Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: THE referendum vote to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 has created a deep political and constitutional crisis. The terms on which Britain would leave or whether it would leave at all were still unclear two years after the referendum vote. The only certainty is that the process of determining a new relationship between Britain and the EU will stretch long beyond the date, 29 March 2019, on which Britain is set formally to leave the EU. As Brexit unfolds, it threatens to unleash disruptive changes in British politics and political economy. Here, I examine what it might mean for the party system. Will it mark a watershed in British politics, producing lasting political realignment of both voters and parties? Or will the existing system survive? British politics has been in turmoil since the referendum, because this was the first time a national referendum had gone against the recommendation of the government and against the status quo. It opened a split between parliamentary sovereignty and popular sovereignty. For Leave supporters, the referendum issued a clear instruction for Britain to leave the EU. But it quickly became apparent there were many different ways of doing so, and no agreement on what the best option might be, even among Leavers. A large majority of MPs had voted Remain and were opposed to any option which involved a hard Brexit, while a minority, mainly on the Conservative benches, argued that only the hardest Brexit possible would respect the referendum vote. Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to solve the problem by calling a general election in 2017 to give her the space and authority to negotiate with the EU. But instead of an increased majority, she lost the small majority she already had and to stay in office, was forced to conclude a confidence and supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), which narrowed her options even further. The negotiations were slow and arduous, because Theresa May was trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, finding a formula which could satisfy simultaneously the contradictory demands of Leave voters, the polarised factions in her party, the DUP, the business community, and the EU. This created a series of acute policy dilemmas, and along the way she lost Cabinet ministers and backing from crucial parts of the Conservative coalition and the Conservative media. By November 2018, with only four months to go before Britain formally was to leave the EU under Article 50, it was still uncertain whether the deal agreed painstakingly with the EU would command a majority in Parliament, because of the opposition of the DUP and the hard Brexit wing of the Conservative party. How the parliamentary impasse over Brexit is overcome could have profound consequences for the party system. Theresa May has defined the choice as between her deal, no-deal or no-Brexit. In November 2018, it seemed quite possible that there was no parliamentary majority for any of the three and that the existing party system would buckle. One or both of the two main parties would split, and a new political landscape would emerge, either immediately through a realignment of MPs within the existing Parliament to create a new parliamentary majority, or subsequently after an appeal to the people through a general election or a second referendum. Theresa May urged her party to support her deal against the alternatives, arguing that a no-deal Brexit would cause substantial short-term damage to the British economy and long-term damage to the reputation and standing of the Conservative party, while no Brexit at all would not respect the first referendum result and lead to a populist nationalist backlash. A YouGov poll in the Sunday Times1 in July 2018 suggested that 38 per cent of those questioned would support a new party promising a hard Brexit, including many (24 per cent of the whole sample) who wanted such a new party to be anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. 33 per cent would support a new centrist party offering a soft Brexit or no Brexit at all. That does not leave many supporting the two parties which have dominated British politics for the last hundred years. The risk for the Conservatives and for Labour is that in the aftermath of Brexit, they lose ground to both a new centrist pro-European party and to a new Britain First party. Throughout her premiership, May sought to preserve the Conservative party as a party of government and to resist the new polarisation between Leavers and Remainers already apparent in the 2017 election. Her deal was a messy compromise which gave no one what they wanted, but which she and her allies presented as the only way to maintain the Conservative party as a pragmatic party of government,2 focussed on delivering a Brexit which would cause as little damage to the economy as possible, at the same time avoiding a permanent split in the Conservative party and a resulting breakup of the party system. Realignments of political parties are rare. They take place when parties split over a fundamental issue of policy, which either anticipate or follow realignments of voters and electoral coalitions. Party realignments can happen in three main ways: when there is a formal split initiated by the party leader, as in 1846 and 1931; when senior party leaders lead a breakaway from a party as in 1886 and 1981; or when one party is taken over by one of its factions, and MPs and members aligned with other factions drift away or are driven out, as in the Conservative party after 1906. In 1846 and 1931, the Prime Minister concluded that the national emergency was so grave that it warranted splitting his party and forming a new administration with members from opposition parties. Robert Peel in 1846 proposed the repeal of the Corn Laws but was opposed by two-thirds of his MPs. A minority followed him into a new government with Liberals and independents. The Corn Laws were repealed. The Conservative party did not form a majority government again for more than thirty years. