Extraordinary Times in British Politics: A Conversation

In the four months since the UK election produced an unexpected majority Tory government, British politics has apparently returned to an earlier era of stable single-party government. The recent election of veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, again by an unexpectedly large margin, has been interpreted by many commentators as entrenching that stability because it has made the Labour Party virtually unelectable. Are we looking at the prospect of ten-to-twenty years of Conservative government? If so, that would contradict some of the political trends we see both in Britain and in similar countries in the English-speaking world. Indeed, the May UK election itself had more of revolution than of stability in its fallout. The Scottish National Party replaced Labour in Scotland, threatening its long-term ability to form governments in the UK. The Liberal Democrats lost two-thirds of their national vote and forty-nine of their fifty-six parliamentary seats. And the United Kingdom Independence Party went from 3 per cent to almost 13 per cent of the national vote which, even though it gained the party only one seat, is an unprecedented success for an insurgent party in UK politics. Add in the anti-political mood sweeping through the Anglosphere, the looming referendum on EU membership that will test the unity of both major parties, and the possibility of another financial-cum-economic crisis, and Britain’s political future suddenly seems highly uncertain.

Quadrant asked two seasoned observers of the British and international political scenes—Tim Montgomerie, Times columnist and founder of the Conservative Home website, and Andrew Gamble, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge, and author of the recent Crisis without End? The Unravelling of Western Prosperity—to discuss the unstable possibilities within Britain’s misleading stability.

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Tim Montgomerie: One minute before polling stations closed at 10 p.m. on Thursday May 7 I had no confidence in who would be Britain’s prime minister the following day. Academics had attached a zero per cent probability to the possibility of an outright Tory majority and I wasn’t much more optimistic. A little bit of humility is perhaps in order therefore as I begin our conversation about the meaning of that election and the possible trajectory of British politics over coming years. But let me dive in anyway and kick off with three big assertions.

Britain is not as right-wing as some Tories now think. Quite a lot of Conservative and Blairite commentators concluded that the British people rejected Ed Miliband’s redistributionist and interventionist policies. I’m not so sure. It’s just as easy to argue that the decisive factors in the result were: (1) the “weirdness” of Ed Miliband—many Britons never got over the “Cain and Abel” rivalry with his older brother; (2) the sense that an economic recovery was under way and should not be jeopardised; (3) an impressive and well-financed Tory ground operation—reinforcing that economic message; and (4) the fear that Scottish nationalists would hold the balance of power if the Tories were ejected. For me factor 4 was absolutely key to the last-minute swing to the Tories. The strength of the Scottish nationalists also shows that the British people aren’t necessarily against a left-wing agenda (very pro-immigration and against austerity and nuclear deterrence) if it’s presented by someone as winsome as Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader. Ed Miliband never looked prime ministerial and wasn’t able to sell his agenda to floating voters but if Labour had a leader with Ms Sturgeon’s qualities I think there might be a majority in England for more left-of-centre policies. Even with the younger Miliband brother as leader the Tories could, after all, win only 37 per cent of the vote.

Labour’s biggest and growing problem is cultural. Labour opposed a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU at the last election (a position they’ve belatedly now abandoned). They never convinced voters they wanted to bring immigration under control. They opposed any serious devolution for England (after granting it to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). They opposed the Tory policy of recognising marriage in the tax system. Labour may have some unpopular economic and welfare policies but its real problem is cultural. The people who lead the party are much more liberal, internationalist and secular than their heartland voters.

Reform of capitalism will return to the agenda. Seven years after the crash I don’t like a lot of what I’m seeing. Zero-deposit mortgages are being advertised again and house prices are bubbling upwards. Telephone-number-sized bonuses for bankers have returned. Governments haven’t made enough progress in cutting their debts or reforming the too-big-to-fail moral hazard problem in the banking sector. Will zombie companies and households be able to stagger on when interest rates start to normalise? Just because democracies voted for a steadying of the ship after the last crash rather than a revolutionary new direction it doesn’t mean they’ll show the same patience if another crash occurs. The new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will frighten voters in many ways—especially with his ugly links to extremist groups like Hamas and the IRA. But his anti-capitalist agenda will resonate with many. A sensible Tory government won’t carry on regardless but will wake up to the unfinished task of reforming (rather than upturning) capitalism. What do you think, Andrew?

Andrew Gamble: Like you, Tim, I was not expecting the result we got last May. I thought the Conservatives would be the largest single party, but that the parliamentary arithmetic would make it hard for them to stay in government. A minority Labour government looked most likely. Winning an overall majority was a big triumph for the Conservatives, and a vindication of Cameron and Osborne.

