Change in British Political Culture

The Prime Minister survived a somewhat lame attack from Blairite and backbench rebels on Monday night. This should be no surprise to seasoned watchers of the Labour Party whose high level power struggles can easily descend into civil war.

MPs are currently in a lose/lose situation – but a civil war is still worse than a duff Prime Minister for their electoral prospects. Brown is now claiming that he will be decisive (aka stop dithering) and that he will rebuild the economy.

Brown has also made a lot of promises about inclusion, transparency and consultation but this was a meeting of the PLP not of the membership. A natural expectation must be that the political class will retreat into its laager and that it will continue to fail to connect with discontent out there.

The coup is over but public and party discontent simmers. It is unlikely that speculation about challengers will end. The next flashpoint is the Party Conference in September. After that, the Queen’s speech in October will be the last before a General Election.

Changes in British Political Culture

It is worth repeating just how bad it was for Labour:

• it lost its popular hold over Wales, Labour’s since 1918
• there is no Labour Euro-representation in the South West
• its share of the vote collapsed to 8% in the ‘prosperous’ South East
• it is now the third party after the Liberal Democrats in English local government
• it secured the lowest vote ever recorded by a serving Labour Government
• the vote fell under 10% for the first time since 1910
• it controls not a single County Council.

What is not often commented on is the degree to which a nation that was once dominated by two tribal mass membership oligopolistic parties with a small liberal Democrat rival and with virtually no nationalist presence (outside the peculiarity of Northern Ireland) has been transformed in the space of thirty years.

The UK is now a country of multiple parties and shifting allegiances. If the Conservatives appear to be the largest party, they are not so dominant as to become complacent.

At the next level down from the Tories’ uneasy dominance, we appear to have three competing parties jostling for second place, possibly as the permanent rival to Conservatism in a revived two party system.

Labour has fallen and UKIP has risen to give the Liberal Democrats an opportunity in theory but one which they show no sign of taking.

The LibDems should be the premier centre-left pro-European party, whittling away votes from progressive New Labour and the liberal wing of the Tories. History shows that they are rarely up to the task.

In reality, the question is whether Labour will recover (which may look less likely in view of the decision of the PLP to back the Prime Minister but is still the best medium term bet) or whether UKIP will create what is, in effect, a broader neo-nationalist challenge to the Conservatives.

If UKIP wins the race, would it drive the Tories to the centre (and to coalition) or force the Conservatives to concede the policy that holds UKIP together? The Tories could crush UKIP with just one policy commitment – withdrawal – but this would cost it business and liberal votes.

This is a bit of a mess. Apart from bread and butter issues, all four parties are dancing around Europe. Two hold the line for hard-line positions (the LibDems and UKIP) that then act as a check on the manouevrability of the two historic mainstream parties.

Meanwhile, the Tories and New Labour try to have their cake and eat it in keeping together their uneasy coalitions of pro- and anti-Europeans. A referendum could lance the boil but it would also expose the contradictions within the ‘moderate’ mainstream parties.

Rising Dissent From Below

Much of the debate centres on the four leading parties because the First Past The Post electoral system means that a leading party might command a majority in the House (and so control of the State) with a minority of the actual vote, let alone a minority of those able to vote.

This raises disturbing questions of legitimacy and even of right of popular resistance in due course, as well as the level of bitterness amongst the losers. FPTP is going to be under great strain if a political culture with multiple parties, each with real backing in the country, is really emerging.

This becomes more critical as a third level of party claims serious support for certain types of community yet cannot get full representation because it is too thinly spread.

This was the historic problem with the Liberal Democrats who were constrained in any radical resistance to the system by their absolute commitment to Parliamentarianism.

The two main contenders for this status now, the Greens and BNP, have a different view of the primacy of Parliament and they have ‘fundi’ wings quite prepared for direct action.

We have not mentioned the nationalists only because they are localized - but they are important. They offer a challenge that is centrifugal, constantly threatening to break up the Union.

Yet the new parties (there is a category of ‘others’ which is a breeding ground for yet further challenges) could undermine the historic liberal democratic consensus in Parliament through action outside it if they become more and more frustrated at lack of progress in their areas of policy concern.

