I read an article, at least one a week, about how Brexit is going to be the death of the Conservative Party. Beyond being very cavalier about the impending doom of the most successful political party in the history of mankind, I don’t agree with most of the analysis on a fundamental level. I think there is a far greater chance that Labour will be badly hurt by the fallout from Brexit and the Tories will muddle through. I’m not saying that definitely will happen, I’m simply suggesting that given what’s in front of us now, that seems much more likely to me. I have thought this for some time, and recent events confirm this for me more and more.
For a start, this fantasy that Brexit is going to disappear as an issue by this time next year seems very, very unlikely to me. What I didn’t get from the People March over the weekend is that Brexit is “over” – what I got instead is that for a group of people on the centre, centre-right and centre-left, a European identity is now a core political belief. The idea that this group of people are simply going to forget about it all once we leave in March 2019 – and I still think we will – is laughable. No, once we have departed from the EU is where the real fun begins.
No matter how we leave, further debate will be inevitable. If there’s a hard Brexit, the fallout will be front and centre, as the economy changes rapidly in front of our eyes. If we have a soft Brexit, Remainers will try and pull us back into the EU while Leavers try and pull us out of more and more European stuff. This is the next ten years of British politics, whether you like it or not. Throughout this, the Tories have a base to call upon – those who are dyed in the wool Leavers, or those who are sick to the teeth of the debate and want to simply move on. It is Labour that is in trouble here.
For a start, any Brexit will impact Labour heartlands much more negatively than the Tory shires. I’m not suggesting that this will lead to them voting Tory – although, perversely, it might – but Labour will be asked some tricky questions about how this was allowed to occur and what their specific solutions are. I can easily imagine a split on the Left along Brexit lines at some point in the next three years; that split is already there, in fact, it would just need to be formalised. You can see it in the Corbynistas vicious attacks on the FPBE crowd – and the Europhiles increasingly annoyed takes with Corbyn, as it finally sinks in that he is not on their side.
Who will profit from a fracture of the Left on Europe is, of course, the Tories. I picture them bumping along as the largest party in hung parliaments, or nursing small majorities for the next decade at least, regardless of how mediocre any given party leader might be.
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While you’re here: I’ve written a new book called “One Last Number”, about what happens when the biggest pop star in the world kills himself live on stage, taking some of his fans along with him. It explores what can and cannot be considered real news in this day and age, and how the splintering we see within social media means we no longer have shared, collective narratives when large scale tragedies occur. Anyway, it’s being published through Unbound, where you have to sell enough advance copies before going to print. If you’re at all interested in “One Last Number”, check it out here:
https://unbound.com/books/one-last-number/
Thanks, all.
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The Tories have a problem because “dyed in the wool Leavers” are a small and fickle ‘base’.
The elderly ones can’t live forever. These who decamped to UKIP and then returned, could just as easily join another extreme party when the Tories soften their stand to appeal to a broader base. The young white working class doesn’t vote. The better educated young appear to be willing to abandon a Leave supporting Labour, but will never join the Tories.
The more the Tories try to appeal to this base, the more voters they lose. This explains the Lib Dem performance in local and Westminster by-elections, which greatly exceeds the Lib Dem’s feeble opinion poll standing. That suggests the brand is still tarnished, possibly beyond repair, but becomes a temporary home for those who don’t like whatever flavour of Leave we end up with.
Whether the Tory party, or the two party system, fractures first remains to be seen.
The Tories have a problem because “dyed in the wool Leavers” are a small and fickle ‘base’.
Really? Since the mid-’90s polls have found a consistent majority for ‘the UK should leave the EU’ plus ‘the UK should stay in the EU but repatriate significant powers’ (as opposed to ‘the UK should keep the same relationship with the EU’ plus ‘the UK should integrate more closely with the EU’ plus ‘I want the UK to be part of a United States of Europe’).
That’s hardly small or fickle: it’s large and consistent. And they only abandoned the Tories for UKIP when the Tories became pro-EU over Maastricht and then under Cameron when (pre-2013) he tried to say the issue was done with.
But the bigger point is that the Conservatives are currently the only party which is not, currently and for the foreseeable future, involved in re-fighting the referendum. the Lib Dems explicitly want to re-fight it with the public, and Labour are engaged in a constant re-fighting of it among themselves with no end in sight.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, are the only party which (other than two or three very vocal rebels) unquestioningly accepts the referendum result and which is debating not whether we leave but the manner of our leaving and the subsequent relationship.
