Tim Bale's Blog

Labour’s conference in Liverpool last year was essentially about defusing a bomb that threatened to go off over Brexit. And it looks like this year will be the same.

That’s because there continues to be a major mismatch between what the party’s membership wants on Europe and what its leadership – Jeremy Corbyn, his (now slightly reduced) coterie of close advisors, and a handful of powerful trade union general secretaries (most obviously Unite’s Len McCluskey) – is prepared to give them.

As the survey research for our new book, Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century, makes clear, Labour’s rank-and-file are overwhelmingly pro-European. Eight out of ten of them voted Remain. Three-quarters of them want a second referendum. And if one were held, nine out of ten of them would vote to stay in the EU.

None of this is lost on the leadership, not least because they’ve seen our research reported in the media. Local constituency Labour parties (CLPs) have made their feelings clear by submitting dozens of motions for debate at conference with a heavy Remain focus. And it has made a difference. Don’t forget that Corbyn’s first response to the result of the referendum in June 2016 (after a campaign in which his efforts to persuade voters to plump for Remain can only be described as lacklustre) was to demand the triggering of Article 50 – and without a vote in parliament to do so. Now, Labour is not only adamantly against a no-deal Brexit but claims it would like to see a “People’s Vote”.

Yet doubts persist – and if you watch Corbyn’s pre-conference interview with ITV’s Joe Pike, you can see why. Asked if he supports Leave or Remain he refuses to answer – eight times.

Moreover, in the run-up to the Brighton conference, Corbyn has effectively attempted to preempt the party’s decision on what its Brexit policy should be by announcing it in advance. He has declared that the plan is to win a general election, negotiate a new withdrawal agreement (one apparently involving a closer economic relationship with the EU) and then put that to voters in a second referendum. This referendum would include an option to remain, too.

Whether this convoluted stance can carry Corbyn and co. through said general election is debateable. Anyone unfortunate enough to have witnessed what happened to Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, when she tried to explain it to the audience on Question Time a few weeks ago is bound to have their doubts.

Emerging bloodied but unbowed from that particular car crash, Thornberry has gone on to add a new twist by asserting that Labour would support the passage through parliament of a last minute deal with the EU negotiated by Boris Johnson as long as it was made conditional on a referendum. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell, however, has very publicly poured cold water on the idea. No wonder an opinion poll released on Sunday showed over two thirds of voters thought Labour’s policy on Brexit was “unlcear”.

Quite why the leadership insists on putting its spokespeople (and presumably its members) through such agonies is not entirely obvious.

We often hear that it is worried about losing so-called “Labour Leave seats” if party policy strays too far towards Remain. Yet even a cursory look at the numbers suggests that (because a large majority of Labour voters in those seats voted Remain anyway) this fear is seriously overblown.

If that is indeed the case, then the only other explanation is that the leadership really isn’t that bothered about Brexit. That might be because it hopes the Tories will take the blame if exiting the EU makes a terrible mess or it might be because it truly believes Brexit will give a Labour government greater freedom to make a success of the economy – despite that widely being considered a fallacy.

Putting it to the vote

It is hardly surprising, then, that nearly 100 CLPs have submitted motions to conference on Brexit. More than 60 of these demand Labour commit to campaigning for Remain. Yet, if last year’s “compositing meeting” (a process during which multiple motions are turned into an anodyne one that can be put to a vote in the conference hall without overly embarrassing the leadership) is anything to go by, they may end up with a motion that says less than they’d like.

But even if Labour’s Remain membership does get the kind of wording it wants, there is no guarantee that it will gain a sufficient majority (especially given union opposition) to see it go into the party’s programme and therefore make it a contender for Labour’s next manifesto. And even if that motion is sufficiently well-supported, there is no guarantee that it would subsequently make it into Labour’s election platform – not least because it may turn out to be one of two “official” statements on Brexit that emerge from Brighton this week: the NEC, Labour’s top decision making body, opted on Sunday lunchtime (via, believe it or not, a round-robin email), to support Corbyn’s line that the party will not make up its mind on whether to campaign for Remain in any referendum until after the general election.

But anyone therefore expecting a fatal shootout on the South Coast this week shouldn’t hold their breath. Corbyn – supposedly a very different leader of the Labour Party and one who promised to be guided by its members – will probably get away with ignoring them yet again. And he’ll do so by doing exactly what his supposedly right-wing, war-mongering, neo-liberal predecessors did: namely, use a combination of good old-fashioned bureaucratic manoeuvring and trade union muscle to ensure he gets what he wants rather than what they want.

And as our research in Footsoldiers makes plain, most Labour members are very left wing and even more socially liberal. Many joined the party precisely because “Jeremy” embodies those very values. True, their infatuation might have worn off – after all, the antisemitism stories and his truly dire poll ratings have taken their toll. But most Labour members still love Corbyn. And even now, as we approach what some see as the European endgame, they may still love him more than they hate Brexit.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/labour-conference-jeremy-corbyn-battles-it-out-with-members-over-brexit-123974

There’s a lot to be said for clarity.

You’ll know this if you saw the clip of Labour’s Emily Thornberry on Question Time a week or so back tortuously trying, and failing, to explain her party’s Brexit policy.

