‘The collapse of Britain’s stillborn Rwanda plan,’ Anadolu Agency, 3 July 2024

Posted on August 26, 2024 by tpbale

The Conservative government’s plan to deport the vast bulk of those claiming asylum in the United Kingdom (UK) to Rwanda was always about politics rather than policy – symbolism rather than substance.

It was first unveiled in the spring of 2022, ostensibly to head off criticism over the number of migrants crossing to England from France in small boats – criticism which came from both Conservative party members of parliament and the populist radical right party, Reform UK.

But it was also made by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who was in big trouble with British voters in the wake of the “Partygate” scandal. Desperate to avoid being forced out of Downing Street in disgrace, he needed something to distract from his travails. Rwanda was that distraction; never mind whether the scheme would work in practice or represented good value for money.

As a result, it was widely assumed it would be quietly abandoned when, a few months later, Johnson eventually succumbed to the inevitable to be replaced, first, by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss and then, after her premiership imploded after just 49 days, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

However, with public concern over migration rising, the government decided instead to make the Rwanda scheme the flagship of its efforts to deter people from seeking asylum in the UK. Anyone not arriving in the UK via a handful of officially-sanctioned schemes would be automatically deemed to be breaking the law. Furthermore, the Home Secretary (the UK’s interior minister) would be under a legal duty to detain and then remove them to a safe country, namely Rwanda. Moreover, whoever was sent there would have no right to return to the UK even if their application for asylum was granted.

Predictably, this last feature of the scheme, along with concerns that Rwanda could not, in reality, be considered a safe country, triggered loud protests among refugee and migration charities, as well as lawyers. The opposition Labour Party also refused to support the scheme but, because public opinion was split, with some of the voters it hoped to win back following its landslide defeat in 2019 expressing their support for it, it did so mainly on the grounds of workability and cost.

But it was ultimately the legal rather than the political objections that prevented the government getting any flights off to Rwanda. In the summer of 2022, following a decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), judges in the UK ordered a last-minute halt to deportations. And in November 2023, the justices of the UK’s Supreme Court unanimously declared the scheme unlawful, albeit only the grounds that Rwanda’s asylum system could not be said to meet the standards expected of it by the UK.

Sunak responded by signing a new treaty with Rwanda and – in extraordinary fashion – passed a controversial act of parliament in April 2024 which asserted that, if the UK government deemed Rwanda’s system adequate and the country safe, then that was indeed the case.

At that point, it was widely assumed that deportation flights would take off sometime this summer, allowing the Conservatives to demonstrate to voters, in advance of an autumn election, that their deterrent scheme was up and running. Instead, Sunak amazed everyone by calling an election for early July, presumably because he anticipated yet more legal challenges and because, even if those challenges failed, he knew the scheme (a scheme that would initially accommodate only a few hundred people rather than the tens of thousands coming “illegally” across the English Channel every year) would not, in fact, “stop the boats.”

Labour looks set to win that election easily and has made it clear that it will not implement the Rwanda scheme, preferring instead to concentrate its efforts on processing asylum claims more efficiently in the UK, negotiating a series of return arrangements with sending countries, and “smashing the smuggling gangs.”

As a result, a scheme that has cost the UK hundreds of millions of pounds and which has seen only two people travel to Rwanda (and to do that voluntarily!), will, like those (in)famous deportation flights, never actually get off the ground – a monument to a policy that no serious politician would ever have dreamt up in the first place.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/analysis/opinion-the-collapse-of-britains-stillborn-rwanda-plan/3265242

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

‘Election vox pops may entertain – but they won’t tell you who’s won…’, Independent, 3 June, 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

Only one week into a six-week election campaign and, if you’re watching or listening to any of the UK’s biggest broadcasters, you already can’t move for vox pops.

Ironically, the journalists who conduct them aren’t necessarily that keen on them. Indeed, some of them actively loathe standing around in the street trying to get passers-by to say a few words while trying, at the same time, not to catch the eye of lurkers who, they worry, won’t ever shut up.

However, programme editors and producers love vox pops. Preoccupied wit the possibility that punters will switch off or switch over if force-fed a news diet composed entirely of politicians and pundits, they hope that featuring a smattering of “ordinary people” will both enliven proceedings and fulfil their commitment to promoting diversity, inclusivity and democratic participation.

I value those things as much as the next person, but I still believe broadcasters should bin the vox pop.

The reason is simple: vox pops can’t possibly provide us with an accurate representation of public opinion. Instead of enlightening us, they often mislead us, giving a skewed perspective that doesn’t truly reflect the balance of opinion in a particular constituency – nor the complexity of, or indeed the direction of travel in, voters’ thoughts and feelings.

An academic study of vox pops in the 2017 election, for instance, found that the views of voters that didn’t reflect the conventional wisdom that the country would have no truck with radical left-wing policies and leaders tended to get left on the proverbial cutting room floor – one reason, perhaps, why at least some parts of the media, notwithstanding polling to the contrary, failed to take seriously Jeremy Corbyn’s closing of the gap with the Conservatives until relatively late on in that campaign.

Vox pops, then, might seem like a good way to include diverse voices, but they’re often anything but because the selection process is far from random. The people and the clips chosen are inevitably edited to fit a narrative – and, as the research shows, often one that fits between fairly narrow bounds. Just as infuriatingly, they also suck up time that could be taken up by other stories or other, more interesting and more robust ways of telling the same story.