This challenge is also highly regionalised. If the petty nationalist parties have their base in localities so do the mainstream challengers, but the most interesting assessment is where the second level parties are dominant and where the BNP, Greens and ‘Others’ have a voice.

The Tories now lead in every part of the country except the North East (where Labour still leads and the Tories follow), Scotland and Northern Ireland (which is sui generis). The SNP’s leading role in Scotland bodes ill for the Union.

But at the second level, Labour still leads the second place position in London, the East Midlands (only just), the North West, Yorkshire and Humber, Wales and Scotland. UKIP leads in the South East, the South West, the East of England and the West Midlands.

In other words, excepting the country’s global city, Southern Britain has moved sharply towards neo-nationalism while Northern Britain and the Celtic fringe remain Labour’s to win back. The Liberal Democrats seem not to be relevant to the struggle for second place in this analysis.

Where Third Level Dissent Lives

Clearly, there is some tension between the Tories' desire to be a national party and its need to manage Southern English euroscepticism while Labour re-builds its still strong Northern and Celtic base to return in force later. The trouble for Labour is that most of the people live south of the River Trent.

A decisive resolution of the West Lothian Question under a Tory Government could see English domestic legislation fall entirely into the hands of the centre-right for a generation, forcing Labour into moderate euroscepticism to survive South of the border.

This leaves the third level dissidents. The Greens are dominant at this level in London, the South East, South West, the East of England, Wales (but only just) and Scotland. The BNP is dominant in the East & West Midlands, North West, Yorkshire & Humber, North East.

In other words, we see here exactly the same basic divide between the political culture that was once fully dominated by the Labour Party and the one that was once fully dominated by the Tory Party.

In the traditional Labour world of England and Wales, the Conservatives are now back in force (at least outside the North East) but only (in part) because the BNP and others have undermined New Labour.

On the other hand, in the traditionally conservative South, the Tories are increasingly challenged not by Labour but by UKIP. Successful organised dissent to the rise of the Right is coming mostly from the environmentalist Left as a Green challenge that is chipping away at the mainstream centre-left.

This suggests that New Labour is losing in multiple directions, against centrifugal tendencies in Scotland, against a resurgence of one nation Toryism, because of anger about the condition of the white working class and because of anger over foreign policy and the increasing integration of the country into the EU.

But, as we shall see, the obsession with economic growth at all costs in the past has also created more focused popular anxieties over migration and the degradation of the environment.

This is a perfect storm for New Labour because we have not mentioned the low turnout. The vast mass of the population were not engaged to vote at all. They were indifferent or apathetic and even declined not to protest at what they appear to have seen as an unresponsive political system out for itself.

Economic anxiety does not appear to have triggered a positive vote but rather a negative attitude to a political class that is increasingly seen as not competent to deal with crisis conditions, indeed almost as an irrelevance.

Policy Implications

The fundamentals of popular disenchantment run deep. They extend far beyond single issue concerns.

We can boil down the apathy and the dissident votes, the failure to endorse Conservatism in a ringing fashion and the confusion over whether current government, liberal or neo-nationalist solutions are best for the country into two broad themes:

• the unresponsiveness of the current political system to the people
• anxiety and anger over the felt effects of neo-liberal economics.

New Labour is unlikely to be able to recover ground until it deals decisively with these two issues. It only has a year of power to do so.

Its current approach to the reform of the political system appears to be little more than tinkering with Parliament and an espousal of the sort of liberal constitutionalism much loved by armchair intellectuals who read the Guardian. This misses the real point of public anger.

Apart from the West Lothian Question which is an irritant, the public generally do not want a European super-state and they want to be involved in local decisions. They do not want a transmission belt State telling them how to live their lives. A written constitution is utterly irrelevant to this.

New Labour has still not understood the point. It is probable that Gordon Brown is psychologically incapable of doing so. The Tories have picked up on these messages and are likely to respond positively in the coming year, severely weakened though they are by their own image of financial rapaciousness.

