The Guardian view on Labour’s victory: now for the Tories to decide
One can read too much into any single byelection in Britain. Most pundits thought that the seat in Peterborough would be won by the rightwing populist Brexit party, which was riding high in the opinion polls after emerging triumphant from the European elections. National politics is focused on a Conservative leadership race revolving around how and when this country could exit the European Union. It seemed that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party would be swept away, not least because the vacancy was created by the jailing of the previous Labour MP for lying to the police. Yet Labour squeaked in with a candidate who had had to apologise for approving – inadvertently, she said – antisemitic material online.
What in part explains this victory against the odds is the re-emergence of a four-party system within the confines of a first-past-the-post election. Labour held on to Peterborough with a paltry 31% of the vote, the lowest share of the vote by a winning party in a byelection since 1918. Mr Corbyn correctly calculated that Nigel Farage’s Brexit party damages the Conservatives more than Labour. He was proved right. Those Peterborough voters who unambiguously favour an EU exit were split between Mr Farage and the Tories. Labour did lose votes to the Liberal Democrats, but not enough to scupper its success. Significantly, a shadow cabinet loyalist called for a second referendum on Brexit, although Mr Corbyn batted this suggestion away. No one can say whether this current electoral constellation will hold.
What will change is the nature of the Conservative party under a new leader. In the race to replace Theresa May almost all the contenders are rushing to consign her legacy to the dustbin of history. Almost every candidate is signalling an appetite for more public spending or more tax cuts or both. Even Mrs May wants to get in on the act, urging her chancellor to end austerity as she is on her way out. This has an obvious political logic to it. The party is too unpopular to do anything other than opt for change, and the public would finally see their politicians talking about the issues that affect their everyday lives.
But to get to such a position requires Tory leadership candidates to map a way out of the Brexit maze. This means persuading enough of the 313 MPs and then a majority of the 124,000 Conservative party members to stop indulging hard Brexit fantasies. Crashing out of the EU without a deal on Halloween this year would damage the economy, place Britain in thrall to Donald Trump’s United States and envenom relations with our nearest neighbours. If a Tory prime minister insisted on pursuing a no-deal Brexit then the question for other parties is how it could be stopped. With a Speaker who is prepared to be helpful to parliament and with Conservatives prepared to bring down the next government, there might be a route to block a damaging and chaotic exit.
The Tory party’s dilemma is whether to adopt the Brexit party’s push for no-deal and its culture wars in the hope of a sugar-rush recovery, or whether to head back to the centre ground while delivering a Brexit deal. The former would mean electing Boris Johnson. Mr Johnson is a vacuous and irresponsible dissembler whose Islamophobia is uttered with a wink and a smirk. The Tories would make a mistake to pick him, one which the country would pay for dearly.
Conservatives ought to take more time to evolve a new Brexit position. France’s Emmanuel Macron has conceded that leaving the door open for another extension of the deadline would be sensible to accommodate an outbreak of realism. With the decline of class, the electorate is becoming divided along lines of age, ethnicity and education. A new leader will be able to reinvent and re-anchor Toryism demographically and philosophically. Those are pressing problems for a party, but for the country the most important task is to reset its Brexit position by honestly confronting its negative consequences.