Uncharted waters

The new government continued the process it began in its first week of defining, or redefining, relations with the EU. There’s not much to add to what I said about that in last week’s post. The de facto Europe Minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, had a “constructive meeting” with Maros Sefcovic, and Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds spoke of “seeking a closer, more mature, more level-headed” relationship with the EU at a G7 meeting in Italy. There is now tentative talk of the first-ever UK-EU summit (£), which would be at least symbolically significant.

Much more high profile was the UK’s hosting of the European Political Community (EPC) summit. That represented a key moment, acknowledged as such by Charles Michel, President of the European Council, in beginning “a new phase in the EU-UK relationship”, but it potentially matters for a wider reason than that. Although as yet not much more than a talking shop, the still nascent EPC may develop into an important forum for European cooperation at a time of uncharted waters for the entire continent (not just the EU) especially as regards defence.

If nothing else, the sight of a British Prime Minister emphasising the importance of his country’s relationship with Europe, and the importance of the European Convention on Human Rights, represented a clear break with the Brexitism of his recent predecessors. This, and the entire way that the UK government approached hosting the EPC, is one, still small, but real, sign that the new government is minded to address what I’ve long argued to be the core strategic error of Brexit, namely its failure to understand the centrality of regionalism to contemporary economics and geo-politics.

Of course, all of this is still only at the (necessary) stage of improving the tone rather than shaping the substance of Britain’s relationship with its regional neighbours. It may be many months, perhaps even years, before it is possible to evaluate its success in practical terms. However, there was a substantive development this week in something which does not require EU agreement, in that the King’s Speech contained planned legislation to make it easier for the UK as a whole (i.e. not just Northern Ireland) to track changes in EU product standards and safety regulations. This is significant in that it partially damps down ‘passive’ regulatory divergence which, since Brexit, has been the main driver of regulatory divergence from the EU, and would have become more so, given various upcoming EU regulatory changes.

It is also significant as it marks a formal recognition of what the Tories had anyway been forced to acknowledge in practice, namely the ‘Brussels effect’, and its particular gravitational pull on the UK for reasons of geographical proximity and economic integration. However, this particular measure doesn’t stop the accumulation of Brexit effects in other regulatory areas and, although the UK will be the main (temporary) beneficiary of a new delay to the introduction of the EU Entry Exit System (EES), that, whilst no doubt a relief to the government, is in no sense the fruit of  any improvements there may have been in the UK-EU relationship, it’s just another technical overrun.

As so often, Rafael Behr sums up the current situation well, writing that “the era of Brexit as a faith-based system of government, setting precise theological parameters for acceptable policy, is over. But that means a new era of Brexit as a different cluster of economic and diplomatic headaches is just beginning.” In that respect, the Brexit process may be entering calmer waters but they are still, inevitably, uncharted ones.

Tories: stick or twist?

Brexiters will, no doubt, be infuriated by these developments but they have other things to occupy them. For the Tory Party and its conjoined twin, Reform, are entering uncharted waters of their own. It’s easy to dismiss what they are up to as irrelevant. It’s satisfying to do so, too, after all the years where every piece of gormlessness or nastiness from every pipsqueak on the Tory backbenches had to be taken seriously since it did, in fact, often have serious consequences. However, it does still matter, in that what happens now to the political right will eventually shape politics, including the politics of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Ultimately, it will determine whether Brexit was a prelude to Brexitism being a permanent presence in British politics, or an aberration that could eventually be corrected.

As the dust of the election has settled, it has become clear that the scale of the Tory defeat was both too small and too large to be easily processed by the party. By any normal standard, it was an historically catastrophic defeat. But compared with some of the most dramatic predictions, which conjured up the possibility of a near complete wipe-out, the Tories did reasonably well. The consequence is that they have enough seats for some kind of ‘business as usual’ approach to be just about possible, and yet too few for it really to be credible.

What ‘business as usual’ would mean is the idea that this was just the normal turn of the cycle of electoral fortunes, perhaps bigger in scale, but no different in kind, to those which have periodically happened before. Combined with the widespread idea that Labour has enjoyed only a ‘loveless landslide’, this could suggest that, whilst noises about ‘learning lessons’ will be made, there will be no ‘root and branch’ re-appraisal of the party or its fundamental purpose and identity. In leadership terms, this would probably be signaled by the choice of James Cleverly, Jeremy Hunt or even Kemi Badenoch, currently the front-runner amongst the Conservative membership according to both  a Conservative Home poll, where she scores 26%, and a YouGov poll, which has her at 31% (Cleverly is at 9% and 10% in the respective surveys, Hunt at 7% and 12%).

It may seem odd to identify Badenoch, who is clearly on the right of the party, as a kind of continuity candidate, but it is correct in the terms I mean it. Yes, she is a Brexiter and a culture warrior. Yes, some of the Ultras have praised her for being one of the few members of Sunak’s cabinet willing to make a public case for the ‘success’ of Brexit. But she enraged them when, alongside Sunak, she put a stop to their crazy idea of scrapping the entirety of Retained EU Law, defiantly declaring that she was doing so as she is a conservative rather than an anarchist. It was a telling phrase, as it captured and critiqued the frenzied destructiveness of the Brexit Ultras. She has also been highly critical of Suella Braverman since the election. So she isn’t someone who is fully aligned with the Brexitists. Equally, whilst she has been highly critical of Sunak’s “election blunders” (£), what this suggests is quite a shallow reading of the defeat, as if it were tactical rather than epochal. So in these ways she is a ‘business as usual’ rather than a ‘root and branch’ candidate.

But it seems obvious that ‘business as usual’, whilst a possible approach, is not, indeed, a credible one. It doesn’t address the evident creaking of the party machine or the demographic challenge it faces. The headline figure of 121 MPs conceals the fact that 80% of Tory seats, far more than the other parties, are held with only small pluralities of the vote, and that the party is heavily reliant on older voters. More fundamentally, such an approach does not address the gaping ideological fissures within the party or the manifest desire of many within it to have a showdown over the very meaning of conservatism. It’s conceivable that ‘One-Nation’ Conservatives might nod along with some attempt at business as usual under any of those three leaders. It’s not as if they have exactly shown Cromwellian resolve to stand their ground over the last few years. But it is surely inconceivable that the Brexitist National Conservatives (NatCons) will do so.

The coming showdown

The NatCons just about contained their loathing of Sunak whilst in government, but only just about. There is no chance of them buckling down for a similar attempt in opposition. For this is not about left and right in the familiar sense. Badenoch, Cleverly, and Hunt are right-wing by any normal standard, as is Sunak, and yet he is a socialist and a globalist in the eyes of the NatCons. The latter are a different breed altogether, and for them the very notion of ‘business as usual’ is a sell-out. A report by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about attitudes amongst those who attended a Bruges Group event after the election provides a good illustration. In a similar vein, Liz Truss may no longer be an MP, but the oxymoronic ‘disruptor Conservatism’ (cf Badenoch’s ‘anarchism’ comment) she represents is still very much alive amongst the kind of people who hailed her mini-budget as a triumph and still regard it, as she does, as having been defeated by a malign, remainer, ‘Establishment’.

So if the NatCons get saddled with a leader who follows any version of a ‘business as usual’ strategy then they will immediately start sniping (and if it is Badenoch, then her conduct to date suggests that conciliation will not be her forte). A few lost by-elections and some poor local election results later, and the new leader will be toppled. This is easy to predict with near certainty because it is exactly how these people, or their political forebears, have conducted themselves going right back to the emergence of Tory Euroscepticism in the early 1990s, whilst the vote for Brexit has added to that ungovernability the implacable conviction that they speak for the silent majority.

All this suggests that later, if not sooner, there will be a face-off between the NatCons and the One-Cons. If it is not later, but comes now, rather than by the circuitous route I’ve just sketched, then, in leadership terms, it will most likely be between Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick, for the former camp, and Tom Tugendhat, for the latter. In the two current polls mentioned above these candidates score respectively 16%, 7%, and 15% in one survey and 10%, 13%, and 13% in the other.

If chosen as leader, each of these candidates would, in different ways, represent a significant departure from ‘business as usual’. Each might be expected to dig deeper into what had happened throughout the 2010-2024 period, rather than just the Sunak years, though none, even Tugendhat I imagine, would raise the fundamental question of what Brexit did to the Party. Whichever side won – and it is because of this that the party may, in the first instance, seek to avoid this showdown – a good chunk of the party membership, its MPs and, with them, its voters, would defect. That is, the NatCons would defect to Reform if a One-Con wins, and the One-Cons would defect to Labour or the LibDems (or conceivably, in some cases, even to the Greens) if a NatCon wins.

When two tribes go to war

So, now, all this can be turned around to think about the relationship between the Tories and the various versions of Farage’s party (i.e. UKIP, the Brexit Party, and now Reform UK). I referred to them earlier as ‘conjoined twins’ because they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw – distinct in themselves, yet having a unique, overlapping connectivity.

This is obvious in the movement of voters and party members between them, in both directions, over many years. It is obvious in the ease with which Lee Anderson moved from Tory to Reform, and in the plausibility of current rumours that Braverman may defect to Reform, just as Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to UKIP in 2014 or, just before the recent election, two Reform candidates defected to the Conservatives. It is obvious, too, in the rapturous welcome that Farage received at last year’s Tory conference, and the fact that Nigel Farage would be as popular a choice amongst Tory members for the leadership as all the main eligible candidates, bar Badenoch (13% and 10% in the surveys quoted above).