It is the second issue, the effects of neo-liberalism, that is more problematic. The dissent against the system is still relatively small but it is clearly growing. Behind the BNP and Greens is a political free market under the rubric of ‘Others’.

‘Others’ received more votes in London, East of England, North West and South West than either the Greens or the BNP and they were competitive as a group virtually everywhere else. A combined dissent vote would have made a fifth party at second rank in its own right.

This dissent comes down to anxiety at two primary results of radical New Labour approaches to economic growth that have shunted aside ‘sustainability’ – migration and environmental degradation.

This is not the time to go into these two issues in detail but suffice it to say that many people who are concerned about migration and environmental degradation did not make the leap to vote for the BNP or the Greens but they are still engaged in these issues and they want action.

Sweep away the personality politics that obsesses the Westminster Village and you have a very serious policy crisis for the Government.

The voters are saying that top-down rule by ‘experts’ without an observable connection with locality and a failure to manage the costs of growth are just not acceptable.

They are saying that this Government must be replaced by one that can deal with these issues if it cannot prove its ability to handle the consequences of its own policies. Now that’s a tough call for New Labour.

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On Election Day 2009

Regardless of interest in UKIP and the BNP, the expectation today is that Labour will lose its significant presence in the South West, will see its dominance in Wales eroded and that both major parties may be placed under pressure from UKIP in London and the North West.

The 2004 British intake into the European Parliament operated marginally in favour of euro-scepticism (more so, if the Celtic component is removed). This margin is now likely to increase significantly. A dip in Europeanism and a moderate rise in nationalism both seem likely.

Analyses of the BNP vote in advance of June 4th seemed to suggest that it had been holding at 5% and to be attracting the votes of middle aged working class males of low educational attainment who were either unemployed or under employment pressure.

BNP voters were also to be found mostly in the decayed council estates of the Northern and Midlands cities where they face competition for resources from West Asian migrants and communities. This is generally Labour not Tory country and the national effect has probably been much exaggerated.

In fact, the bigger threat to the mainstream parties comes from UKIP, which is right-wing and nationalist but not racist. In the event, aesthetic and libertarian considerations are likely to shift the bulk of the dissident Right away from the BNP towards UKIP as the best means of punishing the establishment.

There is however a strong non-racist anti-immigration vote which is not to be assumed to be right-wing (except in liberal fantasies) by any means. It is currently falling disproportionately towards the BNP and UKIP but it is also a ‘main issue’ amongst perhaps a fifth of Tory voters.

There is a leftist dissident challenge to the right [No2EU] which has a socialist model of resistance to wage undercutting and service degradation but it is facing, in effect, a national news blackout in favour of the liberal mainstream. Its arguments are more complex and need time to communicate.

The truth is that nationalist concerns and the politics of ‘ressentiment’ have dominated the political agenda in the last year because that is how the mainstream establishment have wanted to play it. Legitimate concerns about liberal economics have pushed reasonable dissent sharply to the right.

What is interesting is that immigration may have grown in salience in the first decade of the century but, in the mainstream parties, so have issues of defence, foreign affairs and terrorism (the EU, of course, as an issue, disproportionately so for UKIP supporters).

Domestic service concerns (health, education and welfare) have been pushed into second place for a while, although they will surely return in force with tax rises and spending cuts. This may be a delayed legacy of Blair’s refusal to enter into dialogue with the electorate over the Iraq war.

This mood amongst the public is very hard to interpret. Poll findings may mean that the public has now no major difference in its thinking from the mainstream consensus on domestic policy (other than on immigration effects and the general issue of management competence in implementing policy).

However, the implication is equally that the public is highly polarized about, perhaps opposed to, the mainstream’s assumptions about Britain’s role in the world.

Serious questions are being raised even now about expensive interventions overseas, the effects of the war on terror on civil liberties, the close relationship with the US and participation in Europe - but there may be something deeper going on even than this critique of the current government.

Perhaps we are seeing a re-evaluation of national identity as a bulwark against the uncertainties of globalization. Although this is conventionally interpreted as ‘right wing’, it is not necessarily so and it may be that the liberal elite has still not yet come to terms with this turning inward under pressure.

