‘Norman Tebbit carried a torch for a “true-blue” politics now embraced by Nigel Farage’, Independent, 8 July 2025

Posted on July 24, 2025 by tpbale

They say “never meet your heroes” – but meeting your antiheroes can be absolutely fascinating. At least, that was my experience when I met Norman Tebbit. How could it not have been?

Already branded a “semi-house-trained polecat” as an opposition MP, once in government after 1979, his take-no-prisoners, right-wing persona meant that anyone growing up in the Seventies and Eighties in a vaguely left-leaning household couldn’t help but see him as the Thatcherite thug his puppet played in the phenomenally popular satirical show, Spitting Image.

But there was always more to him than that – which quickly became apparent when, in 2017, we met for a chat over a cup of tea in the House of Lords.

It wasn’t that the so-called “Chingford Skinhead” had mellowed in the sense of resiling from many of his characteristic and sometimes notorious beliefs – he might have admitted that he’d been wrong in his opinion of the Ugandan Asians who’d been forced to flee to Britain in the early 1970s. But he was still clearly sceptical about the willingness and ability of migrants to integrate (the origin of his infamous “cricket test”). And he was still very much a Europhobe, and opposed to gay marriage.

But on a personal level, he was nothing like the bike chain-wielding, leather-clad bruiser I thought I’d grown up with.

True, he was still sharp-tongued – a reminder of his considerable talents as a soundbite politician avant la lettre. But what struck me most was his even sharper political intelligence. Here was someone who, throughout his time as a key figure in Margaret Thatcher’s governments, could go studs-up when required, but was also very much a canny strategist.

In retrospect, and even at the time for those willing to see beyond the stereotype, those qualities played a crucial part in some of those governments’ signal achievements – most obviously, trade union reform, privatisation, and a couple of now-legendary electoral victories.

It’s too easily forgotten, especially if we focus on her titanic struggle with Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, that Thatcher’s undermining of trade union power was achieved iteratively rather than via one climactic confrontation. And Tebbit (who, don’t forget, had been an official in the airline pilots’ union) had played a vital part in boiling the frog by steering through the second of a string of employment bills, which over time totally transformed the UK’s previously poisonous industrial relations.

Likewise, the selling off of state-owned concerns to the private sector was not achieved by some sort of big bang, but instead accelerated over time. And once again, Tebbit, promoted to secretary of state for trade and industry, played a vital role, overseeing the first really high-profile privatisation – that of British Telecom – which paved the way for the second; British Gas.

By then, of course, Tebbit and, even more so, his wife, Margaret, had suffered terribly in the IRA’s Brighton bomb attack, and had, as a consequence, been switched from the executive to the electoral front line, becoming chair of the Conservative Party in the long run-up to the 1987 contest.

Already no stranger to media appearances (indeed, during the 1983 election, he’d appeared in more broadcast news items than any Tory apart from Thatcher herself), Tebbit not only helped front the 1987 campaign but helped mastermind it, brilliantly integrating the advertising expertise of Saatchi & Saatchi and the political instincts of his boss and his colleagues – even if one them did famously panic about how things were going.

Afterwards, in semi-(house-trained) retirement on the backbenches and in the Lords, Tebbit, like Thatcher, was admittedly a thorn in the side of his successors, particularly on Europe. But the Tories, and admirers of the brand of “Essex-man”, no-nonsense Conservatism which he embodied, and which, sadly for them now, seems to have passed to Nigel Farage, owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/norman-tebbit-death-thatcher-nigel-farage-conservatives-b2784672.html

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‘Why we need to halt “hard right” in its tracks’, The Loop, 10 July 2025.

Posted on July 24, 2025 by tpbale

Whatever passes for the centre right these days is in serious danger of being displaced or even replaced by the far right – most often by politicians whose questionable commitment to the checks and balances that characterise liberal democracy and whose tendency to counterpose ‘the people’ to ‘the elite’ qualifies them as ‘populist radical’ rather than ‘extreme’ right.

This is happening in three main ways. Sometimes, a far-right party of either variant surpasses its centre-right rival electorally. We’ve already seen this happen in France and Italy and it may one day happen in Germany. Other times, the takeover occurs from within – think what MAGA has done to the Republicans in the US. Occasionally, a centre-right party tries so hard to fight off a far-right contender by adopting its rhetoric and policies that it all but becomes one itself. Arguably this is what’s happening to the UK Conservative Party. Indeed, one might even argue that, in the UK, all three things are happening at once.

