Why would 2018 bring us a new politics when we recently voted for the old one?
Remainers’ dreams of a new party pay scant attention to what the electorate actually wants
Michael Heseltine has got into trouble for saying that a government led by Jeremy Corbyn would be better than Brexit. I am not sure that one would prevent the other but, from his point of view, he is right. Compared with the great European destiny, a Corbyn administration is but the blink of an eye. One purpose of the European Union is to ensure that it makes little difference who runs the government of a member state: the real power is elsewhere. Remainers like that. Leavers don’t.
Naughtily, Lord Heseltine is trying to steal a strong Brexit idea for his own side. One of the best arguments against the EU is that it gives us the kind of regime we can never kick out of power. Now the Grand Old Europhile is saying that is what’s wrong with Brexit: unlike a Corbyn government, Brexit is “not short-term and easily capable of rectification”. His claim is as brazenly cheeky as his recently discovered devotion to the sovereignty of Parliament after half a century of supporting the organisation that took it away. As he disarmingly admits: “My preoccupation is ending Brexit. The means: well, anything to hand.”
I am grateful to Lord Heseltine for leading me to the chosen medium for his latest intervention, the Limehouse Podcast. Without him, I might never have heard of it. It was set up by Liberals in mourning over the referendum result of 2016 and the 2017 general election. It takes its name from the declaration, issued in 1981 outside David Owen’s front door in Limehouse. The signatories were the “Gang of Four”, led by Roy Jenkins, who were splitting from the Labour Party. The Limehouse Declaration led to the formation of the SDP. And the formation of the SDP led to…well, what exactly did it lead to?
It certainly did not, as Jenkins often claimed, “break the mould of British politics”. It helped get Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives re-elected with an enormous majority. It did not destroy Labour either. It did create, with the Liberals, a rather larger centre party; and it did force Labour to become more moderate, thus bringing Tony Blair to the top. Both these achievements are now things of the past.
As 2018 hoves into view, however, the Limehouse Podcasters are hoping that the old Limehouse spirit can infect the future. They think that Britain suffers from “broken politics”. They long for the emergence of a new, moderate pro-remain sort of semiparty thingy – a British version of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France – which will free them from their current hell.
It is amusing to listen to Lord Heseltine’s interview with this lot, because he is comically ill-at-ease in their milieu. Partly this is the fault of the garrulous, inarticulate interviewer. Lord Heseltine’s reply to the final question, about whether he can remember anything funny from his many years in politics, is like Private Eye’s parody interview “Has anything amusing ever happened to you in relation to spoons?” “Nothing occurs to me,” replies Lord H majestically.
Partly, though, it is because he is a shrewd old politician who knows that if you split a party, you are, as he puts it, “fighting on two fronts”. He quotes Disraeli: “Damn your principles. Stick to your party.” He thinks “the tribe” of party in Britain is very strong: “I don’t see the Macron phenomenon.”
He is right. Cold figures show it. In the general election of 2005, Mr Blair’s Labour, which won, got 9,552,436 votes and 35.2 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives got 8,784,915 and 32.4 per cent. The Liberal Democrats got just under 6 million votes and 22 per cent. In this year’s election, Mr Corbyn’s Labour got 12,878,460 votes and 40 per cent of the vote, but lost. The Tories, who won, got 13,669,883 votes and 42.4 per cent. The Lib Dems got 2,371,910, which was only 7.4 per cent of the vote.
So the parties of our “broken politics” got between them roughly seven million more votes this year than when those politics were supposedly not broken; whereas the party trying to break the mould got roughly 3.5 million fewer. This year’s result was the strongest for the two-party system since 1970.
A possible explanation is the Brexit effect. The prospect of recovering national self-government makes it more rational to vote, because the result matters more. It also makes a clear choice more important. People who want conservatism and really don’t want socialism get energised, and vice versa. Obviously the inconclusive parliamentary arithmetic this time makes governing difficult, but that does not show that the political system is not working.
The 2017 election result also suggested that voters had moved on. They seem to have regarded Brexit as a thing decided – which, since a majority of them had voted for it the previous year, was democratically correct. Whatever their personal views on leaving the EU, more than 82 per cent of them were happy to vote for the two main parties who promised to implement Brexit, and to eschew the one party (the Lib Dems) who talked of reversing it. Not much statistical evidence there of a British Macron ready to pounce.
As I say, Lord Heseltine and the Limehousers disagree about what to do next. They agree, however, in an analysis of the present situation that is only half-true. They believe, to use Lord Heseltine’s words, that “both parties have been pushed by an extreme wing”. It is important for them to think this, because it gives them a virtuous justification for revolt, but surely it is true only of Mr Corbyn’s Labour and not of Theresa May’s Tories.
There is nothing intrinsically extreme about being pro-brexit. If there were, it is highly unlikely that 17.4 million people would have voted for it. The same applies, by the way, to the Remain position. Both sides contain extremists – Brexiteers who want to pull up the drawbridge on all foreigners; Remainers who despise Britishness – but neither is dominated by these. The divide, though often emotional, is not between maniacs and moderates, but between reasonable people who – often after much hesitation – have plumped for different visions of how our future is best assured. Nobody could sensibly claim that this Tory Government steering Brexit through is like, say, a Le Pen government in France. It is visibly – often exasperatingly – a coalition of a wide range of views.
So those trying to galvanise a new movement to save us from Brexit extremism are fighting shadows, and will be seen by the voters to be doing so. The only important extremists in our politics just now are running the Labour Party. The most obvious way to stop them is to vote Conservative. I quite see why that is an unattractive option for millions of our fellowcitizens, but my point is that you don’t need a “new politics” to stop Mr Corbyn: you just need him to lose the next election. By then, assuming the parliament runs its term, he will be 73.
To understand what is really going on here you need to listen to Lord Heseltine, not the Limehouse dreamers. “The solution” to Brexit, he says in his podcast, “is for public opinion to move”. This will happen, he goes on, if prices and unemployment rise and living standards fall. Then Parliament will shift. This is not a grand new politics. It is just reverse Micawberism – waiting for something to turn down.