So the Lib Dems’ decision to declare that they will be revoking Article 50 if they win a majority at the next general election clearly has a lot going for it. But it also comes with dangerous downsides.

One thing it certainly does is distinguish the Lib Dems from Labour. There’s no way that Corbyn can match that offer.

So for those who think “bollocks to Brexit” (which Lib Dem activists, I learned down in Bournemouth, like to sing to the tune of Waltzing Matilda), Jo Swinson really is the only game in town.

As such, Revoke is essentially a heat-seeking missile aimed at die-hard Remain voters in the constituencies, most of them Tory, that the Lib Dems have a pretty good chance of winning as long as, that is, the anti-Brexit vote isn’t split.

True, even precision-guided weapons tend to result in some collateral damage.

There will undoubtedly be some less-convinced Remain voters who will be put off by a policy that Labour and the Tories, having promised to implement the result of the 2016 referendum, are already labelling (without a great deal of justification some would say) as “undemocratic”.

But if we’ve learned anything from the last three years, it’s that you really can’t have your cake and eat it.

In politics, trade-offs come with the territory. And under first-past-the-post in particular, as the Lib Dems know better than anybody, it’s not simply about how many votes you get, it’s about where you get them.

Doubters, some of them brave enough to voice their concerns about the policy down among the faithful in Bournemouth, worry that it will remove any chance they have of winning back some of the Eurosceptic south-west seats that, until they lost them in the post-coalition catastrophe of 2015, they’d held through a combination of atavistic partisan loyalty and bloody hard work.

Well, they may be right.

But, although candidates fighting those former bastions of liberalism won’t like to hear it (and may of course prove everyone wrong) those seats are very probably lost to them anyway.

So if Revoke opens up possibilities in, say, London, where seats are genuinely in play, then that may well be a price worth paying.

A bigger problem, perhaps, is that the policy is based on a transparent falsehood, fallacy and fantasy – namely that the Lib Dems are going to win the overall majority that will allow them to implement it.

Sure, stranger things have happened.

But right now, it’s painfully obvious that far fewer voters than ex-Labour and ex-Tory MPs are coming over to the Lib Dems. Current polling puts them at around 20 per cent, if that.

True, political geography, as we’ve already pointed out, matters. But, unless the numbers change significantly, it’s going to have to weave some pretty dark magic to get them nearer to 330 than 30 seats in the Commons.

During any election, then, Lib Dem spokespeople are almost certainly bound to find themselves forced by the media to admit that their central policy is undeliverable.

They will be accused of making a promise they can’t possibly keep, and asked if they risk letting down their supporters like they did over, oh, I don’t know, the abolition of university tuition fees.

They may be able to handle that (they could argue that if they can’t get what they want, then they will resume their call for a second referendum at which they will campaign for Remain).

However, a trickier question would follow – namely, are they really saying, as Jo Swinson appears to be, that she won’t under any circumstances help put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street, even if that ensures a second referendum will take place?

Would doing that really be worse than happily entering into a coalition with David Cameron which, they’ll be reminded by Labour, unleashed five years and more of austerity on some of the country’s most vulnerable people?

And all that ignores what some see as Revoke’s biggest risk of all. It relies on Brexit not happening before the next election.

If Boris Johnson pulls off a miracle and takes the UK out of the EU by the time we troop back to the polls again, then the Lib Dems are going to look not so much like one-trick pony as a no-trick pony.

But hold your horses. That supposedly doomsday scenario might not be such a disaster, after all – at least for the Lib Dems if not for the country as a whole.

If we do leave, not everyone will be chuffed to bits or simply heaving a sigh of relief. And even those who are will soon find Brexit ain’t really over.

As for those who aren’t, they will be angry – really angry – and they won’t be much less angry with Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party than with Boris Johnson and the Tories.

At that point, “revenge voting” could become a thing – and perhaps a very big thing for Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jo-swinson-brexit-revoke-article-50-liberal-democrats-a9108886.html

Regardless of the recent endless political convulsions and intrigue, one thing is certain: party conference season is going ahead as usual.

Whether that’s a cause for celebration among the MPs and journalists schlepping to events in Bournemouth, Brighton, Manchester, Newport and Aberdeen in quick succession remains to be seen.

For the ordinary members of the parties concerned, however, conferences matter. They afford an opportunity not just to let your hair down for a few days, but also to renew your faith and commitment to the cause. You get the chance, too, to talk at fringe events with politicians you might otherwise only get to see on the telly. And, unless you’re a Tory and therefore have no say in such matters, you even get to decide on policies that, theoretically anyway, might make it into your party’s manifesto.

But there’s a problem here too. The “ordinary members” of the UK’s political parties aren’t really that ordinary. In fact, party members are, at least in the strictest sense of the word, positively abnormal. True, getting on for 1 million Britons belong to a political party – but that leaves tens of millions who don’t, and who would probably never dream of joining one either.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that grassroots members are all as weird and way out as some of their media stereotypes suggest. Not every grassroots Conservative is a blue-rinsed dragon or a Colonel Blimp – or, for that matter, an oleaginous “Tory boy” (or girl). Likewise, not every Labour member is a middle-class, Corbyn-supporting “Trot” or a salt-of-the-earth trade unionist. Not all members of the SNP are merciless and monomaniacal “cybernats”. Liberal Democrats don’t all sport beards and open-toed sandals. Greens aren’t all tree-hugging ecowarriors with white dreads and a similarly hirsute dog on a string. And to characterise the Brexit party’s registered supporters (it doesn’t have members, as such) as David Cameron once characterised Ukip’s members, as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”, is – probably – similarly unfair.

