Tim Bale's Blog

Was Margaret Thatcher right? Not about everything, obviously. Only the true-Blue keepers of the flame believe that, surely?

But was she right about ‘popular capitalism‘, the intuitively plausible idea formed by Tories in heady days of the Eighties that held that spreading share-ownership via the privatisation of publicly owned firms and industries would give ordinary Brits ‘a stake in the market’ and, in so doing, would push them to vote Conservative instead of Labour?

The answer, according to some intriguing research I heard about this week during a trip to the States, suggests she might have been.

As far as I’m aware, Lady Thatcher had no personal connection with Princeton, one of the USA’s Ivy League universities, although one of the best recent books on her was written by Sir David Cannadine, a British historian and Princeton faculty member.

But it was here that I attended a colloquium exactly 40 years to the day after Thatcher first entered Downing Street as Prime Minister, and where I heard Yotam Margalit, from Tel Aviv University, present some research he’d conducted with Moses Shayo from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Margalit wasn’t talking about Thatcher, but the findings of his research would, I’m sure, have pleased the Iron Lady no end. As a trained chemist, Thatcher would especially have liked the fact that they resulted not from desk research, but from an experiment.

The experiment was a complex one, with different ‘treatments’ applied to subgroups of the sample of 1,500 English participants. In essence, however, it involved giving the participants, most of whom had never invested in the stock market, £50 to spend over the course of two months on buying and selling stocks on a web-based platform.

In the weeks before and afterwards they, along with a control group, were also asked a range of apparently unrelated questions designed to tap into their underlying social and political attitudes, as well as some more specific, policy-related questions on tax, spending, and regulation.

The results? The people who actually got to trade stocks, they found, ‘shifted rightward’ in their social-economic values. This influenced their attitudes on economic fairness, inequality and redistribution, the role of luck in economic success. They also found that ‘exposure to the market increased subjects’ confidence in the ability of regular people to successfully invest in the market, as well as their own inclination to invest’.

Although there was no shift in participants’ views on policy, such as whether government should provide either more or less generous benefits to the jobless, they did become less sympathetic to the idea of taxing investment gains and regulating the market. They also became much keener on the idea that people be allowed to invest some of their national insurance contributions in the stock market, even if that that meant more meagre retirement funds for those whose gambles didn’t pay off.

Moreover, and in some ways most fascinatingly of all, this ‘rightward shift in social-economic values’ occurred among both left and right-wing voters but was ‘more pronounced among those on the left’. They also found ‘little evidence that the change in attitudes was determined by how well participants’ investments performed’. Amazingly, Margalit and Shayo discovered that the effects on attitudes that came about by playing the stock market were still there when they followed up participants a year later.

These results are striking but they also accord with research based on the science of elections gathered during the late 1980s, which suggests a relationship between share ownership and increased Conservative voting and a similar tendency among the millions who bought shares in the utilities privatised by Thatcher.

Even if those correlations weren’t spurious, popular capitalism (and what Left-wingers consider its evil twin, ‘the property owning democracy’ kickstarted through council house sales), could do the trick forever.

Thatcher herself was unceremoniously dumped by her parliamentary party when the economy tanked soon after her third successive victory in 1987, at which point it had become clear she and many of her flagship policies had become an electoral liability. And although her party managed to pull off a surprise win in 1992, it got its comeuppance in 1997 and, frankly, has struggled ever since.

Nevertheless, leaving time and chance aside, and incorporating a little bit of economic history, this latest research suggests that it wasn’t so much that providing people with the opportunity to own shares failed to shift them to the Right, but that it involved far too few people to pay off long-term, at least electorally.

It’s estimated that around three million individuals owned shares in 1979, and by 1987 the figure had risen to over eight million. But many of the smaller investors were in it for immediate short-term gain, while relatively few were so bitten by the bug that buying shares in privatised companies led them to expand their portfolios to include other asset classes.

In any case, eight million people was only ever a small proportion of the total population. Ownership of UK listed shares by individuals fell precipitately in the 60s, 70s, and, yes, the 80s too, and now stands at around 12%, which incidentally is around the European average. Establishing the proportion of the UK’s population that owns shares individually as opposed to through, say, pension funds, is far harder. Apparently, nearly nine million people in the UK hold stocks and shares ISAs, which constitutes less than one in five of us – a figure which accords neatly with the 19% estimate quoted in a 2015 ResPublica report.

Even if Margalit and Shayo are right, then, capitalism would need to be a lot more popular – in the literal sense of more people owning more shares – to make as big a difference to the nation’s politics and attitudes as Thatcher firmly believed it would.

Sceptics will argue that their findings were produced ‘in the lab’, and that things would be very different in the real world. They may say that in reality, people playing with their own hard-earned cash would lead to devastating losses in their standard of living as well as their faith in financial markets – the very thing the researchers think may (along with sheer familiarity) be driving the attitude shifts they observe.

But that prompts a further question. Would anything that contributed to distrust of financial markets have opposite effects to those that the research discussed here discovered?

Could another crash, or simply a gnawing feeling that the markets are rigged in favour of big banks and crony capitalists, generate support for greater regulation, a more comprehensive safety net, and the idea that failure or success is as much a product of society as it is of individual effort and responsibility? Politicians of every stripe would do well to bear that in mind.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2019/05/how-capitalism-can-change-politics/

Jeremy Corbyn is not for turning. Swinging Labour behind another referendum seems to make sense on so many levels. Yet, for the moment anyway, he simply won’t do it – to the obvious frustration not just of #PeoplesVote fans but of many Labour MPs and trade union leaders, most of the party’s ordinary members, and, as he’s made very clear on several occasions now, Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson. And Labour’s rather ‘meh’ showing at last night’s local elections certainly isn’t going to persuade its leader to change his mind.

