-American who was killed in Minneapolis in May by a white police officer, two stand out: “gratitude” and “guilt”. 

Should descendants of those who built empires on the back of exploitation feel guilty for what their ancestors did? Or should the descendants of the colonised feel gratitude that their ancestors were conquered? 

My wife is a descendant of the conquerors, having been born into the British Cecil family which has produced prime ministers and great political leaders. I am one of “midnight’s children”, born a few months before India won its freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. While I joke that she is a child of the conquerors and I of the conquered, I do not expect my wife to feel guilty for what her ancestors did. But I do reject the idea that I should be thankful that my ancestors were conquered. 

That the conquered should feel gratitude was a view often expressed during the days of the British empire. It was not uncommon for the British to say that the Indians needed to be “civilised”. As Winston Churchill, who was then out of government and campaigning against self-rule for India, put it very bluntly in a speech in 1931, the vast majority of Indians “are primitive people”. 

Today, some historians imply I should be grateful for colonial legacies. Niall Ferguson, in his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World makes the argument that the empire “enhanced global welfare — in other words was a good thing”. He adds that it brought free markets and the rule of law. Other individuals are still as blunt as Churchill. 

While I do not think my ancestors needed to be civilised by Europeans, they had many faults. My family are high-caste Hindus and there is no denying the abominable way these upper echelons of society treated the so-called untouchable castes, now known as Dalits. My abiding childhood memory is of my mother giving the sweeper woman tea and sweets, thinking she was being generous, while telling us that nobody should ever use her cup and plate. 

Years ago, I visited Bangladesh, where my family is from. While very hospitable, the Muslims there made it clear they had not forgotten the dreadful way my rich Hindu ancestors had treated theirs. I know I need to acknowledge such historical truths, but I do not see why I should feel personally guilty. 

The same applies to my wife. For example, on a family trip (including nephews and nieces) to the National Portrait Gallery before the Covid-19 pandemic, we stopped before a portrait of Arthur Balfour, nephew of three-times prime minister Lord Salisbury and himself a prime minister. The potted history mentioned that, as foreign secretary, he was the author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. 

I pointed out that, a few months before, he had warned the British cabinet in a memo, that Indians would not be able to manage parliamentary democracy because they were not of the same race as Europeans. Even education would not bridge the racial divide. Balfour and his fellow cabinet ministers, presided over by Lloyd George, did not dispute Lord Curzon’s estimate that it would take Indians 500 years to learn to rule themselves. I said this not to make my wife’s family feel guilty, but to highlight that the history we have been taught is far from the complete picture. 

This is what we need to tackle: call it the “Machiavelli problem”. More than 1,500 years before the Renaissance diplomat and philosopher wrote his book on statecraft, The Prince, an Indian called Chanakya wrote a treatise on the same subject called Arthashastra, as a handbook for a great king. 

Niccolò Machiavelli may or may not have known about its existence but it cannot be disputed that, while Machiavelli was merely a theoretician, Chanakya helped build one of India’s greatest empires. Indian schoolboys know of both men and the diplomatic enclave in New Delhi is called Chanakyapuri. Yet Chanakya is often described as the Indian Machiavelli and he is hardly known outside India. 

The result of imbalances like these is that descendants of the conquered, like me, always carry two bags: one containing the conqueror’s history, the other that of the conquered. Descendants of the conquerors, like my wife, only have to worry about the first bag. 

Unless we can equalise these historical weights and start to move towards a truly universal history, the past will continue to divide us and we shall always be wrestling with the problems of guilt and gratitude.