Even if such stereotypes about Britain’s party members reflected reality, that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. The variety they seem to offer might, after all, mean that the country’s biggest political parties were at least collectively – if not individually – representative of the UK as a whole.

The problem – as revealed in a new book I’ve written with Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, called Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century – is that this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Take class. Much can be made of the fact that the Tory rank and file, which chose Boris Johnson and seems to be gagging for a no-deal Brexit, is overwhelmingly middle class – certainly far more so than voters as a whole. Using figures from the British Election Study, around 61% of the electorate can be assigned to the social grades that comprise managerial, clerical and professional careers – whereas the figure for the Tory membership is a whopping 86%. The figure here for Lib Dems is 88% and 80% for Greens.

However, at the other end of the scale, only 23% of Labour members fall into the categories that include skilled/unskilled manual workers, lower-grade workers and the unemployed – as opposed to just under 40% of the population as a whole. This is both symptom and cause, perhaps, of the party’s seemingly inexorable loss of support among the country’s (admittedly shrinking) working class. The SNP (28% of whose membership are in this category) is slightly more representative – but only slightly.

The Brexit party came along after we completed our survey research, but, if its registered supporters are anything like Ukip’s members (66% in the roughly middle-class strata, 34% in the working-class range), then they might actually be the most socially representative of all the large parties – more working class than the self-proclaimed party of the workers, if you like.

When it comes to gender, it is easy to pour scorn on the Tories for the fact that more than two-thirds of grassroots Conservatives are men – a proportion that contrasts with the situation in the Labour party, which, in the Corbyn era, has come much closer to parity. In so doing Labour matches the Greens’ 52% male to 48% female ratio. The SNP (57:43) is getting there, but the Lib Dems are progressing only to the extent that just under four out of 10 of its members are women – something Jo Swinson will surely want to change. As for the Brexit party, we can’t know for sure, but if Ukip’s membership is anything to go by, then three-quarters of its registered supporters will be men.

But the biggest membership challenge for the parties is ethnicity. Getting on for 20% of the UK’s population is from an ethnic minority, but at least 95% of the members of all (yes, all) its biggest political parties are white – and that includes Labour, in spite of the fact that it has a hugely disproportionate share (ie, at least two-thirds) of the BAME vote and dominates the cities in which many minority communities are concentrated.

Even more worryingly, the relative absence of people of colour doesn’t seem to have changed very much – in marked contrast to the country as a whole – since the pioneering academic surveys of party members were conducted nearly three decades ago.

That absence risks perpetuating an already vicious cycle. People from ethnic minority groups don’t vote as much as their white counterparts, and are hardly likely to match them if they don’t see themselves reflected not just among MPs who sit at Westminster, but also among the grassroots members who knock on their doors in order to get those MPs elected.

In these circumstances, simply sitting back and waiting for more working-class people, more women and more of those from ethnic minorities to join parties of their own accord is just not going to cut it.

Yes, our research shows that potential recruits tend to approach parties rather than the other way round. But it also shows that they can be prompted to do so, particularly in response to what they see and hear in the media. In other words, messaging and visibility can make a big difference.

More than anything, though, parties need to try harder to dispel the myth – and it is a myth – that party membership is only for those willing and able to give up all their free (or family) time, those who already know people in the party, and those determined to make a career in politics: for now, these are still boxes that middle-class white men seem much more likely to tick. That needs to change.

Originally posted at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/17/white-male-middle-class-britain-poiltical-parties-politics

Far more political parties get their obituaries written prematurely than actually pop their clogs. That’s not to say that the worst never happens. We do have the odd example of a so-called extinction event. The paradigmatic case in point being the sudden and virtually simultaneous collapse of several of Italy’s biggest parties in the early 1990s, during the perfect storm created by the end of the cold war and a spate of corruption scandals.

But it’s worth reminding ourselves, especially when we’re talking about parties that have been around a while, that they do tend to limp and linger on. They fade slowly into obscurity and obsolescence, rather than dying a dramatic death.

That’s partly because the barriers to entry for anybody aspiring to replace them are pretty damned high, particularly in plurality systems such as the UK’s. Historically, anyway, it’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible for any party that can’t manage to score around 30% of the nationwide vote here to break through — unless, like the Scottish and Welsh nationalists or the Northern Ireland parties, they can claim to speak for a particular part of the country with a particularly strong identity. Nigel Farage, in offering the Tories some kind of electoral pact with the Brexit Party, isn’t so much doing them a favour as trying to prevent a re-run of 2015 when Ukip won nearly four million votes and only one solitary seat.

Britain’s big two have been so dominant for so long that they are more or less dug in in a slew of safe seats. That means that, unlike their competitors, they can actually afford to slip some way below the magic 30% and still win a reasonably respectable (and often fairly proportional) haul of constituencies.

Infrastructure keeps them in place too. They hold significant capital, whether it be physical (such as constituency offices), financial (assets and the ability to raise loans and donations), or human (members, know-how, experience, and even cosy relationships with the print and broadcast media).