But could Corbyn, by making what might be a big mistake in the short to medium term, end up doing the country a huge favour in the long term? By sitting on the fence he just might prevent the already painful polarisation between Leave and Remain voters from creating a partisan divide between Labour and the Conservatives to rival the one between Democrats and Republicans that’s disfiguring politics across the pond.

Declaring Labour’s support for a second, ‘confirmatory’ referendum would undoubtedly be a logical move for Corbyn. It would open up the possibility not just of topping the poll at the European elections (an accolade which on current form will otherwise go to the Brexit Party, just as it went to UKIP in 2014), but of strangling Change UK in its cradle or, if that’s too murderous a metaphor for you, blowing up its planes while they’re still on the ground. It would also stop what, after the locals, is bound to be trumpeted (with some justification, it has to be said) as #libdemfightback.

Before anyone gets on my case, yes I know – or at least think I know – why Corbyn won’t make that move.

For a start, there’s the ‘Lexiteer’ perspective he shares with his hard-Left advisors and trade union allies. Just because most economists deride the idea that EU membership presents an obstacle to a faster growing, more ‘socialist’ Britain, it doesn’t mean Corbyn and co. are going to stop believing that it does anytime soon.

And then, of course, there’s the widespread concern among many (but by no means all) Labour MPs in ‘Leave constituencies’ that being seen to do anything that smacks of stopping Brexit will lose them the support of ‘traditional Labour voters’ or ‘the white working class’. Doubtless those MPs will be citing Labour’s disappointing local election results in some Leave voting areas in the north of England as ‘evidence’.

Again, expert opinion would differ. It’s not just a matter of refusing to lump all sorts of very different people together in outdated, subjective, and fetishised categories. Or of being wary of extrapolating too much from the outcome of council contests. It’s also about preferring solid survey research over the faux-concern for their constituents or  ‘democracy’ expressed by a bunch of politicians arguably more interested in hanging on to their precious seats in parliament than the fate of the country as a whole.

Naturally, those politicians will dismiss that research: no-one but no-one, especially a bunch of ivory-tower academic number crunchers and London-based polling companies, will ever persuade an MP that they don’t know ‘their patch’ and ‘their people’ quite as well as they think they do – something which presumably accounts for the stunned incredulity with which so many defeated incumbents greet their demise at general election after general election.

But, to me at least, that research suggests that supporting a second vote wouldn’t actually lose Labour many, if any, seats anyway. And it also suggests that, even if it did, Labour might well win seats elsewhere as a result.

We also need to factor in the opportunity costs that Labour may have to pay for continuing to sit on the fence. True, a fair few of its members and supporters, whatever their t-shirts say, ultimately love Corbyn more than they hate Brexit. But not backing a second referendum – or whatever euphemism you prefer to call it – is, over time, still going to alienate an awful lot of them.

Maybe not so badly that they’ll immediately take to Twitter with their party cards and a sharp pair of scissors. But enough to see them slowly drift away or at least out of the ‘high-intensity’ activities (canvassing, leafletting, etc.) that are still so vital in first-past-the-post contests – something that Labour learned to its advantage, and the Tories to their cost, in 2017.

The eight-month run-up to that election saw Theresa May dismiss any notion that the 2016 Referendum had produced a close result which, along with the difficulties the UK was always going to face negotiating with a more powerful interlocutor, implied the best course to pursue was some sort of Norway-style arrangement. Instead, she went for a hard Brexit designed to appeal to Leave voters – many (though not all) of them socially conservative, less well-heeled and less well-educated – and in particular to the four million voters (13% of the electorate) who two years previously had voted for UKIP.

Sadly for Mrs May (and, as it turned out, fatally for her hopes of honouring her promise to extract the UK from the EU by 29 March 2019), she was only partially successful. Although she increased the Tories’ vote share (from 36.9% to 42.4%), the narrow majority they won under David Cameron in 2015 evaporated, leaving them as a minority government reliant on a dodgy support arrangement with the Brexit-supporting DUP.

True, the Conservatives did win over (and in many cases win back) many former UKIP voters, but only rarely in sufficient numbers in the places where they stood a chance of winning seats from Labour.

Meanwhile, Labour, despite its leader’s ambivalence during the referendum campaign, and despite its pledge to honour the result of the referendum, picked up votes from those sections of the electorate most likely to have voted Remain, namely the younger, the better educated and the more socially liberal. But because many of them were located in more urban areas where Labour would have won anyway, and because Tory support also rose, the party’s big improvement in vote share (from 30.4% to 40%) resulted in a much smaller, 30-seat improvement in seat share.

At that point, the stage was surely set for Britain’s two main parties to make Brexit and, crucially, the values associated with Remain and Leave voting, the main divide between them. And in many ways it still is – but for Jeremy Corbyn.

Few can doubt that the Conservatives’ response to what has happened since – most worryingly the rise of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party  – will be to become, in nature if not in name, what Nick Timothy (once seen as some sort of Rasputin to May’s Tsarina), has taken to calling the National Party. Losing seats at the locals in some Remain-voting areas in the South might give them pause for thought, but it’s unlikely, particularly when Brexiteers can (and will) point to picking up the odd council in the West Midlands – an area that traditionally helps decide the result of general elections.

Now, if politics were physics it would presumably obey Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there would be an equal and opposite reaction. The Conservatives’ seemingly inexorable drift towards what many of its more moderate MPs see as populism, jingoism, and intolerance would be matched by a Labour Party catering only for those for who shudder to think of such things.

Anyone who wonders what that might do to our politics only has to look across the Atlantic, ideally with a copy of Lilliana Mason’s provocative but persuasive book, Uncivil Agreement, in their hands. The polarisation we are witnessing in the USA is driven not just by the fact that Americans are divided by race, religion, and whether they see themselves as conservative or liberal, but by the fact that these identities, via social sorting, increasingly map on to the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.