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald formed a national government to deal with the financial crisis. Only a small number of ministers and Labour MPs followed him, but he was joined by the Conservatives and some of the Liberals. At the subsequent general election Labour was reduced to fifty-two seats. The second type of split and realignment happened in 1886 over the issue of Irish home rule, when Joseph Chamberlain and his supporters broke with the Liberal party and created the Liberal Unionist party which supported the Conservatives and eventually merged with them, guaranteeing a long period of Conservative ascendancy. In 1981, the Labour party descended into bitter infighting over its future direction, and twenty-eight MPs left Labour and established a new party, the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP formed an alliance with the Liberals, before ultimately merging with them to become the Liberal Democrats. This new centrist alliance came close to breaking through in the 1983 election, but although it almost matched Labour in votes, the first past the post system meant that Labour—although heavily defeated by the Conservatives—still won more than 200 seats. The Alliance won just twenty-three. The third type of realignment occurred in the Conservative party after 1906. The party leader, Arthur Balfour, had been trying to hold his party together in a compromise between the protectionist and free trade wings of his party. After 1906, with the party back in opposition, that compromise broke down and the party moved to a hard-line protectionist position. Local associations deselected MPs with free trade views, and many MPs and members defected to the Liberals. The parties became increasingly polarised in the run-up to the First World War. One route to a potential party realignment would be if a Brexit deal gets through Parliament only because of support from opposition MPs, forming in effect a new parliamentary majority. Or it could come about by breakaways from one or both of the two main parties. Or it could be the third kind, a steady purging of MPs and members, creating a much more polarised political system. This is perhaps the most likely. It is very hard to displace one of the two main parties in a system which uses a simple plurality rule in single-member constituencies. The only time it has happened so far was when Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two main parties after 1918, but there were special circumstances, particularly the enlargement of the electorate through the extension of the franchise. Other third parties have had bursts of success, but have not been able to break the stranglehold of the two main parties. The most recent example is UKIP. Despite its success in winning more seats in the European Parliament than any other party, and winning four million votes in the 2015 general election, it only won one Westminster seat, and that was a seat held by a Conservative defector. If seats had been allocated proportionally in 2015, UKIP could have expected to win more than eighty. The main impact of third parties has been to reshape the policies, leadership and electoral strategies of the two main parties, rather than to replace them. Could Brexit change this? In the last fifteen years, both main parties have lost support to third parties. Two of the last three general elections have resulted in a hung Parliament, and the one that did not (2015) only gave the Conservatives a very small majority. That said, and even though the first post-Brexit election in 2017 gave no party a majority, it did see a swing back to the two main parties. Very unusually, both Labour and the Conservatives gained vote share at the expense of smaller parties, particularly UKIP. Together they had more than 80 per cent of the vote, the first time this had happened since 1979. The reason why 2017 saw a turn back to the two main parties was because of voter realignment. The referendum had highlighted the new electoral coalitions which were forming in British politics. The Leave vote was disproportionately made up of voters who were older, with fewer educational qualifications, and who lived in small towns and cities and the countryside. The Remain vote came disproportionately from the young, the more educated, and people living in the big cosmopolitan and multicultural cities. The 2017 election became defined for many voters as a Brexit election, and people voted for the party they thought best represented their referendum choice. There was a big surge of Leave voters to the Conservatives: 70 per cent of Leave voters in 2016 went on to back the Conservatives in 2017 (only 56 per cent of 2015 Conservative voters voted Leave in the referendum). There was also a big surge of Remain voters to Labour, seen as the party most likely to soften or obstruct Brexit, which enabled it to win unlikely seats such as Canterbury and Kensington, while losing former mining seats like Mansfield. In the referendum, two-thirds of Labour voters had voted Remain, but two-thirds of Labour-held constituencies had voted Leave. Both party leaderships sought to hold their old and their new electoral coalitions together by being vague about what kind of Brexit they supported. As the negotiations dragged on, the compromise soft Brexit positions adopted by both party leaderships upset those who saw the Leave/Remain split as the big question on which everything else depended. The Conservatives are most at risk of splitting over Brexit. Their civil war on Europe has been going on for thirty years. David Cameron called the referendum to manage internal party divisions and blunt the rise of UKIP. He failed. The referendum, far from ending the civil war in the party over Europe, has intensified it. While the c.100,000 members of Conservative Associations were strongly in favour of Leave, a majority of Conservative MPs were not, and a majority of business leaders, the core interest group which supports the Conservatives, opposed a hard Brexit, especially one involving no-deal. But that is what the hard Brexit wing of the party has embraced. Without a majority after 2017, party discipline frayed and the Conservative government became vulnerable to pressure from its different factions, as well as from the DUP. May, however, has been an exceptionally stubborn leader. Refusing to abandon her Chequers plan, she clinched agreement with the EU in November 2018 on the legal terms of British withdrawal. She left Conservative rebels with only two alternatives: either they had to swallow hard and support her deal, accepting Michael Gove's argument that the important thing was to secure British departure from the EU in March 2019, following which the Conservatives could elect a leader to deliver a real Brexit; or they had to vote down her deal in Parliament and remove May as party leader, knowing that would provoke an irrevocable split in the parliamentary party