Clearly, none of that stuff lasts for ever. But only very rarely does it disappear overnight. And if you don’t already have it — and new entrants by definition often don’t — then it can take time to get it together. Nor, unless success comes reasonably rapidly, can you guarantee that it’ll last long enough to consolidate for the long term what you’ve managed to build up in the first flush.

Members, in particular, may be pretty easy-come, easy-go. And the technology that new parties nowadays use to help hook them in the first place can easily be turned against them. Social media will make it obvious that an increasing number of rats are leaving the sinking ship, perhaps precipitating even more of them to do so. Even direct debits, which used to be something of a godsend to parties by making membership renewal the default, have turned into a potential liability: most people can cancel them in seconds by swiping left or right.

Older parties, of course, can’t completely avoid some of the same problems. As we show in our new book, Footsoldiers, members’ loyalty can be tested beyond breaking point, especially by leaders who take the party in a direction they fundamentally disagree with. We’re seeing that more than ever during our Brexit cleavage.

But many of those members have been around an awfully long time, are socially as well as politically embedded in their local branches, may well represent them on town or county councils, and have stuck with it through thick and thin. As a result, they are significantly less likely to abandon or jump ship quite so rapidly.

What established parties do find difficult to escape, however, is being rendered increasingly irrelevant by social, economic and cultural change. Most of them will have come into being by mobilising identities that once upon a time were not only widespread, and made a lot of sense, but were also institutionally reinforced by relationships with big external players that both anchored them ideologically and supplied them with valuable resources.

On the Left, for example, you had social democratic and labour parties which mobilised class consciousness and were supported by trade unions. They demanded the state do more to look after workers by regulating the economy and maintaining a welfare state.

On the Right, in many west European countries, you had Christian democrats, mobilising religious adherence and supported (albeit at arm’s length) by the Catholic church. They put more of an emphasis on international integration and the market and were underwritten by a densely-woven, civil society-run safety net that promoted traditional, family values.

But class, even though it continues to play a huge role in deciding our life-chances, is no longer such a big part of people’s identities. Unions are pale shadows of what they once were as economies, at least in the liberal-capitalist West, have shifted irrevocably away from industry towards services. Conventional wisdom — partly thanks to the centre-left itself giving up the fight — has moved away from the idea that the state can and should do everything.

On the other side of the fence, church attendance and religious observance has also declined significantly in most European countries. The Catholic church has been badly undermined by scandal, and the consumerism and nationalism it has traditionally frowned upon abound. Meanwhile, the welfare state, even if it’s fraying badly at the margins, has become something of a given, meaning parties of the mainstream Right and Left have to some extent become victims of their own post-war success.

It is no accident, then, that it is parties in those traditions which (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to be suffering a slow (and, who knows, possibly in the end terminal) decline: what’s happened to both the Labour Party and Christian democrats in the Netherlands provides possibly the direst warning. This decline has been exacerbated in recent years by a failure to come up with convincing answers to widely-felt cultural anxieties brought about by mass immigration and its exploitation by arguably less responsible, but supposedly more responsive (and often more entrepreneurial) politicians – in their case, Geert Wilders and now Thierry Baudet.

Whether we will inevitably see the same happen to both the mainstream Left and Right in the UK, however, is at least debatable. This is not necessarily the chronicle of a death foretold – for the Tories, anyway.

The Conservative Party, with its own long-lasting nationalist, nativist and populist traditions, and its reliance not on God but on Mammon, has far less compunction — as it’s proving at this very moment — about running down the radical right route than its continental, Christian democratic, centre-right counterparts. As such, its chances of surviving the near-death experience represented by the European Parliament elections this summer are probably (famous last words!) reasonably good.

The Conservative party can adapt and cater to these new times – an era where belonging, as self-styled conservative communitarians like to put it, seems to be assuming more and more importance. Although doing so might (as Sajid Javid’s recent spending review seems to recognise) also involve spending more money than ‘the gods of the copybook headings’ would like on things which are seen as a vital part of that community: schools and hospitals and law and order.

Labour, for all its own enthusiasm for such spending, might have more of a problem, however. Its romantic attachment to the working class (however outdated its conception of it) and its reliance on the trade unions make it tricky for it to transition seamlessly into the kind of internationalist, socially liberal party that would suit many of its (overwhelmingly middle-class and well-educated) members. Moreover, that space is also occupied by the Lib Dems, who also have the advantage of a clear rather than a muddied message on Brexit.

Indeed, Labour’s dilemma over the latter is in some ways its larger strategic and electoral dilemma writ large.  Does it try and hang on, perhaps nostalgically, to what some of its supporters still insist talking and (worse still) thinking of as ‘their’ people?  Or does it cut its losses, believing there’s more to be gained on what traditionalists like to stereotype and sneer at as the cosmopolitan side of town.

Some will argue – with a fair bit of justification – that the divide between the two groups of potential voters isn’t quite as significant or, indeed, quite as zero sum as others insist. But few would deny that it exists at all. If so, can and should Labour continue to try straddle it? Or, is it about to fall — and fall fatally — between two stools?