Who’s to blame?

In part, normalisation of far-right ideas is down to supposedly centrist politicians hoping to counter the threat on their right flank by talking and acting tough on immigration, sounding more sceptical about rapid progress towards net zero, and walking back previously liberal stances on transgender issues. But the mainstream media also contributes – as anyone following politics in the UK for a few years may have noticed.

Large parts of the British media treat policies put forward by far-right politicians that are not merely fringe but patently unworkable as options worth discussing and even supporting. A recent example is Reform UK leader Nigel Farage talking about reopening coal mines or, equally absurdly, funding massive tax cuts simply by ‘scrapping’ net zero and DEI programmes.

More insidiously, there is a growing tendency in the British media – especially The Times and The Economist and, even (in its radio coverage) the BBC – to label such parties not as far right (or, at the very least, populist radical right) but as ‘hard right.’

Excuses, excuses

‘Hard right’ is a neologism that, unless I’m missing something, has little or no currency whatsoever among academic experts. Those experts like to call things exactly what they are – namely (following Cas Mudde) far right (the umbrella term) or one of its two variants: extreme right or (populist) radical right.

In their defence, journalists will talk about language evolving to cover new phenomena. This argument, however, seems to ignore the fact that both the extreme and populist radical-right variants of the far right have been around for decades. If this is the case, then why is it only recently that the new term has crept into media output?

Journalists have even suggested that ‘populist radical right’ is just too complex a term for their readers to understand. Why use three words when two will do? This is understandable in a headline, perhaps, but in an 800-word report or op-ed? I don’t think so.

In reality, ‘hard right’ is less an evolution than a euphemism, effectively sanitising and normalising what it purports to describe. And the recent increase in its use doesn’t seem to correlate with any deradicalisation among the parties that journalists are referring to. Instead, it correlates with growth in those parties’ electoral support and their proximity to or entry into government. This all suggests that what’s driving journalists’ use of ‘hard right’ is their fear of losing access to precious sources were they to call it what it actually is. Or, given that Reform UK (successfully) threatened the BBC with legal action if it were to label the party ‘far right’, maybe journalists fear an even worse fate than that.

Which is to be master? Time to make a stand

Ultimately, of course, I can only hazard a guess as to whether journalists’ fears of loss of access, or else media intimidation by the parties themselves, are in fact the cause. Nor can I be sure that other countries are experiencing something similar, although I would be very interested to find out. But I do know that those of us involved in studying such parties – and who, I assume, value precision – should push back against this terminological slippage.

Pushing back can have an impact. And it does matter. After all, as this piece of dialogue from Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass reminds us, language is no trivial matter:

‘“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master – that’s all.”

Originally published at https://theloop.ecpr.eu/why-we-need-to-halt-hard-right-in-its-tracks/

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‘Why are Tories suddenly in favour of proportional representation?’, The Independent, 25 June 2025.

Posted on June 27, 2025 by tpbale

here’s an increasing disconnect between those who want to run the country and the rest of us who merely live in it – and it seems to be making us more likely to call for a change to the way we choose them in the first place.

Back in 1986, when the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) first asked people whether they trusted governments “to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their party”, only 12 per cent of people said “almost never”, compared to 40 per cent who replied “just about always” or “most of the time”.

Yet, its latest report, published this morning, turns all that on its head.

Now it’s those saying “just about always” or “most of the time” who account for 12 per cent, while those who say “almost never” make up an eye-watering 46 per cent of respondents.

But as our trust in government has declined, our support for changing the electoral system so as “to allow smaller political parties to get a fairer share of MPs” has risen.

Back in 1986, for instance, just 32 per cent of us favoured change, with 60 per cent of us saying we wanted to keep the system as it is. Fast forward to today, and we see another near-complete reversal, with only 36 per cent happy with the status quo, while 60 per cent want change.

Cynics, of course, will point to what we might call the “You only sing when you’re losing” effect: as the BSA’s report shows, our views partly depend on whether the party we favour did well or badly out of the system last time around.

Given that they got just four seats in the Commons – instead of the 41 that their share of the vote might have earned them in a perfectly proportional (PR) system – it will come as no surprise that 90 per cent of Green Party voters want to see a change.

Contrast that with Lib Dem voters. Their party’s tally of 72 seats wasn’t off the 79 seats it would have been entitled to under pure PR. Cue the proportion of Lib Dems wanting change falling from 71 per cent in 2023 to just 56 per cent now.