The counterargument is that vox pops provide us with some valuable qualitative, citizen-orientated content amid political coverage that is otherwise dominated by polling, punditry and policy discussion. The reality, however, is very different.

As anyone who’s heard or watched them will attest, vox pops offer overwhelmingly predictable, clichéd responses from an inevitably unrepresentative bunch of people who, for whatever reason, aren’t too busy to chat with a reporter in the middle of the day when most of us will be at work. Moreover, because “balance” is the watchword of broadcasters at election time, the typical ratio is one pro-government voice to one anti-government voice, and then on to a third voice who moans “they’re all the bloody same” and tells us that they won’t bother voting – hardly a message that’s going to encourage people to exercise a right that their ancestors fought and died for.

When asked for their opinions on policy, most respondents do little more than reveal their prejudices and their lack of knowledge – precisely what anybody who’s read Bobby Duffy’s eye-opening book Perils of Perception (which shows just how wrong most of us are about, well, almost everything) would expect.

In fact, the surveys and focus groups that Duffy and his ilk specialise in can provide programme-makers with a far more accurate and enlightening take on what those fabled “ordinary people” are thinking and feeling. The trick is for presenters and reporters not to get bogged down in the stats but simply to summarise and discuss their findings.

All too often, news programmes use polls merely to describe the party political horse race, when, if only they were to drill down just a little further, they’d discover a wealth of interesting material on what really matters to voters up and down the country, as well as giving us a guide to their attitudes on those very same subjects.

Of course, news programmes will still want to send reporters out to take the political temperature in a particular town or city. But instead of accosting passers-by on the high street or market (the latter a particular favourite because it can provide some useful “colour”), why not have them chat with people intimately involved in the issues that polls routinely reveal most preoccupy voters?

On healthcare, talk to a local GP. On the cost of living, talk to someone who works at the checkout at a local supermarket. On housing, talk to a local rental company or whoever does repairs for the local housing association. On child poverty, talk to teachers who are bringing in food, clothing and toiletries for some of the kids in their classes.

All of them, after all, are “ordinary people”. But they’re also people who know what they’re talking about. And who knows, they might even tell us – as viewers, listeners and, of course, fellow voters – something we don’t already know.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/general-election-interview-voters-street-b2554535.html

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

‘Don’t count Nigel Farage out just yet’, Unherd, 25 May 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

Who knows what Nigel Farage is really up to? Apart from Farage himself, that is, though he sometimes seems to have trouble making his mind up. But now he has, what are we to make of his decision not to stand for Reform UK in July’s general election?

In a statement posted on X, Farage declared: “I will do my bit to help in the campaign, but it is not the right time for me to go any further than that.” It was, however, apparently the right time for him to focus his energy across the pond. “Important though the general election is,” he said, “the contest in the United States of America on November 5 has huge global significance.” Accordingly, he continued, “I intend to help with the grassroots campaign in the USA in any way I can.”

It would seem the man who, in Brexiteers’ eyes, helped “give them their country back”, has clearly decided, notwithstanding the fact that, as he puts it, “only Reform have the radical agenda that is needed to end decline” in the UK, the UK (and its decline) isn’t now his main priority.

In fairness, Farage has cancelled his GB News show in the run-up to the general election, apparently so he can help the Reform campaign. Yet his detractors will no doubt note that the opportunities offered by teaming up with Donald Trump between now and November are far more lucrative than those available to him on home soil.

A more charitable view is that Farage really does believe that the world — and by implication Britain — is under threat from the increasingly broad catch-all of “globalism”. To stay and fight it on this small island would be pointless, the argument runs. Better, instead, to confront it alongside the guy with the best chance of putting it to the sword, and if that means being accused of deserting his troops to run away to the MAGA circus, then so be it.

Really, the truth may lie somewhere in between. And there may, in any case, have been other factors bearing on his decision — some short-term, some long-term. In the short-term, Farage, who is no fool, has presumably (and probably wisely given its poor showing in recent local and by-elections) come to the conclusion that Reform is unlikely to make that big a splash in July’s snap contest, and certainly not one big enough to give him even the remotest chance of finally taking a seat in the House of Commons.

His claim on GB News that he’d “put in place some preparations to launch [a campaign] next week” but had been “wrong-footed” by Sunak’s surprise announcement did little either to clarify his rationale or to convince anyone that he has as much confidence in Reform’s current leader, Richard Tice. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, given that the best excuse Tice could come up with for Farage’s failure to step up was that his standing “involves threats to his life”.

But Farage may also be thinking long-term. While he has pooh-poohed suggestions that he might one day re-join the Conservative Party after leaving it in the early Nineties, it remains a possibility no-one should discount. Indeed, it’s still something of a dream for those who believe that the scourge of progressive liberalism can only be fought by “uniting the Right” behind a genuine (as opposed to an ersatz) populist. Were Farage to have gone full-throttle anti-Tory over the next six weeks, he would surely have damaged his chances of convincing any doubtful Conservatives to take a chance on him as their leader in a few years’ time.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Farage will go AWOL in the campaign, or that Reform is no longer capable of costing the Conservatives a fair few seats on 4 July. But, whatever the reasons behind his decision not to lead his party’s charge, Tory high command will be breathing a small sigh of relief — for now at least.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/newsroom/dont-count-nigel-farage-out-just-yet/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

‘Foxes at the door – the Tories’ identity crisis’, House Magazine/Politics Home, 9 May 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

Every political party likes to believe that it’s somehow special, sui generis, novel. In truth, though, there’s little that’s new under the sun.

