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.