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Public Anger and a British Revolution ...

The symbolic low point in the continuing scandal over Parliamentary expenses was a Tory MP’s investment of public money in a floating duck house for his country house pond – how very eighteenth century!

The actual low point for the prospects of MPs in general was when David Cameron himself ensured that Andrew MacKay would be forced to step down as MP at the next election. Mackay was a deep insider yet public anger ensured that rarity in British politics - a Party leader putting people before cronies.

The Nature of the Rot

The problem for analysts is uncertainty about what may happen next. This is uncharted territory. The modern British are notoriously placid when it comes to rioting and revolution. There are few mechanisms by which public anger can be translated into a forced circulation of elites.

But it is hard to exaggerate the extent of Middle English rage. This is not only about MPs but about an assumption that the whole of the political class (including MEPs) is dodgy and that the rot has extended deep within the higher administrative ranks of public service.

The House of Commons’ own civil servants appear not merely to have enabled but to have encouraged MPs to take everything out of the system that they could - under conditions of secrecy. Officials seem to have bent the rules to enable senior figures to make a few thousands here or there as ‘bunce’.

So it was not just MPs being greedy and pressing the point with a weak ‘executive’. but a Commons executive that seemed to consider opacity and skimming from the public to be appropriate and normal. This is why some MPs feel themselves victims even if the public has very little sympathy for them.

The Problem of Virtue

On top of this is growing evidence that, if not fraudulent, many very senior MPs, including some at Cabinet-level, were engaged in tax-avoidance operations. The rest of the population is about to be placed under increasing tax pressure to clear up political failures of judgement and scrutiny.

So, while the Government was attacking tax avoidance schemes for individuals and businesses outside the magic circle, some senior MPs were clearly on the make. This is regarded as morally unconscionable.

The issue here is really one of that most unfashionable word 'virtue'. Many critics know that they would not necessarily have behaved any better than the MPs under similar circumstances, but that is not the point. It is about who makes the rules as much as about whether rules were followed.

The public knows that MPs set up this system up solely for their own benefit without considering the interest of their employers, that very same public. The politicians had enabled their own moral degradation through lack of moral backbone - and they did so in secret.

The vast bulk of the general public works under rules set by others. It accepts that this is how the world works - through the rule of laws which they only make indirectly. They would have been fired in disgrace if they had tried the same rule-bending as their representatives. That is why they are angry ...

The Moral Issue

So, the crisis is not really about money or taxpayer rights (despite the best efforts of some very anally-retentive petit-bourgeois suburban Tories), it is about morality. Above all, it is about trust that the public interest will be served - the political and administrative class has failed this test appallingly.

For this reason, the politicians and administrators have a problem. It is psychological. Psychologists call it denial. Psychologists might also call the drive for constitutional reform as displacement activity. Recognition that there is a problem is the first stage to recovery.

Yet, a continuing theme in media coverage was that the politicians just 'did not get it'. They continued to defend themselves as 'operating within the rules'. They seemed genuinely shocked that their underhand ways of matching professional salaries outside politics were not regarded as reasonable.

And they still do not 'get it'. The public wants virtuous behaviour. That's it. That's all. Yet the politicians and administrators think the public wants a different system with different rules, and that a pale pink version of it, whether Tory reformist or liberal constitutionalist, will lance the boil.

This is not the time to predict the future. The whole crisis could blow over with some minor adjustments, much like those announced yesterday by David Cameron. The return of a Tory Government might persuade the public that 'virtue' will be returned to public life and that we can all go back to sleep.

That's a tough call for the Tories, the party of 'brown envelopes' under John Major and one whose MPs have behaved every bit as appallingly as a distinctly a-moral New Labour. It implies a destructive purge within the Tory Party in the context of some revival of neo-nationalist fervour in a recession.

This is why the Tories, and increasingly the centre-right media, are pushing hard for an election this Autumn. The debate can still be managed now as a need for integrity and reform. A decent PR-driven 'purge' and an economic down-turn might swing it for the Tories. But maybe not so easily in 2010.

