Questionably loyal opposition

I am writing these words with no idea if you, dear Critic reader, will ever set eyes on them. Should my manuscript — scrawled with a cotton earbud in organic lemon juice — go safely unintercepted across the Gloucestershire border, I can only hope that my colleagues at Critic HQ have the sense to iron the tattered pages and reveal the tract I have concealed herein.

For the last ten days, by treachery’s cruellest devisings, we in Worcestershire have waited in sullen bondage under a fearful new yoke. The insidious tyranny of a County Council leader from the Green Party. The decision by Conservative councillors to back a so-called “rainbow coalition” under a Green leader was intended as a high-minded gesture to overcome political deadlock in county hall, following the collapse of the previous Reform UK minority administration. Within hours however, the extent of their folly became apparent, as hordes of crusty urbanites with dogs on ropes descended on Pershore and Upton-upon-Severn, going from house to house confiscating all the pâté de foie gras they found, replacing it with compulsory hard drugs. 

Your correspondent has been forced to make a vow of fealty to the newly installed Chief Man Bun of Kidderminster, and we have been dragooned to carry out mandatory awareness raising service under the watch of grim-faced lanyard women with mental health fringes.  When asked about their vote of support for the new regime, local Tories respond: “it was just a prank, bro”. Much good that will do them when they are soon deported to the re-education facilities that are already being built, sustainably, in the Malvern Hills. 

I jest, of course.  Matt Jenkins, the Green Councillor who now leads Worcestershire’s administration, seems like a fairly harmless if mildly annoying centrist dad type, whose only strong opinions appear to concern home insulation. In any case, his election as leader is an event of “net zero” significance for a local authority that is already hopelessly and irredeemably broke. 

Whereas our neighbours in Birmingham were bankrupted by years of chronic overspending, with a disastrous verdict of historic sex discrimination over pay landing a billion pound coup de grâce, Worcestershire’s ruin is far more typical of that of local authorities across Middle England; albeit a rather extreme case. Saddled by Westminster with a range of expensive statutory obligations — from public health, to adult social care, to services for children with special educational needs — successive Tory administrations stolidly refused to impose anywhere near the maximum permitted increases to council tax. But along with all of the other Tory-led shires across England, they also failed to persuade Conservative ministers in London to reduce the burden they were imposing on the counties. 

The council’s total liabilities stand at well over £900m. This may not sound vast compared with its roughly £1.2bn annual income, but the authority runs a persistent deficit, with very little room under current laws to stabilise its financial position or begin paying down its debt. Furthermore, the accumulated deficit in the county council’s Dedicated Schools Grant was projected to have grown to around £190m by early 2026; roughly a 100 per cent increase on the year before. This is non-discretionary spending required by law, which sits off the council’s main books. The auditors have criticised the council for insufficient action over many years to manage the growing deficit for High Needs education, which has been attributed to chronic underfunding of that part of the budget. 

In defence of the Tories who led the council for twenty years until 2025, it is clear that what they were expected to do was cut the local services for which people paid their council tax, in order to cover costs that most people would expect would be met out of general taxation. And they were supposed to do this at the same time as raising council tax. Rather than do this, they instead decided to run chronic deficits and build up debt. Whilst many local Tories will privately tell war stories about their battles with Whitehall and the Treasury for a more realistic approach to local government liabilities, I can only find evidence of one single Conservative councillor — a district councillor from the New Forest in 2018 — who left the party in protest over the issue throughout their entire 14-year stint in power. 

I don’t blame the individuals involved too harshly. Politics is a never-ending trudge through miserable compromises and coalition-building with people with whom we agree partially on some things but not others. Neither do I begrudge those who kept their heads down in the hope of possibly becoming a parliamentary candidate. A county council running up a billion pounds of debt is, at the end of the day, not a matter of life and death, even if it does impose costs that will have to be borne by future generations. Once you start internalising the idea that it’s worth making concessions in order to keep worse people out of power, and especially that one could always do more good in the long run personally by climbing the greasy pole, all sorts of trade-offs and compromises start seeming reasonable, even perhaps noble. 