These are, effectively, one party which has split, initially over the priority given to leaving the EU. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that Farage left the Tory Party in 1992 in protest at John Major signing the Maastricht Treaty, exactly the root of Euroscepticism within the Tory Party itself, before becoming a founding member of UKIP. In principle, the fact that the UK has left the EU has rendered that split redundant. In fact, it has morphed into a split between the Brexitism of Reform and the Tory NatCons, and something even less easily nameable. It’s not simply One-Nationism, though that’s the only obvious shorthand term for it, it’s a complex amalgam of pragmatism, economic and social liberalism, opportunism and respectability, decency and laziness, the remnants of Tory Europhilia and of patrician dutifulness, and a kind of ideology of non-ideology. Interestingly, both sides lay claim to being heirs of Thatcher, much as Leninists and Trotskyites laid claim to Marx.

The way that the Tory vote just about held up at the election so as to yield 100+ seats, whilst the Reform vote was so dispersed that they managed only five seats, makes Farage’s pre-election talk of taking over the Tories redundant. But it is evident that the fate of the two parties remains linked. If the Tories attempt a ‘business as usual’ approach they will continue to leak votes and possibly MPs to Reform, especially if, as is likely, Farage’s party starts to win some by-elections, local elections, and even seats in the Welsh Senedd. If the Tories flip to One-Nationism, there will be a major exodus to Reform. If the Tories flip to National Conservatism, then it’s not obvious that they can survive without merging with Reform, and little reason why they shouldn’t do so, or at least make some sort of pact. That is what Braverman already favours, as do almost half of Tory Party members according to current polling. And, whether they merge or not, in this scenario there will be a major exodus of One-Nationers. There just doesn’t seem to be any viable strategy for the Conservative Party.

Unreformable?

That doesn’t however, exhaust the travails of the political right, because if the Tory internal coalition is now highly combustible, it is by no means the case that Reform is a stable entity, or that it is well-equipped for the uncharted waters of its new role and aspirations as a Westminster political party. For one thing, it is heavily dependent on one individual, Farage, and, astute as he is at cultivating his media persona, he has vulnerabilities. His Putinophilia is the most obvious, but so too is the vanity that, as can already be seen, makes him more interested in posturing in the US and his GB News show than in the daily grind of being MP for Clacton or of party management.

Relatedly, Reform has almost nothing in terms of grass-roots organization or local government presence (of the sort that makes the LibDems so resilient, whatever happens to their Westminster vote). In that respect, it isn’t even as well-developed as UKIP had been. Many of its candidates at the last election have already generated scandal, and there may well be more to come. And it is also already under challenge over its governance, or lack of it, from ousted Deputy Leader Ben Habib.

Habib is a ludicrous and unpleasant character, but the governance issue is real and won’t go away. The episode also revealed other uncomfortable truths about the party. For Habib’s summary sacking was part of the changes that saw party donor Zia Yusuf installed as chairman, provoking some Reform supporters to racist outrage about a Muslim holding this role. Indeed, part of Farage’s problem is that were he to allow the party to democratize he would also open the floodgates of influence to people who would undermine his attempt to make the party appear respectable and electorally viable.

In short, it would not be absurdly risky to bet on Reform imploding before we get to the next election. Equally, were the Tories to merge or even just form a pact with them, that would entail taking a share of the fallout from such an implosion.

The looming danger of Donald Trump

Looming beyond all of the issues discussed in this post is the uncharted water of a possible second Trump presidency, something that seems more likely, and certainly came to renewed prominence, with the failed attempt to assassinate him last weekend. His victory in November – and it is important to recognize just how imminent this possibility is – would pose profound problems for any British government, exacerbating the sense that Brexit has left the UK floundering alone, outside any major political or economic bloc, despite the very tentative developments mentioned above.

The consequences are set out in detail in a recent briefing by Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform, but, in broad terms, it would put a fresh premium on better relations and greater integration with the EU, especially as regards defence, but also trade. That would clearly be consistent with, and would provide further justification for, Labour’s general approach (as would a Biden victory, though for different reasons). To that extent, the Labour government is better positioned to deal with the consequences of Trump 2.0 than the Tories would have been.

But as regards the relationship with the US itself, whilst it is indeed true that any UK government would struggle with Trump, Labour will find it especially difficult. The personal and ideological differences between Starmer and Trump are huge, notwithstanding reports this week of a positive conversation. That will become all the more evident since it’s clear that another Trump administration would be even more extreme than the first one. Already Trump’s freshly-announced running mate, JD Vance, has showed his contempt for the Labour government, specifically. It’s not clear how easily normal diplomacy will be able to smooth UK-US relations this time round. Equally, whereas last time, as always, a lot of the nuts and bolts of the relationship were maintained at the level of official bureaucracies, it’s not clear how those on the US side will fare under what seems likely to be a relentless assault from Trump.

At the same time, if Trump wins it will represent a new phase in the long and complicated story of his relationship with Brexiters, or Brexitists. His first election gave them a particular fillip, persuading them that they were part of a populist tide of history, whilst he, himself, laid claim to being ‘Mr Brexit’. Since then, there has been far more open intellectual and ideological traffic between Brexitists and the US radical right, exemplified by the explicit links between the National Conservatism movement and the British NatCons, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Frost, Miriam Cates, and Liz Truss (who this week openly endorsed Trump’s campaign). Trump 2.0 will put momentum into their parallel desire for Brexit 2.0.

And that is before we even come to Farage, who will undoubtedly seek to make much of his own ‘special relationship’ to act as if he were Britain’s de facto Ambassador. Trump will encourage that, both as a way of cocking a snook at Starmer’s government as well as for fairly obvious psychological reasons. For Trump, like a school bully or a gangland boss, thrives on the kind of cringingly undignified fanboydom that Farage all too happily provides (and, presumably, thinks earns him the esteem rather than the contempt of his hero).

However, Farage may find, as he briefly tasted during the election campaign over his remarks about Ukraine and NATO, that lining up with Trump in the coming years will, finally, break the largely easy time he has been given by the media and, even, break his hold over some of his supporters. For clearly the biggest danger from Trump 2.0 is what it would mean for Ukraine, which is likely to be tragic, and for emboldening Russia, which would be profoundly dangerous for peace in Europe, with the nightmare scenario being open conflict in the Baltic states. Even without that nightmare, the consequences of these uncharted waters for the UK and its politics are difficult to predict, but will be profound. They may well be even more profound than those of Brexit but, in any case, they will certainly make the folly of Brexit even clearer.

Correction, 20/07/2024: In the post I wrongly say that Kemi Badenoch explained her approach to REUL by saying she was a conservative not an anarchist. In fact, she said 'arsonist' not 'anarchist'. I don't think it affects the substance of my point, though

The return of competence and why it matters

What a difference a week makes. Not so much because of policy changes, though there have been some crisp announcements, including discarding the stupid, illegal and immoral Rwanda policy and lifting the ban on new onshore wind farms. And certainly not because Britain’s many problems have been solved; on the contrary, we have repeatedly been told how slow and difficult fixing them will be. But that, actually, does begin to point to the difference. It is a sign of reasonable, adult, and honest politics.

The return of basic competence

That is what is new, and it was manifested again and again this week. Smoothly, methodically, a cabinet was constructed. It is peopled largely by those who have been shadowing their portfolios for a while and who have already given careful thought to them, or who have been immersed in them by dint of having chaired the relevant select committee. Outside the cabinet, but in important ministerial posts, there was a peppering of non-political experts, Sir Patrick Vallance for the science brief, James Timpson for prisons. As a ‘government of all the talents’, this is far more convincing than Boris Johnson’s recruitment of David Frost or, further back, Gordon Brown’s appointment of Digby Jones, blowhards both.

These are all, for the most part, serious, competent people, for all that many are untested in government. That, and the lack of drama accompanying the process, might be thought of as the bare minimum, and it’s not as if Starmer has not had plenty of time to plan for it. But it is far too long since even this bare minimum has been the norm. Recall Johnson’s first cabinet, selected solely on fealty to Brexit. Recall the mess of his 2020 reshuffle when, rather than be subjected to the absurd demands of Dominic Cummings, Chancellor Sajid Javid resigned. Recall how, at their first meeting after his 2019 election victory, Johnson forced his new cabinet to chant the dishonest promises he had made.

As for competence and fitness for office, recall the almost endless list of recent Tory ministers who failed those tests. It is hardly necessary even to give examples, and certainly impossible to list them all, let alone to identify the worst. I suppose Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling might be the most compelling candidate for that title and, in case there was any danger of forgetting him amidst so many others, that danger was removed by his inclusion, at Sunak’s behest, in this week’s Dissolution honours list. It was a final, graceless, shameless spit in the country’s face from the outgoing regime.

Recall, too, the prodigious churn of those ministers over the last few years. Of course, it remains to be seen how Labour fare in this respect, but, as Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government argues, the composition of this new cabinet suggests that Starmer has begun by putting an emphasis on continuity and stability, alongside competence.

Repairing some of the Brexit damage

So - methodical, undramatic, competent, stable. The same words apply to Starmer’s first press conference and first appearance in the House of Commons, and to Rachel Reeves’s first speech as Chancellor and her launch of the National Wealth Fund. And these words alone show the stark contrast with what has characterized recent political life. We simply haven’t seen anything like this for years. More particularly, these words also represent one reparation of the damages of Brexit. For, as I outlined early on in the election campaign, a large part of the chaos and incompetence they replace was directly attributable to Brexit. It's worth emphasizing this point because, of course, it is familiar territory that Brexit itself is not going to be reversed by this government. Yet this does not preclude addressing any of the harms associated with it.