Reform UK, for all the excitement surrounding it right now, is no exception to the rule – not just because it’s basically UKIP 3.0/Brexit Party 2.0, but because it’s merely the British representative of the populist radical-right parties that have been shaking up continental Europe for years.

That doesn’t mean Richard Tice and his gang don’t present an imminent threat to the Tories. Indeed,  they could well cost the government dozens of seats at the next election – one reason why the sometimes surreal war of words between them has begun to hot up recently.
But for anyone even casually acquainted with British and European politics over the last couple of decades, Tice – together with the man who many see as the party’s real leader, Nigel Farage – is playing some familiar tunes. 

So, too, are those Conservatives desperately trying to persuade many of their erstwhile supporters not to sing along – largely by playing something not too dissimilar themselves: immigration, Islamism, net-zero, woke, European superstate, crime and corruption. Rinse and repeat.

True, there are always variations on the theme. With William Hague it was “a foreign land” and “save the pound”. With David Cameron it was the “tens of thousands” and “the green crap”. With Theresa May it was ”Go home or face arrest” and “citizens of nowhere”.  With Boris Johnson it was “Get Brexit done”.  With Liz Truss it was “the blob”.  And with Rishi Sunak it’s “Stop the boats”.

But insisting that, unlike the liberal left and “the elite”, you’re at last listening to “the people” never works in the longer term. All it does is drive up the salience of those issues that disillusioned voters tempted by parties like Reform care about most. And it legitimises and normalises rhetoric and policy positions that, ultimately, no mainstream centre-right outfit can fully commit to without doing itself and, even more importantly, the country some serious damage.

Portugal’s Chega may have been grabbing all the headlines recently, but the spectre of radical right-wing populism has been haunting Europe for a quarter of a century; 1999 being the year Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) narrowly beat the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) to second place in Austria’s federal election. Since then, the continent’s Christian democratic, conservative, and market liberal parties have, along with their centre-left opponents, been trying – and failing – to come up with a way to put the populist radical right back in its box.

Initially the hope was either that it could be frozen out by agreeing to treat it as a pariah or that a spell in government would see it fall apart as its promises were exposed as so much hot air. But when those responses failed to do the job, they soon gave way to what is now effectively the default response, namely to stress to voters that the issues the insurgents are raising – especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to immigration and integration – are indeed pressing, while the solutions they are proffering, and the language they are proffering them in, aren’t actually so unreasonable after all. 

Even where it seems to succeed, it’s only a temporary fix. Nicolas Sarkozy’s hardline stances didn’t ultimately save the French centre right from collapsing or from Marine Le Pen. Similarly, tough talk from Mark Rutte may have kept the Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in power for longer but ended with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom coming first with almost a quarter of the vote last November. The FPÖ looks likely to do the same in Austria later this year, notwithstanding the ÖVP’s marked swing to the right under Sebastian Kurz. And while Boris Johnson saved the Tories, and Britain, from the Brexit Party in 2019, its successor is surging again right now.  

In no small measure that’s because, in order to fight populist fire with populist fire, mainstream right governments end up saying and doing things which their party’s business constituency and more affluent and educated voters find increasingly hard to stomach – either because it harms their economic interests or their socially liberal values, or both.

Meanwhile, hardline voters come to believe that the government’s heart isn’t really in it and vote for “the real deal” anyway – one reason why so many Reform voters say they wouldn’t return to the Conservatives even if they offered a referendum on immigration.

Just like many of their European counterparts, then, Britain’s Tory leaders have found that ramping up the rhetoric and ratcheting up the policies in order to shoot the populist radical right’s fox ends up feeding it. And now, given the call in some parts of the Conservative Party to “unite the right” by absorbing Reform rather than simply plagiarising it, the fox – in the form of Nigel Farage – may even, after the election anyway, be about to enter the henhouse.

A historically successful mainstream centre-right party effectively merging with or being taken over by a populist radical-right rival? That really would, I confess, be truly special, sui generis, novel – and very worrying to boot.

Originally published at https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/foxes-door-tories-identity-crisis

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Local election results will be a serious shellacking for Rishi Sunak and the Tories’, Express, 3 March 2024.

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tpbale

If a week is a long time in politics then three years is a lifetime. In the first week of May 2021, Boris Johnson’s Tories won the Hartlepool byelection from Labour with on a swing of 16 percent – an incredible achievement for a party that had been in government for over a decade and one that, we now know, saw Keir Starmer come very close to throwing in the towel as Leader of the Opposition.

In yesterday’s local elections in Hartlepool, however, Labour gained eight seats and the Conservatives lost six – a result that saw Keir Starmer’s party take control of the town’s council and puts it in in pole position to win the parliamentary seat at the general election later this year.

Starmer can also take similar heart from results in places like Redditch, Thurrock, Swindon and Milton Keynes.

True, there will be a few furrowed brows in Labour HQ at the party’s failure to win back Harlow, as well as at the loss of seats to the Greens and independent candidates in some larger towns and cities – presumably as a byproduct of the war in Gaza among left-wing and/or Muslim voters.

But given the size of Labour’s majorities in the parliamentary seats in those places, their disaffection is ultimately unlikely to cost Starmer seats at the general election, although Bristol just might prove a bit of a headache.