Nobody, surely, wants to see that kind of poisonous politics play out here. All of which raises the intriguing possibility – even for those who want to see Corbyn commit his party to a referendum and to remaining in the EU – that, by resolutely refusing to do either, he might be doing precisely the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2019/05/is-corbyn-doing-the-country-a-favour/

“The crisis”, according to Antonio Gramsci, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Sure, those lines were penned (in prison as it happens) sometime between 1926 and 1935. But Gramsci’s oft-quoted phrase provides an eerily accurate description of UK party politics in 2019.

For decades after Labour replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories – early in the twentieth century – this country’s politics largely (although never exclusively) revolved around arguments over the size of the state and how much governments should tax, spend, and redistribute.

Voters were relatively class conscious and often maddeningly tribal – content to choose between one of the two main players whose dominance was, at least in part, underwritten by the first-past-the-post electoral system that the UK, unlike most other advanced liberal democracies, decided to stick with.

That two-party system first began to fray at the edges in the early 1970s, its threads pulled by a combination of rising Scottish (and then Welsh) nationalism, and disillusionment with both Labour and the Tories, which led to the Liberals winning nearly a fifth of the vote in 1974. A much bigger tear then occurred in the mid-eighties, when Labour’s lurch to the Left and the Conservatives’ lurch to the Right gave rise to the SDP and eventually the Lib Dems.

Since then, the two-party system has only crept closer and closer to its eventual demise: the Lib Dems held the balance of power in 2010, forcing David Cameron into a coalition; the SNP became Scotland’s biggest party five years later, after an election in which UKIP won nearly four million votes, albeit only one measly seat.

True, the two main parties appeared to bounce back in 2017, their combined vote share exceeding 80% for the first time in a long time. But anyone who thinks their problems are over is fooling themselves, not least because cultural divides brought to a head, but not caused by, Brexit (over national identity, migration and multiculturalism, law and order, etc.) are now every bit as important as the economic divides that previously reinforced Conservative-Labour predominance. Voters are not only more volatile and less tribal; they also care more nowadays about stuff that undermines both the unity and the traditional appeals and agendas of the big two.

As a result, the Tories, despite Theresa May’s best efforts to tack to the Right, remain vulnerable to a radical populist alternative on one flank (be it UKIP/Tommy Robinson or the Brexit Party) and, precisely because of those self-same efforts, to whatever the TIG morphs into on the other.

But TIG, particularly if it manages to absorb the Lib Dems, also represents a serious potential threat to the Labour Party – all the more so if Deputy Leader Tom Watson’s newly-established party-within-a-party, Future Britain, presages mass defections. And nor, given young people’s concerns about climate change, should we completely forget about the Greens.

The UK, then, is already a multi-party system – not just an embryonic one, but a near-term one: a living, kicking entity that reflects the sheer diversity of a truly 21^st century electorate. But it’s a system that currently can’t be born, leading to the “interregnum” we’re currently trapped in and the “morbid symptoms” Gramsci referred to – most obviously a whole bunch of voters, and their parliamentary representatives, who are disoriented, anxious and often angry about the direction that what they used to think of as ‘their’ parties seem to be taking.

What is stopping this fully-fledged multi-party system from coming into being is obvious. Indeed, it’s been staring everyone in the face for years. It’s the first-past-the-post, plurality electoral system that (unless, like the SNP, their support is geographically concentrated) massively disadvantages small parties, not least by persuading people that, however much they might like them, a vote for them is a wasted vote.

What we need to do – no, what we absolutely have to do – is to junk an electoral system that is manifestly unfit for purpose and replace it with a proportional alternative that would allow voters to vote for parties that actually reflect their shifting preferences rather than forcing them to choose which one of the big two seems likely to do the least worst damage.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Changing the electoral system; hardly a radical idea, right?  Haven’t people – often very, very boring people – been banging on about it for ages? Didn’t we have a referendum on it a few years back? And wasn’t it rejected by an overwhelming majority?

Well, yes and no. There was a referendum in 2011 (one which, incidentally, allowed the road-testing of many of the techniques later used by the Leave campaign to secure victory in 2016).  But the electorate was offered an utterly uninspiring, and some would say false, choice between FPTP and the Alternative Vote (AV) – a system whose main advocate, the by then terminally toxic Nick Clegg, had previously (and tellingly) referred to as ‘a miserable little compromise’. No wonder only four out of ten voters could even be arsed to turn out.

Frankly, we should aim much, much higher. Like New Zealand did in the early 1990s, when frustration with the two main parties boiled over into demands to end their in-built, in-bred duopoly, we should follow a two stage process. Stage one: a chance for advocates to educate people about the myriad different systems out there and then to find out, in a referendum, which of those systems they would plump for, assuming there were to be a change. Stage two: a referendum to determine whether they’d prefer to stick with the devil they know or dump it in favour of the winner of that initial public vote.

In New Zealand, the process resulted in the country plumping for MMP – the mixed member proportional system that’s used in Germany and (although, for technical reasons, it’s less proportional there) for elections to the devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales.

Essentially, voters get two votes – one that allows them to decide who their local MP will be and a second that sees them pick parties rather than individual candidates and that, once all the votes are counted, ensures (subject to a threshold designed to exclude really, really small outfits) that parties’ share of seats in parliament reflects their share of the vote in the country.

Were the UK to follow its former dominion’s example it would, as it did there, massively shake up and shake out politics without nixing the ‘constituency link’ we still seem to value. Even if today’s two main parties survived, their parliamentary and governmental hegemony would be challenged by a number of smaller parties, at least some of them based not, as now, simply on narrow nationalism but on big ideas – ideas that, however much some people may hate or even fear them, resonate with millions of people all over the country, but which are currently underrepresented (if they are represented at all) in its legislature.