Governmental competence at home is one example, but so too is repairing Britain’s international relations and reputation. Thus Foreign Secretary David Lammy immediately travelled to Germany, Poland and Sweden saying “it’s time to reset our relationship with our European friends and allies”. Reset from what? Self-evidently, from the damage of Brexit. And a re-set to what? An ambitious security pact, encompassing not just defence but also energy, climate change and irregular migration. On the latter, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper discussed border security issues with her counterparts in EU countries and Europol. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds is already talking about seeking improvements in the trading relationship with the EU, and already getting positive noises of potential support from the Irish Taoiseach. And Nick Thomas-Symonds, who has the pivotal post-Brexit role of Minister for European Relations, had an immediate and positive conversation with Maros Sefcovic.

Meanwhile Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn immediately hosted a meeting with Northern Ireland’s First and Deputy First Ministers, promising an improved relationship with Westminster. Starmer himself went on a tour of the devolved nations, also seeking a ‘re-set’ of relations, and emphasizing Britain’s commitment to the Good Friday Agreement when in Belfast. He then headed to Washington, where alongside the NATO summit he met some European leaders with the avowed intention of “forging closer UK-EU relations” and had a bi-lateral meeting with President Biden. There are to be further meetings with the Irish and French leaders in advance of the meeting of the European Political Community, which is being hosted by the UK.

I’m not suggesting that all of these things are solely to do with repairing Brexit damage, but there is no doubt that the way Brexit was done with almost no regard for the devolved administrations did great harm to, and caused a new and specific resentment within, the relationships between those administrations and the London government. There’s certainly no doubt that Brexit opened a particular crisis in Northern Ireland’s politics, with consequences for the UK’s relationship with the US, and especially with Biden. Equally, Brexit did great harm to the UK’s relationship with the US generally, so much of which had been predicated on the UK as a bridge between the US and the EU, and tellingly, it’s reported that Biden suggested to Starmer that improving UK-EU relations now would help to reinstate that role.

Re-setting the UK-EU relationship

There’s no cause to get carried away by all this. These are very early days, and most of what has happened is ritualistic, or at least diplomatic, politeness – though how could it be anything else, yet? The hard politics of, especially, re-setting the relationship with the EU has still to be done. On that, there is no shortage of wise advice available to the new government, none wiser than that in the excellent open letter written to Keir Starmer by Charles Grant, the Director of the Centre for European Reform. It contains important insights about both the possibilities for what could be agreed with the EU and the domestic politics of delivering it. There are similarly insightful suggestions as regards, specifically, a security pact from the Royal United Service Institute.

What unfolds from now on for the UK-EU relationship is going to be a very complicated story. The trade expert David Henig has usefully pointed out that there is not going to be a single ‘re-negotiation’, but a whole swathe of “inter-linked discussions” about different policy areas, undertaken via different institutional mechanisms, and involving different actors. It will be a big task to hold all of this within a coherent strategy. But what we have seen this week, and, like the cabinet formation, it has been done quickly, methodically, and undramatically, is the broad direction of intended travel, which is towards rapprochement. In that respect there has already been a decisive break, certainly in tone, and potentially in substance, with the last eight years of Tory government.

Moreover, it is a break being enacted without internal opposition in the governing party in the sense that, whilst the latest polling shows that the vast majority in that party want to go further than the government seem to be proposing, none want it to go less far, or to pursue a more antagonistic relationship. That, too, is a clear break with the Tory government, which faced fury from within at any step to improve things (or even at seeing a better relationship as being an improvement). Conversely, whilst there have been squeals of outrage in the pro-Brexit press and from some Brexiter politicians, another difference that has come this week is that, suddenly, their voices seem all but irrelevant.

The legitimacy of Labour’s mandate

Although the speed and energy with which this has re-set has begun have been impressive, the basic approach to this (and other policy areas) has not come as a surprise. It is exactly in line with the promises Labour made during in the campaign and had signalled for months, if not years. It is the platform that won them a huge victory. Yet the other theme of this first post-election week has been a buzz of commentary and criticism suggesting, both explicitly and implicitly, that Labour may have won a majority but do not have a legitimate mandate to govern. The point, of course, is that the vote share was so small compared with the size of the majority.

I discussed this briefly in my previous post, written in sleepless haste early on the morning of the day after the election. It poses some genuine questions about the case for electoral reform, but they are being weaponized in misleading and sometimes dishonest ways. And whilst we are very fortunate indeed that there has been nothing remotely like the attempts to derail the handover of power that accompanied Biden’s presidential victory, these insinuations about the legitimacy of Labour’s win are a very distant echo of them.

As I said in that post, the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system is difficult to defend on rational grounds (though not impossible). But it is the system we have, and, within that system, Labour won the majority it did. More than that, it did so having recognized exactly what was needed to win within such a system, namely to achieve the greatest possible ‘vote efficiency’, so that, rather than piling up huge majorities in some constituencies, Labour sought, and gained, smaller majorities but in more constituencies. That was also associated with a policy programme, including that related to Brexit, which lost some of the votes they would otherwise have received in seats where they could ‘afford to’, whilst gaining votes in seats where they needed more in order to win. There’s nothing illegitimate in that, and in a sense it broadens support for the government, whilst also making it more shallow.

Nor is there anything illegitimate in voters choosing, as it seems they did in large numbers, to vote tactically for whichever party had the best chance of defeating that party such voters least wanted elected, rather than voting for that party which they most wanted to win. I did it myself. It has always happened to an extent, and it happens in other countries’ voting systems, too, as the recent French election demonstrated. If it did so more on this occasion, then that is partly because of the level of hostility to the Tories, and partly because it is now easier to identify how to cast tactical votes effectively. This also means that, in itself, share of vote does not tell us everything about voters’ preferences. They have adapted their votes in the light of the FPTP system, so it doesn’t follow that, under a Proportional Representation (PR) system, they would vote in the same proportions.

Moreover, and it was clearly the case in this election, voters’ willingness to choose one party is partly about their view of the other party that may let in, as well as of the one they hope it will keep out. To be more concrete, as I pointed out last week, tactical voting against the Tories (especially by those who voted LibDem in previously safe Tory seats) will in part have been informed by the fact that they were not put off by the prospect of a Labour government. And on top of all that, some who did not vote Labour, and some who did not vote at all, will have made those decisions in the expectation that Labour would win without their votes. That may be part of the reason why the percentage of those who decided which way to vote on polling day is higher for the other parties than for Labour

So for all of these reasons, the outcome of the election, for all the gross disparities it has created, is not illegitimate, since it is a result of the system which we have (and which has produced similar disparities in the past), and the decisions made by voters in the light of how it works. You can only win according to the rules, and if you do, then the win is a legitimate one. That is a quite different issue from whether the system itself is a good system and there have long been very serious doubts about that. So, by all means, let’s have a ‘public debate’, perhaps a Royal Commission and even, heaven help us, a referendum, about changing the electoral system. But, in the meantime, it is quite wrong to use those doubts as a way of casting doubt on the legitimacy of this particular government.

Farage’s opportunism and his opportunity

Of course, the reason this is being raised so widely now is only partly to do with the Labour vote share. It is also because of Farage’s complaints that Reform’s share of the seats is so much less than its share of the votes. That isn’t new. Almost the same thing happened with UKIP in the past, for example in 2015, when they achieved one seat on the back of 12.6% of the votes, compared with Reform’s five seats from 14.3% of the votes at this election. (It has also happened to the LibDems for decades, and they, like Labour, found a way to maximize vote efficiency this time, in their case by focusing everything on a relatively small number of constituencies, a large number of which they won, in this case making their share of the vote very similar to their share of the seats.)

That this problem isn’t new doesn’t make it less of a problem. But, whilst UKIP complained about it before, Reform are doing so more vociferously (and now with support from some Tories) as they now have ambitions to government, rather than being primarily orientated towards leaving the EU. This is actually a key new development in the UK political landscape, since it is the first time a populist party has had such an ambition, no matter how distant the prospect. UKIP really had no aspiration beyond pressurizing the Conservatives over Europe. Reform want to replace them and, given the parlous state of the Tory party, that isn’t entirely inconceivable.

As for Farage, we can be quite certain that, but for the fact that it doesn’t favour his party, he would be insisting that “the fine British tradition that has served our great nation for so long should not be set aside for some ‘continental’ jiggery-pokery. It has given us strong government! Do we really,” – and here he would give his peculiarly repellent, man-of-the-people, gurning chuckle – “want to be like the Italians? Really?” He might well also point out that we have had a referendum on whether or not to keep FPTP and decisively voted to do so, and the will of the people, once disclosed in this way, can never be revisited.

Strictly speaking, all that is irrelevant to the case for replacing FPTP with some form of PR, as Ian Dunt has persuasively argued this week, which stands or falls on its own merits regardless of what anyone thinks of Farage. There is a counter-argument, which is that there is a democratic case for a system which makes it hard for extremist parties to gain representation. But no one should be under any illusion that Farage is driven by the desire for a disinterested debate about political theory. He sees that there is an opportunity within grasp, and he is correct.

What is at stake?