Likewise, before last year’s landslide, some 60 per cent of Labour supporters favoured change – and that’s now fallen to 55 per cent.

Predictably enough, Conservative supporters have travelled in the opposite direction. In 2023, only 24 per cent wanted to change the voting system to make it fairer. But, after a general election that saw the Tories bag only 121 seats instead of the 154 that pure PR would have given them, that proportion has now more than doubled to 52 per cent.

Still, that pales in comparison to Reform supporters – some 78 per cent of whom say they want a change (hardly surprising, given Farage and co ended up with just 5 seats at Westminster rather than the 93 they might have expected from pure PR).

All of which means that, for the first time ever, a clear majority of the country’s right-wing voters seem open to change. Meanwhile, a majority of voters as a whole seem more relaxed about the obvious corollary of such a shift: just over half of us now say we’d prefer a coalition to a single-party government.

Put that together with the possibility that Labour, if it’s as unpopular in four years’ time as it is now, could reach for PR as a last-gasp way of “saving the furniture”, and the end of first-past-the-post (FPTP) might – just might – come sooner than we all think.

Whether that would help restore our trust in government, who knows? But it’s got to be worth a try.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/proportional-representation-pr-fptp-electoral-reform-b2775772.html

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‘London isn’t a Labour city any more — the three key questions that new polling raises’, The Standard, 24 June 2025.

Posted on June 27, 2025 by tpbale

“London is a Labour city” was always something of an exaggeration but it’s even more misleading today than it has been for quite a while. Polling just released by the Mile End Institute (MEI) at Queen Mary University of London suggests that the capital’s falling out of love with Labour. We can guess why its former supporters have gone AWOL but whether they can be tempted back or replaced is another matter.

It’s still the case that Labour is doing better among London’s voters than it is across the country as a whole. Labour support is averaging a paltry 23 per cent nationally compared to 32 per cent in the capital. Sadly, however, the 11-point drop in the party’s support since the general election is exactly the same in London as it is across Britain, suggesting that Labour is no more insulated against disillusion in the capital than anywhere else.

And the similarities don’t end there, although they aren’t exact: for instance, very nearly three-quarters of Londoners who voted Labour in 2024 are currently sticking with the party, meaning they are (at least according to the very latest polling) considerably more loyal than their counterparts across Britain as a whole, only just over half of whom are showing the same kind of loyalty.

On the other hand, the quarter of Labour voters who have deserted the party seem just as prone in London as they are elsewhere to plump for a panoply of other parties.

What does seem clear from MEI’s polling is that it’s what’s happening – or maybe not happening – in Westminster and Whitehall, as opposed to City Hall, that’s the biggest problem for London’s voters: indeed the 39 per cent saying that the UK government is doing a good job delivering on its general election promises only just outweigh the 37 per cent who say the opposite.

Londoners weren’t asked directly about Keir Starmer but it’s doubtful that they feel more positively about him than voters in the rest of the country, who currently give him a net negative rating of -54. Against that, the -10 rating Londoners give Sadiq Kahn seems positively glowing, and suggests that the mayor may be helping Labour to keep more of its voters in the capital than the country as a whole.

All this raises three key questions. What is it that Labour has done to disappoint so many of its former supporters? Can it win them over again? And, if it can’t, is there any chance that it might be able instead to persuade those who didn’t vote Labour in 2024 to give the party a try in 2029?

The strategy pursued by Starmer and Reeves – symbolised by their commitment to welfare reform and constraining the spending of supposedly non-essential government departments – is built around the idea of demonstrating to a doubtful public that Labour are the proverbial “grown-ups in the room”. “Fantasy economics”, be it associated with Nigel Farage’s bonkers Britannia Card for non-doms or predictable protests against benefit cuts by the party’s own MPs, is rejected in favour of fiscal orthodoxy, even if that means making life harder for some of those for whom life is already a struggle.

At the same time, Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper are clearly desperate to show Labour’s no soft touch when it comes to immigration. Add to that a relatively generous settlement for Wes Streeting at Health, and, the argument goes, you have a recipe for re-election.

The problem is that, apart from the latter, none of that is what many of those who elected Labour in 2024 expected or wanted from a government promising “Change”.

Instead, they feel they’re just getting more of the same, along with a side order of “island of strangers”. As a result, unless there’s both a policy- and a vibe-shift sometime soon, then they may well be gone for good. And no amount of half-strength populism and “Iron Chancellor” chat will see former Reform and Tory voters flocking to replace them.