Brexit didn’t blow up British politics. It was in big trouble already. Since there’s no point trying to put the genie back in the bottle, then I’m going to ask him to grant me at least one wish: PR for the UK. Not entirely novel, I admit. But radical? You bet.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2019/03/lets-junk-our-electoral-system/

“It’s a funny old world,” observed Margaret Thatcher as she was forced by her party to step down as Tory leader and UK prime minister back in 1990. She’d won the Conservatives three elections on the trot — two of them with three-figure majorities in the House of Commons — and yet here they were, unceremoniously dumping her and moving on.

Well, since then the world — or at least Toryworld — has got funnier still.

Notwithstanding the reputation for ruthlessness that Thatcher’s defenestration served to reinforce, it has taken the party two whole years to get shot of a leader who not only failed to increase its parliamentary majority but actually managed to blow it completely in a campaign whose wheels fell off as soon as it got going.

Moreover, the party now proposes to conduct a leadership contest that, unlike the one that followed the Iron Lady’s forced departure, will be decided not simply by its MPs, at least some of whom will have a pretty good idea of what the job entails and, therefore, the capacity of the contenders actually to do it, but by 100,000 or so grassroots members, who, with the best will in the world, maybe aren’t as well placed to judge.

Nor can those rank-and-file members be said to resemble anything approaching a microcosm of the country over which whoever they choose as their leader will soon be charged with running. They don’t look like it and they don’t think much like it either. This is particularly true when it comes to Brexit: indeed, they are three times as likely as voters to favour Britain leaving the EU without a deal.

And therein lies one of the most intriguing paradoxes of British politics — namely that the party that gives its members the least formal say on policy has found its policy most influenced by them, especially on the existential issue of Europe. And this in spite of the fact that their numbers have dwindled rather than burgeoned in recent years.

Without being able to discuss, let alone actually pass, a single policy resolution at conference (an occasion that, for the Conservatives, is little more than a corporate cash cow crossed with a beauty contest-cum-networking opportunity for the egregiously ambitious), the grass roots have helped turn what was once a heretical view held only by a few Eurosceptic ultras into what, for the majority of the party, is now an absolute given — namely that the UK is “better off out”.

Compare that to the influence (or rather the lack thereof) wielded by Labour’s much larger membership. For all their party’s much-vaunted internal democracy — albeit a democracy somewhat mitigated by the muscle of the trade unions — an overwhelmingly Remain rank and file has so far found it impossible to push its leadership off the fence on Brexit. And this in spite of the fact that said leadership was elected in no small part because it promised, in terms, and unlike Voldemort (sorry, I mean Tony Blair), to be guided by what they wanted.

Certainly, if Jeremy Corbyn changes his mind anytime soon it won’t be because he has finally decided to honour those promises, but because he (or rather his advisers) have been persuaded by the results of the European Parliament elections that his pro-Brexit prevarication is no longer the magical masterstroke it appeared to be the 2017 general election.

All of which suggests that member power does not, in the end, really lie in any formal involvement in a party’s policymaking — something that most leaders can navigate their way around anyway.

Rather it lies, first, in members’ dogged determination to pick as parliamentary candidates only those hopefuls who conform to their preferences on the one thing they decide really matters. And, second, in their perceived willingness to support the removal of their leader by someone else they can be persuaded to believe better reflects those preferences — something that MPs (actual and prospective) cannot help but pick up each and every time they get their ears bent at events back in their constituency.

Political parties, whether they call themselves leftwing or rightwing, mainstream or insurgent, are, like businesses, so much more than a bunch of organograms showing who’s in charge of who. They are living, breathing cultures — an ever-shifting balance of forces between the management, the workforce, the salesforce and the customer. Who runs the show is clearly important — but it’s by no means all that matters.

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/65dd73f0-7e17-11e9-8b5c-33d0560f039c

With Theresa May finally on her way out of Downing Street, a Tory leadership contest that has been bubbling under for months is now starting.

It’s a two-stage process. The first sees votes among Conservative MPs designed to whittle the contenders down to just two front-runners. The second stage sees the party’s grassroots members choose between them in a postal ballot.

In other words, it is members of the public – those who pay £25 a year to join the Conservative Party – who get the final say on who the next prime minister is. There will not be a general election because the party is already in power.

So, who are its members and what do they think on key issues, not least of course Brexit?

We don’t know exactly how many Conservative Party members there are because – unlike the UK’s other parties – the Conservatives don’t regularly release the figures.

The last time they did so was back in March 2018, when they put the figure at 124,000.

That’s larger than some of the more pessimistic guesstimates, but way down on the peak of nearly three million that the party boasted in the early 1950s.

Membership plunged after that before levelling off at around one million in the 1970s and 1980s, since when it has been dropping almost inexorably.

One thing we can be sure of, however, is that the Tories have far fewer members than the Labour Party.

Even if we assume that Labour’s membership has fallen from the late 2017 peak of more than 550,000, it still has a huge advantage over the Conservatives when it comes to campaigning on the ground.

Right now, however, none of that matters as much as the fact that those 100,000 or so rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party have a crucial role.

They are going to be choosing the next prime minister of a country of over 65 million people – something which has never happened before.

Most members of most parties in the UK are pretty middle-class.

But Conservative Party members are the most middle-class of all: some 86% of them fall into the ABC1 category used by market researchers to describe the top social grade.

Around a quarter of them are, or were, self-employed and nearly half of them work, or used to, in the private sector.

Nearly four out of 10 put their annual income at over £30,000, and one in 20 put it at over £100,000. As such, Tory members are considerably better-off than most voters and, indeed, the members of other parties.

On the other hand, the fact that 97% of Conservative Party members are white doesn’t do much to distinguish them from their counterparts in other parties.

It does inevitably mean, however, that ethnic minorities, who make up well over 10% of British people, are heavily under-represented in the Tory rank and file.

So, too, are women. Other parties – notably Labour and the Greens, but also the SNP – now come close to gender balance, but seven out of 10 Conservative members are male.

Tory members are also older than the members of most other parties. True, their average age may “only” be 57, but this disguises the fact that four out of 10 are over 65.