There are many excellent blogs, even if they now mainly go under the name of ‘newsletters’, competing for too little reading time (making me especially grateful to the many readers who continue to read this one), but one I always make time for is Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine. That’s not because I always agree with it, though I often do, but because it is wide-ranging, intellectually sophisticated, and well-written. In this week’s post, Carr criticizes as “premature” and “not a little lazy” those commentators who have “hailed Labour’s victory as a defeat for populism”.

He's right. At best, it’s a breathing space. More to the point, as commentators as diverse Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times (£) and Fintan O’Toole in Foreign Affairs have observed, this government could represent a ‘last chance’ for Britain to hold back populism and demonstrate the efficacy of ‘centrism’. If it fails, it is all too easy to easy to imagine Farage’s siren call that, now, both Conservatives and Labour have been found wanting, and it is time to ‘try something different’.

By sounding innocuous, it will have an insidious appeal well beyond Reform’s core vote. It was very noticeable during the campaign how rattled Farage was when Reform candidates and activists were exposed as racists or, in other ways, disgraceful. As with RN in France, the strategy is to try to present a ‘respectable’ front, garnering respectable voters, whilst dog-whistling to the less respectable, but it is a strategy with inherent tensions: if the whistle is sent in the wrong register, then the humans can hear it. (This isn’t, by the way, “sneering and name-calling” at those who vote for populist parties, one of several things I was accused of this week in a rather peculiar, unprovoked attack made on me this week. It’s analysis.).

During this breathing space, two things could, and hopefully will, happen. One is that the realities of being in parliament, and claiming an aspiration to govern, will take their toll on Reform. They may find it more difficult to manipulate the House of Commons than they did the European Parliament. Farage is in many ways their greatest asset, but he is notoriously difficult to work with and, to my eye, his narcissism, which is the cause of that, is growing. There are already signs of internal arguments, and there will be greater media scrutiny of their policies, their funding, and the peculiar structure of the party itself. Much also depends on what happens to the Tory Party, of course, something I’ll come to in future posts.

The other, somewhat related, hope is that the combination of energy and unfussy competence which Labour have begun to show this week will continue, and will bear fruit – demonstrably and fairly quickly. Populism likes to define itself as anti-Establishment, anti-elite, anti-Woke, and anti-globalist. But amongst the better ways to define it is as being anti-competence. Competence is the one thing it cannot deliver, and one of the best ways of countering its appeal.

The day the country turned on the Tory Party

So it’s over. From the beginning it has been strange. In my first post of the campaign I noted that for months this election had seemed overdue, but its sudden announcement made it seem premature. Very quickly what was both long-awaited and novel seemed to have become interminable. From the start the outcome seemed predictable, and yet until the very end important aspects of the outcome remained highly unpredictable. And, throughout, little was said about Brexit, and yet Brexit in some form or another was a constant sub-text.

What is also over is the nine-year period of Conservative government, or 14 years including the Conservative-led coalition. For many of us that, just in itself, makes it a moment to savour, whatever we may think of the incoming government or of its prospects. It is not even necessary to be especially left-wing, or left-wing at all, to feel some sense of relief, if only exhausted relief. For, by any standards, these have been tumultuous years, and in all too many ways calamitous years. So it’s worth, in this moment, briefly taking stock of them.

Goodbye to all that

Politics isn’t just about political leaders, by any means, but it is partly about them and, anyway, thinking of it in those terms can be a useful shorthand. We know, roughly, what it means to talk about the Thatcher, or Thatcher-Major, period, or about the Blair, or Blair-Brown, period. And we can grasp something of what we have just lived through simply by the length of describing it in that way: the Cameron-May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak period. It discloses the churn, the instability, the failure; the lack, in fact, of conservatism in its most general sense.

But it gets far worse if we consider each individual element. Cameron, entitled, patrician, casually corrupt and yet, possibly, the least awful of them. May, stiff, unimaginative, perhaps dutiful, but that duty spotted through with cruelty and spite, and yet, possibly, the least immoral of them. Johnson, depraved, venal, priapic, lazy, dishonest in every conceivable respect and yet, possibly, the most imaginative of them. Truss, woefully incompetent, vain, ideologically rigid and yet at least the most short-lived of them. And Sunak, whose plastic surface concealed only more plastic, an emptiness inhabited only by an ambition to be ambitious and yet, in inconsistent flashes, perhaps the most pragmatic of them.

Taken in total, even without considering the bottomless pit of their grueseome camp-followers and underlings, they form an unprecedented cast of political and psychological grotesques paraded in unprecedentedly quick succession. Together, they left a legacy of damage, disgrace, decay and, ultimately, disgust. If this election result tells us anything it is that, collectively, they managed to turn those of just about every shade of political opinion against them. Even those who did vote for their party yesterday will, in many cases, have done so with huge reservations and little enthusiasm. So, just at the most basic level of politics, they have comprehensively failed. If there is nothing else to say today it is that we, as a nation, are unequivocally better off for having seen the back of them.

Our voting system is difficult to defend on rational grounds and yet, sometimes, it does manage to capture, and in that sense to represent, the state of the nation, if only despite, rather than because of, itself. Thus the 2017 election gave rise to a parliament which, like the country, was deeply and almost evenly divided by Brexit. The 2019 election expressed a national desire, reprehensible and illusory as in my view it was, and partly born of exhaustion and boredom, for Brexit to be ‘done’. This latest election has shown a kind of national consensus, even if based on a wide variety of reasons, that the Tories needed to be routed. There are endless statistics being bandied around this morning, but the key one is this: the Tory share of the vote dropped by almost 20 percentage points.

Brexit: cause and consequence

Brexit is a central cause of what has happened to the Tories. What would have happened but for Brexit is, of course, unknowable, but it was certainly the referendum vote which caused Cameron to resign, and it is all but certain that there would not otherwise have been the same turnover of leaders. Some of them would certainly not have ever become Prime Minister without it. The Partygate scandal may have been the beginning of their end but, as I’ve written elsewhere, there are many links between that and Brexit. Subsequently, and perhaps the decisive moment from which today’s result has flowed, came Liz Truss’s mini-budget disaster, which is absolutely inseparable from Brexit. And, of course, for many voters, Brexit is the direct cause of their revulsion at the Tories: an unforgiveable, era-defining disaster in itself, even before the Tory attack on the middle-classes and established institutions which it unleashed, as discussed in last week’s post.

But Brexit is also the consequence of these years of Tory misrule. Between them, the leaders and their regimes did not just bring Brexit into existence, they also gave it its particular shape. By that I mean not simply the institutional form it has taken, but much of the dishonesty, division and toxicity which has surrounded it, and which has also created the situation whereby very little can be done about it, at least for now. For, whilst this is indeed a moment to savour and to take stock, this election is also, as I have been trying to stress in my last few posts, only a staging post within the still-unfolding politics of Brexit.

That’s not the statement of a ‘obsessive remoaner’ who can’t ‘let go’, and wants to ‘re-litigate the referendum’ or even ‘go back to 2015’ (all things which I have been wrongly accused of). On the contrary, it is an acknowledgement of what Brexiters ought to be saying: Brexit wasn’t just a passing event, now finished with, but the beginning of a new era. Indeed it’s not just what Brexiters ought to be saying, it is what they would be saying were it not that they know it has failed. Had it been even remotely a success, they would certainly be more than happy to acknowledge that we are living in a country transformed by its consequences.

So if the election is a post-Brexit staging post, what happens next? That can be thought of in two ways. One is about policy and, specifically, how the Labour government will approach the UK-EU relationship and, equally important, how the EU will approach relations with the UK’s new government. The other is about Brexitism, and the fall-out of this election result for the Conservative Party and the political right generally.

What next? #1 Labour’s post-Brexit policy

I’ve already written a lot about this on this blog, and my summary of what can be expected was published last month in Byline Times. Other, perhaps more expert, summaries are widely available, including a wide-ranging analysis from the Centre for European Reform, a mainly economics-focused piece from the Financial Times (£), and a specialized assessment of trade issues by Sam Lowe on his Most Favoured Nation newsletter. We will soon know the realities, so I don’t see much value in speculating further on this question, but two specific points may be worth making today.

One is that, as of today, the dynamics of the domestic politics around the relationship with the EU have fundamentally changed. That is because almost all of the most influential pressure on the government will be pushing it towards a closer, and certainly a more amicable, relationship with the EU, ranging from pressure to maintain regulatory alignment right through to pressure to rejoin the single market and customs union. That is in complete contrast to the last eight years where the government was constantly under pressure from its backbenchers, and pro-Brexit media and thinktanks, to diverge from the EU and to have as antagonistic a relationship as possible. It’s true that those voices will still exist and be very noisy but, overnight, they have become far more marginal to where political power and influence lie, for all that Farage’s election will give him a new platform to pollute the airwaves.

The second point is that, from today, many people are going to start (some, no doubt, have already started) saying that Labour would have won, and won big, whatever their policies, and therefore they could and should have been far bolder in their promises. That will be said in relation to all kinds of issues, as it was after the 1997 election, but I’m obviously meaning, in particular, that it will be said in relation to reversing Brexit (or reversing hard Brexit). So it is perhaps important to recall, before it recedes too far into memory, that this was not obvious at the time that Labour formulated their post-Brexit policy, and that many, even most, commentators did not expect the opinion poll lead to hold up all the way through to the election as it did. And, indeed, had Labour changed Brexit policy in the run-up to the election that might well have changed the outcome entirely, or at least the extent of the victory. We will never know, now, but it is far easier to be wise with the result in, and the ‘Ming vase’ safely carried over the victory line.