A bit of a headache is as nothing to the full-on migraine that the Conservatives are going to be suffering today and all through the weekend. Ignore all the whistling in the dark about low turnouts and ‘not detecting any real enthusiasm for Sir Keir’: the results aren’t just bad for the Tories and Rishi Sunak; they’re truly terrible.

Tory losses in council seats – always likely given how poorly they’re polling nationally and given those seats were last contested at the height of the so-called vaccine bounce that helped Johnson win Hartlepool – seem to be matching pundits’ most pessimistic predictions.

Don’t be surprised, then, if the Tories end up losing 500 councillors – and not just to Labour but also to the Lib Dems. Ed Davey and co. should be able to claim that they’re well-placed to make major inroads into the government’s so called ‘Blue Wall’ in the home counties, as well as in the south west.

As for Reform UK, they didn’t stand many candidates in the locals but are already crowing about their performance in Blackpool South where they ran the Tories incredibly close in the race for second place.

In truth, however, although the party’s 17 percent vote share looks superficially impressive, it’s as nothing to what its predecessor, UKIP, often managed at byelections in its heyday. That doesn’t necessarily mean Reform won’t cost the Conservatives dear at the general election, particularly if Farage becomes its leader. But the idea that Blackpool constitutes a genuine breakthrough – one that should either encourage Tory MPs try to get shot of Sunak or encourage him to move even further to the populist radical right than he’s already doing – is for the birds.

Ben Houchen’s win in Tees Valley will also come as relief to the PM, especially if Andy Street pulls off the same trick in the West Midlands – and all the more so if Susan Hall miraculously snatches London from Sadiq Khan.

Yet anyone looking for an underlying indicator of how much trouble the Tories are really in should also be looking at the results of mayoral contests in York and North Yorks and the East Midlands, which includes a whole bunch of Labour target seats).

Make no mistake, then, the odd shaft of light aside, Sunak has suffered a serious shellacking. At the moment, and probably sensibly, there appears to be little enthusiasm in Conservative ranks to replace him as the party’s leader. Mind you, a weekend – particularly a bank holiday weekend – can sometimes prove a long time in politics too.

Originally published at https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1895373/rishi-sunak-local-election-tories

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Like it’s 1997? Major’s lot weren’t so pointless, poisonous or loathed’, Observer, 17 March 2024.

Posted on March 25, 2024 by tpbale

We learned two things about the Conservatives last week. First, that they’re planning to spend so much money at the next election that they can’t afford to return Frank Hester’s tainted millions. Second, that the election won’t be held in May.

I doubt I was alone in breathing a sigh of relief that the Easter holidays weren’t going to be blighted by a campaign. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might actually have been better, for all our sakes, had voters been given the chance to put the Tories out of their all-too-obvious misery. Instead, the country will have to put up with another six months or so of fag-end government.

It wouldn’t be the first time, of course. There have been plenty of occasions on which the proverbial swing of the political pendulum has seen us governed by politicians who have served their purpose yet remain doggedly determined to hang on, hoping against hope that something will turn up while their supposed supporters tear them down and tear themselves apart in the process. Whether, though, we’ve seen anything that quite matches the truly chronic combination of torpor and turmoil that we’re witnessing right now is debatable.

That’s because by no means all outgoing administrations since 1945 have been aware that they were about to be booted out. The Labour politicians who lost in 1951 might have been exhausted after serving in government for a decade of war and peace. But with opinion polling still in its infancy, and with their core working-class vote and their faith in socialism still strong, they weren’t simply – or at least so obviously – going through the motions.

Likewise, the Tory politicians who lost in 1964 knew they were in trouble. Harold Macmillan’s failure to secure EEC entry, plus a bitterly contested succession that saw the leadership pass to the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home, along with a faltering economy, didn’t help. Still, they hadn’t entirely given up the ghost – rightly so since, in the event, the election proved a very close-run thing.

More than that, like their Labour counterparts in 1951, and in stark contrast to the Conservatives today, Douglas-Home and his colleagues, for all that Wilson and his team talked of “13 wasted years”, could point to some solid achievements: a huge housebuilding programme and massively improved standards of living for the masses – and all without doing any appreciable damage to the postwar welfare state.

Nor, unlike today’s Tories, did they have to worry about the parliamentary party turning into an undisciplined, factionalised rabble, focused more on a post-election leadership contest than winning the election in the first place. Back then, loyalty really was the Conservative party’s secret weapon and Douglas-Home, having lost the election, was free to hand over to Ted Heath at a time of his own choosing.

Heath (like Wilson in 1970) was surprised to lose in 1974. So, for all the difficulties both men encountered, neither really ran fag-end governments. That was not, perhaps, so true of Jim Callaghan, who famously bemoaned “a sea-change in politics” – “a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of” that, after 1978/79’s winter of discontent, helped Margaret Thatcher come to power. The same might be said of Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, even if, like Douglas-Home’s, it ran the opposition much closer than anyone imagined.

But the real parallel with Rishi Sunak’s so-called zombie government and parliament is, of course, John Major’s – an administration for which, after Black Wednesday in 1992, everything that possibly could go wrong did go wrong, with any light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be an oncoming train.