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2019/09/a-dire-warning-for-our-old-political-system/

So, you’ve finally landed the job you’ve been dreaming about your whole life. But, damn it, there’s a catch. In order to land it, you had to promise a whole bunch of people something big. And now it turns out — not altogether surprisingly, your critics say — that’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver. And even if, by some miracle, you do end up delivering it, an awful lot of people are going to hate you for it. Even worse, some of those who thought they’d love you for it are going to find that it doesn’t help them anywhere near as much as you said it would. It may even make their lives worse.

No, I’m not talking about President Donald Trump and his beloved border wall. I’m talking about British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his push for a “no-deal” Brexit (under which the U.K. leaves the E.U. without any kind of negotiated agreement over borders, tariffs and the like).

Back in July, Johnson won the contest to replace Theresa May as head of the Conservative Party (and therefore PM) by insisting that the U.K. leave the E.U. by the deadline for departure set for Oct. 31 — with or without a deal — after she tried and failed to hammer one out. But whether he’ll succeed is anyone’s guess, and that’s never a good situation for the leader of a country to be in. The next couple of months could see Johnson emerge as a conquering hero to Britain’s pro-Brexit voters, or one of the country’s shortest-serving prime ministers. In other words: It’s all or nothing.

May at least got three years before she had to face the music. During that time, she painfully tried to reconcile various irreconcilables. Most obvious was the Conservatives’ desire for a close economic relationship with the E.U., Britain’s biggest trading partner, even after it departed the economic and political bloc so that E.U. citizens could no longer freely live and work in the U.K. The other was to prevent the need for a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K.

May’s biggest mistake, however, was to coin the fateful slogan, “No deal is better than a bad deal” — one that gradually morphed, among Leave-voting Conservative members of Parliament who had promised the public a quick deal, from a management-textbook cliché into a full-blown mantra that spelled her downfall.

When she came up with a withdrawal agreement that involved too many concessions, they blocked it and forced her to resign. The Conservatives, then, had failed to deliver Brexit and looked hopelessly split. Upended by Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party in elections to the European Parliament in June, they won less than 10 (yes 10) percent. Threat level to the Conservative Party: existential.

His problem? Most MPs (including, as he well knew, a number of his own Conservative colleagues) won’t countenance that and made it clear they would pass legislation forcing him to ask the E.U. for an extension to the deadline. His response? To bend (but not break) the rules of Britain’s unwritten constitution by effectively obliging the poor old queen to prorogue (temporarily suspend) Parliament and cut down the time available for Conservative rebels to do that.

Their response? To pass the legislation over the course of just a few days before the suspension kicked in. His counter-response? To use the passing of that legislation as an excuse to call for an early general election on Oct. 15. Whether Parliament will eventually grant him his wish (they refused his first call for one today) is by no means certain.

In the end it will be up to the opposition Labour Party, many members of which (including former leader Tony Blair) regard it as a trap that they should avoid because, even though the opposition is supposed to grab any chance it can to replace the government in office, the party is pretty unpopular right now. If they do, however, polls suggest Johnson stands a reasonable chance of winning. And, if he wins, he will be able to claim a mandate to take the U.K. out of the E.U., with a deal or without one.

If that isn’t enough to scare the E.U. into making 11th-hour concessions, Johnson argues that Britain will be fine because the government is spending untold millions on preparing for a unilateral Brexit and his best buddy, Trump, will fast-track a lucrative trade deal that would supposedly make up for any business lost with Europe.

That’s still the plan. And it just might work. But it comes with massive risks.

If Johnson genuinely cares about the national interest, then a new independent report on the serious, across-the-board harm a no-deal departure could well do the country should surely give him pause. It suggests not only disruption, but a decline in trade and economic activity resulting in significantly slower growth that can’t be compensated for by deals done with other countries.

But even if partisan advantage is all Johnson cares about, he should be careful what he wishes for. Right now, no-deal is the preferred option of only just more than half of Conservative voters and a mere quarter of all Brits. And should it actually happen and turn out to be a disaster, it could constitute a career-terminating event for those politicians seen to be responsible.

True, if Johnson can engineer an election before no-deal happens — if it happens — then a heady mix of nationalism, populism, tough-on-crime rhetoric, hostility to migration and multiculturalism, and the splashing around of plenty of borrowed cash might lend him victory.

Yet, long term, that kind of appeal could trash not only the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence, but also permanently brand them — in a country that is becoming ever more socially liberal and multiethnic — as the absolute opposite: a right-wing populist party that can’t win sufficient support from moderate floating voters.

Sound familiar? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Originally published at https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/british-pm-boris-johnson-gambling-everything-no-deal-brexit-will-ncna1049776 

Boris Johnson won the Tory leadership by promising party members anything and everything they wanted to hear. It’s also pretty obvious from the flurry of splash-the-cash policy announcements he’s already made that he’s going to try to pull off the same trick with the 99.9 per cent of the electorate who, while they didn’t have a say in him becoming prime minister, may well be asked to vote very soon on whether he should carry on in the job.

Whether that general election takes place before or after the UK has left the EU is anyone’s guess, but it’s worth thinking through.

The best-case scenario for Boris Johnson surely remains that he somehow persuades the 27 EU countries to make changes to the deal sufficient to squeeze it through the House of Commons. The latter – let alone the former – won’t be easy; but it may be possible.