They are concentrated in the southern half of the country. Nearly 60% of Tory members live in Eastern England, London, the South East and the South West.

So much for demography and geography. What about ideology?

Well, not surprisingly, Tory Party members are more right-wing than the population as a whole.

On a scale where zero represents very left-wing and 10 very right-wing, the average voter places themselves at the centre point. The average Conservative Party member places themselves at 7.6.

Certainly, grassroots Tories are socially conservative.

Three quarters of them believe, for instance, that young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional values. Nearly six out of 10 support the death penalty.

They are also conventionally right-wing on some aspects of economic policy.

For example, only 15% of them believe that government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off.

But on other issues they hold views that may be more unexpected.

A third of Tory rank-and-file members believe that ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth and that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor.

About half believe that big business takes advantage of ordinary people.

Interestingly, they have also cooled on austerity. In the summer of 2015, some 55% said government spending cuts hadn’t gone far enough, but two years later that had fallen to 28%.

What Tory members haven’t cooled on, however, is Brexit.

Indeed, since we started tracking them in 2015, they’ve hardened their position.

It is clear that they are not supporters of the deal negotiated by their outgoing leader.

In fact, it is now the case that fully two-thirds of them back a no-deal Brexit – an outcome supported by only a quarter of voters as a whole.

Nor are they in the least bit keen on the idea of letting the public have another say on the UK’s EU membership.

Some 84% of them oppose the idea of a new referendum on the issue.

In short, the grassroots aren’t simply sceptical on Europe; they can’t wait to leave, whatever that might take.

This, then, is the Conservative Party electorate.

And those MPs hoping to succeed Mrs May will need to pitch their promises accordingly.

Originally published at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48395211  NB The BBC has exclusive publication rights: commercial re-use of this post is therefore prohibited.

London might be one of the world’s most multicultural, multi-ethnic cities but recent research shows that BME people, especially BME women, are seriously underrepresented in the capital’s local politics. The proportion of black and Asian councillors has risen over the past two or three decades so that in 2018 it stood at about 26 per cent compared to a Black and Asian population of about 32 per cent.

But while, broadly speaking, the proportion of Asian councillors is now roughly equivalent to the proportion of London’s population that is Asian, black Londoners are still underrepresented.

When Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End Institute polled Londoners, over a third of them said they would like to see that change. Nearly four in ten (37 per cent) say they’d like to see more councillors from an ethnic minority background and only one in 20 (5 per cent) said they’d like to see fewer. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, improving ethnic representation is more of a priority for BME Londoners, 50 per cent of whom would like to see the proportion rise compared with 29 per cent of white Londoners.

There’s also a whacking great age gap when it comes to this issue. Some 56 per cent of Londoners aged 18-24 would like to see more ethnic minority representation in London’s councils. But when you ask Londoners over 65 years old, the figure plummets to just 16 per cent.

There are big (and not unrelated) differences between London’s Tory and Labour voters, too, and between Leavers and Remainers. Just 18 per cent of Conservative voters say they’d like to see more ethnic minority councillors – a figure that rises hugely to 53 per cent among the capital’s Labour supporters. There’s a similar split between London’s Leavers and Remainers (18 per cent against 49 per cent and, again, not unrelated).

To some, this will look like another battle, or at least a skirmish, in the “culture wars” that some people like to bang on about these days. And you can see why, at least in the sense that a similar pattern is repeated when Londoners are asked about Muslim councillors.

True, the most common, and most encouraging, answer given by both Remainers and Leavers is that it doesn’t matter whether councillors are from this group or not (41 per cent and 37 per cent respectively).

But it’s nonetheless striking that a quarter (24 per cent) of London’s Leavers and exactly the same proportion of its Tory voters say they’d actually like to see fewer Muslim councillors in the capital’s local government, compared with just 4 per cent of Remainers (and 6 per cent of Labour voters) who say the same.

Conversely 28 per cent of London’s Remainers (and 34 per cent of its Labour voters) say they’d like to see more Muslims serving on the capital’s councils – a feeling shared by just 10 per cent of London’s Leavers and 8 per cent of its Conservative voters.

Tellingly perhaps, similar differences are evident between, on the one hand, Leavers and Tory voters and, on the other, Remainers and Labour voters when it comes to councillors from the LGBT community. There’s also a difference on gender, with Remainers and Labour voters nearly twice as likely to say there should be more women on London’s local authorities.

In the end, though, perhaps the most important thing to emerge from our polling is something that also comes out when you ask voters about their MPs. When it comes to councillors, what matters far more to Londoners than ethnicity, religion and sexuality is whether they’re local. Six out of ten of the capital’s voters would like to see more councillors come from the area they represent.

And although it seems to be an even bigger priority for Labour (and Lib Dem) supporters than for Conservatives – something that’s even more true, incidentally, when it comes to getting more working-class people elected – the idea that councillors should come from the area they represent is not only widespread but transcends any of the familiar demographic differences. It’s even something that (whisper it softly!) Remainers and Leavers can actually agree on.

Originally published at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/culture-wars-bubbling-under-but-ultimately-londoners-prefer-local-and-working-class-people-wvn8gfddq

Talk of Tory Islamophobia has some way to go before it rivals Labour antisemitism but it is getting louder. This week there was a damning report about Facebook posts by self-identified grassroots members of the Conservative Party, some of whom seem bent on preventing Sajid Javid, the UK’s Muslim Home Secretary, becoming their leader.

CCHQ has pledged to take action against any Tory members who indulge in the kind of noxious and explicit religious hatred revealed in the story, but continues to argue that those who it has suspended (or may go on to suspend), investigate and possibly expel constitute a few bad apples.

It may well be right. But is there any measurable evidence of a wider and deeper undercurrent of prejudice against Muslims amongst rank-and-file Conservatives?  One way to tell is to look at the responses they give when asked about the kind of MPs they’d like to see in the Commons.