Similarly, it should not be thought that, with a huge victory now achieved, changing that policy in any substantial way would be risk free. The size of the majority makes no difference (despite all the recent Tory nonsense about a ‘supermajority’, as if it bestowed extra powers on a government). Labour’s voter coalition is a fragile and not very deep-rooted one, achieved primarily because of the extent of anti-Tory feeling, and reliant on the ‘efficiency’ of their vote-harvesting, which has partly been achieved by its very limited, and highly muted, post-Brexit policy.

That said, the very fragility of the voter coalition means Labour will be under huge pressure to quickly achieve economic growth, with all that would enable them to do, and one solution (though it wouldn’t be that quick to achieve) might be to seek single market membership. Having been so adamant that they will not do so, I think it almost inconceivable that they change tack, but many will no doubt urge it to do so, and this will also have a new dynamic now. For, unlike the Tories, such urgings will be coming from within the party and be being resisted by a leadership which, whatever it may say, is not ideologically invested in Brexit.

In immediate practical terms that may not seem like much of a difference, but the ‘join the EU movement’ is now in a different place to that which it has been at any time since the UK left, in the sense of being strongly represented within the governmental tent (not to mention having significant increased parliamentary representation from the LibDems). If joining the EU is ever to happen, this movement has a better platform to build on now, certainly compared with what would have been the case had the Tories won. At least for now, the wilderness years are over, and if public opinion for re-joining continues, or even increases, the case will become progressively harder to ignore.

What next? #2 Brexitism and the Tory meltdown

So what of the departing Conservatives? I wrote recently that in some ways this election could be read as a verdict not so much on Brexit, but on Brexitism. It was found guilty, including of the way it has corroded standards of public life, the restoration of which is an immediate and urgent task for the new government. But as I said in that post, Brexitism will not be killed off by this election and, paradoxically, the heaviness of the Tory defeat and the scale of the Reform vote (these things being linked, of course) will mean that, where it lives on, it does so as undiluted faith of its most hardcore believers.

Inevitably, there is now going to be an intensely bitter period of recrimination within the Tory Party and on the political right generally. It will not just be about the election result, but about the entirety of recent political history, going back to the referendum. It will be about Brexit, to a large extent, but not about its fundamental wisdom. Rather, it will be about Brexit not having been done ‘properly’, or its ‘opportunities’ having been squandered. What the Tories ought to consider, but probably won’t, is the underlying, historic folly of having held a referendum in 2016 to defuse the threat from Farage, and ending up with him still biting deeply into their vote, but now also having the LibDems on their one-nation flank, digging very deep into their traditional heartlands. That’s the meta-story of the last decade and it’s not clear how Humpty-Dumpty can be put back together again.

As early as February 2023, I wrote in detail about what was in store after this election, because it has been obvious for at least that long, including the significance of Reform being “able to mobilise perhaps 15% of the electorate, mainly at the Tories’ expense” (it turned out to be 14.3%). Barring some details, almost every word of that post still applies today, and so do those of a more recent post, last October, after the Tory Party conference. There, I discussed how Brexit has morphed into Brexitism and has driven the Tory Party mad. I won’t repeat the very lengthy analysis of those two posts, which are there to be read if anyone wants, but the point is that now, like a boil that has been bulging with festering yellow pus, all this madness is about to explode.

The result of that will partly depend on exactly who is left in the House of Commons when the dust settles, and whether the party amends its leadership selection system so as to remove power from the rank-and-file membership. But there must be a strong expectation that the initial move will be to chase the Reform vote, lurching to the purism of National Conservatism, even though some of its key advocates lost their seats.

Meanwhile, Reform itself has created, for the first time, a bridgehead of avowedly populist MPs in the House of Commons. It will be used and abused by Farage just as he used his position as an MEP in the European Parliament, and it is depressingly easy to imagine the media continuing to shower disproportionate attention on his antics, well beyond what Reform’s four seats warrant, for all that Farage will brandish their vote share as a weapon. The longer-term question is whether that vote share is its floor or its ceiling and, especially, whether, as Farage has already threatened, they will now be able to move from poaching disaffected Tory voters to making inroads into the traditional ‘old Labour’ vote. To the extent that Starmer has stabilized that vote, by nullifying Brexit as an issue and the more general revamping of his party, it feels remarkably fragile. It’s not so hard to see the Red Wall falling again.

For the time being, what happens on the political right may seem quite marginal to politics. All the focus will be on the Labour government and what it is doing. But that won’t last forever, especially if that government falters, and the 2029 election approaches with a mood of public dissatisfaction not just with Labour but with politics generally. Then, the anti-politics of a Brexitist party may become very attractive to many voters, and it can’t be assumed that such attraction will not extend to newer, younger voters by then.

In fact, for all the scale of Labour’s victory, I can’t shake off a sense that it is, in its entirety, fragile, and certainly more a vote against the last government than for the new one (especially in England and Wales). Of course, it is a remarkable achievement. Who would have thought, five years ago, that such a huge Labour victory was possible, or even a Labour victory at all? That achievement isn’t negated by the relatively small vote share, to the extent that one of the main reasons why Tory seats were flipped by the LibDems in this election, when they weren’t in 2019, was because voters in those seats no longer feared a Labour government. But the victory also speaks of a huge volatility so that, by the same token, who would want to bet on what may happen in the next five years? That’s an important question for all of us, and in the context of Brexit, or more precisely for those who would want to see its reversal, it is also an important question for the EU.

A day to hope

But I wouldn’t want to end this post on so sober a note. This is, indeed, a day to savour. There may be, there will be, disappointments, and perhaps worse, ahead, but today there is something to celebrate. It isn’t simply the defeat of a political party. It is the defeat of a political ethos of gross dishonesty, unforgiveable incompetence, corruption, entitlement, and cruelty. That ethos has degraded our institutions, poisoned our political culture, and debased our international reputation. It gave us Brexit, of course, but it also gave power to mediocrities, dullards, charlatans, fantasists, fanatics, thugs, and liars.

For all that we will have had a very wide and contradictory variety of interpretations of what we meant by it, yesterday, with our stubby pencils, in rickety booths in makeshift halls across the country, we collectively and clearly said: we should be better than this.

Let’s hope we will be.

We're still processing the Brexit rupture

I wrote in last week’s post about the sense of the post-Brexit period having beeen characterized by a new kind of political ‘game’. That is something which seems to have only just occurred to many political commentators judging by the way that Andrew Neil has belatedly worked out “how Brexit broke the Tory Party” and Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times has started puzzling over why our leaders don’t want to talk about Brexit (£). And these are supposedly two of the leading political journalists in the country, at the cutting-edge of political analysis.

My point isn’t meant to be the tedious, self-important moan that I’ve been saying these kinds of things for years, and anyway I’m certainly not the only person to have done so. Others include plenty of high-profile columnists in established media outlets, so my criticism also isn’t a moan about ‘the mainstream media’, which is considerably more variegated than that over-used and rather lazy term recognizes. Rather, it’s a criticism of the dominant approach to political reporting, exemplified by people like Neil and Shipman, or, say, BBC Political Editor Chris Mason, within, but not co-extensive with, the mainstream media.

It’s an approach which is so mired in the weeds of politics as a series of moves on the chess board that the bigger picture of the board, let alone the very rules of the game, are left relatively unexamined. That failure derives not so much from the commonly made charge that such an approach over-focuses on personalities, but from the way that it over-focuses on ‘events’ to the detriment of patterns, whilst assuming that the underlying verities of political life are unchanging, almost eternal. It ignores, or at least is slow to recognize, what Rafael Behr eloquently called “the roiling churn under a still crust” in his analysis of the election.

Perhaps that is inevitable in political reporting, per se, but it is inadequate in terms of political analysis, and would be with or without Brexit. However, Brexit has brought its inadequacy into particularly sharp relief.

How Brexit ruptured British politics

The careless injection of a mechanism of direct democracy, the referendum, into a system that was otherwise one of representative, parliamentary, democracy constituted a core rupture in modern British politics. That would probably not have been the case had ‘remain’ won, to the extent that remaining would have meant ‘no change’ – that is, it would not have had to have been ‘enacted’ – in exactly the same way as every previous UK-wide referendum. It became such a rupture because ‘leave’ won, especially as it did so by only a slender majority (and only in two of the UK’s constituent parts), against the official policy of the governing party and most of its (then) MPs; against the policy of all of the opposition parties in the House of Commons; and, hence, against the desire of the vast majority of all MPs at the time.

That in itself marked a break with ‘normal’ politics, but to it was added the fact that the particular time of the referendum, the particular issue it concerned, and the way that issue came to be the subject of a referendum, were all bound up with a contestation between ‘normal’ politics and a populist politics defined by a rejection of political norms. That the populist cause won such a referendum, the design of which flowed largely from Cameron’s desire to kill off the challenge of populists from outside the governing party, and to both placate and marginalize those within it, created a wholly new political world, even though all the old, familiar trappings and rituals of politics have persisted.

Yet, even now, the dominant approach to political reporting seems not to understand this change. Of course, other important things have happened since 2016, some of which, most obviously the pandemic, would have been challenging to political normality in themselves. And, of course, had the UK stayed in the EU there would have been all sorts of crises and changes. But it is the rupture of Brexit which underlies how politics since then has, in fact, developed. It’s in that sense that, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are in “the experimental laboratory of post-Brexit politics”.

