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.