Originally published at https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/london-labour-support-fall-voters-reform-poll-b1234656.html

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‘Starmer’s immigrant rhetoric and politics of migration’, Anadolu, 23 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

The decision last week by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to announce a headline-grabbing tightening of the UK’s immigration regime – and some of the tough talk in which he couched that announcement – is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to the stunning successes achieved at recent local elections by Nigel Farage’s populist radical right party, Reform UK. 

It is also an attempt – albeit not necessarily a sensible economic or political move – to clean up another mess Labour inherited from the Conservatives’ largely wasted 2010–2024 government.

When, in 2016, British voters decided that the country should leave the EU, many did so because they were promised it would allow the UK to “take back control” of its borders. They assumed, not unreasonably, that the end of free movement for EU citizens would mean a significant reduction in immigration – something they had long demanded, especially in the wake of a huge and utterly unanticipated influx of people from Poland and other eastern European countries that joined the bloc in 2004. As it turned out, however, the very same Conservative politician who had done so much to help “Get Brexit Done” – Boris Johnson – then did the very opposite of what most voters wanted from it.  

​ ​​​​​​No migration vs. labor market shortages

Worried that the end of free movement would lead to labor market shortages in a country that has traditionally relied on migrants to do the jobs that Brits cannot or will not do, his government introduced a remarkably liberal immigration regime. The result? Firstly, a massive increase, rather than a decrease, in the number of people coming (perfectly legally) to study and work in the UK – the only difference being that, instead of coming from Europe, they were coming mainly from South Asia and Africa.

Secondly, and hardly surprisingly, anger on the part of Brits who had been sold a lie – anger that was rapidly compounded by growing concern (whipped up by populist politicians like Farage and the influential right-wing print media) about the growing number of people from other developing countries coming across the Channel from France in small boats in order to claim asylum – at huge cost to the taxpayer.

In a vain attempt to assuage that anger and concern, the Conservatives had belatedly introduced stricter criteria for those hoping to obtain visas to live and work in the UK, as well as passing legislation to declare asylum seekers arriving via unauthorized routes “illegals” and promising to deport them to Rwanda in west Africa – a fate that would supposedly deter people from coming and so “Stop the Boats.” Despite the millions of pounds spent on the Rwanda scheme, no deportation flights ever took off and it was abandoned by the incoming Labour government. Instead, it declared that it would seek to “Smash the Gangs” responsible for trafficking people across the Channel. That approach, which involves greater cooperation with French and other European governments, will take time to work – if it works at all. ​​​​​​   

British public thinks legal migration is also high

In the meantime, the Starmer government is still left with a level of legal migration that, according to the public (and much to the confected horror of the country’s right-wing politicians and news outlets), is still far too high.

So the measures were announced last week: restricting skilled work visas to graduate jobs, ending easier entry for people working in social care, upping English language requirements, reducing the time overseas students are allowed to work freely in the UK after graduation, and insisting that migrants will need to spend 10, not five, years before they can apply for citizenship.

Hence, too, Starmer’s harsh rhetoric – his claim that what he called the Conservatives’ “failed experiment in open borders” – was a “squalid chapter” in the nation’s history that had caused “incalculable” damage and risked making us “an island of strangers.”

All this was economic, historical, and sociological nonsense, according to most experts. And it sparked moral and political outrage from the country’s cultural liberal voters. Equally predictably, however, its cultural conservatives dismissed the hardline language as nothing more than a transparent attempt to disguise the fact that the measures themselves didn’t go far enough in bringing down legal migration and also would have zero impact on illegal entry.

Even if the critics are wrong and the measures do bring about a significant reduction, who knows whether any drop will serve to reassure those voters who are especially angry about immigration or simply raise the salience of the issue – much to the delight of Farage and co. It also risks further alienating the government’s more progressive supporters, many of whom are already upset by its proposed cuts to welfare.

The biggest risk of all, however, is that Starmer simply ends up joining a long list of British prime ministers who, on immigration (as on much else), have overpromised but underdelivered.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/opinion/opinion-starmers-immigrant-rhetoric-and-politics-of-migration/3577413

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‘Starmer’s winter fuel allowance “U-turn” sets him on a tricky path with backbenchers and voters’, The Conversation, 22 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

The U-turn is a long and, depending on your point of view, honourable or dishonourable tradition in British politics. Now Keir Starmer has been accused of following this tradition after heavily hinting the UK government is reconsidering last year’s decision to deny the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners.