As leader of the Leave campaign, Johnson is, after all, much better placed than ‘reluctant Remainer’ Theresa May to persuade his Brexiteer ultras that he’ll get them what they want when he sits down in Brussels to negotiate the famous ‘future relationship’. And there may still be enough ‘Labour Leavers’ to compensate for any ‘Spartans’ on his own back (and indeed front) bench who won’t take yes for an answer under any circumstances.

Once we’re out, Johnson can then carry on promising all things to all men and, in the spring, go to the country hoping that the wave of relief – and the sheer uselessness of his Labour opposite number – will see him swept back into Downing Street with a working (and maybe even a comfortable) majority.

If, however, it proves impossible to come to an agreement, and Westminster finds a way to block a no deal, then we’ll presumably see an election held sooner rather than later.  Although Corbyn and co. would still be a factor in Johnson’s favour, that contest one wouldn’t be so easy to win – but difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

For a start, an awful lot of people – not just hard-core Leavers – would buy the argument that Brussels was to blame for us leaving without a deal because of its sheer bloody-mindedness and intransigence. And if there’s one politician who is a sufficiently skilled populist to be able to frame an election as ‘the people vs. Parliament’ then it’s Boris Johnson.

An autumn election, however, would be much easier to win before rather than after the UK leaves the EU without a deal.  After all, the disruption and dislocation that many experts are convinced will ensue are hardly likely to endear the government to a country suffering as a result.

There are going to be so many ‘make your mind up moments’ in the coming weeks and months and one of the biggest for Conservative MPs is this: would the damage done to the party’s reputation by their leader failing to fulfil his promise to get the UK out of the EU by 31 October be worse than the damage inflicted on it by the economic chaos that might ensue following a no deal Brexit?

It was a beautiful day yesterday but as I look out of my window today, the skies are dark, the thunder is booming and the rain is falling.  Summer – even for the new sun king, Boris Johnson, won’t last forever. It never does.

Originally published at https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/27/boris-johnson-should-call-a-general-election-now-if-he-wants-to-win-10467443/

I first began taking politics seriously in the mid-1980s. At that time, the Italian political prisoner and left-wing philosopher Antonio Gramsci was particularly fashionable – especially, I recall, in the pages of Marxism Today

Through the lens of Gramsci’s theories, former Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques and the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall both recognised how Margaret Thatcher’s government had succeeded in winning and then consolidating political power by redefining what counted as “common sense” – in other words, what was seen as feasible, mainstream and “normal.” Their observations were animated by what Gramsci called “hegemony” – the idea that truly transformative political (and therefore economic) power is, at least in part, rooted in cultural authority.

But if the British left has always appreciated Gramsci, it’s politicians on the right who have actually been better at learning his lessons. Britain’s new Brexiteer-ultra cabinet has proved this once again.

Gramsci famously made a distinction between a “war of position” (a slow, incremental, insidious attempt to infiltrate political institutions and achieve cultural and intellectual authority) and a “war of manoeuvre” (a swift, full-frontal assault, capable of achieving a knock-out blow especially in the wake of successful positional campaign).

In so doing, the Italian philosopher provides us with a guide to what Britain’s Brexiteers have been up to all these years, and to what’s happening now.

For many years – a fair few of them spent in the wilderness after the 1975 referendum on European Economic Community membership produced a two-thirds majority for Remain – British  Eurosceptics built on the UK’s lack of European identity, engagement and understanding, and harnessed print-media owners’ hostility to EU regulation. Although their contribution to the nation’s “common sense” can be vastly exaggerated, Boris Johnson’s Brussels dispatches for the Daily Telegraph, filled with tales of bendy bananas, undersized condoms, and oversized bureaucracies, doubtless played a small part in the process.

Sceptics also began their long march through the institutions. Some joined the Referendum Party and then Ukip. But others stayed within (or eventually rejoined) the Conservative Party – an organisation in which it became increasingly difficult to become a parliamentary candidate if you were in any way sympathetic to the European project. As time went on, outright antipathy to Brussels became a precondition.

All this led to David Cameron caving into calls for a referendum and, with a little help from the Eurozone and migration crises – and of course from Dominic Cummings – to the vote being won, albeit narrowly, by the Leave side against progressive Remainers. Over the preceding decades, the latter had never truly sought to counter the right’s combination of insidiously drip-fed, and occasionally in-your-face, Euroscepticsm.

Since then, the Brexiteers have been preparing to move from their war of position to one of manoeuvre – a strategic transition that began with the European Research Group-organised guerrilla attacks against Theresa May, which made parliamentary approval of a deal impossible, and (with May’s foolish help) soon made no-deal seem like a serious and reasonable option. But it was May’s consequent resignation that enabled the Brexiteers’ war of manoeuvre to really begin in earnest.

Johnson’s victory this week constitutes the first battle won. His splash-the-cash policy platform – “more bobbies on the beat”, fixing the social care crisis, and almost everything else on the agenda of the Daily Mail and Telegraph readership – is the second. And his appointment of Brexiteer ultras to the cabinet, and members of Vote Leave’s campaign machine as government advisors, is the third.