On reflection perhaps we should not have been so surprised by the result. The Conservatives had been ahead of Labour on best candidate for prime minister and on economic competence for the whole parliament, sometimes by as much as twenty points. The very effective tactic of frightening voters (particularly UKIP voters) with the prospect of a weak Labour government propped up by the Scottish Nationalists should have given the Conservatives a commanding lead. The puzzle is whether they were ahead all along and the polls just did not reflect it, or whether there really was a very late movement.

I agree Labour has a cultural problem, but more worrying for them is the structural problem. In the election it was fighting on three fronts and did not do well on any of them. In Scotland it was perceived as not left-wing enough against the SNP and lost forty of its forty-one seats. This was one of Labour’s most secure traditional heartlands, but now that politics has become defined in national identity rather than class terms it is hard to see how Labour can recoup its position. In the North of England, Labour was perceived as not protectionist enough, particularly on immigration, but also on jobs and housing, against the challenge of UKIP, which now has second place in a large number of Labour seats. In the South-East and South-West and the Midlands, Labour was perceived as no longer in touch with the middle England voters who went for Tony Blair in such numbers.

The Conservatives are set to strengthen their advantage by passing some form of English Votes for English Laws, which will give them a much larger majority at Westminster on issues which are deemed to concern England only. The boundary changes which were scuppered by the Liberal Democrats in the last parliament will now go through, correcting some electoral bias. The opposition to the Conservatives is once again fragmented, as it has been many times in the last hundred years, so provided the Conservatives can stay united they have the opportunity to stay in office for a long time.

I see three problems for the Conservatives. The first is that they could easily become complacent and underestimate the appeal of an anti-austerity program. The recovery is still fragile and vulnerable to external shocks. The anti-politics mood which first UKIP and now Corbyn are benefiting from remains strong. As you point out, the Conservatives are not particularly popular.

The second problem is the EU referendum. Cameron did not need to call a referendum and probably thought he would never have to go through with it. But now he has to fulfil his pledge, and winning a vote to stay in suddenly looks a real challenge. The crisis in the Eurozone may have subsided for now, but the refugee and migrant crisis is even more toxic, and the more the EU looks unable to handle it, the harder it will be to secure a vote for staying in. A vote to leave will force Cameron to resign, damage Osborne’s chances of succeeding him, and plunge the party into a crisis of leadership and purpose.

A third problem is the Union. A vote by England (and Wales) to leave the EU, and a vote by Scotland to stay, will trigger demands for another referendum on Scottish independence. So Britain leaving the EU will probably be closely followed by Scotland leaving the UK. The Conservatives are riding high at the moment but there may be reefs ahead.

Tim Montgomerie: I agree with you on all of the structural issues facing Labour and you are also right to worry about the dangers ahead for the Conservatives—especially with regard to austerity and Europe. On austerity the government isn’t even trying to honour the “we are all in this together” mantra any more. It is granting large, budget-busting increases in pensions while imposing a large squeeze on the tax credits given to poorer workers. When the Conservatives promised to enact £12 billion of welfare cuts during the election campaign few voters realised that the working poor would be the principal targets.

The austerity picture is, of course, very uneven. The NHS, pensions and aid budgets are growing as if Britain had a spendthrift socialist government. The budgets for the police, armed forces, foreign service and—short-sightedly—house building are being cut much more deeply than Thatcher ever dared. My guess is that the cuts will not cause decisive political pain if the economy keeps growing and tax revenues continue to recover. We need the Chinese economy to keep going and for Modi’s reforms to supercharge India. What will emerge if Osborne does eliminate the deficit is a different kind of problem state, however. Britain won’t have an indebted government any more but it will have a misshapen state, with the health and welfare budgets accounting for more than half of all spending.

On Europe the renegotiation isn’t going well, not yet anyway. Reports suggest that many nations—notably Germany—are implacably opposed to the key demand of Cameron that some limits be put on the in-work benefits that new economic migrants can claim. This was only a very modest request from Cameron and if he can’t even get that it will fuel the sense that Europe is treating Britain like a doormat. The continuing fragility of the Eurozone, the refugee crisis and an empty renegotiation will give the “Leave” camp the ammunition they need to present Europe as yesteryear’s project. “Winning the future” and the younger, middle-of-the-road voters will be crucial if Brexit is to have any chance of success. A third of angrier, whiter, older voters are already in the Out camp. To get to 51 per cent, the more moderate middle needs to be wooed. If Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage are the two faces of Out—and it’s premature to assume that the new Labour leader will embrace another Tony Benn position—that is not a good look for those who want to argue that Britain’s future is outside of the EU.