The election: more than numbers

The current election is the latest expression of that (including the very fact of its near silence about Brexit). Post-referendum politics has seen unprecedented events, including the unlawful prorogation, as well as the extraordinary churn of Tory Prime Ministers. This election, too, looks set to deliver an extraordinary outcome. Even a narrow Labour victory would be remarkable, from its 2019 position, let alone the predicted landslide. Equally remarkable is the prospect of an historic fracturing of the coalition of Tory voters. But this rapid succession of unprecedented ‘events’ is not a coincidence. They form a pattern, and are explicable, albeit they were not necessarily predictable, in terms of the Brexit rupture, but puzzling to those who have not grasped it.

I can’t help thinking, though I suppose it might have happened anyway, that this is the reason for the apparently endless volume of polling, and the proliferation of ever more sophisticated methods of conducting polls, and of data visualization to report the results, which has characterized this election. I certainly don’t recall it featuring to such an extent at previous elections, even as recently as that of 2019. This has generated a whole sub-industry of comment about the polls, whether they can really be right, and what they mean if they are. It is as if there is an almost desperate attempt to ‘get a hold’ on what is happening, and that ‘the numbers’ will give the answer, to the point of overkill.

Even as a junkie for that kind of stuff, I now find myself skipping over yet another attempt to cut the data in some new and jazzy way. In any case, even without this explosion of polling data analysis, and without denying that some of it can be helpful to understanding politics, I don’t think that, in and of itself, it constitutes political analysis, especially analysis of the big picture shift which we’ve been living through. A couple of examples from this week illustrate this.

Analyzing the Tory collapse

One is an article in the Financial Times about how voters in prosperous parts of southern England who would previously have voted Tory are turning away from the party, including what might once have been called ‘the professional classes’, whether affluent or not. There’s nothing wrong with the article in itself. It makes plenty of excellent points. But whilst it and similar articles (such as Andrew Neil’s) are appearing now in response to election polling data about the demise of the Tories, the underlying issues they discuss have been evident since pretty much the day after the Brexit referendum, the eighth anniversary of which fell this week.

Most obvious was the way that so much of support for Brexit was bound up with a sneering disdain for, indeed, ‘the professional classes’ and, more generally, for all forms of expertise and education (except, ironically, when manifested in the cartoon-patrician Latinisms of Rees-Mogg and Johnson). That extended beyond the traditional Tory scorn for ‘politically correct’ academics and social workers to encompass lawyers, judges, civil servants, business people, and even, eventually, bond market traders. All were cast, first, as enemies of Brexit and, then, as exemplars of the woke elite, the more so if they lived in or near London. Unsurprisingly, if a political party keeps telling people that it loathes them, those people begin to become disinclined to vote for that party.

However, the peculiar political rupture of Brexit inflected this in a very particular way. Back in September 2017, I wrote about “a new Brexit political correctness” in which it had become virtually unsayable that those who most supported Brexit had no idea how to undertake it, and it fell mainly to those who had opposed it to deliver it. That is, the Brexiters were dependent upon the very people they despised as the educated, professional elite, and at the very moment they were most vociferously denouncing them as such, to deliver the thing they most wanted. That applied most obviously to civil servants, but it has also been the case for leaders and managers in business, as well as those in civil society, including universities. And perhaps no profession has been needed to enact Brexit as much as the legal profession.

So, in very broad terms, the Brexit Tories were saying to whole swathes of the middle-class, many of whom were amongst its habitual voters, not only that they were loathsome, and not only that they had to ‘suck up’ Brexit, but that they had to make it work. And then, on top of that, because so much of what the Brexiters had promised was undeliverable, and couldn’t be ‘made to work’, they were pilloried all over again for ‘sabotaging’ Brexit, if only through lack of ‘true belief’.

Along with that, whereas Tories had traditionally abjured what they called ‘the politics of envy’ they heavily invested in it when it came to Brexit. This was a slightly different, though sometimes overlapping, attack on the ‘remainer elite’ (which, of course, numbered half the country, and far more than half of its younger inhabitants) for being not just woke, liberal-minded, and unpatriotic but also for being economically privileged.

Thus remainers’ opposition to Brexit was often explained by their desire to be able to employ Bulgarian nannies, to have holiday homes in Europe, or even just for ease of travel when holidaying in Europe. In this, they took aim not just at middle-class professionals but also at the kind of ‘aspirational’ working class voters who had been an important part of the Tory voting coalition, especially under Thatcher, ignoring that child care, foreign travel, and even foreign holiday homes were not just the purview of a tiny metropolitan elite.

Such a politics might work for the purposes of mobilizing voters in the referendum, as the Vote Leave campaign showed. It might also work for mobilizing populist grievance against the government, as the UKIP vote had showed. But for a Conservative party to do so, and moreover to do so whilst in government, was always likely to end in disaster. The populist grievance would, in its nature, be disposed to turn on the governing party, all the more so in the context of its inevitable failure to deliver ‘true Brexit’, and all the more so again with so many Conservative MPs denouncing their party as ‘not really Conservative’. Meanwhile, those parts of what had once been the Tory voting base which had been so bitterly reviled by post-Brexit Conservative populism were likely to desert them.

The peculiar circumstances of 2019, including Farage’s decision not to oppose the Tories, and their voters’ fear of Corbynism, covered this over. But just because it didn’t show up in the electoral numbers, the underlying analysis of what Brexit had done to Tory politics still held good. That is now apparent in the polling numbers because the circumstances of 2019 have changed and, having failed to do the underlying analysis, political reporters are suddenly shocked by the pincer movement on the Tory vote.

Some of that would have happened anyway, with or without Brexit (for example because of demographic and educational trends). But the current prospect of meltdown, or even annihilation, for all that it may only be showing up in opinion polls now, grew organically from Brexit and, although never inevitable, was always probable. Hinc illae lacrimae, as Rees-Mogg might put it.

Analyzing Farage’s blunder

Quite how many and how salty Rees-Mogg’s tears will be remains to be seen, and will depend on factors including whether the Labour vote holds up, turnout, the extent of tactical voting, and may well be decisively affected by really quite small numbers of voters in quite a large number of seats. It also, of course, depends on how Farage and Reform fare.

The media focus on the re-emergence of Farage and the rise in support for his party, as if these were shock developments, adding piquancy to an otherwise predictable election, is another example of the over-focus on ‘events’ and of polling-driven reporting. Having failed to grasp the rupture of the referendum, the dominant media assumption was that Farage was an old story, and Reform a lingering irrelevance. In fact, they’ve been an ongoing thread in the pattern of post-Brexit politics.

There’s much that could be said about that, but here I will just focus on the second of this week’s stories I want to discuss in this post, the row provoked by his comments about Ukraine, Putin, the EU and NATO. It was unusual, because Farage doesn’t make many mis-steps, and this was a mis-step rather than yet another example of a populist politician deliberately generating outrage. It emboldened the Tories finally to criticize him, sometimes quite caustically, and it’s worth understanding why they felt able to do so. It wasn’t as if, as he himself reminded us, he hadn’t said similar things before, and this, again, is an example of how post-Brexit political reporting has not kept pace with the political landscape: Farage has been an open apologist for Putin for years, but that has been only sporadically noticed within the dominant approach to political reporting.  

I’ll come back to that, but as to why the Tories, including Boris Johnson, felt able to attack him, that is largely because of his criticism of NATO. Such criticism is very common within alt-right, populist circles in the US within which Farage moves, but it doesn’t play nearly so well in the UK, even amongst Reform voters and Brexiters. For many of them, NATO is bound up with their sense of patriotism, partly because it is seen as the lineal descendent of the Second World War alliance (that with Russia having largely been erased from memory by the Cold War), and especially of the D-Day landings (giving Farage’s blunder a resonance with Sunak’s own recent one). It was also very much central to the Brexiters’ case that the UK could safely leave the EU since its primary security alliance lay in NATO.

Had Farage criticized only the EU’s eastwards expansion for ‘provoking’ Putin to invade Ukraine, grotesque as that would have been, it perhaps wouldn’t have caused him quite so many problems. Apart from anything else, that is a view shared by many Brexiters and is what Johnson said at the time of the annexation of Crimea. In an angry reaction to Johnson’s criticism of his comments, Farage reminded his supporters of this. But that may have been a mis-step too, to the extent that some Reform voters are even more besotted with Johnson than they are with Farage. In any case, Johnson’s focus had been the EU, not NATO, and it was notable that, subsequent to his original comments, Farage, too, chose to focus on that aspect.

However, even that is much less safe ground than it was at the time of the annexation of Crimea. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine and Zelensky enjoy a level of support in the UK, including on the populist right, which also makes the context different to the US. Headlines, such as the Mail’s “Zelensky: Farage is infected with the ‘virus of Putin’”, clearly rattled Farage. For once, he had misjudged his audience, even to the extent of earning a reprimand from the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, also published in the Mail, and criticism in the Spectator and the Telegraph.

That matters for a party which sets such store by its support for the armed forces, and is also unused to criticism from the pro-Brexit press. One reason that has happened is that the whole episode laid bare the peculiar consonance between the pro-Putin, anti-NATO stance of much of the populist right, internationally, and that of the Corbynite left, which the British populist right abjures (apart from those in that weird little political space where neo-communism, neo-fascism and libertarianism meet, exemplified by Spiked Online, which came out in defence of Farage this week).

