So, it’s
the New Year, and there’s a long, long list of things to get through. There’ll
be the French and German elections, the onset of the Trump administration in
the US, and policy questions galore. Will the UK be able to disentangle itself
from the European Union without a great deal of economic pain and wasted
bureaucratic energy? Will Russia be happy to trade a more muscular American
foreign policy for a more semi-detached stance from Uncle Sam in Europe? Will
rising interest rates slow growth? How long can China continue to fuel the
world economy? All these questions will be to the fore in 2017. For now, let’s
kick off the year with a review of where British politics stands right now,
shall we? We can take each party in turn if you’d like.
The
Conservatives. The Conservative government led by Theresa May (above) is in a
strange position. On the face of it, ahead of them lies a grim, grey task:
managing Britain’s exit from the EU. It’s uncontroversial to say that this is
the greatest task the British state has had to tackle since 1945. It won’t be
complete for many, many years, despite the likeliest exit date in formal terms
still being the spring of 2019. European law could take decades to wash out of
the British statute book; the country’s trade will only slowly adjust itself to
the new realities; the UK will probably want to avail itself of many EU
institutions, such as policing and student exchange, on an
indefinite basis. At the same time, some Conservatives are beginning to fret
that Mrs May’s undoubted popularity masks a fundamental lack of grip and
decisiveness. This might arise just from the inevitable hesitation involved in
the heavyweight decisions that face the Prime Minister. But if might also be
that her popularity is built on sand. She is not much of a public speaker,
isn’t very quick on her feet, and is said to be a control freak of an
administrator. Mrs May seems to shift about in a very cramped manner, inching two inches to the left, and then one to the right, before starting all over again. She hasn't moved very far from the spot since becoming Prime Minister. It's not particularly inspiring, to say the least, and there doesn't seem to be much of a guiding philosophy behind it all. All that bodes very ill for a national leader who will have to
manage years of hard negotiations in Brussels, all the while trying to bind the
wounds of a country that has become very divided over the European question.
Conservatives seem united for now, but can they really hold together
harmoniously as Britain leaves not only the Single Market, but – it appears –
the EU’s Customs Union as well? We seriously doubt it. Their real
salvation is their lack of opposition, which neatly brings us to the state of
the other parties.
Labour.
You come to this site for a historian’s insight into public policy questions,
don’t you? Well, here’s one: the Labour Party is in by far its most
serious crisis since 1931. It will probably survive as an institution, but its
future as a party that seeks to govern on its own at Westminster is now clearly
in doubt. Labour is being buffeted by so many crises, all at one and the same
time, that it’s hard to count them up. It faces a very long-term decline of its
relevance to a populace that increasingly experiences work as a series of
overlapping, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, even chaotic tasks. Its blue-collar
ethos, its union backers, the settled communities that might once turn out to
vote for the party en masse: these are becoming a thing of the past. On top of
those long-term trends, large-scale immigration and a reputation for financial
profligacy have both helped to loosen solidaristic bonds of loyalty and
fellow-feeling among an electorate now less disposed to vote for measures that might help incomers. Added to that, Labour have in Jeremy Corbyn a leader who
is clearly just not cut out for the role, and who the public have mainly taken
against. The week just gone, which was supposed to involve a New Year 'relaunch' of Mr Corbyn's 'brand', ran like an
episode of 1970s Doctor Who: its
terrible acting, frenetic plotline and mock gravitas came with an atmosphere of
affected and unconvincing semi-comic seriousness that made you want to hide behind the sofa.
Then, to add to that, Labour is now
afflicted by ‘Brexit and Trump’, those poorly-realised twins of impossible
choices and foreign policy dilemmas. Labour is being transformed into an
anti-austerity party obsessed with the domestic sphere at a moment when almost
all attention will be focused on foreign policy: on whether to reinforce NATO
and rearm if the Trump administration looks likely to abandon Eastern Europe,
and on the means by which the UK leaves the EU. That latter issue looks likely
to tear Labour’s two remaining electorates apart, since working-class northern
English towns and the Welsh valleys share almost nothing on this one with
liberal big-city urbanites. Labour is being hit by a serious of storms that add
up to a tsunami. It seems unlikely to hold power on its own again for many,
many years.
The
United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP’s new leader, Paul Nuttall, faces what
seems like an insuperable challenge. If the Conservatives have problems, and
Labour is in a really dreadful state, then UKIP isn’t far behind. Having lost
its very raison d’etre when Britain voted to leave the EU, it has been
undermined from within by the kind of vicious infighting that will happen when a party
loses both its compass and arguments in one fell swoop. Mr Nuttall has made a big
noise about ‘replacing Labour’ in its northern strongholds, which is
undoubtedly the right call given just how weak Labour is becoming: but it would
have been much easier to assault some of those huge Labour majorities if UKIP
had lost the referendum. They needed a sense of grievance, a cause, a
justification for their politics of anger: instead, Mrs May’s insistence on a
so-called ‘Hard Brexit’ is likely to steal lots of their voters, much to
Labour’s disadvantage in marginals where they face a Conservative challenge.
Their record in council by-elections over the last year has been terrible, and
they’ve got nowhere fast in Parliamentary by-elections such as those held at
Sleaford. Their poll ratings, although hovering at about where they ended up in
the 2015 General Election, are nothing to write home about. They’re going to
lose all their Members of the European Parliament when Britain pulls out of it
in 2019, and unless they start winning actual elections soon – at Copeland,
Stoke Central or Leigh, all Labour seats that should be in their sights –
no-one is going to take them that seriously as a threat under First Past the
Post. Mrs May seems to have shot their fox.
The
Liberal Democrats. Now the yellow team look quite a lot healthier than UKIP,
despite still wallowing rather lower than them in the polls after their disastrous
showing at the last General Election. This is mainly because, unlike UKIP, they
have a grievance to exploit, and can pose as the champions of the 48 per cent
of the electorate who voted to stay in the EU. In this age of political rage,
where shouting at all and sundry on Twitter can stand in for actually engaging
everyone’s brains, that matters a lot. They did well in the Richmond Park by-election, of course, and they’ve been running the board on almost everyone
else in local council by-elections. We tend to think that the latter phenomenon
is in part due to fired-up activists turning out angry Remain voters, often in
areas where the Liberal Democrats were previously strong. Their national
opinion polls have gone up a bit, but not very much – perhaps a couple of
points since the autumn, an increase well in line with previous boosts the party has received after its many by-election triumphs since the Second World War. Even so, that
all-Britain rating probably won’t matter very much when we come to a General
Election. The Lib Dems will have to focus all their fire on perhaps twenty
seats that they think they can realistically win. With the higher profile that
being ‘the party of Remain’ lends, with some fire in their bellies, a bit of
luck and some Brexit blunders from the government, they can make headway. Their
leader, Tim Farron - not, shall we say, a man hitherto overtroubled by the hallmarks of leadership - will be hailed as a liberal hero if he doubles his party’s
seat tally, an entirely possible scenario that looked barely even conceivable
just a year ago.
That’s
the survey done. In a 2017 that’s likely to be pretty bleak, Britain’s
political parties don’t have a vast amount to look forward to. Labour is fading
away like a wall of bold colours facing a sunny window. UKIP faces an
existential crisis scarcely concealed by the party’s bluster. The Conservatives
will probably govern for the next decade, but it might be a loveless and
grinding affair. The Liberal Democrats feel like the sky’s the limit only
because they’ve spent the years since 2010 locked in an electoral dungeon. Hey, you come here for the historical insights, not the cheer.