Polling by then was no longer in its infancy, and it indicated beyond any reasonable doubt that nemesis was just around the corner, while the days of even residual deference to the leadership among Tory MPs, along with the public’s enthusiasm for “Thatcherism with a human face”, had long since passed. Sleazy, out of ideas, and utterly divided on Europe, its civil service turning its mind to Labour, and many of its own MPs preoccupied with post-election plotting or else unemployment, the government simultaneously limped on and fell apart.

Even so, I don’t recall Major’s fag-end administration being quite so poisonous and pointless, or quite so loathed, as Sunak’s. I guess we’ll just have to wait until autumn to see if the voters agree.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/17/like-its-1997-majors-lot-werent-so-pointless-poisonous-or-loathed

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

‘The fading promises of COP28’, QMUL, 26 February 2024.

Posted on March 25, 2024 by tpbale

New Year’s resolutions are, as we all know, exuberant promises too often forgotten by mid-January. Likewise, the tenuous commitments made at COP28 already sound a little flat. And with elections taking place all over the world in 2024, you have to wonder how much they will impact parties’ manifestos this year. 

Let’s hark back to early December when two weeks of COP negotiations wrapped up. If you’re struggling to recall what was agreed, you’re not alone. In negotiations, language is everything and the call for a “transition” away from oil, gas and coal was as good as it got. But let’s be clear – a vague pledge to “transition” is a far cry from an explicit plan to rapidly phase out these climate-destroying fuels. 

The irony – and, many would say, the hypocrisy – of the UAE hosting wasn’t lost on anyone. The Emiratis owe pretty much their entire wealth to fossil fuels and they, along with the other petrostates, fought hard behind the scenes to water down language around their precious oil and gas. 

In fact, fossil fuel producers were arguably the biggest winners, escaping COP28 without any enforceable commitments to wind down production. Smaller at-risk nations received token loss and damage payments – a drop in the (rising) ocean compared to their adaptation needs. 

So where does this leave us? After two weeks of talks, the world remains way off course when it comes to making the emissions cuts science says we need and vague “transition” rhetoric offers little hope of getting there anytime soon. Our climate emergency demands radical action, yet COP28 brought only more incrementalism – not great news, especially when we’ve just learned from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service that between February 2023 to January 2024 the world reached 1.52C of warming, making last year the first year-long breach of the limit set in Paris in 2015. 

Does this mean all hope is lost? The UK boldly claims climate leadership, but lags in domestic efforts, denting its credibility. And while public concern grows, most voters are likely at this year’s general election to prioritise the cost of living and crumbling public services over the climate action they know is necessary, but they fear may hit them too hard in the pocket – one reason why Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party seems to have joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in scaling back its green commitments. 

Some of our Queen Mary academics who travelled to COP point out that while political progress disappoints, meaningful commitments are happening in business, law, agriculture and health. On the global political stage, the green agenda is still playing only a relatively minor part, and democracy seems unlikely to award it a starring role any time soon. 

Originally published at https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2024/hss/opinion-the-fading-promises-of-cop28.html

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

‘Reform’s success is not the real story of the by-elections’, Financial Times, 16 February 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by tpbale

If some of the more excitable commentary that has accompanied the news from Kingswood and Wellingborough is anything to go by, then the real story of this week’s by-elections is not so much a dreadful defeat for the Conservatives and an encouraging win for Labour, but the performance of the radical rightwing populist party, Reform UK

Until Thursday, the story goes, Richard Tice and his colleagues had flattered to deceive, doing nowhere near as well in real elections, whether parliamentary or local, as they’ve been doing recently in the opinion polls. This time, however, things were different: the FT’s latest poll tracker puts them on 10 per cent nationally — a figure they essentially matched in Kingswood, where their candidate took 10.4 per cent of the vote, and surpassed in Wellingborough, where the party’s co-deputy leader Ben Habib, took exactly 13 per cent.

Cue predictable panic in the Conservative party — some of it real, some of it confected in the sense that the results will be exploited by rightwing Tories who, even if they don’t want Rishi Sunak replaced, want him to move further in their (and Reform’s) direction. That would mean cutting taxes, slowing progress to net zero, and taking an even harder line on immigration.

The chances of any of that persuading enough voters to return to the Conservative fold to secure them a fifth successive term in office are slim — not when the priority for most Brits right now is an end to both the cost of living crunch and the crisis in the country’s health service.

And before they do anything too rash, anxious Tory MPs should also remember that Reform’s performance at these by-elections doesn’t even come close to matching the results achieved by its predecessor, Ukip.

In local contests which preceded the 2015 general election (when it took 12.6 per cent of the vote), the party, then led by Nigel Farage, regularly came second, not third — and it did so on shares of the vote that exceeded 20 per cent. Moreover, it managed to take first place in the two constituencies (Clacton and Rochester and Strood) it fought after two Tory MPs defected to Ukip in the autumn of 2014.

That said, what we saw in Kingswood and Wellingborough is not nothing. If Reform manages to stay in double figures throughout the coming year, then the Conservatives are in even more serious trouble than they appear to be right now. That’s because polling suggests that the bulk of those switching from the party to Reform voted Tory back in 2019. Were Tice to follow through on his promise to stand candidates in Conservative, as well as opposition-held seats, then this could, in a swath of more marginal constituencies, easily see tens of Tory candidates lose out to their Labour and Liberal Democrat rivals.

Moreover, Reform has achieved its current level of support with the relatively unknown Richard Tice in charge. Heaven knows what sort of figures it might register were Nigel Farage to decide to return to the fray and lead a party of which he (it being a registered company rather than a more conventional membership organisation) is the majority shareholder.