This puts the Conservatives in tune with the vast majority of the public — you know, the ones who don’t go on political marches — who may or may not agree with the result, but who can’t bear the thought of having to go through the whole thing again.
I don’t know if I’d frame that as an advantage for the Tories or just them getting lucky because the other parties are shooting themselves in the foot, but it is significant.
M –
I largely agree with what you say. The Conservative party has become, not by direct choice, the Party of Leave. Brexit is not really a problem for Tories though – especially when the Conservative party sees itself as the ‘national party’. Anti-Brexit Conservatives are, as you say, a small vocal group, but still a small one and often, it appears to me, from the generation of the 1975 Common Market referendum.
True, the Conservatives may have more difficulty in convincing their big business supporters of the wisdom of Brexit – but are those supporters really going to transfer their allegiances (and their cash) to Corbyn’s left Labour party or to the Liberal Democrats who show no great interest either in business and economic issues (unlike their Canadian Liberal counterparts)? I think not.
But I am also doubtful about the resilience of the idea ‘that for a group of people on the centre, centre-right and centre-left, a European identity is now a core political belief.’ Fighting to stay in the European club is one thing, but campaiging to re-join, on less advantageous terms, a club that the voters have already rejected is quite something else.
My analogy would be with the shrill unionist opposition to independence for Southern Ireland after the first world war. Once an agreement was brokered with the leaders in the South (the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921) and implemented during 1922, the issue quickly faded away as far as everyday British politics was concerned – though ‘faded away’ doesn’t mean gone away.
So I see the policy of renewed UK European Union membership as being consigned to a box file on a high dusty shelf in the Foreign Office or, perhaps, keeping company with other reports marked variously ‘Plan for Electoral Reform at Westminster’ or ‘Scheme for Electing the House of Lords’ in a filing cabinet somewhere in the depths of Liberal Democrat HQ.
Should say ‘Paul W says…’
That presumes there is going to be a persistent national majority in favour of a ‘hard’ Brexit and that that Brexit will not push the economy into recession.
On the doorstep during 2017, in a constituency the Tories lost to Labour, and had split 50/50 in the referendum according to estimates, I found few enthusiastic hard Brexiteers. Most Tories who had voted Remain were prepared to trust Theresa May to deliver an un-damaging soft Brexit.
This is clearly not going to satisfy the Leave camp who will decry it as BINO or BRINO and will say it is a betrayal of the referendum. It is also not at all clear that this is on offer from the EU, or that it offers any advantage over remaining.
At least crashing out, and the consequences, will give us some clarity. However I don’t think that the reality of that ‘clarity’ will bring much additional support to the Tories.
In my view Brexit will continue to be an existential crisis for the Tory one nation tradition. It will be very hard, if not impossible for a more right wing Hard Brexit Tory party ever to put that coalition together again. This is particularly the case as much of the Leave vote had little to do with the EU but was a protest against austerity, the Cameron government and what was perceived as poorly controlled and excessive immigration. Those Leave voters will think twice about ever voting Tory.
This is particularly the case as much of the Leave vote had little to do with the EU but was a protest against austerity:
This is wrong. As I already wrote, in opinion polls from the mid-nineties — so in a range of economic climates, and throughout the New Labour era when the word ‘austerity’ wasn’t even mentioned in national conversation — there was a solid, if slim, majority for ‘Leave the EU’ combined with ‘stay in the EU but repatriate powers’. Given the latter was not on offer (as Cameron’s renegotiation proved), the result of an In/Out referendum at any time in the last twenty-five years would have been a coin flip.
Given that, I don’t think you can say the Leave vote ‘was’ anything to do with transient issues of the moment like ‘austerity’, any particular government, or even immigration (a referendum might well have been lost even in 2001, and that was before the era of mass immigration really got going). Those things have all changed over the last two and a half decades, but the desire to leave the EU has scarcely wavered; so it must run deeper than any particular issue of the moment. The one thing that has remained constant over those decades has been the EU and, more particularly, the EU’s direction of travel towards greater integration and ‘ever closer union’.
Therefore the Leave vote had everything to do with the EU, in that it was an expression of the unease with the direction of the EU that has existed in the UK ever since the Maastricht treaty was imposed, without any referendum and through a whipped vote in the Commons, on an unwilling nation.
To get back to the topic: my point wasn’t that the Tories had played this particularly well, but that the other parties have played it terribly. What you say would be true if the Labour party wasn’t currently re-fighting the referendum within itself. I can’t see many people who just want the government to get on with stuff deciding to vote for a party which can’t even decide what side it’s on.