Scenarios of Political Crisis

The crisis could equally merge with the greater election cycle and not be wished away so easily. We could see the ousting of Gordon Brown and the emergence of a new reformist centre-left response based on constitutional reform. This is implied by Alan Johnson's intervention at the weekend.

Under this scenario, the two equally disgraceful main parties (although the Liberal Democrats are really not much better) fight it out with different visions of national governance and economic survival on a level playing field. Any deeper anger gets expressed as a drift to neo-socialism and neo-nationalism.

This is a scenario that could see the return of Labour but it would scarcely be a Government with a national mandate. A vicious struggle for power and influence would take place in a low-performing economy whose young graduates have officially been advised to go overseas and work for a pittance.

And then there is the third scenario - a true circulation of elites, a revolution in all but name ... there is a West European precedent that should unnerve the existing political leadership in Westminster and, if it had any sense, in Whitehall - the Tangentopoli scandal in Italy.

The essence of this scandal was that it smashed the two traditional leading parties of the day and allowed space for new radical formations to appear, based on regional and populist anger. After a period, the Left and the Right then coalesced into new formations.

The current crisis is nowhere near as bad as that in Italy in the decades leading to the early 1990s. There is no major organised crime force sitting on the sidelines. Nor is the national security elite linked to a history of anti-Parliamentarism. Our Left was never Communist to the extent of pro-Sovietism.

But the 'mood' of the public at this time is as cynical as anything to be found in Italy. We are heading for a very serious and prolonged economic weakening. The UK is a powder keg of regional tensions. We have our home-grown petit-bourgeois anti-tax populism in UKIP.

UKIP Populism - The Importance of June 4th

As you drive across Southern England, it is UKIP that has the poster presence. A solid result for UKIP on June 4th will tell us whether centrifugel tendencies may unravel the tweedledum-tweedledee transfer of power between Tory and Labour that has dominated British politics for a century.

It is not the BNP that worries the mainstream (that's just for the papers), it is UKIP on the one side with its more measured neo-nationalist message and the continuing apathy, revulsion, cynicism and, finally, fission of the activist elements on the centre-left.

There have been suggestions that at least half of the Commons might be swept away by the electorate at the next General Election or through forced resignations and retirement before it. If this happened (and we are sceptical), this would be the most extensive clear-out of the House since 1945.

We are sceptical because, in fact, the MPs have not been so bad as has been painted. It is hard to oust or de-select MP on lack of virtue. Very few MPs cannot deal with their misjudgements with a bit of grovelling, some pay-back and a rhetorical self-administered slap over the wrist.

Perhaps 1-2% of MPs might be ousted on breaches of the rules, maybe more, but certainly not half. Neither Party Leader is strong enough to mount the sort of purge that would satisfy the public and, already, the Telegraph campaign is faltering against Party determination to hold ground.

Where Next?

The Italian scenario is merely the circulation of elites. Nearly twenty years on, the generalised corruption has gone only to be replaced by a right-wing dominated by an eccentric billionaire whose coalition includes those same populists of the 1990s and tamed fascists who can still promote anti-gypsy mania.

The Italian Left is a loose flaky coalition of euro-socialists, liberals and hard leftists who are merely recreating the old corrupt Socialist Party in jerks of deals that leave much of the Italian public cold. Democracy has survived, is probably healthier but it still not virtuous, competent or nice.

It is not hard to see the seeds of something similar in the UK. Our Government is widely seen as on its last legs with only a year of office to go. The elections on June 4th have been hyped-up as an opportunity for the BNP. In our view, the BNP is likely to be a damp squib.

The real weight of opinion is likely to be towards the Tories (on policy) and UKIP (on rage against the system), with Left voters staying at home or ‘going Green’. In other words, we may see a shift towards the populist, but not necessarily towards the racist, right wing.

How the Tories handle this shift after June 4th may dictate not only whether they will be the next Government but also whether they will be a Government with sufficient popular mandate. If they fail to handle their position well, they could be faced with a resurgent centre-left or system melt-down.

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