As a reminder, the winter fuel payment is a lump sum of £200 or £300 paid to pensioner households to help pay heating bills. Last year, the government restricted eligibility to those who qualify for pension credit or other income-related benefits, in order to save £1.4 billion.

This was followed by months of pressure from Labour MPs that has intensified since the local elections. Starmer seemed to confirm at prime minister’s questions on May 21 that the government would change the threshold (by how much remains unclear), allowing more pensioners to qualify for the payment.

One view is that this is a belated but ultimately sensible recognition, in the wake of Labour’s drubbing at the local elections, that the policy was hurting the party badly. On the other hand, in giving in to pressure to ditch it, the government may be setting a dangerous precedent. Capitulate on this and Labour’s anxious backbenchers would soon be demanding Starmer and Rachel Reeves go back on their intention to cut billions from the welfare budget.

Both takes are essentially correct. Polling evidence points to the removal of the allowance being one of the most unpopular measures announced by the government since it came to power in 2024. Regardless of the £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances, taking a universal benefit away from a bunch of people who are regarded by most voters as uniquely deserving was bound to be as politically toxic as it was (arguably) financially rational.

The only question now is quite how far Starmer’s rethink on the payment to pensioners will go. He has said the government will look at changing the income threshold that determines eligibility, but has not said by how much.

One has to ask whether a change along those lines would actually constitute a U-turn at all. By definition, a U-turn is a 180-degree reversal of a previous commitment. In this particular case, that would mean restoring the allowance to everyone in receipt of a state pension, irrespective of their income or wealth.

This is not merely semantic nitpicking, a pointy-headed demand for terminological exactitude. It’s a deeply political question.

Will a complicated (and costly) mitigation of the policy be sufficient – symbolically and substantively – to cut through to a disappointed electorate? And will Starmer be able to convince the public that this is a government holding its hand up, admitting it got it wrong, and determined now to do the right thing?

How to U-turn

Successful U-turns have tended to be big and bold. The best example, perhaps, is John Major’s announcement after he took over from Margaret Thatcher in 1990 that he was scrapping the poll tax. “Scrapping” is the operative word: unlike Thatcher, he didn’t try to preserve the principle of a per person charge by getting the Treasury to subsidise individuals’ bills. Instead, he returned to financing local government via a charge to households rather than every adult within them.

And as for the parliamentary precedents, history teaches us that once a government’s MPs realise they can prevent it from doing something they’re convinced will harm their chances of re-election, they will try to do exactly that – however much the policy makes long-term sense for the nation as a whole. Just look at how “Nimby” (not in my back yard) Tory backbenchers continually scuppered the last government’s attempts to get more houses built in those parts of the country that needed them most.

That’s not to say that Starmer and Reeves won’t now get their way on welfare cuts (or “welfare reform” as they like to frame the issue). Labour has a massive majority, and its MPs aren’t (yet) as habituated to rebellion as their Conservative counterparts became over the course of their party’s 14 years in power.

What’s more, we are still four years from a general election, and the media narrative around “benefit cheats” means voters are far more inclined to support cuts to welfare than, say, the NHS.

Whether, then, Starmer’s U-turn (if, indeed, we should really be calling it that) works – whether electorally or in terms of his ability to force his backbenchers to accept measures they don’t like – remains to be seen.

Unfortunately for him, he faces something of a paradox. In order to convince the public, he should probably go the whole hog; but doing so may well render his life at Westminster rather trickier than he would like it to be.

No surprise there, perhaps. After all, “Politics,” the economist JK Galbraith once suggested to US President John F. Kennedy, “is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable”.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/starmers-winter-fuel-allowance-u-turn-sets-him-on-a-tricky-path-with-backbenchers-and-voters-257360

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‘Nigel Farage has the crowd, but not the plan – and the clock is ticking’, LBC, 3 May 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

Nigel Farage doesn’t have a reputation for doing policy.  He’s more of a ‘vibes’ politician – all about the headlines rather than the small print. 

And when it looks like the small print might get him into trouble he simply denies knowing anything about it.  

Back in 2014, for example, when challenged in an interview about some of the battier ideas that had appeared in UKIP’s manifesto at the 2010 election, he said he’d not read it.

