Brexit is turning our politics European amid the wreckage of the old parties

You can see the outlines of three new forces emerging, a realignment based on culture not class

Watching our exasperating Brexit dispute from the safe distance of Vienna, where I was staying for the past month, it struck me how strangely Europeanised our party politics have become, with the prospect of it becoming even more so as our party system reconfigures.

In one respect, however, we remain proudly uncontinental. Talking to Austrian friends about the great Brexit “mess”, I detected, along with a fair amount of Schadenfreude, a sneaking admiration for the democratic theatrics that the House of Commons has been providing. In a Europe of often sterile national parliaments – where people tend to read out pre-prepared texts and vote along the lines of deals agreed between party leaders – our domestic drama has provided a refreshing alternative. Since the 2016 referendum we have been having an intense family argument and, unlike the gilets jaunes challenge to the authority of the French state, with little violence.

That said, the lack of a government

majority since the 2017 election has had the effect of “Europeanising” party politics by creating a kind of nascent multi-party democracy within the tottering structures of the old two party, first-past-the-post system.

The case for the traditional two-party system is that it provides decisive government, albeit at the price of disenfranchising quite large parts of the electorate and making it harder for new political forces to emerge. By contrast European-style multi-party democracy with various forms of proportional representation (PR) is more fluid and open but tends to hand out vetoes to more political players and can therefore lead to stasis.

So May’s Withdrawal Agreement has been blocked not only by Labour but also by the SNP, the DUP, the Liberal Democrats, the inner Tory party ERG grouping, and could in plausible scenarios even be blocked by the new Independent Group of Mps.european political classes have developed over decades the skill of cross-party consensus-building to unlock vetoes that our own adversarial political class lacks, admittedly exacerbated by two further factors: the rigid political style of Theresa May and the fact that the main opposition party is led by members of an unclubbable, far-left political tradition.

A further Europeanisation looks likely as the parties reconfigure away from socio-economic class politics to socio-cultural identity politics. Initially, this is likely to be a top-down movement, exemplified by the Independent Group, as the parties adjust to the fact that less than a third of voters strongly identify with the party they voted for in 2017 but more than three-quarters strongly identify with their Leave or Remain vote.

Whatever happens, the Tory party is destined to become the Brexit party. But that means a more overt working class-middle class alliance clustering around the sort of “hidden majority” policies represented by the 2017 Tory manifesto (shorn of its suicide clauses about social care). That means: market-friendly but social democratic in economics, broadly liberal in politics and somewhat conservative in social and cultural matters.

That begs many questions, of course. What is “somewhat conservative” for one thing? It would surely not mean reversing gay marriage, for example, but it might mean greater respect for more traditionalist, Roger Scrutonesque sentiments in social policy and, say, making it easier for one parent to stay at home for longer when children are very young.

But a low immigration, high-ish public spending party that throws money at universal credit, builds more social housing and nationalises social care (to save middle-class people having to sell their houses) would be a potentially popular British version of Christian Democracy, speaking for the suburbs, smaller towns and countryside. I happened to see this nascent potential Tory party on show at George Freeman’s Big Tent Ideas Festival last September when Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was shouted down by Tory activists in a debate about the future of capitalism for taking the traditional low-tax, free-market line.

Meanwhile, the more socially liberal voting bloc based in London, the metropolitan centres and university towns will be divided between some version of the old Blair/cameron status quo – a Chuka Umunna/nick Boles double act – and the new model Labour Party which will be aggressively “woke” socially and statist in economics. Curiously, this leaves little room for the old Thatcherites who occupy the free-market, low-tax, pro-business but socially traditionalist corner of the graph, what one might call the golf-club voters. They might have to vote for the Nigel Farage party. The other disenfranchised group is young people who are militant about sex and race equality but don’t like a big state and high taxes.

Although one can see the outlines of these three parties already emerging, lasting political reform tends to come from the bottom up not the top down: see the emergence of the Labour Party in the early 20th century or more recently the Five Star Movement in Italy. A new grand constitutional settlement, including greater representation for English voters and a reconsideration of Pr-type voting systems, would hasten bottom up reform but does not seem imminent.

Yet it seems pretty obvious that our two party, first-past-the-post system belongs to an earlier age. Continental PR systems are appropriate for a more fluid age with a more diverse and less class-conscious electorate. Moreover, they have more successfully absorbed, accommodated and domesticated legitimate populism by giving it a political voice. Once given political responsibility, some populist parties, like The Finns in Finland, have split between pragmatists and truebelievers. Others, like the Freedom Party in Austria, have been largely co-opted and de-fanged by the larger centre-right coalition party.

A good recent example of this has come in Italy where the Five Star Movement (and Lega Nord) have both been seduced by the anti-mmr vaccine cult. But when the Five Star education minister was faced with thousands of schoolchildren going down with measles, the party abruptly dropped its opposition to vaccinations.

People used to say, rather smugly, that populism had been held at bay in this country by our first past the post voting system. But the truth is it just took a different and, ultimately perhaps, more disruptive form, by focusing on our exit from the EU.

But changing the voting system can only get you so far. The big problem that we are facing in the future is that it is easier to fashion compromises over socio-economic differences than it is over socio-cultural ones like national identity, immigration and the pace of social change.

The Seventies socio-economic log-jam was eventually broken by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. The value impasse between liberalism and social conservatism cannot be broken in the same way. It must instead be transcended by a political leadership that can build bridges between the two ways of thinking and being.