This is exactly what we did when we surveyed the Tory grassroots just after the 2017 election as part of the ESRC-funded Party Members Project run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University.

The exact question ran as follows: “To what extent do you believe that more or fewer MPs in parliament should come from the following backgrounds?” We then listed, for instance, “people who come from the area they represent”, women, ethnic minorities, LGBT people. Also on the list were Muslims.

Respondents could then tell us whether they’d like to see a lot more, slightly more, same as currently, slightly fewer, a lot fewer – or they could say they didn’t know.

We also asked the same of members of other parties, which revealed some very marked differences.

Labour members, for instance, were actually pretty positive: some 62 per cent thought there should be slightly more or a lot more Muslims in the Commons – a figure which can’t really be accounted for, incidentally, by ethnic background since only one in twenty of Labour members identify as anything other than White British.

At the other end of the spectrum were Ukip members, a mere 4 per cent of whom said they’d like to see more Muslim MPs. Now, if you think that the Commons should be a microcosm of British society, then there should be an increase, since Muslims currently make up 5 per cent of the country’s population but just 2.5 per cent of MPs.

This notwithstanding, some 10 per cent of Ukip members said they’d prefer to see slightly fewer Muslim MPs, and 45 per cent wanted a lot fewer.

So what about Tory members? It turns out that they are nowhere near as enthusiastic at the thought of more Muslim MPs as their Labour (or, indeed SNP, Lib Dem, and Green) counterparts. Only 17 per cent picked that option.

On the other hand, nearly half of all Tory members (44 per cent) were satisfied with the status quo, which suggests that getting on for two-thirds (61 per cent) of them can’t really be said to have a serious issue with Islam.

However, that still leaves a quarter (26 per cent) of grassroots Tories who’d prefer to see fewer Muslim MPs – twice as many, incidentally, who said the same (13 per cent) about ethnic minority MPs and (for good measure) six times more than said the same (4 per cent) about female MPs.

That, along with some of the anecdotal and social media evidence that’s emerged recently, suggests that there is there really is a degree of at least low-level Islamophobia at the Tory grassroots.

CCHQ should be careful not to overreact – after all, the party’s rank and file is already up in arms over Brexit; the last thing it needs is to feel that it’s being accused of religious and racial prejudice. But the party’s leadership – and, very importantly, its potential leadership contenders (not just Sajid Javid) – do need to take the issue seriously.

As Labour has vividly shown, denying there’s a problem, and so leaving it to fester, is neither a good look nor a good idea.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/tory-islamophobia-racism-sajid-javid-conservatives-members-ukip-a8865331.html

Lady Thatcher may be an icon to her most devoted fans but, as far as I know, none of them has ever worn a “What would Maggie do?” wristband. That’s not to say that they don’t find themselves asking (or being asked) the question now and then. After all, Thatcher, together with her eponymous –ism, have become lodestone and touchstone to rightwingers the world over. However imperfectly remembered or understood, Thatcher and Thatcherism simultaneously exert a magnetic attraction and provide a litmus test. They also conjure up the Conservative party’s glory days – a state of ideological grace, global respect and seemingly endless electoral success, all of which it could enjoy again if only it were to return to the path of free-economy/strong-state righteousness.

So when the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, addressing London’s hesitation in following Washington’s hard line on Huawei, said: “Ask yourself: would the Iron Lady be silent when China violates the sovereignty of nations through corruption or coercion?” he was touching – and presumably fully intending to touch – one of the most sensitive of all Tory nerves.

Pompeo’s implied answer to his own rhetorical question was, of course, no. How could anyone even imagine Britain’s latter-day Boudicca putting up with Beijing’s attempt to undermine security and sovereignty by force or fraud? Maggie would have told the Chinese where to get off – and sharpish, right?

Wrong. As always, the question “What would Maggie do?” isn’t as easy to answer as it might appear to be. Sure, Thatcher was (like her great ally back in the day, Ronald Reagan) very much a cold warrior – and, given the value of the special relationship and the existential threat posed to western liberal democracy and capitalism by the Soviet Union, some of us would say: quite right, too.

But many of those who worship her but weren’t around at the time forget that she was also, for most of her premiership at least, a pragmatist, particularly when it came to foreign policy. Indeed nowhere, perhaps, was that pragmatism more on display than when it came to China, especially over what was then the biggest potential beef between the two countries: the handover of Hong Kong .

Under no illusion about Britain’s lack of bargaining strength or its consequent inability to enforce any promises made to the population of its former colony, Thatcher signed the Sino-British declaration of 1984. In so doing, she not only recognised the reality of Chinese Communist power but also prioritised the maintenance of market confidence in Hong Kong, as well as the need to dampen fears back home that hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of its citizens might end up fleeing to the UK.

Moreover, China was by no means the only powerful country that Britain’s first female prime minister allowed to do pretty much what it wanted. Corruption and coercion in Middle Eastern monarchies was fine and dandy, as long as they kept up their lucrative orders from the UK’s defence industries. And those less positive than I am about the US will no doubt point to its numerous violations of other countries’ sovereignty, especially those in Latin America. Let’s not forget, when Thatcher herself was prime minister, Washington’s full-scale military invasion of Grenada in 1983 – a country whose head of state was none other than Queen Elizabeth II.

Then, of course, when it comes to allowing Huawei to get involved in building the UK’s 5G network, we need to recall Thatcher’s free-market enthusiasm for “outsourcing” if that meant getting, in one of her favourite phrases, value for money. Yes, she liked to go in to bat for successful British companies abroad. But, as her reaction to the destruction of much of the UK’s manufacturing base in the early 80s clearly showed, she had precious little sympathy – and precious few words – for those firms that failed to compete at home against superior foreign competition.