Whether this will be reflected in falling support for Farage or Reform in the opinion polls, or next week’s election, is not clear (I doubt any effect will be easy to separate from general noise/ variance, or other factors such as the growing evidence of extensive racism within the party). But, in line with my point that political analysis should be driven by more than polling, or even election, data, I want to come back to why his well-worn views caused the stir they did, and why this is not just of passing significance.

The answer is that they arose in the context of Farage being interviewed as a party leader, and a candidate to be an MP, by the BBC’s Nick Robinson. That may be related to the polls, of course, but he led UKIP when they were high in the polls, too, and he has stood as an MP before. Now, though, he does so whilst making the demand to be treated as the leader of the opposition, a demand extending to wanting to appear alongside Sunak, Starmer, and Davey in a leaders’ debate. He also does so whilst threatening, perhaps not entirely vainly, to be in a position to effect a takeover of the Tory Party (£) after the election. The hubris that drives him to insist on his own importance brings with it the possibility of nemesis through the scrutiny of being treated as important.

All this may fizzle out, depending on the election result, including in Clacton, and the scale of support for Reform. In that sense, the numbers matter. But, whatever the numbers next week, the analysis of the basic dynamic of populism in post-Brexit politics will still exist. So Farage’s difficulties this week are a harbinger of the future. In a similar way to how the Tories found that governing from an insurrectionist posture isn’t viable, so will Farage find, if he becomes a player in post-election opposition politics, that this is very different to what he has faced before.

Crucially, though, all this holds true even if Farage disappears from the scene, for it will apply in one form or another to any populist leader or movement that may emerge from the expected electoral wreckage of the Tory Party. We even know when we’ll see the very first installment of that: Tuesday 9 July, when a ‘PopCon’ post-election event has already been scheduled. We don’t know who the participants will be, but we do know it will happen whoever they are.

The post-Brexit political process

It’s now well-understood that Brexit was a process, not an event. What is perhaps less well-understood is that the same is true of post-Brexit politics. I’ve described 2016 as a political rupture, but that does not mean it was a single moment. Rather, it was like an earthquake with multiple aftershocks, by no means all of them predictable, heralding an on-going process, but also entailing a long ‘processing’, which is still underway, of what happened. That has been missed in the dominant narrative of political reporting, which treats Brexit as ‘over’ and seems to regard ‘going on about it’ as slightly lacking in sophistication, if not downright obsessive.

By the time of next week’s post (which, for this reason, is likely to be later in the day than usual) we will know the election result. A Labour victory seems certain and, although the scale of that victory is still hard to predict, it is likely to be extensive enough that we will hear much of it being a huge political ‘event’. That may well be true in terms of ‘the numbers’, but it would be better understood as a particular, albeit important, moment within the unfolding of post-Brexit politics; rooted in the complex story of what has happened since 2016 and laying the ground for the continuation of that story.

It shouldn’t be assumed that this is the prelude to greater political stability. Nick Tyrone, in his latest Week in Brexitland substack, makes an interesting direct comparison between the 2016 referendum vote and this election, suggesting that both show an angry, almost nihilistic, desire to smash political norms. Matthew d’Ancona made a very similar point in this week’s New European, and it is compatible with Behr’s identification of the “roiling churn” beneath the surface of this election.

I’m sure there’s an element of truth in it, which prompts the important question of where that anger will be focused next. However, it’s surely equally true that this election shows the appeal, which Labour has tried to tap in to, of putting ‘an end to the chaos’. My point is that in both these respects, and others, the election is part of the ongoing aftershocks of the Brexit rupture. The lab is still open and the experiment is far from being over.

 

Playing the new political game

The first cricket test match I ever attended was England versus West Indies at the Oval in the baking hot summer of 1976. It was the final test of a series in which a truly magnificent West Indies side crushed England, to an even greater extent than the 3-0 scoreline suggests. It was also politically significant in terms of British race relations, having begun with the infamous pledge by England’s South African-born captain, Tony Greig, that his side would make the West Indies “grovel”. At the same time, the West Indies had enthusiastic support from Britons of West Indian descent, perhaps especially at the Oval, bringing steel drums and trumpets, much to the dismay of some English traditionalists. The racial and post-colonial politics of the series have been extensively discussed and are well-captured in the 2010 film Fire in Babylon.

I’m not sure to what extent I was aware of any of that at the time – I was only 11 – but what was apparent throughout the series, simply from a cricketing point of view, was that it wasn’t just that the West Indies were playing much better than England, but that they were playing an almost different, more modern, and certainly more thrilling game. That was most graphically visible at the Old Trafford test, when veteran English batsman Brian Close, who was 45 and had not played test cricket for nine years before being recalled that summer, was almost literally pulverized by the sublime fast bowling of Michael Holding.

Just as some English traditionalists abhorred the exuberance of the West Indies’ supporters, so too did they complain that such aggressive fast bowling ‘just wasn’t cricket’. But they were wrong. It was what cricket was becoming*. Inescapably, those complaints had more than a tinge of post-colonial angst and of racist outrage. Cricket, invented in England and exported to the colonies, was no longer that of the Bufton-Tuftons of the MCC and Lord’s, or, for that matter, of the working-class league cricket of northern England, where players like Close had their roots. And descendants of those who had once been slaves were the architects as well as the masters of this new cricket. At that Oval test I attended, Greig acknowledged that by going on all fours and ‘grovelling’ to the crowd.

Reactionary resentment

Well, I’ve been told before that cricketing analogies don’t have any resonance for many readers of this blog, so I’ll get to the point. I was reminded of all this by the publication this week of the Reform UK manifesto. I’ve already reviewed the specifically Brexit-related elements of this in a separate post which covers all the party manifestos, but it has a more general significance.

Part of that significance relates directly to the laments of the cricket traditionalists of my childhood. There is a lineal connection between the kind of ‘I want my country back’ nostalgia of the Reform party and that sense of not just English cricket, but England itself was being supplanted. There’s also a discernible connection between the post-colonial complaints of those traditionalists and the manifesto’s policy proposal that that “any teaching about a period or example of British or European imperialism or slavery must be paired with the teaching of a non-European occurrence of the same to ensure balance”.

Long before anyone talked much, at least in relation to British politics, about populism, it was being incubated in a reactionary resentment, a kind of sullen victimhood. Even in those days, now fifty years ago, I heard that phrase, ‘it’s not my country any more’ and, which is perhaps less heard now, the half-baffled, half-aggrieved one that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’. That strand of cultural politics never went away, but became subsumed within the coalition of voters and ideologies which Thatcherism assembled. It was a coalition which gradually unwound, and UKIP was one expression of that. But what we are now witnessing is the dramatic, and possibly permanent, fracturing of the traditionalist and populist right.

So there is a literal connection between my cricket story, as a vignette within this strand of politics, and this week’s Reform manifesto. But there is also a metaphorical one, which works in the opposite direction. The literal connection posits populist politics as linked to reactionary horror at the new cricket of the 1970s. But the metaphorical connection posits populism as a new kind of way of doing politics which is making established norms of political arguing and campaigning seem outmoded and redundant, just as the 1976 West Indies’ team made England’s cricketers seem obsolete, almost to the extent of playing a different game altogether.

The anti-politics of Brexitism

The Reform manifesto is a good example, starting with its insistence that it is not a manifesto but a ‘contract’ with voters. For that very insistence is nonsense in suggesting that it entails some sort of binding commitment, given that what it proposes is undeliverable. That this is so as regards its costings was quickly pointed out by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), but it is equally true as regards many of its core pledges. For example, picking up migrants in the Channel and returning them to France is, in practical terms, impossible, as is the commitment to ending NHS waiting lists. It is certainly true of the core pledge to cut immigration to the bone. And the Brexit pledges, which I discussed separately, may not be literally impossible, but would come at an economic and political cost which is not mentioned, and no doubt would be denied. If this manifesto were put into practice, it would make the Truss regime look like a model of competence and stability.

However, crucially, and this is the sense in which the populists are playing a different game to ‘normal’ politics, simply demonstrating that the manifesto is nonsense, and the ‘contract’ is fraudulent, cuts little or no ice. For, as Farage’s response to being told just that shows, they themselves are happy to admit that it isn’t actually being put forward as a programme for government, as they have no expectation of winning the election.

So what is presented as a contract, because ‘manifestos’ are the supposedly discredited vehicle for politicians to make promises that they break when elected, consists of promises which are pre-broken by the anticipation of not being elected. This is politics as anti-politics. As for things like the IFS calculations, they can simply be dismissed as the usual Establishment nay-saying, from forecasters who ‘always get things wrong’. Yet even that is not the whole story, since the manifesto is shameless in referring to the FT, two former Governors of the Bank of England and, indeed, the IFS as having endorsed parts of its economic programme.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is a version of what happened with the referendum, where the Vote Leave campaigners made impossible, and often contradictory, pledges. They, too, rubbished experts who painstakingly explained the impossibilities and contradictions simply for being experts (whilst happily relying on the authority of those experts who supported them, many of whom are the same people who are behind the Reform manifesto). They, too, gained strength from their lies being debunked, since the very debunking helped the lies to circulate more widely (the £350 million a week for the NHS being the prime example). They, too, when asked to produce a workable plan for Brexit, insisted that they were not going to form a government, so it was not for them, as campaigners, to do so, and one reason they were able to get away with that was the expectation on both sides that they would not win anyway. In this sense, there’s a continuity between pro-Brexit populist politics and post-Brexit populist politics, making Brexitism a useful term to connect the two.

The last chance for Tory traditionalists?

