Tim Bale's Blog

Theresa May isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she has been extraordinarily successful in winning over the support of many of the nearly four million people (12.6 per cent of the electorate) who voted for the populist radical right United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) back in 2015.

Brexit, border control, grammar schools, “strong and stable” leadership, support for ordinary working people, dollops of common sense, and the merest dash of criticism of big business. You name it, the prime minister has supplied it, and the response – especially now Nigel Farage seems finally to have left the building – has been everything she could have hoped for and more.

In contrast, Ukip’s latest leader, Paul Nuttall, is seen by his critics (both within and out the party) as a hapless, hopeless character.

And if he cannot improve on the party’s dire local election performance and its current opinion poll ratings, his position must surely be under threat post-election – or it would be if there were anyone serious willing and able (and, indeed, brave enough) to take over.

As a result, Ukip seems to be facing a pretty bleak future – presuming it has a future at all. The party is reported to be haemorrhaging members as fast as it is haemorrhaging voters, and is widely thought to have severe financial problems now its biggest donors have shut their wallets.

That, and the fact that there will be no more EU money coming the party’s way after 2019, may well mean it will very soon no longer be a going concern, electorally or organisationally – or both.

Given, however, that Mrs May will almost certainly be unable (once again) to achieve a noticeable reduction in immigration, at least in the short term, and given that the cultural anxiety created by Britain becoming an ever more multicultural society is unlikely to go away, the country may still have room for an Islamophobic, English-nationalist party.

But unless it is led by someone skilled and charismatic enough to convince people that it is not the BNP Mark II, then that party will – like the BNP Mark I – be condemned to roam the radical right-wing fringes of the party system, where there are few votes and no seats.

Originally published at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tim-bale-h8272pflh

In a hastily-scheduled (and totally-hypothetical) media appearance, Mrs May said the following:

‘Governing is about making hard choices but it’s also about listening and, wherever possible, about building a national consensus.

In the last few days it’s become clear to me that people all over the country are worried about the policy floated in the Conservative manifesto on social care.

I believe I have a duty, as a responsible and responsive Prime Minister, to listen and to reflect those concerns.

If that means re-thinking a policy floated in a manifesto, then I think it’s important that a politician – especially one running for the top job in British politics – should be big enough to do that.

After all, no-one should think they have a monopoly on wisdom – especially not on a question as vital to all of us as social care.

That’s why today I’m announcing that, if I am fortunate enough to be re-elected as your Prime Minister, that I will call for a Royal Commission on Social Care so that we can achieve a genuine, cross-party, practical and affordable solution to one of the toughest issues facing every single family in the UK – now and in the future.

I realise that, in doing this, I will be accused of a U-turn, of having made a mistake. My reply to that is that it is always better in politics, as in life, to pause for thought rather than plough on regardless, heedless of genuine concern on the part of the people and the country which I aspire to lead.

Yes, governing is about choosing.  But it’s also about listening.  And that’s what, on social care and how we pay for it as a nation, I, as your Prime Minister, have decided to do.’

Theresa May, it would appear, has poured water on the idea of televised leader’s debates during the ‘snap’ UK general election she’s just called.  Depending on your point of view, this means either that she is ‘running scared of the voters’ or is focusing on ‘getting on with the job’ and ‘meeting voters all around the country on the campaign trail’.

But, in an era in which so many citizens are supposedly feeling disconnected from the so-called ‘political class’, is she passing up a valuable opportunity to engage people in a process which, after all, is supposed to be at the very heart of a democracy – the chance to choose who governs us over the next few years?

Some would say no, not least because such debates have considerable downsides.  For one thing, the media’s obsession with them crowds out so much else. For another, they skew the conversation away from parties and their platforms and towards a handful of men and women who have been chosen (often by a highly unrepresentative bunch of people, be they grassroots members or their colleagues) to lead them.

Taking firmer root?

In the UK, we live in a parliamentary democracy, not a presidential system. Elections in democracies like ours are not supposed to be gladiatorial contests between individuals.  Yet more and more (though by no means all) of those democracies now seem to be going in for televised candidate debates.