So the Iron Lady did sometimes choose to remain silent – at least when she felt it was in Britain’s best diplomatic or economic interests to do so. Whether, on this particular issue, then, she would have kept her own counsel or instead come out swinging is ultimately anyone’s guess.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/10/margaret-thatcher-us-huawei-mike-pompeo-china

Forty years ago this week, the Conservative party won the UK general election with 44% of the vote, netting the country’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, a comfortable overall majority of 43 seats and setting her up nicely for what turned out to be more than a decade in Downing Street.

How things have changed. No 10’s current occupant may still be a Tory woman, but she presides over a minority government barely worth the name and she’s unlikely to be there for more than a few months, let alone years. And, zooming out to look at the party system as a whole, the Conservativesnow find themselves in a far more diverse and challenging environment than the one that Maggie confronted as she stood on the steps of Downing Street paraphrasing St Francis of Assisi.

Sure, back then, the party’s main rival was, as it is today, a Labour party racked by internal divisions, albeit led by someone, Jim Callaghan, who was not only genuinely of working-class stock, but who most voters could at least imagine as prime minister, largely because he’d been doing the job for the previous four years. And sure, rather spookily, Labour were on almost exactly the same number of seats (269 on 37% of the vote) as they’re on today. So, indeed, were the UK’s “third party”: the Liberals won 11 seats in 1979 compared with the Lib Dems’ 12 in 2017.

But just look at the differences. The SNP won just two seats in 1979 compared with the 35 they won in 2017 and the 56 they won in 2015. The Greens, who won just over half-a-million votes in 2017 and just over a million in 2015, won only just under 40,000 in 1979, fighting as the Ecology party. Sinn Féin didn’t even feature in that election, while the DUP was still playing second fiddle to the slightly more biddable Ulster Unionists.

Just as importantly, there was no Ukip. Britain’s populist radical right party may have performed poorly in 2017 as Theresa May’s hard Brexit strategy partly did what it was designed to do – hoover up lots of its erstwhile voters. But let’s not forget that just two years earlier there had been nearly 4 million of them – some 13% of the electorate. In 1979, the only alternative on the Tories’ right flank was the National Front, which won fewer than 200,000 votes on a share of less than 1% of an electorate that largely regarded them as beyond the pale.

Zoom out further beyond these shores, and we can see that the voter fragmentation of the party system that has characterised this country has also affected many of the other supposedly liberal democracies. Their systems, and the established parties that dominated them for perhaps too long, have likewise failed to keep pace with a raft of profound and often cross-cutting social, cultural and economic changes, changes that have fractured familiar bases of support and created a less tribal, more consumerist electorate. At the same time, the rise of 24/7 multichannel and social media has encouraged an insatiable public demand for the novel, spectacular and hyperbolic.

All this has helped new parties to gatecrash not just electoral markets but also parliaments and governments the world over. Quite how they do that is the theme of a new book just published by Radix, the self-styled thinktank of the radical centre. In it, authors Nick Silver and Zoe Hodge take a look at political insurgencies, particularly in Italy, France, Spain and Canada, and try to work out what helped them upend the status quo.

True, some will quibble with the book’s broad definition of insurgency. Movimento 5 Stelle, La République En Marche and Podemos, we can probably all agree on. But Justin Trudeau’s Canadian Liberals? Maybe not so much. Still, taken together, their case studies arguably provide us with an off-the-shelf recipe for success applicable to “potential new parties or old parties that wish to reinvent themselves” over here. And, handily, it’s one the authors developed before either the Brexit party or Change UK came on the scene, which, because it wasn’t developed with them in mind, makes it a reasonably objective way of judging their prospects.

Three things, according to Silver and Hodge, appear to be particularly crucial.

First, charismatic leadership by an individual who can convincingly portray him or herself as an outsider would seem to be essential, not least because this leader needs to embody the differences between the new party and the “more of the same” on offer from politicians who are made to look tired, unrepresentative, compromised, even corrupt, by comparison.

However much some people might complain that Farage has been a fixture of this country’s political scene for what seems like for ever, and however much they might admire the guts of Heidi Allen and Chuka Umunna for leaving their old parties, it’s pretty clear that – on this criterion anyway – the Brexiters beat the Tiggers hands down.

Second, process is as important, if not more so, than policies. The emphasis is on new, often digital, methods of consulting supporters in order to arrive at supposedly commonsense yet innovative solutions to problems that established parties have allowed to fester for years, in hock as they are to vested interests of various hues.

On this one, it’s probably a little early to make a proper judgment, especially on the consultation front. But it’s all too easy to imagine the Brexit partybeing happy to travel policy-lite for as long as possible. By contrast, the more earnest Change UK (many of whose existing MPs, after all, have held government jobs in their time) feels obliged sooner rather than later to respond to Labour and Conservative criticisms that it doesn’t yet have a coherent or comprehensive platform.

Third, communication, particularly targeted communication based on harvesting data and involving some seriously savvy playing of the 21st-century media game, is also vitally important. One thing successful new parties seem to share is the ability to use digital platforms to mobilise potential supporters, many of whom may previously have given up on politics. They succeed in moving them from online, initially passive support to the offline, “in real life” activity that helps get voters out on the day.

Here again, the Brexit party seems to have hit the ground running while Change UK has been slow out of the traps. It’s not just the contrast between the launches of their respective candidate lists for the European elections, it’s their online presence. And we’re not just talking better branding – we’re talking basic functionality and financial nous.

Whether Farage can eventually get his second “people’s army” out “on the doorstep” is a moot point: that was always one of Ukip’s problems and the embarrassingly damp squib that was his March to Leave hardly bodes well. Change UK, on the other hand, can look hopefully to the hundreds of thousands who marched through central London and the millions who signed the revoke article 50 petition. But unless the party can actually get hold of their contacts, how much use are they really? Meanwhile, sources tell me that, as of the end of last week, the Brexit party had signed up more than 70,000 “registered supporters” – at a (very profitable) £25 a pop.