That’s going to have to change if he’s serious about driving his latest vehicle, Reform UK, through the gates of Downing Street. Being the toast of the town, as he is after his party’s stunning performance at elections this week, is great. But there’s a downside. From now on, its policy offer is going to come under a lot more scrutiny.

For a while, at least, Farage, like struggling Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, might be able to get away with hanging a big ‘Currently Under Construction’ sign over his platform. And he and his backers can also point to the setting up of a new think tank, Resolute 1850, reportedly linked to the party, as an indication that, as well as ‘professionalizing’, they are finally taking policy seriously.

But if that is the case, then it could have quite a job on its hands if it’s to resolve what some see as the fundamental inconsistency between, on the one hand, Reform’s essentially Thatcherite enthusiasm for a shrinking the state and cutting public spending and, on the other, the evident desire of many of its target voters for a state that saves and protect us when things go wrong.

It’s all very well, for example, to demand, as Farage did, that the government nationalise British Steel, but – as Thatcher (whose forced departure was what prompted him to leave the Conservative Party for UKIP all those years ago) would have told him and as he and his colleagues still believe  – government ought to be getting out of the way, not stepping in and interfering with the free market.

Farage is also playing with fire when he says we need to look again at how we deliver and fund healthcare.  A pledge to keep the NHS free at the point of use but somehow financed in a different way is going to have to be coherently and convincingly worked through if it’s not to fall to pieces under the pressure of a general election.

Right now, then, Farage seems to be seen by many of his jubilant supporters as the messiah. But on policy he’s always been more of a naughty boy. That needs to change – and perhaps more quickly than he’d like.

Originally published at https://www.lbc.co.uk/opinion/views/nigel-farage-has-the-crowd-but-not-the-plan-and-the-clock-is-ticking/

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‘Under “Brexit Badenoch”, what is the future of the Conservative Party?’, The Independent, 26 April 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

ow many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, runs the old joke, but the lightbulb really has to want to change. The same goes for political parties. For all the talk about Sir Keir Starmer somehow fooling his members into letting him reverse Labour out of the electoral dead end into which his predecessor had driven it, he couldn’t have done it unless, deep down, that’s what most of them – or at least the silent majority that chose to stick around – wanted him to do.

The Tory grassroots aren’t so very different. Back in 2005, they didn’t necessarily like being told by David Cameron that they had to stop “banging on” about Europe, low taxes and immigration and talk instead about public services and the environment. But, after three election defeats on the trot, they accepted that it was the only way out of the right-wing, populist corner into which Hague, IDS and Howard had painted the party.

The problem, of course, was that once Cameron had tricked the hapless Lib Dems into going into a coalition, he and his sidekick George Osborne turned out to be bog-standard, Brussels-bashing Thatcherites whose social liberalism definitely didn’t stop their government disparaging migrants.

The Conservative Party, it turns out, craves the appearance but not the reality of change, and then only occasionally. Indeed, at the moment, even the appearance is proving tricky since it seems to have decided – despite plenty of evidence to the contrary – that it went down to a historic defeat last year not because it presided over years of slow growth and stagnant real wages, and not because crucial public services like the NHS were visibly falling apart, but because it didn’t pursue tax and spending cuts and culture wars with anything like the fervour that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK managed.

“After defeat,” writes the political commentator Matthew d’Ancona, “the hardest task for any party is also the only one that counts: which is to open its eyes.” The 2024 leadership contest was an opportunity to confront the party with some of these awkward truths. But it was an opportunity missed – either because the candidates were too ideologically blinkered or because they worried that to do so would blow any chance they might have had of winning.

Rather than enabling a post-mortem by proxy, it saw them choose instead to tell the party – and, in particular, what Paul Goodman, the Conservative peer and former ConservativeHome editor, calls the “right-wing entertainment complex” – what it wanted to hear, not what it needed to hear. Hence numerous faux-philosophical nods to the need to appeal to the supposed “common ground” rather than the centre ground of British politics, all the talk of immigration rather than the NHS, the calls to lean into a “realignment” that never was, and the focus on winning back Reform and stay-at-home voters rather than winning over their Labour and Liberal Democrat counterparts.

For all the talk of her being a breath of fresh air, then, Badenoch, a Brexit true-believer who genuinely, if preposterously, seems to believe that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office, is essentially just another comfort-zone Conservative. As such, she risks taking the party even further down the road towards being an ersatz populist radical right party – towards a space on the political spectrum already occupied, and very effectively so, by Farage’s latest vehicle.

