Fraser Nelson:
Britain’s uniquely flexible and feisty political system has spared us the worst of populist rage
It’s fairly easy to panic about the future of Britain if you spend too much time looking at the House of Commons. Our MPS are in a flap. Most of them voted against Brexit but were given new marching orders last year and are trying to work out what comes next.
This newspaper recently revealed that at least 15 Tories are set to defy the Government on Brexit. That’s if the members of the Cabinet can agree on anything. All of this is mocked in Brussels: how to negotiate with such a partner? Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, has been more blunt, referring to Britain’s “political, monetary, constitutional and economic collapse”.
That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that we’re witnessing British democracy at its very best and most effective.
Last year, the public voted to defy the advice of almost every single political party leader: it was always going to be traumatic. The vote for Brexit was one of those great democratic shocks imposed on our parliamentarians from time to time. It was destined to upset and discombobulate those inside the House of Commons, but also to realign them with public opinion – and, in so doing, kill off populism. So far, so good.
Look abroad, and it’s hard to find a country that does not have a serious problem with populism. In Germany, Angela Merkel is still struggling to form a government because the far-right Alternative für Deutschland did so well in the recent election. Marine Le Pen won a third of the vote in this year’s French presidential election, almost twice as much as her father ever managed.
Populists sit in the parliaments of Austria, Italy, Spain and Sweden, and in the governments of Greece, Hungary and Slovakia. Mr Rutte only managed to hold onto power following elections this year after telling migrants to “act normal or go away,” something that no British prime minister would ever utter.
But in Britain, populism is dying on its feet. The British National Party, the only racists in our democratic system, won almost a million votes in the 2009 European elections but then saw their vote fall by 99 per cent. This was mainly thanks to Ukip, which having achieved its purpose, lost 85 per cent of its votes at the last election. Brexit is assured and Nigel Farage has been discharged, left to roam talk radio studios and the American after-dinner circuits.
Much as though I hate to admit it, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn also shows the system working as it should. Labour had run out of ideas and candidates and his new brand of radical Left politics certainly chimes with the frustrations of a young, propertyless generation.
Abroad, this led to the creation of parties like Syriza and Podemos. Here, our old-fashioned party system allowed for this renewal to take place within the official opposition.
So Britain now has no shortage of people shaking their fists at the establishment, threatening to bring the whole show down. But they are doing so from inside Parliament.
I was in Cambridge last night for the Tanner lecture series about politics and architecture – not as abstract a topic as you might think. When the House of Commons chamber was destroyed by a firebomb in 1941, there were calls to replace it with a modern, European-style semicircle where MPS could sidle up to each other and seek consensus.
But Churchill was opposed, saying a consensus within any political class poses a real danger to democracy and an invitation to populists. After all, he said, those semicircular European parliaments had not handled populism very well. “We shape our buildings,” he said, “And afterwards our buildings shape us.”
So they decided to keep a chamber that only has 450 places for 650 MPS – precisely to guarantee the kind of drama we are witnessing now with the discussion of the Brexit Bills.
The place is designed to feel like a bear pit. Visitors are always struck by its size, how it looks more like a film set replica than a parliament and how the politicians are lined up snarling at each other like animals on a leash.
I’ve seen one well-upholstered MP find a seat by walking up to a packed bench, aiming his bottom at a non-existent space then starting a descent: it seemed to work. It’s no one’s safe space. MPS who speak can expect to be shouted, bayed or laughed at, any mistakes mocked mercilessly.
Even a well-functioning government would struggle to maintain its dignity in such a system; a divided one has no chance. But that is the whole idea.
To see Ken Clarke deploring Brexit, then being cheered from Labour benches, is what Churchill had in mind when he said democracy needed these “episodes and great moments, scenes and rows”, ideally between MPS squeezed up together because such battle is “better conducted at close quarters”. Without the drama, he said, Parliament loses its hold on the public mind.
It’s this drama, even a sense of mutiny and bedlam, that denies populism the space it needs.
In her maiden speech a few months ago, the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch expressed it in a less Churchillian way. She quoted Woody Allen, to the effect that if sex was not messy then you weren’t doing it right.
The same, she said, is true for democracy: the fact that the biggest arguments are being had inside the chamber, rather than outside, is a sign of our system working as it should. And the vote for Brexit was perhaps the greatest ever vote of confidence, both in this political system and in the project of the United Kingdom.
And this is perhaps why public opinion on Brexit has barely changed since the referendum. The MPS were given a jolt and were never expected to take it very well. The idea was to start a long journey to reinvigorate politics and to protect the British political system, which represents the ultimate triumph of custom over logic.
Months, perhaps years, of awkward political readjustment lie ahead of us. It will be of no comfort to the MPS embroiled in such an agonising process, but it really is going according to plan.