Rishi Sunak must be hoping that the lure of the big bucks that Farage, as a friend of Donald Trump, could earn as a talking head in the US presidential campaign will ensure that eventuality doesn’t come to pass. He should also be crossing his fingers that none of the Conservatives’ current contingent in Westminster jumps ship to join Reform, especially if a defector has the courage to resign their seat to fight a by-election.

But, in the midst of all this speculation, let’s not lose sight of the bigger story from both Kingswood and Wellingborough — namely that they bear out the results of opinion poll after opinion poll in suggesting that voters are fed up with the Tories and now seem prepared to give Keir Starmer and Labour the benefit of the doubt.

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/6ba497d4-f64b-4bcc-8646-b77c4cce8135

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Tories’ worst nightmare is coming true as Reform threat proves real’, Daily Express, 16 February 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by tpbale

Both the Prime Minister and his opposite number have had a torrid time of it over the last week. Things began particularly badly for Starmer, when anti-Semitic remarks made by Labour’s candidate in Rochdale, Azhar Ali, came to light. They only got worse when, instead of withdrawing support from him straight away, Starmer tried to style it out, only to have to ditch him anyway the next day.

True, the damage done to Labour’s chances of winning the general election is unlikely to be fatal.

But the Rochdale shame and shambles still aren’t helpful – not least because a key component of Starmer’s schtick is that he’s fundamentally changed his party and that, while he may not be particularly inspiring, he is at least decisive and competent.

Rochdale also played right into the hands of Tory spinners who spend most of their time these days coming up with new ways to present ‘Sir Keir’, as they insist on calling him (presumably to suggest he’s some sort of out-of-touch aristocrat), as a ‘flip-flopper.’

Along with the fact that a widely predicted increase in inflation failed to transpire, this took some of the pressure off Sunak, who’d spent the previous week shrugging off criticism of his £1,000 Rwanda bet and his trans jibe at PMQs.

But the respite for Rishi didn’t last.

The PM has made growth one of the five pledges he robotically repeats in every single media appearance, which is why Thursday’s announcement of a recession represents a really bad blow for him.

That recession may be dismissed as merely ‘technical’ by his Chancellor but, sadly for Sunak, it accords with all too many people’s lived experiences.

‘It’s the economy, stupid’ may be a cliché that originated across the pond; but anyone who thinks, as a fair few Tory MPs seem to think, that voters can be persuaded to forget all about it by banging on about woke and small boats, needs their head examining.

In Britain, it’s also the NHS, stupid, so stories about the difficulties faced by the NHS right now are hitting the Tories hard too – this week’s news that there’s been a big drop in applications for nursing degrees is just the latest example.

In the end, it’s these fundamentals – not which more or less dodgy candidate stands (or isn’t allowed to stand) for this or that party – that decide which of them wins or loses, whether we’re talking about general elections or by-elections.

Personally, I doubt that things are quite as bad for the Tories as this week’s MRP poll, which has them losing a jaw-dropping 285 seats, suggests.

But the results from both Wellingborough and Kingswood are nevertheless stunning – all the more so, perhaps, because Reform now seems to be performing in line with its opinion poll ratings.

So a tough week has ended far better for Starmer than it has for Sunak. Even if he rides out the inevitable calls for him to go by some on his own side this weekend, the Prime Minister is still in a whole heap of trouble.

Originally published at https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1867329/Tories-Reform-by-election-result-Kingswood-Wellingborough

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘The plotters, the coup and Farage’s path to the Tory throne’, Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2024.

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tpbale

Tory nerves have been fraying for months. But with the publication of a survey predicting the loss of nearly 200 seats, funded (apparently to the tune of £40,000) by the so-far-so-mysterious “Conservative Britain Alliance”, there’s a serious risk of full-blown panic setting in.

The constituency-by-constituency survey means Conservative MPs are now split into those sighing with relief that, despite it all, they still look like holding onto their seats and those who know they have little hope of doing so – one of whom, Simon Clarke, took to the pages of this newspaper to join the similarly-doomed Andrea Jenkyns, in calling on his colleagues to rid themselves of Rishi Sunak before it was too late.

For some of us, the only surprising thing about Clarke’s cri du cœur and Lord David Frost’s equally apocalyptic take on the survey’s results was the absence of any mention of the so-called “wipeout” suffered by Canada’s Progressive Conservatives back in 1993.

How Conservative parties die

That was the year in which Canada’s governing party, also led by a recently appointed party leader and prime minister, Kim Campbell, lost 167 seats, retaining only two it had previously held in Canada’s 295-seat House of Commons. 

The explanations for what can genuinely be called an “extinction-level event”, were, as they always are, complex and contingent – but by no means completely unfamiliar to us here.

As with Scotland, there were tensions over constitutional reforms designed to pacify separatists in the French-speaking province of Quebec, not only leading to a loss of constituencies there but also inflaming resentment elsewhere – resentment that led to the formation of a challenger party on the right which, after winning precisely no seats in 1988, picked up 52 five years later. Its name? Reform.

And then there was the economy. Canada was only just emerging from a recession and the government, with public finances under severe stress as a result, had introduced a deeply unpopular Goods and Services Tax (GST). Having been in office for nine years, there was no one else to blame, and with the end of its latest five-year term looming, the Progressive Conservatives had effectively run out of road.