Now the war is about to see the opening up of another battle front in continental Europe, as Johnson, spurred on by parliamentary supporters, takes on Jean-Claude Juncker, Michel Barnier, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Leo Varadkar et al.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, one of Johnson’s many heroes (who probably, of course, had never heard of Gramsci, let alone read his writing): “this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end; it is merely the end of the beginning”.

Originally published at https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/07/what-boris-johnson-and-tory-right-have-learned-antonio-gramsci

The current Tory leadership contest is sheer agony – especially for those of us able to call to mind the calibre of some of those who have steered the party and the country in times gone by. There’s one man, in particular, whose influence on Britain and the wider word was – and continues to be – immense. And yet his name isn’t lauded like say, Churchill or de Gaulle. History seems rather to have written him off. But without him, our lives might have been very different. I’m thinking of Harold Macmillan.

Let’s begin with his more trivial achievements – well, relatively trivial. In 1956, Macmillan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was looking for ways to dampen down inflation by cutting consumption. In that year’s budget, he introduced a government-backed savings vehicle which paid out no interest but instead offered investors the chance to win a tax-free prize every month. Sixty or so years later, over 20 million people in the UK own well in excess of £30 billion worth of Premium Bonds.

A fair few of those people will also live in a house originally built in the years following the war. Some of those buildings, of course, went up during the pioneering Labour government that led Britain between 1945 and 1951. But even more of them were constructed under the Conservative government that followed it – and which ran the country for 13 years until 1964.

That government’s first Minister of Housing – the man to whom many believed Churchill had given a poisoned chalice by asking him to achieve the seemingly impossible target of 300,000 properties a year – was (yes, you’ve guessed it) Harold Macmillan. Via some judicious deregulation, he not only helped the construction sector reach the target but helped it do so far earlier than expected.

Before that success, many of his colleagues had written Macmillan off, regarding him, indeed, as something of a political oddity and a personal failure (his impressive military record in WWI and diplomatic role in WWII notwithstanding).

Westminster’s worst kept secret was that his wife had been conducting an affair with his Conservative colleague, Bob Boothby, since the 1930s. And during that decade, Macmillan himself had earned a reputation as a disturbingly unconventional thinker on economic and social policy, writing volumes such as The State and Industry (1932), Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Unity (1933), The Next Five Years (1935), and, perhaps most famously, The Middle Way (1938). All of them championed the idea that governments should take greater responsibility for the economy as well as, more generally, the welfare of the population as a whole.

Meanwhile, Macmillan’s family business, in which he played an active role, was publishing John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory – probably the most influential book on economics of the 20th century. It is credited with helping to convince post-war policy makers that, via the management of demand by fiscal and monetary means, they could prevent a return to the unemployment which blighted Britain (and other countries) in the thirties.

It became increasingly clear after 1945, that the Conservative Party was going to have to reconcile itself to the public’s demand for a more activist state – one that would provide both economic growth and increased social security. And so Macmillan’s long-held beliefs looked rather more prescient. So, too, did his opposition to appeasement, which, along with that of Churchill, Eden and others, later helped to avert the charge that the entire Conservative Party had effectively given Hitler what he wanted.

As a result, and given his successful ministerial record under Churchill, it came as no surprise that, in April 1955, Eden having finally managed to winkle the grand old man out of Number 10, Macmillan was named Foreign Secretary. Later that year, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Macmillan’s elevation to the Premiership just over a year later in January 1957, however, did come as something of a shock to those not in the know. It had a great deal to do with an event that is often quoted nowadays (in the same breath as Brexit) as one of the most disastrous and humiliating episodes for a British government in recent memory – the 1956 Suez crisis.

It might be going too far to assert that, without Macmillan, Eden would never have gone with the idea that Israel should invade Egypt in order to provide a pretext for Britain and France to snatch back the Suez Canal. But Macmillan’s enthusiasm for the plan, and his misplaced confidence that US President Dwight Eisenhower (whom he had got to know well during the war) would tolerate the operation, certainly did nothing to dissuade his colleagues from going ahead with it.

It is undoubtedly true, though, that it was Macmillan’s rapid realisation that the otherwise relatively successful intervention would have to be called off, not least in order to prevent a diplomatic disaster turning into economic chaos, which convinced those same colleagues to stop it in its tracks.

It was also Macmillan who, unlike, his rival Rab Butler, was able to convince his furious fellow Conservative MPs that the government could recover from the affair – one of the main reasons the party turned to him rather than Butler when Eden resigned.

Supermac – as he came to be dubbed – turned out to be right. Not only did he manage to repair relations with the US, later striking up a friendship with the much younger Jack Kennedy, but at the 1959 election – one unusual for being fought in the autumn rather than the spring or summer – he increased the Conservative Party’s overall majority to over 100.

This he did by persuading voters (who he famously said “had never had it so good”) that it was the architect and guarantor of their burgeoning consumer affluence, establishing the template later used to similarly devastating electoral effect by Margaret Thatcher in the loadsamoney 1980s. But he also did it by refusing to countenance the public spending constraints demanded by his supposedly proto-Thatcherite Treasury team, whose resulting resignation in January 1958, Macmillan, with his characteristic ‘unflappability’, dismissed as “a little local difficulty”.

In hindsight, this may have been unwise – though not nearly as unwise as his fateful decision in 1960 to commission Dr Beeching to write his report which resulted in the closure of a third of Britain’s rail network, cutting off hundreds of towns and villages from one of the most environmentally-friendly (if costly) forms of transport.