Of course, it’s true that Reform is not going to win this election. So we might just say that none of this really matters. But it isn’t as straightforward as that. This is not Screaming Lord Sutch and the Monster Raving Loony Party, standing for laughs, even if its proposals might as well come from them. As with UKIP before, Farage and Reform are deadly serious and they now know, because of what happened with UKIP before, that it is perfectly possible to have a big political impact without winning much, if any, formal political power. This time Farage says, and there’s no reason to doubt him, that his aim is to take over the Tory Party and to become Prime Minister in 2029 (£).

In response, Rishi Sunak might be expected to counter-attack. At the moment, his only message to Reform voters is that they will be responsible for increasing the size of the expected Labour majority. He could, instead, denounce Reform’s policies as unworkable and damaging, just as he does other political opponents, especially Labour, if only on grounds of fiscal orthodoxy. That, after all, was his pitch when opposing Truss in the Tory leadership election, and when he took over from her having been proved right about the consequences of her policies. But he is unlikely to challenge Farage in that way and everyone knows why: many of his MPs and most of his party members are themselves broadly supportive of Reform’s agenda.

There was a very interesting interview this week on Nick Cohen’s The Lowdown podcast with the journalist Rafael Behr in which he makes the point, amongst many others, that Sunak almost inexplicably flunked standing up to the populists in his party after he had easily defeated their attempts to derail the Windsor Framework and defied their desire to scrap the entirety of Retained EU Law (both of which, by the way, are now Reform policies). I, myself, had speculated at the time of the Windsor Framework that it marked a new chapter.

In fact, Sunak proceeded to pander to the populists, especially with the Rwanda policy. Or, perhaps, he was not pandering to them so much as showing his own beliefs. Either way, he could not satisfy them, and, as has been the story under all the recent Tory leaders, they simply demanded more. Now, there is another moment, perhaps the very final one, for a Tory leader to challenge the populist right, if only as the last act of his political career, but he is unlikely to make use of it.

The responsibility of voters

In any case, it’s probably too late. The genie of anti-politics will not easily be re-bottled. It thrives on attention and rebuttal (making even this blog a very small part of the problem), yet it also thrives when ignored or left unchallenged. So, what to do? No one has a satisfactory answer to that, but it surely has to be based upon facing down, rather than pandering to, populists, if only because pandering to them is self-defeating. Theresa May’s main argument, in itself a principled one, for delivering Brexit was that, were it to be abandoned, voters’ faith in democracy would be damaged. Yet, as was always inevitable, delivering Brexit did not satisfy its supporters and that also damaged their faith in democracy. And so those voters are now, once again, being mobilized by Farage.

Politicians obviously have a particular role in challenging Farage but, at the same time, I think it is insufficiently said, perhaps because it has become almost taboo to mention, that these voters themselves must take ultimate responsibility. They believed the impossible promises made for Brexit and yet, finding those promises not to have been delivered, are willing to accept still more impossible promises from the same people who made the previous ones. They revel in their worldly ability to see through the charlatanism of politicians who are ‘all the same’ and ‘just in it for themselves’, yet are entirely gullible in accepting obvious charlatans like Farage and Johnson as being ‘different’ and ignoring their obvious self-interest.

The numbers of voters involved aren’t small. On the basis of the latest opinion polls, Reform have 16% support and the Conservatives have 21%. Supposing that only a third of those Conservative voters have effectively the same views as Reform voters (and I think it is probably higher), that suggests a bedrock support for Farageist populism of 23%, or almost a quarter of voters. They will all have received years of free education, a lifetime of free health care, have or expect to have livable pensions, and have lived their entire lives without war or mass unemployment.

They are, in short, the beneficiaries of the post-war social democratic settlement and what still endures of it. That’s not to deny they may have all sorts of hardships and legitimate grievances, but by global and historical standards these are not the downtrodden and oppressed of the earth. I simply don’t buy the idea that many, if any, of these voters are so downtrodden and desperate that they can’t be blamed for latching on to any glimmer of hope, and are simply exploited by unscrupulous populists like Farage. It's an idea which is really just a misguided attempt at liberal understanding, or perhaps an expression of liberal guilt, and it plays straight into the hands of populists.

For to the extent that there is a near-taboo on saying such things it is, actually, just one of the many duplicities of such populists, who seize on it as ‘sneering elitism’. In fact, what could be more patronizing than to deny that voters are responsible for their choices? It’s true that criticizing such voters will do nothing to change their minds, and even, to the extent they hear the criticisms, it will probably cement their opinions, but it is still worth saying. Anyway, it’s not as if not criticizing them will make a difference either. And what certainly won’t make a difference is offering them undeliverable policies on the basis that to do otherwise would be disrespectful of their desire for such policies. On the contrary, as Brexit has shown, that just sets up a new cycle of resentment.

The coming political battle

There is a temptation to think that with a probably large, and possibly huge, Labour majority in prospect, it will be years before Conservatives or Reform matter again. I think that it would be a serious mistake to yield to that temptation. For one thing, Labour’s ability to win has to some considerable extent been achieved by Starmer ceding ground, in both tone and substance, to the populists, just as New Labour only won by ceding so much ground to the neo-liberals.

There’s an element of necessity to that in electoral systems where you can only win from the centre, given that the location of the centre changes over time. In one sense of politics, the centre is a reality that must be accommodated, and catered for, especially at elections. Starmer understands this, and It was Corbyn’s inability to do so which doomed him to oblivion. In another sense, which Corbyn understood and Starmer seems not to, the location of the centre is always a matter of political contestation, and that contest is continuous and not the same as, although it intersects with, electoral politics.

In that second sense, the battle with populism, as regards both its policy prescriptions and its anti-politics mode of conduct, will continue after the election. In fact, it will become especially important then because when, as will almost inevitably happen, and probably quite quickly, disillusion with the new government sets in, that will be a new moment of opportunity for the populists to say that the ‘mainstream’ political parties are ‘all the same’ and none of them will ever succeed. As they do so, there’s every possibility that Starmer’s government will try, just as Tory centrists did before, to accommodate and appease them, again pandering to rather than challenging their demands and, again, finding them implacable.

So, at best, the election will be a moment to briefly pause and take some pleasure in the end of what have been some long and truly ghastly years for anyone who is both politically sentient and committed to honesty, rationality or even just basic competence in politics. But it will only be a pause. Brexit won’t have gone away, and nor will the politics that brought it. On the contrary, unless there is a highly unlikely fightback from its more traditionalist wing, there must be every chance that the Tory Party will fully embrace a Farageist National Conservatism, whether led by him or not. The Reform manifesto looks like, and is, a ridiculous joke but, as Farage gloated in the European Parliament after the referendum: “when I came here 17 years ago and said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, you’re not laughing now”.

It’s true that winning an election on anything like such a manifesto will be difficult. If my back-of-the envelope calculation of there being perhaps 25% bedrock support for it is correct, that leaves a fair way to climb to form a government, even under first-past-the post. But a ‘NatCon’ party espousing something like that manifesto would have a lot of influential and rich backing and a lot of media support, and, as I observed last week, unless Labour prove to be really effective in government, its large majority could easily crumble in a low-turnout election in 2029. In any case, even without winning that election, if a party on such a manifesto came even within contention it would have at least one very important consequence: it would kill, stone-dead, any prospect of the re-joining the EU for years, if only because it would make it too risky for the EU to accept Britain as a member.

Metaphors to live by

In that post last week, I finished with the image of us all being lab rats within the post-Brexit laboratory of political science, but in some ways that is misleading. I was mainly thinking of the fact that only quite a small number of people will directly influence the internal politics of the Tory Party. But as a metaphor in a more general sense, it fails to recognize the agency which we all have, to at least some degree.

One of my favourite cartoons concerns the famous Pavlovian experiment in which, after repeatedly ringing a bell at the same time as feeding them meat, dogs were conditioned to salivate merely at the sound of a bell. That is to say, they had no agency and their behaviour was a conditioned reflex. In the cartoon, there are two dogs salivating and a scientist in a white coat holding a bell. One dog says to the other: have you noticed how every time we dribble, that guy Pavlov rings a bell? It’s a nice subversion of assumptions about where agency lies.

Or, to put it another way, going back to cricket. I’m not the avid follower of the game I was as a child and a young man, and in fact the last test match I went to was in 2000. It was the last day of what again was the last test of a series between England and the West Indies, again played at the Oval. Since 1976, much had changed in cricket, including the way that English cricket was organized and the England team played it. Much, too, had changed in society.

The 2000 match was watched by a packed, multi-racial, crowd, with both sides having enthusiastic support, and I don’t think there were any of the racist or colonialist undercurrents there had been in 1976. There was certainly nothing resembling the ‘grovel’ comment. England won that game, and narrowly won the series, but the teams were well-matched. More to the point, they were both playing recognizably the same game. Things change.

But there is no inevitability in how they change. That’s down to agency; to the decisions which, collectively, we make, not just at elections but every day.

 

*One might argue that it was not new anyway, and English complaints about the West Indies’ fast bowling were hypocritical. It was England, after all, who had deployed ‘Bodyline bowling’ in the 1930s. But I think a new cricket was emerging in the 1970s, part of which was to do with faster bowling becoming routine, hence it was shortly afterwards that helmets began to be worn and became the norm. And cricket was changing in other ways, too, away from the still rather amateurish ethos that had prevailed (e.g. as regards fitness or squad-building) as well as in its financial and commercial structure, and in game formats, playing styles etc.