ANDREW NEIL: In a democracy we get the politicians we deserve. Until we surrender our predilection for anti-wealth creation, anti-enterprise and anti-success fast fixes… issues WILL worsen earlier than they get higher

The only unknown about next Thursday’s elections in England, Scotland and Wales is whether it will be a terrible day for Labour or a truly historic awful one. My money is on the latter.

We can say with some certainty that Labour will lose control of its once rock-solid Welsh fiefdom for the first time since devolution was introduced in 1999. That it will fail to come anywhere near capturing the Scottish parliament, where the dead hand of the SNP will tighten its grip.

That the local election results in England will be a massacre, with polls putting Labour on track to lose almost 2,000 of its 2,557 council seats which are up for grabs. And that Labour’s even heading for major setbacks in its London citadel.

What we don’t know is if Labour will come not second, or even third, in Scotland and Wales but a humiliating fourth in both (behind Nationalists, Reform UK and the Greens).

Or if the losses in England will be even more cataclysmic than predicted; and London even worse. The Conservatives are also in for a bruising day on May 7. But it is Labour that will be thumped.

Its losses will be spectacular enough, of course, to trigger the next round of fevered speculation and agitation about Keir Starmer’s job security.

His rivals are on manoeuvres already. He’ll be lucky to survive the summer. A new Labour leader could be crowned at its annual conference in late September. But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter.

Even if Starmer staggers on, Labour is now under the thumb of its public sector union-dominated, high-tax, big-spending, know-nothing soft Left.

Starmer has already been veering hard in that direction to save his skin. Anybody with aspirations to succeed him will also have to kowtow to such forces.

So the soft-Left die is cast regardless of who leads Labour. All that remains uncertain is how long it will be before the bond markets, where governments go to borrow, decide to round on Labour over its economic follies and turn off the debt taps – or, more likely, charge eye-watering levels of interest on any new borrowing. Either move will provoke an economic crisis which the Government might not survive.

But that is for another day. Next Thursday will be of significance for more than just the Labour Party or Starmer’s future. It will be another milestone in the sad, sorry state of British politics – further proof of our gathering political dysfunction.

For a start, it will be another nail in the coffin of the two-party politics that has long dominated the electoral landscape. Labour and the Tories used to win solid working majorities in the House of Commons with just over 40 per cent of the vote.

On Thursday, their share of the vote – combined – will come nowhere near 40 per cent. We now have a multi-party political system, with votes spread across five parties.

You could say England is merely catching up with the rest of the country: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have long had multiple parties.

But when you combine that with our first-past-the-post voting system, the chances of some strange results are high.

For much of last year, Reform UK has enjoyed a clear and rising lead in the polls – at one stage creeping over 30 per cent. The more Reform is over 30 per cent in a general election, the more likely it is to be the largest party, perhaps even with an overall majority.

But recently Reform’s vote share has fallen back. It’s still in the lead, but not by so much, with Labour, Tory and Green vote shares in the mid-to-late teens and the Lib Dems bringing up the rear.

If, come a general election, Reform was to win 25 per cent or so of the vote with, say, Labour second on about 20 per cent, it is perfectly possible Labour would end up with considerably more seats than Reform – because the latter’s vote would be widely dispersed, whereas Labour’s would be concentrated in constituencies it could still win.

This is not an argument for proportional representation, which brings a myriad of its own problems. But it does illustrate that a multi-party system and first-past-the-post voting are not comfortable bedfellows.

You can imagine the democratic crisis that would follow if Reform were clear winners in vote share but Labour remained the largest party. It is hardly a recipe for the political stability that a sound economy requires.

The July 2024 general election was a harbinger of such distortions to come. Labour won by a massive landslide on a mere third of the vote. The next election could produce an even more peculiar result.

Without at least some broad correlation between vote share and seats in the Commons, democratic legitimacy is undermined. Yet that could be the direction in which we’re now travelling.

Other dangers to democracy will loom before that. Those who want a united Ireland are already the biggest voting bloc in the NI Assembly, with Sinn Fein providing its First Minister.

If, on Thursday, the Welsh Nationalists end up the largest party in Cardiff and the SNP strengthens its control in Edinburgh, then all three devolved parliaments will be under the influence (in some cases the control) of parties that want to break up the UK.

Add to that the likelihood that Reform, at its core an English nationalist party, will emerge the largest party in England and you have a chilling vision of the future.

It is a grim measure of Starmer’s innate ineptitude that he has revitalised the country’s various separatist forces when, before he took power, they were on the wane.

It is easy to understand, of course, why the country has fallen out of love with Labour and the Conservatives. Between them, they have presided over a collection of policies so ridiculous it makes you wonder if we are still a serious country.

With Labour backing, the Tories ran down our military in the previous decade, even as the world became a far more dangerous place. Now in power, Labour cannot bring itself to reverse this foolishness by rearming.

But it continues to pour billions into welfare. As we head for a £400billion-plus welfare bill by the end of this decade, we are already, in terms of share of GDP, only the 12th biggest spender on defence in Nato. In 2010, we were second, behind only America.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have used their time in power to back energy policies which placed the obsessive pursuit of net zero above all other considerations. We were setting an example in clean, renewable power for the rest of the world, they chorused in harmony.

In practice, this approach has lumbered us with the most expensive industrial energy costs in the developed world and the second most expensive domestic energy bills, while achieving only an infinitesimal reduction in CO2 emissions.

Not content with hollowing out our military, both parties have also devastated our heavy industry with their expensive energy.

Discarding all considerations of security of supply or cost, Labour now champions the importation of oil and gas from abroad while refusing to further exploit our own oil and gas resources in the North Sea. Sometimes the stupidity of those who govern us knows no bounds.

Both Labour and Conservatives have regularly shown contempt for public opinion. They were content to preside over mass migration (while denying they were) yet, incredibly, failed to build the new homes such a surge in our population would inevitably require.

The Tory record on housebuilding over 14 years was lacklustre at best. Labour is doing no better – it has more chance of building a rocket to go to Mars than hitting its target of 1.5million new homes by 2030. The number of residential homes currently under construction in London is at its lowest level since Victorian times.

So voters have every reason to be disillusioned with Labour and the Conservatives. It is a measure of the paucity of Labour talent that the alternatives to Starmer would likely be just as bad, if not worse – which is why, unless saved by a quirk of the electoral system, Labour is likely heading for oblivion not just on Thursday but come the next general election.

The Tories are in no better shape. Kemi Badenoch has grown in confidence and authority to become the most accomplished of all the current crop of party leaders (not a high bar, I grant you). But she leads a party whose brand might well be tarnished beyond saving.

Her systemic problem is that so much of what currently ails us – in defence, energy, the economy, housing – started under the Tories. They were complicit in what has gone wrong and voters are in an unforgiving mood, even as they warm to her.

So the Tories will come nowhere in Scotland or Wales on Thursday, undermining their claim to be a national party. There will be slim pickings even in their hitherto English heartlands. And London remains pretty much a no-go area for them.

The country is in a mood to discard Labour and the Tories for fresh alternatives. The problem is that, rather than being braced for the harsh realities tough times demand, we are too easily seduced by the clowns.

The more idiotic policies the Greens promulgate – such as free housing and lavish welfare for all new migrants – the higher they rise in the polls. And they are not alone. The SNP pushes for price controls on food. Even Rachel Reeves floats the idea of rent controls.

It is self-indulgent and self-defeating, but our politicians spout such nonsense because so many of us cheer on those who do. It is especially frustrating because, if we put the politics aside and rein in, for a moment, our national habit of running ourselves down, we can see Britain has still so much to play for.

We are a services superpower. In accounting, banking, data processing, medical diagnostics and audio-visual services, as well as legal, business and financial services, we export more than any other country bar America.

Even as exports of goods to Europe declined after Brexit (thanks to all manner of European Union non-tariff barriers designed to punish us for leaving), the shortfall was more than made up by the increased export of services to the rest of the world.

We have the biggest and most vibrant hi-tech sector in Europe, employing over 1.75million people, with a turnover heading for £200billion. It’s been growing three times faster than the economy as a whole for the past decade. Last year, it raised more venture capital for start-ups and expansions than the next three largest European markets combined.

We are European leaders in artificial intelligence by a country mile, partly because we have escaped the stifling regulatory ambit of Brussels, which has all but killed AI in the EU.

AI is already bringing major gains to all the services in which we excel, making us potentially even more dominant than we already are. Just imagine what could be achieved if we brought this state-of-the-art expertise to bear on rebuilding our industrial-military base.

There are so many reasons to be positive about our country’s future – and so many reasons to despair about how it is being held back by a dysfunctional political system which would rather debate sidebar issues like cultural identity rather than do the heavy lifting that wealth-creation demands.

I weep no tears for the demise of Labour or the Tories. But I see no salvation in the new, so-called insurgent parties now demanding our attention.

In a democracy we get the political system we deserve. Until we give up our predilection for anti-wealth creation, anti-enterprise, anti-success quick fixes, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

By all means let’s excoriate the politicians. But perhaps the real reason for our sorry political state can be seen in the mirror. Until we the voters realise that political earthquakes like the one about to hit Labour on Thursday will not be the start of something better but just another bump on the rocky road of decline, the prospect of a national revival remains as far away as ever.