On the subject of Mr Corbyn, what did you think of the first decision of his leadership—to go to Trafalgar Square and address a rally calling for Britain to accept more refugees? I could almost hear traditional working-class Labour votes sinking away. His positions on the IRA, Russia and militant trade unionism are deadly for Labour.

Andrew Gamble: That is very Jeremy Corbyn. I expect he will be attending plenty of demonstrations during his leadership. It is the style of politics he understands best and enjoys the most. On domestic issues he will probably try to be inclusive (at least at first) and may have a chance of unifying the Labour Party around an anti-austerity program, with pledges on house building, a national investment bank, and opposition to further welfare cuts. I suspect he will find it much harder to find consensus on foreign policy and defence, because he will always speak his mind on issues like refugees, Syria, Palestine or Ukraine. He has played down earlier suggestions that he would support Britain’s withdrawal from Nato, but that remains his view. The Conservatives will make great play with this.

The first big test for Corbyn will come if there is a vote on military action in Syria. A large number of Labour MPs are likely to vote with the government. That could set a pattern for Corbyn’s leadership. Similarly Corbyn is almost certain to support any strikes which the unions call, another gift to the Conservatives. Corbyn went out of his way in his acceptance speech to praise the organic links between the Labour Party and the unions, even though the unions are shrinking and of the 148,000 affiliated union members in the leadership election only 71,546 voted.

I am interested to hear what you think of the Corbyn phenomenon. In one way it seems crazy that a party which has just suffered such a serious defeat after moving left should now move even further left and repudiate not just the heritage of New Labour but also the foreign policy heritage (Nato and nuclear weapons) of the Attlee government. It is as though Labour after its 1983 defeat had elected Tony Benn as its leader.

But maybe these older frameworks are not the way to view Corbyn. What is striking is that he owed the scale of his victory not to the union Left but to the influx of new members, and particularly the new £3 registered supporters who voted 83 per cent for him (I assume they were not all Conservatives).

This is an insurgency similar to other insurgencies on both Right and Left in Europe that we have seen recently. So much of the energy in politics belongs now to these new anti-politics movements. There are a large number of voters who are viscerally opposed to the established political elites and are more interested in protest and in expressing their beliefs than in making compromises to try and win power and change things. We have become used to UKIP. What is surprising is that an insurgency has been successful (for a number of contingent reasons like the changes in the rules for electing Labour leaders) in one of the two main established parties. This is an opportunity for the Conservatives, but also a problem, because it raises the political stakes much higher than they have been for some time. Margaret Thatcher used to say that one of her most important achievements was New Labour. That achievement is in peril today.

Tim Montgomerie: Blair’s New Labour project is not in peril, Andrew—it is dead and there are 251,417 sets of fingerprints on the dagger that killed it, that being the number of votes that elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader. While you are right that the scale of his victory reflects the votes of new members, the overwhelming plurality of existing members backed him too. Blair’s party ignored his repeated appeals to reject Corbyn. Most striking was the fact that Liz Kendall, the candidate backed by the leading Blairites, won a humiliating 4.5 per cent of the vote. Corbynism, in other words, is currently twelve times stronger within the Labour movement than Blairism. I don’t think it’s just the legacy of Blair’s Iraq war. It’s a rebellion against the control-freakery of the New Labour machine and the way Blair, Mandelson and other leading members of his team have become “filthy rich” since leaving office—often by cosying up to despotic regimes or big business.

Deeper than those internal party factors is a rebellion against stagnant wages, the impact of technology on job security, and a sense that the bankers and other super-rich types who allegedly got us all into the economic mess have never faced a reckoning. This takes us back to the “reform of capitalism” agenda that I highlighted in my opening observations to you.

I also think it’s a cry of despair about democracy. Democracy isn’t just in trouble because politicians break their promises on immigration, tuition fees and airport expansion. It’s in trouble because politicians seem to have less and less power these days. The courts, quangos, central bankers and supranational institutions like the EU are diminishing and some would claim infantilising politicians. If politicians don’t have the power to change the things that matter some voters may have concluded that they’ll use whatever influence they have to make a protest rather than choose a statesman.