That said, when the contest kicked off in the first week of September, it could not have been predicted quite how badly things would turn out. Seven weeks later, when the ballots were counted, the Progressive Conservatives took just 16 per cent to the Liberal Party’s 41.  

Almost as damagingly, Reform took 19 per cent, while the Bloc Québécois took 13.5 per cent, rising from 10 to 54 seats, with both parties hoovering up plenty of former Conservative voters.  

Campbell, having lost her own seat in the rout, surrendered the leadership to former Cabinet Minister Jean Charest, whom she’d beaten in the contest to replace Brian Mulroney earlier in the year and who was one of the two Progressive Conservatives left in the Commons. 

But it was never really glad confident morning again, and in 2003 the party merged with the successor to Reform, the Canadian Alliance, to create the Conservative Party of Canada, whose leader Stephen Harper, by “uniting the right”, managed to serve as Canada’s prime minister from 2006-2015. Polls, which currently put the party near 40 per cent, suggest it won’t be long before it returns to office.

Canada 1993, Britain 2024?

The 1993 catastrophe – easily the worst single defeat ever suffered by an incumbent government in a Western democracy – has achieved near-mythical status among policy wonks around the world, especially among right-wing politicians keen to avoid the same fate.

True, it might not have earned a mention this week by Messrs Clarke and Frost, but it certainly hasn’t been forgotten by senior figures in Reform UK. Speaking just a few days before Christmas about the party’s determination to remove the Tories from power, one of the insurgent party’s number predicted that, if and when Nigel Farage was “properly engaged” with Reform, its ratings would shoot up overnight. “You do that to the Tories,” they declared, “and you are looking at a Canadian wipeout.”

The parallels, of course, may not be exact, but they can be portrayed as eerie – especially by those determined to see them as such.

After all, Sunak, like Campbell, gave his party something of a boost in the polls straight after taking over from a deeply unpopular predecessor, only to see it evaporate in short order as voters rapidly remembered that all the problems associated with the old regime – not least when it came to the economy – hadn’t magically disappeared.

Then there’s the fact that Reform helped the opposition into power by splitting the right-wing vote. In 1993, Canada’s Liberals increased their vote share by only nine points. But in doing so they more than doubled their number of seats and won a comfortable overall majority (their best performance since the 1940s). That is what haunts so many of today’s Tories on this side of the Atlantic, whichever wing of the party they see themselves belonging to.

And they are right to worry. Reform UK might not yet have ascended to the giddy heights reached by the Brexit Party in the summer of 2019; but it seems to be doing better and better with each poll published and now looks set to stay in double figures, with most of its new supporters moving to it from the Conservatives rather than from Labour’s traditionalist flank. 

Why hasn’t Farage joined Reform?

That was true of voters defecting to the Brexit Party five years ago, too; but back then disaster was averted by Tory MPs, reluctantly or otherwise, replacing Theresa May with Boris Johnson – who, in terms of his ability to connect with disaffected Leave voters, proved more than a match for Farage. 

Sunak stands no chance of doing the same. As Farage noted this week: “Rishi Sunak may be intellectually bright, but he does not connect with ordinary people at all.” Nor, as even some of those who despair of Sunak acknowledge, is there anyone else, either inside or outside the Cabinet, who seems likely to do so either; or at least no one among the ranks of those crazy enough to preside over a general election currently set to deliver something between defeat and annihilation.

Johnson was helped, of course, in 2019 by Farage’s last-minute decision not to stand candidates against sitting Conservative MPs. That was not so much because it saved many of them their seats (research suggests, in fact, that only a handful, if that, of Tory incumbents held on as a result) but because it sent a signal to “his voters” that they could vote for Johnson and trust him to “Get Brexit Done”.

All of which prompts an intriguing question: given that, as was the case at the beginning of 2019, we have a hopelessly divided, poorly-led Conservative government that looks to be heading straight for the rocks, why hasn’t Farage decided to return to the fray to lead Reform UK?

Ask around and you’ll hear various explanations. According to his stand-in, the party’s current leader Richard Tice, Farage is “giving a lot of thought to the extent of the role that he wants to play in helping Reform UK save Britain”. Don’t forget, he told journalists: “A good poker player doesn’t show their hand too early. Nigel is the master of political timing.”

But there’s another explanation. Tice may think that, as he put it recently, “the Tory party deserve to be smashed and destroyed”. But Farage may prefer to wound rather than to kill – for the simple reason that one day soon he’s hoping not just to rejoin the Conservatives, but to lead them.  

Nigel Farage, New Conservative leader? 

It’s a prospect that he himself raised back in October, telling a journalist, “I’d be very surprised if I were not Conservative leader by 2026. Very surprised” – only to say not long afterwards that he’d made the remark “in jest”. But it seems eminently possible that the enthusiasm with which he’d been greeted by the Tory faithful at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October may have given him pause for thought. 

Sunak, clearly desperate to keep Farage fans from flocking to Reform UK at the general election, told GBNews that “the Tory Party is a broad church. I welcome lots of people who want to subscribe to our ideals, to our values’ – a statement that only served to suggest that the door remains, if not wide open, then at the very least ajar.

That allows nervy Conservatives to indulge the fantasy of Farage loyally joining the Tory fold before the general election and transforming their fortunes – just think of the political coup de théâtre we’d witness were Sunak to allow the prodigal son, in the run up to the campaign, to seek and win selection in a safe Tory seat! 

