Ireland shouldn’t hold its breath for a sea-change in UK’s broken politics

The emergence of a breakaway group of pro-EU MPs at Westminster may be too little, too late for Ireland, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

‘Are rebel UK MPs more than just a dinner-party conversation made flesh?’

IT’S noteworthy that those who say they want to “break the mould of politics” always seem to come together around a nostalgic call to make things go back to how they’ve always been.

That’s certainly the case in Britain with the new Independent Group of breakaway Labour and Tory MPs, who seem to harbour a longing to return to what they regard in retrospect as the halcyon days before Brexit, when the middle ground of British politics just accepted EU membership as unchangeable, like the weather. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It’s just interesting that this fundamentally conservative (with a small c) world view should be seen as somehow ground-breaking.

The big question for Ireland is: how significant are these developments across the water? Do they really herald a shift in thinking on Brexit to a position much closer to what this country wants?

That’s impossible to say. There are only around 800 hours to go until Brexit, but it’s still early days when it comes to possible political realignment. There was genuine excitement in the 1980s at the launch of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), whose members had also resigned from Labour in protest at its drift to the hard left. In all honesty, the new Independent Group (TIG) doesn’t feel anything like as momentous yet. It’s only a snapshot but the lack of enthusiasm from the audience on Question Time on BBC TV last Thursday night was striking. Momentum may build, but it’s far from guaranteed.

The UK’s two-party system is stubbornly resistant to change. At some point in the next few years, they’ll all have to fight a general election, when the odds must be that most then lose to official Tory or Labour candidates. A total of 28 MPs defected to the SDP in those early days; just six were re-elected.

The chances of some big Emmanuel Macron-style movement sweeping to power look slim. For one thing, there’s not enough people in the UK enthusiastic about the EU. Even a majority of those who voted Remain in 2016, and would do so again, are lukewarm about Brussels. They may be scared of the economic consequences of leaving the EU, but that doesn’t mean they like the federalist project. Britain is not Ireland.

If nothing else, the emergence of the new group at least confirms that, for many voters, the current system does not offer an obvious fit for their beliefs; but there are dangers in that too. Nice, metropolitan types in England hate it that the DUP holds the balance of power in Westminster. Well, imagine a rump of MPs from former UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party entering Parliament under a more proportionately representative system. It might be more democratic, but it wouldn’t necessarily make politics more centrist or agreeable.

That’s always been the advantage of the “first past the post” system. It’s not representative of the broad range of political attitudes, certainly not at the moment, with everything in flux, but it does offer stable government. Minority governments might be more reliant on smaller factions than they are now.

Of course, the Tories who left last week to join TIG claim their party is already in hock to extreme “hard right” Brexiteers, but that does seem an odd thing to say when those she’s talking about believe the exact opposite, namely that the party is firmly in the hands of “wets”, to use a term coined in the 1980s for those unenthusiastic about Thatcherism, all pushing for the softest of possible Brexits.

But even if it was true that small extremist factions inside parties currently have too much power, on both left and right, the chances are that, after Brexit, the woolly centrism beloved of TIG will eventually come to the fore again.

This has so far been the main criticism of the new group from Labour supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. That the defectors were quickly joined by Tories such as Anna Soubry, who still enthusiastically defends the post-crash austerity programme of the Tory/Liberal coalition after 2010, only confirmed that. Where’s the radicalism? The Corbynites do have a point.

They have little respect for those who don’t stay and fight their corner. The hard left in Labour held their ground through a succession of centrist leaders that they despised, not least Tony Blair. Did they cut and run?

The TIGs think Labour has gone too far left this time to be saved, and they may be right, but the hard left always took the longer view and eventually won the party back. Labour moderates will never win it back from the outside. All TIG MPs have in common right now is the desire for a second referendum on Brexit. It could be that their actions breathe new life into that campaign, just when it was looking hopeless, but there has to be a suspicion they’ve left it too late.

There must be an equal suspicion, as articulated by The Guardian’s Owen Jones last week, that TIG has no obvious demographic outside of middle-class journalists and politicos in London.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is not the only one suffering from “Brexit fatigue”. Everyone is punch drunk after months of wrangling, and the media is at this stage just going round in circles. This gives them something new to write and talk about. It’s fun to play Fantasy Politics with all the permutations.

Whether TIG can become more than a metropolitan dinner party conversation made flesh remains to be seen, but the biggest consequence of its creation has probably been achieved already, and that is to destroy once and for all Jeremy Corbyn’s chances of becoming prime minister. Opinion polls show that TIG has taken support mainly from Labour, leaving the Tories with a double digit lead after a prolonged period in which the two parties were, give or take the odd percentage point, neck and neck. Theresa May would be foolish to call an election on this basis. Her lead was even bigger before the 2017 election and she threw that away with her utter uselessness as a communicator. There’s no guarantee she wouldn’t blow it again.

That’s the problem with Fantasy Politics. Anything is possible. Could there in the next few months, for example, be what would amount to a cross-party government of national unity, led by Tories but with the assistance of pro-Remain Labourites, “Tiggers” and Lib Dems? That’s complicated because it would either mean the latter lot voting for the exit agreement, in other words actually leaving the EU, which they don’t want to do, or the Tories abandoning the clean Brexit which is supported by an overwhelming majority of their members and supporters, if not MPs. It’s hard to see how they could do that without doing serious long-term damage to the party.

All outcomes are possible, except arguably that Britain will end up staying in the EU. There’s no guarantee that this would even solve the problem. It would be welcomed by the political establishment in London, Dublin, Brussels and the media, but that doesn’t mean it would be more than a phoney truce. Sometimes, as in a marriage, too much has happened to go back to how things were.

No one even knows what a vote to Remain right now would do to British politics, or whether it would unleash a wave of populist anger against arrogant political elites. Because that’s one thing on which both the hard left and hard right do agree — that there has been a fatal disconnect between the people and the polity. They’re surely right about that. They just happen to disagree on how to fix it.

Overturning Brexit would offer some respite, and perhaps that’s all people want at the moment; but the EU has been a faultline in British politics since it joined the EEC in 1973, and there’s no reason to suppose that staying in would end it. It might even make it more important, leading to further fractures of which the emergence of the TIG faction is just the beginning. That probably won’t turn out to be the seismic change in British politics that some are hailing, but for Ireland the real significance may be in making Tory Brexiteers and Labour moderates coalesce around whatever deal is cobbled together in the next few weeks to avoid a No-Deal exit. That gives pro-Brexit voices the exit that they want, and anti-Brexit voices some consolation that the sky won’t fall in; but it would be naive to hope that the trouble ends there.

The next hurdle of negotiations over the final shape of the deal would still to be cleared, and that could prove every bit as turbulent.