But it was surely in defence and foreign affairs that Macmillan made his biggest and most lasting contribution. He played a role in Cold War efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons but also secured the Polaris weapons system for the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. He effectively admitted that Britain’s imperial game was up and then set a course firmly for decolonisation with his ‘Winds of change’ speech in February 1960.

And, of course, after trying to establish the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as a counter to the EEC, Macmillan swiftly came to the realisation that the UK had no alternative but to join the bigger bloc, initiating its first of three eventually successful accession applications to what is now the EU.

Whether that 40-plus years of membership is about to end – and end in tears – who knows? What we do know, however, is that without Harold Macmillan, Britain and the world might well have looked very different.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2019/07/the-pm-we-shouldnt-write-off/

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Has the Conservative Party become a death cult? A few years ago that would not have been a question that it would have occurred to anyone even to ask. But after the publication of YouGov’s most recent polling of its grassroots members, it’s one that’s hard to ignore.

Some 61 per cent were willing to countenance significant economic damage to the British economy in order to leave the EU. And 63 per cent and 59 per cent of members were apparently content to see Scotland or Northern Ireland leaving the UK if that is what it took to get Brexit.

In some ways, even more shockingly, just over half of rank-and-file Tories (54 per cent) thought the destruction of their own party would be a price worth paying for Brexit, with only just over a third (36 per cent) feeling that, at that point, the game would no longer be worth the candle.

So what just happened? How on earth has the membership of an organization traditionally dedicated to the preservation of the Union – and, presumably, the preservation of itself – come to believe that nothing (well, almost nothing: a net 12 per cent thought Jeremy Corby becoming PM would be worse than not getting Brexit) trumped quitting the EU?

Obviously, this hasn’t come out of nowhere. It was in the early 1990s that the Conservative Party first began seriously experimenting with hard Euroscepticism (the idea that we’d have to leave the EU because reform would never deliver what we needed), and after that it began to need more and more of the stuff in order to feed what soon became an increasingly debilitating and expensive habit.

But to go from that to full-on junkie status – to so crave the hit you not only want but need to the point where you no longer really care whether you live or die – is quite something, and has only happened more recently.

That’s even more clearly the case if you recall the summer of 2015. Back then, alongside my colleagues Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, we surveyed Conservative Party members as part of an ESRC-funded research project (that will be published in September as a book called Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century).

At that moment in time, two-thirds of members told us that they’d wait to see what their then leader (and prime minister) David Cameron came back with from Brussels before making up their minds how to vote in the upcoming EU referendum.

Fast forward to now and two-thirds of Tory members say they want not only Brexit and not only a hard Brexit (where we leave the customs union and the single market) but a no deal Brexit.

There are, of course, myriad reasons that might account for such a change of heart.

One obvious explanation is that Cameron’s renegotiation turned out to be such a damp squib that it proved once and for all to an already pretty hostile party that soft Euroscepticism (the idea that we could get reform from within and opt out of what we didn’t like) wasn’t really going to cut it.

Another is the rise and fall of Ukip, which under Nigel Farage’s breathtakingly brilliant leadership, managed to permanently fuse Euroscepticism and anti-immigration sentiment and, in so doing, represent a serious threat to the Conservative Party’s hitherto unchallenged hegemony over the country’s right-wing voters. It was a threat that the Tories responded to by essentially co-opting the insurgency’s agenda.

That co-option, of course, went on – more or less officially – before, during and after the referendum campaign, accelerating under Theresa May, who literally told members that “no deal was better than a bad deal”.

That notion was then given rocket-boosters by their celebrity-politician favourites like Jacob Rees Mogg and, of course, Boris Johnson, as well as by their favourite newspapers: don’t forget that a third of rank-and-file Tories read the Telegraph and just under a fifth read the Mail. The triumph of the Brexit Party at the European Parliament elections – a triumph no doubt assisted in part not only by Conservative voters but Conservative members – has only served to up the ante even further.

And then, finally, there’s what some insist on calling “entryism” – the promotion of the idea that Brexiteers, and especially former Ukip members, should join the Conservative Party to influence its policies, its choice of candidates and its choice of leader.

Surveys can’t confirm whether this so-called Blukip phenomenon is as real as some of the self-styled victims of it, such as Anna Soubry, have alleged. But what they do seem to show is that well over a third of the current Conservative Party membership joined after the 2016 referendum, which some will take as at least circumstantial evidence and may explain why they care more about Brexit than their party’s long-term survival.

What they also show is that, while no deal wins the support of “only” 60 per cent of those members who had already joined the party by the 2015 election, that figure rises to 70 per cent for those who joined after the 2016 referendum, and to an astonishing 77 per cent of those who became Conservative Party members after the 2017 general election.

In short, attitudes on Europe have hardened among rank-and-file Tories; but part of that hardening is due to the fact that some of those with less strident views on the issue may have left the party only to be replaced by Brexiteer-ultras. That, of course, is democracy. But it’s also bloody good news for Boris Johnson – at least until he risks, as prime minister, having to disillusion and disappoint them.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-boris-johnson-tory-leadership-party-conservative-no-deal-ukip-nigel-farage-a8977716.html