Neither of Britain’s two newest parties has members in the conventional sense. That’s by no means unheard of among new parties in other parts of the world. But it does mean any claim they might make to be “democratic” has to be taken with a gigantic pinch of salt. Their belief that intermediate layers of internal governance might somehow break what they see as a sacred bond of trust between leader and followers, and between “movement” and “the people”, means that, in reality, the former rather than the latter remain in charge. Ultimately, then, there is more than a touch of populism about the outfits that seem to be succeeding right now. As such, they constitute a potential challenge not just to the “political class” they love to target but to representative democracy itself.

As new parties in this country have found before, of course, first past the post, the system that delivered Thatcher two even bigger majorities despite her party’s declining support, can prove a very cruel mistress. But if Brexit continues to blow apart traditional political identities, and if the poor handling of the issue by both main parties continues to alienate even the kernel of their core support, we may well find the UK’s political system is rather less resistant than many imagine to the shock of the new.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/28/forty-years-ago-thatcherism-swept-britain-could-our-new-parties-repeat-the-trick

Brexit threatens to blow the British party system apart. Differences over the UK’s relationship with the EU have never been deeper, more salient and more entrenched than they are now.

Europe has become a fundamental cleavage, rivalling those which have traditionally helped determine, and continue to help determine this country’s party politics.

Tectonic shifts like this are rare. But when they do occur, they throw up the possibility of profound change and realignment. Inasmuch as voters ever identified with the programmes and the parties on offer, they may forget any loyalties and any preferences they once had. New contenders for their support may emerge, and indeed already have. Existing parties may split – or at the very least reconfigure themselves, and their appeals to the electorate, in order to try and cope. All that seemed solid may melt into air, with profound consequences for electoral competition.

We know that Remain and Leave now seem to constitute political identities as powerful as those once created by, say, class and partisan loyalties. It is those identities which, along with sociological change and electoral systems, help to determine a country’s party system – the pattern of interaction between political parties in a society, most commonly characterised according to the number of parties and their ideological spread.

Cleavages – profound splits in society, some of which are rooted in economics (such as differences between owners and workers), some of which are attitudinal (such as differences over the extent to which a country should be open or closed, cosmopolitan or parochial) – often find expression in politics, with parties positioning themselves on either side of the split.

New cleavages don’t come along every day.  However, when they do, they can reshape party systems by bringing forth new parties that mobilise along them. But they can also prompt existing parties either to adapt and/or to break apart. The introduction of democracy at the start of the twentieth century, for instance, made the UK’s latent owner-worker cleavage manifest, leading the Conservatives to transform themselves from the party of the landed aristocracy and agricultural interests to the party of business, low taxation and a smaller state.

Meanwhile, the Liberals, pulled apart by war and hobbled by their reluctance to take on working people as candidates, fragmented and floundered and were soon overtaken by Labour and left out of government for almost a century.

Later on, European integration, the failure of corporatism and industrial decline drove a further wedge into cracks between left and right in the Labour Party, resulting in the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – and later the Lib Dems – which eventually forced Labour to adapt in order to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, on the right, concerns about cultural change and immigration in particular, combined with the media’s hunger for controversy and novelty, helped to put rocket boosters under UKIP, which then pushed the Conservative Party towards a more Eurosceptic position that eventually resulted in the holding of the EU referendum in 2016.

The question is whether that referendum, and its result, will produce tensions – socio-economic and cultural – that can no longer be contained by the UK’s party system in its existing form?

Will the Conservatives, for example, become a party dominated (even more than is already the case) by antipathy to the European Union and supported by older, less highly-educated people alarmed by the UK’s increasingly multi-ethnic character and longing for a return to a country they recognise as their own?

Will Labour, for its part, see its electorate become more like its membership – overwhelmingly middle-class, university-educated and socially-liberal? And is that (admittedly growing) segment of society yet big enough to win it elections in our current electoral system, even presuming Labour holds on to its predominant position among ethnic minority voters?

And how will all this impact on the geographical reach of both parties: will Labour become even more urban and the Tories ever more rural and small-town? Will the North-South divide in support begin to break down? Or will Labour’s cautious ambivalence on Brexit eventually see Remainers flood to the Lib Dems?

Alternatively, perhaps will we see the new centrist formation, currently known as The Independent Group, displace the Lib Dems. Could success on its part eventually persuade the Conservatives to change course and veer off the right-wing, nationalist road they have been travelling down since Theresa May took over? Would this, in turn, open up space for a new, more populist radical right insurgency on their flank, whether it be led by Nigel Farage and friends or a UKIP 2.0 prepared to tap more directly into widespread Islamophobia than they were ever prepared to? Or could an end to PR elections for the European Parliament spell doom for minor parties like the Ukip and the Greens, who have since the early eighties benefited from the opportunity the European elections have given their supporters not to, for once, cast a ‘wasted vote’?

As for the Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), all of which are more fortunate in that they enjoy more geographically concentrated support, will their very different stances on Brexit hinder or help them? And will Brexit mean that the party systems of the constituent parts of the UK become even more dissimilar than they already are?

There are, it is clear, more questions – far more questions – than answers. So much so that anyone who claims they know what’s going to happen to the UK’s party system in the next few years is either a knave or a fool. Educated guesses, on the other hand, are permitted. So here goes.

If Brexit goes ahead and continues to structure political identities as strongly as it seems to be doing right now, then Labour could well be in big trouble since large numbers of its voters will feel badly let down and could jump ship if a new centrist party can displace the Lib Dems and develop not just a coherent post-Brexit platform but an organizational infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Tories, contrary to much conventional wisdom, will probably hang together – partly for fear of hanging separately and partly because we’ve forgotten, absent Europe, how much they all agree on.

And if Brexit doesn’t happen, the polarities are reversed: the UK remaining in the EU would almost certainly make things far more difficult for the Conservatives than for Labour.  As to whether Labour, or any other party, would then be capable of winning a comfortable majority in the Commons, well watch this space….

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/03/29/brexit-tearing-apart-britains-establishment-political-parties/