By the way, we’ve only mentioned the Liberal Democrats in passing. Do you agree with my Times colleague Daniel Finkelstein that they’re as dead as the Monty Python parrot? Down to eight seats, starved of media oxygen, ousted from their northern, Scottish and West Country heartlands and led by the untested Tim Farron—it certainly doesn’t look good for them. You could argue that they’ve gone from the second-most important party in British politics during the coalition government to the sixth-most interesting. The SNP with its grip on Scotland, UKIP with one-and-a-half-million more voters and Ulster’s DUP with the capacity to help Cameron out in close parliamentary votes are arguably all more worthy of our attention.

Andrew Gamble: It will be very difficult for the Liberal Democrats to revive. In a first-past-the-post system they relied hugely on incumbency and the slow build-up of local support and councillors. It will be some time before they can plausibly present themselves as a protest party again. What might help them is a split in the Labour Party (1980s style), but this looks unlikely at the moment. Without some big change like that they will struggle to make an impact.

From one angle the fragmentation of the opposition to the Conservatives into so many different parties means that under first-past-the-post they can go on winning elections with not much more support than they got this time. But that could be a big strategic mistake. Now that the main opposition party has been captured by a grassroots insurgency it means that the Conservatives have to be sure that they never lose another general election. As their attack ad puts it, “We can’t ever let Labour back into power again”. The creation of New Labour meant that many Conservatives thought it was safe to let Labour back into power in 1997 and were almost resigned to it. The loss of New Labour means that the stakes are much higher now for the Conservatives.

Labour might win a general election again, for all the reasons you mention. It is remarkable how since the financial crash in 2008 across Europe incumbents have often been ousted but only in favour of another mainstream establishment party. But this may change if some of the underlying problems which gave rise to the crisis are not tackled. Syriza in Greece may not be the only exception. Everyone is assuming it could not happen in the UK, but as you point out there are a lot of people unhappy with many aspects of capitalism and with the remoteness of political elites.

In these circumstances, if real polarisation opens up between the main political parties that would potentially destabilise politics because it would mean the insurgents, especially under first-past-the-post, would have a real chance of taking control. The Conservatives could face an insurgency of their own if times get hard again. The loyalty of voters to political parties is declining, and their readiness to be swept up by sudden surges of emotion and appeals to identity seems to be increasing, amplified by social media.

With the Labour Party it is hard to know whether it has changed permanently or whether it is going through one of its periodic internal upheavals, and will after an interval choose a different leader and policies that return it to the mainstream. The test will start to come with the elections next year—Scotland, the London Mayor, local elections. Corbyn has to show he can mobilise all the current non-voters and young people he talks about to vote for Labour. Most of the commentary suggests he cannot appeal much beyond the ranks of those already committed to him. But we simply don’t know at this stage. If he cannot win elections will his supporters stay with him for the long haul or will they melt away?

Tim Montgomerie: You write “we simply don’t know at this stage” and I end where I began—with a dose of humility. We really don’t. This year has been the most extraordinary year in British politics for decades. Labour has been reduced to one MP in its Scottish heartland. The Lib Dems are down to a rump of eight MPs—all white men. David Cameron wins the first Tory majority since 1992. Labour elects a leader who believes in pulling out of Nato and then appoints a shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who congratulated the IRA for its part in bringing peace in Northern Ireland. Yes, he congratulated the IRA.

I thought I understood how British politics worked but so many extraordinary and absurd things are happening at the moment that I’m no longer sure. Given Corbyn’s strong mandate he should probably expect at least a year or two as party leader before his internal opponents (80 per cent of the parliamentary party) move in for the kill, but the appointment of McDonnell suggests he might destroy himself before the London and Scottish elections or destroy Labour at those elections. One of those things is going to happen, of that I’m sure. If I’m wrong I really should give up political punditry!

Andrew Gamble: I agree. It has been an extraordinary year. British politics has always had a capacity to surprise, but seldom on this scale. The next few years are not going to be boring. With his appointment of John McDonnell as shadow Chancellor, Jeremy Corbyn shows that he means what he says. We are going to have that rare thing in politics, the testing of a real alternative to the consensus on fundamentals that has existed between the parties for the last thirty years. Nothing like this has been attempted since Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. But she at least had been voted for by her MPs, even if she did not have the support of her shadow cabinet.

What happens to Labour is going to occupy us a lot in the next few years, but there are other big issues too, chief among them the EU referendum, and what that will mean for the Conservatives if it is lost and the party divides. Looming over everything are the migration and refugee crisis and the fears in the City that another major economic downturn cannot be ruled out. Not many fixed points anywhere in all this. It should keep us busy.