According to that fantasy, getting Farage inside the Tory tent would represent the most effective way of fulfilling Tory strategist Isaac Levido’s “narrow path to victory”. Should the economy improve and tax cuts deliver a feel-good factor, the polls might tighten sufficiently to allow the government to argue that a ballot cast for Reform UK would let in Labour rather than being “a free hit” for disaffected Tory voters who assume their party is going to lose anyway.

In reality, a pre-election Farage-Tory alliance – or at least a non-aggression pact – would benefit the former Ukip leader far more than it would the embattled Prime Minister, especially in the aftermath of an election that looks likely to leave the Tories in what Lord Frost vividly described as “smoking rubble”. At that point, Farage really would be well placed to rejoin the party, make it into the Commons and eventually run for the leadership. 

In many ways, it would make perfect sense. Farage taking over would, after all, represent the culmination of a process that has arguably been unfolding for a decade – namely the sometimes halting but seemingly inexorable transformation of the Conservatives from a mainstream centre-right outfit, concerned mainly with the protection and promotion of the free-market and traditional institutions, into a populist party of the right – dedicated to disrupting, even destroying, institutions the better to pursue its twin obsessions with immigration and “woke”. 

There are many on the right of the party who firmly believe that this is the direction in which it must travel if it is to thrive in the future, convinced as they are that their big win in 2019 reflected a long-term (and for some, long-awaited) realignment of British politics triggered by Brexit. They realise, however, that journey can only be taken under the leadership of a politician possessed of sufficient guile and charisma to enable them to sell a small-state, low-spend, low-tax message to less affluent voters who, for all their cultural conservatism, are not necessarily attracted, especially if they are heavily reliant on public services, to Thatcherite economics. 

For a while, of course, those right-wingers had high hopes of Boris Johnson in that regard – so much so that some one hundred MPs felt able to countenance his returning to lead the party in the wake of the implosion of (the self-evidently guileless and charisma-free) Liz Truss. But now that they’ve finally grasped, post Partygate, that even many of their target voters never want Johnson near No 10 ever again, their erstwhile champion is no longer an option.

Nor, after her tragicomic departure from Cabinet, they have concluded, is Suella Braverman. And nor, if charisma is one of the crucial qualities you’re looking for in a leader, is Robert Jenrick. Kemi Badenoch might just fit the bill, but, even leaving aside what some colleagues see as her arrogance and abrasiveness, will she really connect as well with ordinary voters as she apparently does with the Tory grassroots?

Farage on the other hand has proven star quality – and guile and charisma by the bucket-load. He may not be a Conservative yet, but the latest Ipsos polling suggests that getting on for half of all those who voted for the party in 2019 have a favourable impression of him – around the same, note, who look favourably upon Sunak and Johnson, two paid-up Tories. 

As long as he doesn’t decide to join Tice in genuinely trying to smash and destroy the Conservative Party, why shouldn’t there be a way back for him, perhaps after Badenoch is given a chance to try (and probably fail) to restore its fortunes after what many assume will be, to quote Clarke, “a shattering defeat”?

Having resolutely refused to say who funded the YouGov poll that he used to put the cat among the pigeons, Lord Frost, confronted mid-week by the Conservatives’ leader in the lords, Lord Nicholas True, is reported to have told him that he “did not think the donors were linked to Reform”. But that was a form of words that hardly rules out the possibility that the “shadowy” group based out of an office in Covent Garden, working (supposedly in cahoots with 10 or so disillusioned Tory right-wingers) to oust Sunak may have links (financial and otherwise) to the Faragist insurgency.

A possible plot?

One prime mover in this supposed coup has been outed as Will Dry, a 26 year-old former No 10 special adviser, where he was head of polling, who allegedly framed the questions for the devastating Conservative Britain Alliance poll earlier this week. Dry said he had become “steadily more dispirited” working in the heart of government, and “had concluded, sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats”. If Farage returned to frontline politics, suggests Dry, “the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas”.

But the Westminster rumour mill is now connecting other names to the supposed plot. These include Jake Ryan, a former journalist who was appointed a special adviser to Braverman in October 2022, when Joel Winton also joined her team. Winton and Ryan are not the only Braverman alumni supposedly connected to the new coup. Plotters are also thought to include Chris Jenkins, a former adviser to Lord Frost, who joined Truss’ team in No 10 after also working for a couple of years as special adviser to… Braverman.

They envisage a torrid couple of months ahead for the Prime Minister that could help their cause prosper, in which the Tories lose two by-elections next month and are then assailed by local election results in May that are devastating generally, but particularly in Red Wall seats. Farage seems to sniff opportunity here. As he tweeted this week: “The Red Wall is completely and utterly gone.”

Yet a successful challenge to Sunak from the right of his party, by Braverman, or former immigration minister Jenrick, or anyone else before the election, remains highly unlikely. 

Which brings us, full circle, back to the Canadian wipeout scenario. The sheer suddenness and scale of the defeat is what most of us who remember it, rightly, recall. But just as important is what followed in its wake – namely, the merger of the losers with their nemesis to form a new, more populist, more right-wing, and electorally successful Conservative Party. 

Couldn’t happen here?  Don’t be so sure. “The [current] Tory party seem to be utterly terrified of me,” Farage noted earlier this week. No wonder.

Originally published at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/01/27/tory-party-rishi-sunak-nigel-farage-coup/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment