The Conservative leader purity spiral
How social warming is pulling the contenders away from reality
What’s the most important challenge facing the UK right now? Is it the woefully low productivity growth since 2008, leading to real wages staying static or falling? Is it the NHS being essentially unable to provide a functional service, with achingly long waits for ambulances and treatment? Is it the prospect of frighteningly high heating bills in the coming winter, to add to escalating vehicle fuel bills as the pound clatters downwards against the dollar? Rising inequality? The impossibility for most younger people of buying a home?
Or is it, as the contenders for the Tory leadership seem to be suggesting, that we aren’t sending enough would-be immigrants to Rwanda, that taxes are too high, that some organisations are too “woke”, and that the UK belongs to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)?
The first paragraph above is a collection of problems that economic and social commentators have pointed to. Weak productivity growth between 2008 and 2018, according to very smart people, is “structural, not cyclical”: “The weakness of trend productivity growth appears to be consistent with a secular, long-term stagnation type narrative.” In other words, the Conservative government of the past 12 years has let things get worse. Meanwhile the NHS’s woes predate the Covid pandemic, as these two graphs from the Daily Mail show:
The threat of colossal heating bills is being declared, publicly, by people in positions to know.
But if you were following the hastily convened Tory party leadership contest over the past week, you could think that none of that matters. It’s all wokeness, vague gestures at how wonderful the past administration was (except when it wasn’t, at which point of course one had to jump ship), how awful the ECHR is, and especially noises about deporting more people who manage to survive a Channel crossing in a small boat to Rwanda.
How did a group of eight (quickly reduced to six, then five) MPs who in theory should be plugged into so much essential information flowing from all over the nation find themselves wrangling like cats in a sack over who could be quickest to cut the most tax? This, at a time when public services (such as the NHS) are struggling to recruit people and fund the new hospitals which were promised?
The answer: they’ve been pulled into a purity spiral, the natural consequence of putting a small group together in an (ideologically) enclosed space. As the bickering continues, fewer will meet the increasingly stringent requirements of the dominant ideology. And in the leadership race, the perceived most important things in the early rounds (where the voting is by fellow Tory MPs) are adoration of Brexit, insistence of sending desperate would-be immigrants far away, and making a disgusted face when someone says “woke”. (Always important not to define the latter word, because that might be difficult, though at Kemi Badenoch’s launch event the self-contained single-stall gender-neutral toilets were hurriedly labelled “Men” and “Women”. This had no appreciable effect on anything. What’s the opposite of virtue signalling?)
Round and round and round they go
Purity spirals are a form of social warming, because everyone gets more annoyed with everyone else: those deemed sufficiently pure to remain in the conversation, because they come under increasing scrutiny from those left behind and have to fear being left out, and so become ever more critical of those also remaining; and those thrown out as insufficiently pure, because they think everyone else is being hypocritical. Eventually, group dynamics means that only a tiny number are sufficiently pure to be allowed to remain, and they reach a stasis in which everyone is suspect, even while they nurse the one true flame, whatever it’s about.
Purity spirals are an extreme version of the tendency of groups to shift towards a shared ideology. That effect was identified in a paper by Cass Sunstein way back in 1999. He called it “the law of group polarisation”, saying: “In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own pre-deliberation judgments.”
Another word would be “groupthink”. Being both empirical—you can observe it—and regular—it keeps happening—means that we should expect to see it all over the place where groups get together to discuss topics where they have an ideological agreement. Pro-gun groups will become more pro-gun. Pro-abortion groups will become more pro-abortion. The noisy voices will tend to be more extreme, and they’ll pull the group in that direction. You can see this a lot on Twitter, where moderate people will retweet a more extreme view of what they think, skewing the discourse. It was visible in the Labour party during the Corbyn years (and especially on pro-Corbyn Twitter), and now it’s happening in front of us with the Tories.
The trouble with these tight little groupings, though, is that they easily become more and more detached from the reality of the wider population. MPs’ WhatsApp groups are wonderful breeding grounds for this sort of effect; the European Research Group (ERG) of anti-European Tories (which includes/d Kemi Badenoch) would regularly push itself to more and more extreme positions on topics because if you didn’t, then what sort of wussy insufficiently Brexit-y person were you, exactly?