For my sins, I write a comparative introduction to European politics that covers the whole continent but contains tables and figures which often focus on eleven of its countries (and before you ask, yes, the UK is – and always will be – one of them!).  The new edition is just about to come out and, among other things, asks how many of those eleven effectively always stage such debates during elections.

The answer is six, although, given France held them again this year (and what marathons they were!), we should probably say seven.  Only one (Hungary, if you’re interested) doesn’t, while Spain and Italy challenge a widely-held assumption, namely that staging televised debates at one general election means that such debates are bound be held at the next.

In fact, there is no such guarantee.  The agreement of parties and their leaders to debates cannot be taken for granted from one election to the next, mainly because their participation owes little or nothing to their concerns about legitimacy and public engagement and everything to their perceived self-interest.

Opposition parties, especially if they are small and spend most of the time denied the oxygen of publicity by the media, see them as a chance to right that wrong and level the playing field.  Governing parties, especially if they think they are going to win an election (and, after all, that consideration often determines whether or not they call an election in the first place), may well prefer to avoid them, primarily because they provide unwelcome exposure for their opponents and because they represent an unnecessary risk.

This self-interested logic, rather than the spirit of Demosthenes, is what is driving calls by the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the rest for televised debates during this campaign. And it is clearly driving Mrs May’s decision to turn them down.

In the spotlight

It is worthwhile noting that May’s refusal to get involved may only be an opening gambit: she will almost certainly agree to something less than a full debate – perhaps a show in which leaders, separately, are grilled some combination of an interviewer and a studio audience. That way she can claim to have done her democratic duty.

But in some ways, the absence of fully-fledged debates will be a pity.  They do pull in big audiences.  The first to be held in the UK, the Brown-Cameron-Clegg debate in 2010, attracted 9.4 million viewers and an audience share of 37% – greater than soaps like Coronation Street and Eastenders attracted at the time.  In 2015, the seven-way leaders’ debate was watched by 7 million – a 31% share.

Of course, many of those citizens were the sort of people who normally take at least a passing interest.  But research suggests that at least some of them were people who might previously have paid no attention to the campaign.  Debates have their downsides but if they can pique the curiosity of citizens who otherwise wouldn’t engage in political discussion, then maybe those downsides are a price worth paying.

Originally published at https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/lights-camera-action/

Let’s not over-complicate things. Prime ministers only call an early election if they need to or because they’re sure they’re going to win. In Theresa May’s case, both things apply – and in spades.

May could probably have made it through the Brexit negotiation process with the relatively small parliamentary majority she currently enjoys. It’s just that “enjoys” is hardly the right word.

The Conservative parliamentary party contains dozens of Eurosceptic ultras who have been campaigning for years, even decades, to leave the EU – and they want a Brexit that is as total as it is final. Whereas most Tories will regard the trade-offs that a relatively pragmatic PM is bound to want to make as sensible compromises, the Eurosceptics will see them as betrayals.

Obviously, a bit of sound and fury from May’s backbenches might occasionally come in handy. Other heads of government know all too well that, ultimately, any deal a politician hopes to bring home from Brussels has to be one that they can get through their own party and parliament.

But there are limits. Given May’s current majority, Tory troublemakers could have the whip hand, exercising an influence – even a veto – that goes way beyond the number of voters they actually represent. True, 52 per cent of British people opted to leave the EU. But only a minority of them were voting for the hardest of hard Brexits. Why, then, should the majority of Conservative MPs, who reflect the “have our cake and eat it” views of most Leavers (border controls, but free trade and movement too), be held to ransom by their fanatical colleagues?

By calling an election that looks set to result in a larger majority, May will bag herself a crop of first-time Tory MPs who, whatever their views on Europe, will owe a debt of loyalty to her (at least while they still have hopes of preferment and promotion). If and when things get sticky, she should be able to rely on these newcomers to see her through, irrespective of any resistance put up by the old-school ultras.

