May, like Powell, takes heed of public opinion
What happened to her political principles?
Many will recall the conflict in the Tory party in the late Sixties and early Seventies between its then leader, Ted Heath, and its great ideologue, Enoch Powell. Powell took issue with Heath on various points, and two resonate today. One was mass immigration, in those days from the Commonwealth rather than Europe, which had happened without the British people being consulted, and which Powell saw from his perspective as an MP in Wolverhampton was causing tension and unhappiness. The other was Heath’s ill-fated project to take Britain into what was then called the Common Market, which Powell saw as an outrageous sacrifice of British sovereignty, the end not just of our nationhood but of the right of the British government to do what its electorate wanted.
It was hardly surprising that, as I listened to Theresa May’s speech last Wednesday, I was reminded of Powell. When she told some of her colleagues, and their tame pundits in the media, to stop whining about Brexit and instead to respect the votes of more than 17 million people who had found the EU unpalatable, she made a profoundly Powellite point. She accused such people of sneering at the majority who voted in the referendum. In truth, it is a sneer that has lasted for decades.
Even during the Thatcher government, when it sought to return power from the all-knowing state to the individual, there was still a coterie of ministers who thought they really did know best. Powell understood the feelings of the people: it made him, in the eyes of his opponents, a dangerous politician and rival, which was why they rushed to accuse him (falsely) of racism for his warnings about the unpopularity of mass immigration and of Little Englandism for his views about Europe. Mrs May seems to have learned from this – and, as Prime Minister, is in a strong position to invite those in her party who disagree with her to defy her if they dare.
Britain has lurched slowly towards democracy since the Great Reform Act of 1832. It has taken some in our political class 184 years to realise what democracy really means: the paramountcy of the will of the people. Ironically, it required not a general election but a plebiscite to have that will properly expressed. Those who for decades have wanted to leave the EU went to one general election after another feeling utterly disenfranchised, because neither party likely to be elected had any intention other than to stay in the club, at vast expense to the taxpayer, at ever greater sacrifice of our sovereignty, and with an open borders policy imposed upon us that caused social problems and made us more vulnerable to crime and terrorism. That we now have a prime minister who sees the irreconcilability of those policies with the views of the majority of the British people is a great advance for democracy.
In a country such as ours referendums are only acceptable when a matter of potentially huge constitutional significance is contemplated, as it was on June 23. They cannot be a substitute for thoughtful, responsive government that understands, as all governments should, what the public really wants. Nor does this mean governments have to engage in followership rather than leadership. But the lead a government should give is one that goes with the grain of public opinion rather than against it. The growing vote for Ukip in recent elections was a portent of the referendum result, even if Ukip has only one semi-detached MP as a result. That the Cameron government chose to ignore this before June was just one aspect of its fatal arrogance.
With the sort of clear choice before them that did not exist between potential governing parties at the last election, the British people gave a clear signal in June not just of their true view on the EU, but of the frustration and annoyance they felt at being treated with contempt by the political class. Mrs May has received and understood this. Her fellow Western leaders have generally not: for them democracy is a tiresome advisory process that they can feel free to interpret as they wish, not a guide to public opinion which, if ignored, will build up to a quiet – or perhaps not so quiet – revolution of the sort we have just had in Britain. It is why Donald Trump stands such a good chance of winning the American presidential election next month. It is why Marine Le Pen will do so well in next May’s presidential election in France. And it is why Frauke Petry’s AfD party is eating into support for Angela Merkel in Germany, and may well help depose her as head of the ruling coalition there next autumn.
Given the pitiful state of the Labour Party, Mrs May could have ignored public opinion and allowed the Government to carry on sneering. That she did not is a refreshing sign that she genuinely understands that things cannot carry on as before. Not every aspect of her conference speech was so admirable, though. If she is seriously thinking of pursuing a sub-Keynesian approach to the economy, with state intervention in the private sector, she should think again before the markets force her to do so. In the post-Brexit world she is commendably determined to bring about, interfering with a free-market approach in business and imposing regulation will be the easiest way to shoot our new economic and trading arrangements in the foot. There are certainly abuses of remuneration in some companies, but it is the shareholders’ job, and not the state’s, to sort that out.
That vital consideration aside, our new Prime Minister has connected with the zeitgeist of the British people. She can lead them properly and confidently once she has won their respect in this way. She deserves the unqualified support of her colleagues for this. It has taken almost 50 years to learn Powell’s lessons about accommodating the will of the people, but better late than never.
Amber Rudd was one of the most militant Remainers in the referendum campaign: but isn’t it remarkable what a sniff of high office can do? In a conference speech that she delivered as if impersonating a piece of cardboard, our new Home Secretary outlined policies about immigration and foreign workers that would have turned her stomach a few months ago.
When the public see politicians such as Miss Rudd ditch such supposedly deeply held principles in the interests of rampant personal ambition, we realise we are still some way from having a political class that we can unreservedly respect.
I’m getting rather tired of what Nigel Lawson called the “teenage scribblers”, the currency traders and analysts whose actions affect the value of sterling. The ignorance these teenagers have of economic and political fundamentals (they almost all called Brexit wrongly) is compounded by their reliance on computer algorithms, which were initially blamed for the “flash crash” in the value of sterling on the Asian markets in the early hours of Friday – on the basis that the computers were scouring the internet for “hard Brexit” horror stories.
I can’t understand what the scribblers think a “hard Brexit” is. Have they seen the reverse ferret by the IMF this week, which has now decided we are going to grow faster this year than any other Western economy? Are they aware of the profound European banking crisis, or the effect of a Trump victory on the dollar? Are they talking down sterling to make a political point? Because its value bears no relation to reality at all.