The same dynamic took over during the early part of these leadership stakes, where everyone (except, notably, the former chancellor Rishi Sunak, who actually knew the sums) was falling over themselves to offer bigger and bolder tax cuts—estimated collectively by the Labour Party at a total of £330bn, roughly equal to the NHS’s annual budget. Ditto the “export immigrants” scheme. Lip service was paid to other topics such as the woeful lack of investment in productivity, or housebuilding—topics that actually affect voters, and where the government can make a difference.
Many political parties fall into this sort of purity spiral. In the US, the Democrats and Republicans each have their own vortices, from which moderate members vainly try to pull them away, on the basis that much of the population won’t wear it. (For Republicans, it’s the Trump stolen-election madness; for Democrats, the topic seems to change each week—Green New Deal, Supreme Court, filibuster, abortion—yet never lands on something on which they’re all aligned.)
Nobody knows
But the Tories have repeatedly shown us its worst version. By having a two-stage process in which the many contenders are narrowed down to two by MPs, thus guaranteeing a first-order purity spiral process, followed by a vote by the party members, guaranteeing a sort of ideological race to the bottom, they’ve created a machine for impossible promises. In 2019 it pitted Boris Johnson, pushing Brexit with the backing of that wing of the party, against Jeremy Hunt, backed by more moderate Tories seeking some sort of compromise with the EU. Johnson’s win then saw the moderates evicted from the party, and Johnson boasting of having sorted out Brexit, when in fact he’d done nothing of the sort. But the 200,000 Tory party members in the wider country (average age 72) didn’t care.
They should, though. Because the signs are that the wider population can see the problems looming, and doesn’t think the answers being offered are the right ones. Bear in mind that the incoming winner will have just over two years until a general election is due, and will have a huge mess to clear up, first in rebuilding trust with the public that not every minister is completely lying when they appear in or on the media, and second that they’re actually going to get anything done, having already abandoned their plan to build huge numbers of houses and 40 hospitals.
Lewis Goodall, the BBC Newsnight policy editor, put this pithily on Twitter in a thread about the results from a “Conservative-leaning” focus group, carried out by More In Common:
And the results:
In particular there was this:
And yet, when Suella Braverman was interviewed on Radio4’s PM programme on Thursday evening, hours after being ejected from the race, the principal point of difference she brought up between herself and Penny Mordaunt (who had come second in the poll of MPs) was a culture war issue: “I think she said a trans woman is a woman—I disagree with that” (listen from about 9’00”). She also said that she thought there should be someone who was a “real Brexiteer”, claiming that title for herself for having not only campaigned for it (as Mordaunt also did) but also voted against her then party leader Theresa May three times over it. Neither topic seems to have featured in the Rother Valley focus group. (Watch the full report here.)
You could say that Braverman has been left behind, so who cares what she says? But clearly the arguments will carry on over the weekend about who is the purest on Brexit, on immigration and borders, on identity politics.
And none of that matters to people worrying about how they’ll pay next January’s heating bill.
Part of the problem has been that the leadership candidates have had very little direct contact with the media to quiz them about their plans. Nadim Zahawi, who replaced Sunak, was in the initial group of eight, and then absolutely dismembered in an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme (listen from 1’34”: “It literally is devoid of all semantic content for someone to come on this programme and say ‘this tax cut and this tax cut without saying where it’s going to come from’); within hours he was out. Sunak survived an interview on the same programme the following day. Many of the candidates evaded journalists’ questions at their campaign “launches”.
There will be two TV debates, which will at least shine rather harsher light on the claimed policies’ benefits to the public than MPs have done.
The worry, though, is that the 200,000 Tory party members who make up the electorate for the next PM won’t take note of that. They aren’t representative at all of the population at large. While it worked out fine in the case of Johnson (but fell apart thereafter), the concern is that the purity spiral in evidence in Westminster will leave the Tories with a leader promulgating views which the pure few agree with, but leave everyone else shaking their heads. How, we’ll wonder, did we end up with this one.
And I feel we’ve been in that place before.
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