And even in the unlikely event that some voters eventually decide they prefer the copy to the original, the Tories’ decision to bang on about boats, boilers and bathrooms, while having no credible answer to the crisis in Britain’s public services beyond yet more spending and tax cuts, will likely alienate many others.

If the Conservative Party carries on like this, whoever leads it, any road to recovery will surely turn out to be a blind alley. The former cabinet minister Francis (now Lord) Maude was once reported to have said that the Tories have two settings: complacency and panic. To show signs of both at the very same time is really quite something.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/conservative-party-future-kemi-badenoch-b2737966.html

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‘Brexit and the Conservative Party’, UK in a Changing Europe, 25 April 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

The impact of Brexit on the Conservative Party provides a textbook example of the remedy being worse than the disease.

Cameron had always been a soft or small-e Eurosceptic, as much concerned with the symbolism as the substance of UK’s relationship with the EU: as Leader of the Opposition he had committed to pulling Conservative MEPs out of the European People’s Party – European Democrats grouping without thinking of the consequences for relations with other centre right leaders. As Prime Minister, however, he was (rightly or wrongly) genuinely concerned about the direction the EU seemed to be taking in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, famously wielding the UK’s supposed veto in December 2011 in a vain attempt to head off a new fiscal compact. He calculated that a win for Remain in a referendum off the back of his negotiations would warn Europe off further encroachment on the City’s freedom of manoeuvre.

However, Cameron’s primary rationale was political. The referendum would finally put an end to the arguments over Europe that had been tearing the Conservatives apart since the 1990s and were once again provoking rebellions among backbenchers chafing against his coalition with the Liberal Democrats – most alarmingly in October 2011, when 81 of his MPs defied a three-line whip to vote for a an EU referendum. A promise to put the issue to a once-and-for-all vote would also, hoped Cameron, stop any further drift of support to UKIP, the Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party led by the charismatic right-winger Nigel Farage. Two Conservative MPs eventually defected to the party in the autumn of 2014, following its victory in elections to the European Parliament earlier in the year.

Yet neither the referendum itself, nor the UK’s eventual departure from the EU, has ultimately achieved any of those aims. Indeed, Brexit has arguably exacerbated the very problems it was supposed to solve.

True, discipline within the parliamentary Conservative Party and Cabinet was already fraying before June 2016 and Eurosceptic MPs made it very obvious very quickly that they were unimpressed with Cameron’s renegotiation – one reason why he suspended collective responsibility for the duration of the campaign in the first place. Yet the infighting grew even more intense after the result was announced, with the backbenches and Cabinet divided into Leavers and Remainers. The party has never really recovered its equilibrium.

Theresa May, who took over as Prime Minister following Cameron’s post-referendum resignation only to lose the slender Tory majority he’d won in 2015 two years later, failed to hold her government and her party together as a toxic combination of transparent leadership ambitions and genuine ideological conflict exploded in full view of an increasingly exasperated public. The parliamentary and Cabinet battles over her doomed Withdrawal Agreement effectively normalised rank disloyalty on the part of ministers and backbenchers – some of it pursued personally, some of it via an alphabet soup of ginger groups of which the arch-Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) was the forerunner. And that indiscretion, indiscipline, and impatience has plagued the party ever since.

Brexit has also seen the Conservative Party become less of a broad church than it used to be, at least at Westminster. From 2016 it became increasingly difficult for pro-European Conservatives to convince increasingly Eurosceptic local associations to select them as parliamentary candidates. While during the referendum campaign there were plenty of incumbent MPs who, even if they considered themselves Eurosceptics, voted Remain, anyone wanting to maintain their ministerial status and/or rise through the ranks since has had to support the UK’s departure. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson took things to another level entirely by ejecting twenty-one Conservatives (some permanently, some temporarily) from the parliamentary party for trying to prevent a no-deal Brexit – a move which, along with the large majority Johnson won at the 2019 General Election, helped shift the balance on both back and front benches away from the relatively moderate, mainstream, liberal Conservatism associated with the party’s electoral revival after 2005.

The requirement that Tory MPs either prove they voted Leave or else display the proverbial zeal of the convert has led to a noticeable shrinkage of the talent pool available to whoever is leading the party, whether as Prime Minister or as Leader of the Opposition. Even more importantly, it has also helped determine who is Conservative leader. In a party as leadership-driven as the Tories, this inevitably has a huge impact both on its direction and its governance and on its reputation with the public.

