The Blessings of Brexit

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Thus begins Charles Dickens’s great novel A Tale of Two Cities, in which Paris and London serve as contrary examples of how two neighbouring but distinct societies handle the political and social problems of their day. And such is the extraordinary power of coincidence in history that these two cities are again playing this same match in the politics of Europe and democracy. Paris has just had a presidential election; London is about to hold a general election. And the question that the world’s commentariat is asking is: Which city is handling the spectre of populism better?

The question is loaded, of course. Populism is a “boo” word and we are meant to disapprove of it. It has been denounced by European leaders and global establishments. Given this, handling populism better is more or less equivalent to defeating or restraining it. That’s why Emmanuel Macron has emerged as a hero in the world’s press after defeating the “populist” Marine Le Pen of the National Front by two to one in the French presidential election and rejecting her policies out of hand.

At the same time recent discussions of populism in the media and the academy have shown it to be a more complex and less primitive phenomenon than first thought. Political theorists of Left and Right increasingly interpret populism as an attempt by the voters to restore to political debate those political issues, such as immigration, that liberal elites have largely excluded from the national agenda by the simple expedient of never discussing them or even by declaring them to be politically unacceptable. The populist upsurges in Europe are one result.

Populism played a significant role in the Brexit debate when UKIP started winning elections on the issue of Britain’s EU membership. That forced David Cameron to promise a referendum on it, which he lost. When Theresa May became Tory leader, she adopted the Leave decision unequivocally (“Brexit means Brexit”) and, as we shall see below, she both drew UKIP voters back into the Tory fold and brought Brexit into conventional party politics.

We thus have what Dickens might call “a superlative degree of comparison”. In France Macron represents the decision of the political establishment to reject any compromise with populism, to keep it from power, even to demonise it. In Britain Theresa May represents a decision to draw populism into the main democratic debate, to subject it to the conventions of democratic government, and to draw it into respectability.

Which strategy is more likely to succeed? There are some warnings for Macron in the electoral statistics. No fewer than 12 million people cast “spoiled” ballots when confronted with the choice between Macron and Le Pen (some writing rude remarks on the ballot paper). If you count those abstentions as votes, Macron won less than 50 per cent of all who went to the polls either to vote or to protest. Other Macron supporters told pollsters they had voted against Le Pen rather than for him. These figures suggest a high level of populist disaffection among French voters.

Macron is almost a provocation to populist sentiment in himself. As seasoned observers such as Quadrant contributor Christopher Caldwell pointed out, a nation angry with both the governing Socialists and the wider French establishment has just elected as president someone who has been a Socialist economy minister, a Rothschild banker, and the graduate of one of the great establishment training grounds. How much voter support can he count upon when the going gets rough? It is still uncertain whether his new party will win a majority in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.

And though Macron is something of a Rorschach Test for commentators—they see what they want in him—he has said forcefully that he will pursue an agenda the reverse of Le Pen’s populist one. He is a passionate Europhile, for instance, and an advocate of pro-business economic reforms. Alberto Mingardi points to some of the economic contradictions of Macron’s “revolution” on page 63 of this issue, but perhaps the most fateful of Macron’s instincts on policy are his passionate multiculturalism, his post-nationalism, his hostility to “Islamophobia” and his belief in a liberal immigration policy. He seems to believe in the limitless capacity of France to absorb more migrants and more cultures in a common multiculturalism even to the extreme of saying “there is no such thing as French culture”.

Populists see a very different France—a country divided bitterly between the native-born and migrants, facing another surge of lawless migration from the Mediterranean, and disturbed by constant acts of murder and terrorism. It is not yet in a state of civil war, but scores of automobiles are burned every night in the major cities, the spread of “no go areas” continues steadily, and the imposition of Muslim rules on both Muslims and others living in these areas becomes increasingly oppressive. Ominously for Macron, younger voters are attracted to this gloomier view. His opponent won 44 per cent of the vote of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds—the largest share she garnered from any age group—who are presumably less subject to post-colonial guilt, less willing to yield their interests because of it, and more predictive of how future voters will trend on these issues.

According to all the wise men (and wise women too, of course), what Brexit was supposed to do was to divide the Tory party at all levels and render it incapable of government. What Brexit actually did was to repair a deep and bitter gulf on “Europe” that had divided the Tories at all levels since the Macmillan and Heath governments committed their party to Europeanism. Within a few months of the June referendum, the Tories had both reunited with surprising ease around a clear Brexit agenda and leapt from levels of support in the high 30s to stable figures of 44 to 48 per cent in polls.

What this revealed was that the Tory Europeanism of the 1960s and 1970s was a false transplant onto the great oak of Toryism that didn’t “take”. Macmillan and Heath concluded that British membership in the European Union was the answer not only to the decline of British world power but also to their party’s need for a non-socialist form of modernisation. But the idea that the interests of the British state could be advanced by sinking its identity and institutions into those of a regulated, centralised and protectionist state was always a paradox too far. Most Tories never embraced this policy by a substantial and lasting majority. They continually rebelled against its extensions and implications for policy such as the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties. And they saw some of their more dedicated supporters in the electorate defect to other parties or slide into apathy, abstention and protest from a sense that the party had betrayed its nature and purpose. They became, er, “populists”.

What the Brexit vote did was to make it both possible and respectable for all Tory traditions to support leaving Europe. That liberated people to abandon the fixed positions and conventional wisdom of the previous forty years. And over the next few months, following the replacement of Cameron by May, the Tories gradually reassembled themselves as a post-European party and Tory populists came home.

That is having more consequences on the electoral fortunes of all parties than most commentators expected. But that’s because they have forgotten UK electoral history from, say, 1930 to 1970. Throughout those years the Tory party received the votes of fully one-third of working-class voters. Moreover, that one-third provided the Tories with one-half of their total electoral support. And it drew that support from all over the British Isles, not merely from the South-East. When the Tories committed themselves as a party to support EU membership, they drove away their supporters in the patriotic working class and, in recent years, in the Thatcherite private-sector middle class as well. By weakening the British identity in this way, they strengthened the appeal of local nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. And they fostered the rise of UKIP as a vehicle for the specifically British loyalties and opinions they had abandoned or heavily qualified.

Brexit has reversed those electoral trends in an astonishingly rapid way.

If the expected Tory landslide this month occurs, it means that the Tories have reassembled the broad-based majority national coalition they enjoyed from 1931 to 1974, when it began to splinter. This prospect is strongly reminiscent of the 1931 election, which brought to power a Tory-dominated National Government with more than five-sixths of MPs on the government benches. That election brought to an end a period of parliamentary instability that had seen two minority governments in the previous decade. It introduced forty-three years during which the Tories, either alone or in coalition, were in power for thirty-one of them.

That is the prospect beckoning Theresa May. It is the best of times for her. But for Macron?