This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

What motivates voters at general elections? Are they concerned with themselves and their own immediate material interests? Or are they worried about the good of the community (or “society” or “nation” or even “race”) to which they belong?

After the recent wipeout of the Conservative Party in the general election, these questions have to be asked. There was certainly a gap in policy intentions and ideological positioning between Labour and the Conservatives. But the gap was small relative to that between the number of MPs the two main parties got elected.

Some kinds of political branding and rhetoric are successful, and others are not. Politics is, above all, the astute deployment of words. My argument here will be that the words chosen by Rishi Sunak and his colleagues were useless.

When trying to find answers, Edmund Burke is worth remembering. Famously, he said that “society” (his word) is “a contract … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. By implication, people with an active interest in politics — which in a mass democracy means all of us — must worry about the good of their society not just in the next few years, but over generations.

If Burke is right, politicians — certainly those of a conservative bent — should give speeches that emphasise the long-run, multi-generational benefits of what they propose.

Modern Europe has two recent examples of the validity of this sort of political discourse and action. In the decade to 2009, Greece was wracked by left-wing governments, with financial and economic stability constantly jeopardised by large budget deficits and a spendthrift public sector. Fortunately, in 2019 Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the centre-right New Democracy party came to power and prioritised financial discipline.

Public debt remains enormous, but it is under control. In 2022 some debt to other Eurozone member states was repaid early. In 2023 New Democracy won another general election with a commitment to better public finances.

For decades Italy has been a byword for the incontinence of its public finances, with the populist right said to be as much to blame as the socialist left. When Giorgia Meloni of the reportedly fascist Brothers of Italy party became prime minister in October 2022, a common expectation was that the government would lurch further into deficit and that public debt would become yet more unmanageable.

Remarkably, Meloni’s government has almost halved the underlying cyclically-adjusted budget deficit between 2022 and 2024, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. She has worked closely with her technocrat predecessor Mario Draghi, aiming to reduce the ratio of debt to national output.

People care more about good government than how tax levels affect their own incomes in the next year or two

Was this electoral suicide? No, Meloni’s party, once a minor player in Italian politics, came top in the European elections in June this year.

Of course, to mention Edmund Burke in the context of Mitsotakis and Meloni is stretching it a bit. But there is a theme here. Most people voting this year are also likely to be voting five, ten and 15 years from now. They (or at any rate an electorally significant proportion of them) don’t want the same issues to come back time and again.

Society is not much of a contract if it is between those who were disgusted when runaway deficits and soaring debt were issues in 2009, who were appalled when runaway deficits and soaring debt were issues in 2014, who became fed up to the back teeth when runaway deficits and soaring debt were issues in 2019, and who must now decide …

The larger point is that people care about good government in the long run. Such matters as their nation’s fiscal solvency and financial standing do affect how they vote. It may not be a Burkean long run, but everyone faces a long run of voting over a lifetime, and thinking to some extent about children and grandchildren.

In particular, people may care much more about good government than about how the level of tax affects their post-tax incomes in the next year or two. Politicians who promise tax cuts — and who put tax-cutting at the front and centre of their messaging — may have misunderstood the electorate.

When Rishi Sunak launched the Conservative manifesto at a much too well stage-managed press conference on 11 June, his focus was on tax cuts. The impact on the opinion polls was negligible or negative. Quite simply, Sunak is a poor politician who had chosen the wrong words. He thought that British voters were overwhelmingly concerned with themselves and their own immediate material interests, and they weren’t.

None of the four Conservative manifestos from 1979 to 1992, all of which led to victory, highlighted tax cuts as brazenly as the 2024 manifesto. They were exercises in branding and rhetoric and appeals to freedom, a small state and property-owning democracy. They said plainly that the Conservatives believed in less taxation rather than more.

But the manifestos of those years also had phrases about the case for honest money, which implied that balancing the budget ought also to be high on the political agenda.