‘No Brexit, no Boris Johnson’ is a claim that may be ultimately impossible to prove beyond all reasonable doubt. But that the UK’s withdrawal from the EU clearly helped Johnson snatch the keys to Number 10 from Theresa May. His successors, Liz Truss (a zealous convert) and Rishi Sunak (a Brexit true-believer) also proceeded to crater the party’s electoral standing.

The fact that, eight and a half years after the referendum, there are only 121 Tory MPs sitting in the House of Commons also owes something to ongoing tendency in the Conservative Party to take a hardline view on Brexit. An attempt to appeal to Leave voters (and re-create the 2019 ‘realignment’) led to the party adopting increasingly right-wing views on migration, multiculturalism, the supposed scourge of ‘woke’ and the apparent cost and futility of moving to net zero. As a consequence, Brexit has left successive Conservative governments with insufficient bandwidth to tackle many of the challenges facing twenty-first century Britain, and the accompanying rhetoric has alienated many moderate voters.

Now in opposition, led by yet another Brexit true believer, the Conservative Party looks set to continue talking more about boats, boilers and bathrooms than the bread-and-butter issues which matter not just to voters but to the country itself. About Brexit, however, the party is now relatively silent – partly because it is now ‘done’, partly because survey evidence suggests that it is not widely regarded as a success. Whether Conservative MPs will stay quite so quiet should the Labour government try to move closer to the EU in the future will be fascinating to see.

Originally published at https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-and-the-conservative-party/

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‘Rachel Reeves needs to change the record’, Linkedin Pulse, 27 March 2025.

Posted on June 3, 2025 by tpbale

“Politics,” according to the economist J.K. Galbraith, “is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable” – and that’s precisely what Rachel Reeves can argue she’s done in her Spring Statement.

No-one who’s followed Reeve’s writings or her career in Labour Politics can seriously believe she actually wanted, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to make cuts to welfare benefits that, even if we take official estimates rather than those of her opponents, will see an additional 50,000 British children pushed into relative poverty.

But, in her view (and that of the Treasury she heads up), not to have done so would have sent a signal to the bond markets, the media, and voters that she wasn’t serious about sticking to her self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’, with all the dire consequences for the government’s financial credibility that Liz Truss ran into after Kwasi Kwarteng’s politically catastrophic ‘Mini-Budget’ in the early autumn of 2022.

Nor is Reeves the first Labour Chancellor to deem it necessary to slaughter some of the party’s sacred cows: her predecessors have been doing that ever since the party overtook the Liberals to become one of the UK’s ‘big two’ political parties. No pain (on the part of outraged backbenchers and grassroots members), no gain (in terms of convincing markets, media, and voters that the government not only talks the talk but walks the walk).

Yet one has to ask whether, both economically- and politically-speaking, this is such a smart strategy. Will the cuts she’s announced get the government any nearer to its holy grail of growth?  Will they really encourage people who aren’t currently in the labour market to re-enter it? Is it really possible to improve the country’s crumbling public services by spending less rather than more money on them? If the answer turns out to be no, both the economy and the government are going to be going nowhere fast.

And politically, in spite of the fact that, after the cash the government’s pouring into the NHS and defence, total spending is still relatively high, there’s an even bigger risk – namely that by doing what she’s doing, Reeves opens herself up to the accusation that she’s not so much grabbing as simply playing on Tory territory, legitimising a worldview that says we should always aim to shrink rather than expand the role of the state.

Reeves and her supporters will, of course, argue that she has to deal with things as they are, not as they might like them to be.  But this presumes that reality and perception are two completely different things, when the truth is that the former is –in part at least – constructed by the latter.

Allied to that is the idea that the preferences of the electorate in particular are (to lapse briefly into jargon) exogenous rather than endogenous – in other words formed outside politics rather than formed partly by it.  If that’s not the case (and it’s not) then politicians have at least a chance to shape preferences rather than simply accommodate them.

Shaping preferences is, fairly obviously, easier to do in government, when politicians can do as well as say things.  Unsurprisingly, in opposition, Labour was the ultimate preference accommodator, ruling out tax rises because it was convinced voters wouldn’t wear them – even though it must have known it would need the money.  Sadly, the Spring Statement suggests that, now it’s in office, it’s still very much stuck in that groove. Time, perhaps, to change the record, Ms Reeves?

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rachel-reeves-needs-change-record-tim-bale-uhjse/

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