It does grate, however, to hear those same people, and their colleagues in the rest of the Conservative Party, justifying the heterodox decision to back a coalition with the Greens and the Lib Dems by reference to the “chaos” of the outgoing Reform minority administration. A minority administration forced to choose between two bad options is almost by definition going to be chaotic. Whilst the Tories did not engage in routine opposition for its own sake, they did oppose Reform’s budget which attempted to raise council tax by around 9 per cent. Clearly, there was division within the Reform faction on the council which ultimately made the minority administration unworkable. But after decades of piling up problems to be dealt with later purely in order to keep Labour and the Lib Dems out of power, to then turn around and support a Green-led administration because Reform were unable to get a grip on the chaos they inherited after only a single year seems extraordinary. 

What the Conservatives have done in Worcestershire, both while they are in power on the council and then subsequently in opposition, is to conform to the roles expected of the government and the loyal opposition in the Westminster model. This involves a weary and supposedly high-minded navigation of trade-offs while in office in order to retain office, and then an immediate reversion to a childlike state of innocence once in opposition, where they are expected to pretend those trade-offs and compromises don’t exist. This comes naturally to both of the major parties, but especially to the Tories, for whom the neverending alternation between power and opposition is a tune to which they have been dancing for centuries. 

Shortly before the last general election, I was discussing what the future political landscape was likely to look like, with a friend of mine who can just about remember Churchill’s defeat by Attlee in 1945. I suggested that the Conservatives were likely to have an exceptionally difficult time regaining trust among right-wing voters, even if Labour proved exceedingly unpopular (this was just before Farage’s return to the leadership of Reform), on account of their dismal performance in office under a succession of leaders over 14 years. My old friend — a Tory voter but not a partisan — dismissed this, stating that their record in power would quickly become little more than yesterday’s news, and today’s fish-wrapper. 

This was a pithy summary of the calculation that underlies the principle of loyal opposition. That is, a system in which today’s opposition is generally made up of those who composed and will compose both the previous and the next government. Both sides enter into a tacit contract to behave reasonably; not to use the powers of incumbency to hurt the opposition, to keep the activities of opposition within agreed (and rather formulaic) parameters, not to scorch the earth on their way out of office, and most importantly of all, not to prosecute or punish those who have left office. Under this system, leaving office and moving into opposition cleanses all sins, and wipes the slate clean. 

At its best, the Westminster system guarantees just enough political competition to ensure a steady but evolving elite is regenerated over time, and removes violence or the threat of it from the political calculation entirely. It should also provide a healthy incentive structure where those in office are enabled to take just the right level of risk, but not too much. But at its worst, the system engenders complacency and entitlement among those who come to believe it is their rightful place to govern half of time, and that it is outrageous that they should face either opposition that is too robust while they are in power, or consequences for serious errors when they are out of it. 

For the Conservatives at local level … the loss of incumbency seems to have unburdened them from any sense of responsibility at all

This is where we have ended up, and why we are now facing a moment of flux in our politics. For the Conservatives at local level, particularly in those places where they were previously the natural party of government, the loss of incumbency seems to have unburdened them from any sense of responsibility at all. Where Reform have, or tried to, form administrations, Tories have very quickly become comfortable talking about them as if they’ve been in office for decades already. 

In a multi-party system, the distinction between being in or out of office is less pronounced than it is in a two-party system accustomed to majority government. On the continent, many parties are judged just as much for the posture they take and the alliances they make in opposition as they are when in power. Calculations about which other parties they will and won’t do business with become a part of the party’s identity. In local government, this is already playing out. Those who are surprised that the Tories would have backed a coalition with the Greens and the Lib Dems over Reform — and this clearly includes many senior Conservatives — have not been paying attention to what the party is becoming at local level. 

Despite the repudiation of the deal by the Tory leadership in Westminster, the new administration in Worcester stands, and Conservative councillors are likely to support it in one manner or another until a better option presents itself. It raises undeniable questions about how Conservative backbenchers are likely to behave should they find themselves holding the balance of power in a hung parliament in Westminster after 2029.