None of this means, incidentally, that Britain isn’t heading for a hard Brexit in the sense of leaving the single market (and, indeed, the customs union) because of May’s opposition to freedom of movement and the European Court of Justice. But, on balance, that hard Brexit may well be softer than it might otherwise have been – a deal mitigated by complex derogations, multiple side-deals, and extended transition periods.

None of this, of course, can be guaranteed. A multi-governmental, multi-level process might fly apart for a million and one reasons that no one can yet foresee. What we can predict with some confidence, however, is that, barring May shooting a puppy or drowning a kitten on live TV, the Conservatives are going to win a thumping great victory on June 8.

Labour’s membership elected a throwback to the 1970s who voters cannot take seriously and who struggles to get his message across, and to get it straight

It’s not just the Tories’ 20-point-plus lead over Labour in a whole host of recent opinion polls that leads inexorably to that conclusion. It’s the numbers behind those numbers.

Britain, like many other advanced democracies, has left behind the era of position politics, where tribal voters clashed over big ideas and sharply contrasting collective interests. It has moved into an era of valence politics, where what matters to most people is whether the parties competing for their support can run the country competently, as well as handle anything unexpected that may come up in the future. Not surprisingly, given this, and the fact that most people don’t have the time and the inclination to pay too much attention to policy detail, leadership matters – a lot.

Dig deeper into the polling and it becomes clear that the Conservatives have huge leads on “best party to handle” virtually every issue bar health (always a bit of an Achilles heel for them). Moreover, they are far more trusted on the economy and public finances than their Labour counterparts. On top of that, Theresa May is way ahead of Labour’s leader, not just on “preferred prime minister” but on a whole series of character traits associated with being able to do that job. With these kinds of numbers, it’s not just that May can’t lose; it’s that she can’t fail to win big.

Just as importantly, right now is about as good as it will ever get for her. Public confidence in a low-wage, low-productivity, import-dependent economy currently ticking along mainly on the back of a world-class financial services sector, largely debt-fuelled private consumption and a drastic fall in the exchange rate is only going to last so long, especially if inflation begins to kick in.

Likewise, the British public’s patience with a badly underfunded health service and a care system in crisis will eventually run out . And sooner or later, of course, at least some Leave voters will wake up to the fact that Brexit can’t possibly deliver all the goodies they were promised during last summer’s referendum: free trade deals with the rest of the world will be a long time coming, if they come at all; additional millions for the NHS won’t magically materialise; and immigration won’t fall to anything like the levels hoped for.

So May is surfing a wave before the tide goes out. The Labour Party, meanwhile, is drowning. It’s not all Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. Under Ed Miliband, the party found itself badly torn between apologising for “failing to fix the roof when the sun was shining” (as George Osborne – remember him? – used to put it) and defending New Labour’s otherwise impressive record.

Its ambivalence and embarrassment about its own rightward shift on both welfare and immigration also prevented it from communicating that shift to voters who were increasingly concerned about cultural as much as economic issues.

But if things were bad before Corbyn took over as leader, he has made them much worse – and not just by shifting Labour’s stance back to the progressive liberalism that alienates so many of the party’s potential voters and makes it such a tempting target for Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing print media.

After its second defeat on the trot in 2015, Labour needed a forward-thinking, attractive and competent leader to take on the Tories and help win the EU referendum. Instead, its membership elected a throwback to the 1970s who voters cannot take seriously and who struggles not just to get his message across but to get it straight in the first place. No wonder the Liberal Democrats, who at least know where they stand on Brexit, seem set to make something of a comeback. And no wonder the SNP expects to hold the vast majority of the sweeping gains it made in 2015.

One “minor party”, however, isn’t looking forward to an early election. Since she became prime minister last July, almost everything Theresa May has said and done – on Brexit, on grammar schools, on immigration – has been done with one eye on bursting Ukip’s bubble. It has worked. On Thursday, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage announced that he would not even be standing in this election.

Whether, though, May’s embrace of right-wing populism will do her, her party, or indeed the country any good in the long term, who can tell? As the ancient Greek historian Polybius once observed: “There are far more people who know how to win than know how to make proper use of their victories.”