and the fall of the government. Theresa May is a highly cautious, pragmatic politician, who will not want to be remembered for breaking up her party. But it is becoming very hard to see how the present Conservative party can be reunited again as a broad centre-right party, whether or not her deal is rejected. Its different factions cannot agree on what form of Brexit they want, in part because they cannot agree on what kind of future they want for the UK. But however the immediate parliamentary deadlock is resolved, a shift to a hard Brexit party seems inevitable once Theresa May departs, and the purge of pro-Europeans begins in earnest. Some Conservative columnists have already begun calling for deselections.3 The hard Brexit wing feels that time is on their side because as long as the members remain so strongly pro-Brexit, then the next leadership election, when it comes, will deliver a pro-Brexit leader. The Remain faction is in a weaker position, because any Remainer candidate for leader will struggle so long as the test—in the eyes of party members—of being a true Conservative is defined as supporting a hard Brexit. The Remain wing of the Conservative party is also the One Nation wing, and contains those most supportive of changing tack on austerity, investing in public services, and pursuing an industrial strategy to rebalance the economy. The hard Brexit wing generally favours more deregulation, a low tax economy, more privatisation, and further cuts in public spending. Their Global Britain envisages Britain more attached to countries in the Anglosphere, and especially to the United States, than to Europe.4 These differences on economic and social policy, and on Britain's place in the world, make the chasm in the party seem very deep indeed. Both wings see themselves as representing the interests of business and the economy. But for Remainers, the business interest they support is the one that has developed over the last four decades of EU membership, while Leavers are more willing to see corporate Britain as another sectional interest, and make no secret of the fact that many existing businesses will have to adjust or disappear post-Brexit, because they have become too dependent on their links with the European economy. They favour instead businesses and entrepreneurs who are focussed on the opportunities of global, not European, markets. If May is blocked by her party, she could follow Robert Peel and try to pass her deal, or some variant of it, with opposition votes. That would bring a spectacular realignment of British politics. More likely is the prospect that she is challenged or resigns and is replaced by a hard Brexit leader who will be unable to unite the party. The Remainers will either break away in a group or will be steadily purged. Conservative members and voters are now both strongly Leave. There would still be some tensions. A hard Brexit Conservative party would be led by believers in Global Britain rather than Britain First. Their priorities are free trade agreements and deregulation rather than the priorities of most people who voted Leave, which are immigration control and economic protectionism. If they fail to manage the expectations of their new social base, they might see support drifting away to the populist nationalist right. The Conservatives are a party of Brexiteers led by a Remainer, while Labour is a party of Remainers led by a Brexiteer. Labour was, for a time under Kinnock and Blair, solidly pro-European, but that changed with the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. His election revived the long-standing conflict between the parliamentary party and the extra-parliamentary movement. Attempts to depose Corbyn by MPs after the referendum failed, and the 2017 election consolidated his position still further. Despite Corbyn being a long-standing critic of the EU and voting against every European treaty, the switch of Remain voters to the Labour party in 2017 helped him defy the widespread expectation that he would preside over a Labour rout similar to 1983. A few MPs and some party members have begun to leave the party, but although there has been no organised attempt so far to deselect MPs, there has also been little attempt by the Corbyn leadership to maintain Labour as a broad-based party of the centre-left. The Corbyn project seeks to recreate Labour as an extra-parliamentary party of the radical, populist left rather than as a centre-left parliamentary party. The Corbyn leadership is keen to avoid a formal split, but a gradual purging of the party of its social democrats, similar to what happened to the Conservatives after 1906, seems likely. Within Corbyn's Labour there is a tension between Labour members, 85 per cent of whom support a second referendum on the terms of Brexit, and 90 per cent of whom would vote Remain in such a referendum, and up to a third of Labour voters, particularly in northern cities, who voted Leave. The Corbyn leadership and its trade union allies want Labour to accept Britain's departure from the EU and an end to free movement in order to preserve its old social base, but that is hard to reconcile with the enthusiasm of most party members and most Labour voters for a ‘people's vote’ and for staying in the EU. Labour's pro-Brexit stance may eventually disillusion many Remain supporters, and lose votes to anti-Brexit parties like the LibDems and the Greens. Labour wants to hang on to its core working class vote in Wales, the north and the Midlands, with a class message about jobs and services and a Brexit message that Labour will not go back on Brexit (particularly free movement). Combining this with a message that can win over centrist Remain voters will be extremely difficult. Large numbers of voters will feel unrepresented either by a hard Brexit Conservative party or a soft Brexit Corbynite Labour party. Many on the pro-European wing of the party may in time conclude that the party is no longer for them, while many Labour Leave voters may shift either to the Conservatives or more likely to a new populist nationalist movement if ‘proper’ Brexit is not delivered. What part might the Liberal Democrats play in any realignment post-Brexit? They are the one national UK party with an uncomplicated and unwavering commitment to Europe. They campaigned hard to keep Britain in, and ever since have been campaigning hard for Britain to stay in. But they suffered a big electoral defeat in 2015 which saw them go down from fifty-seven MPs to eight, undoing the work of fifty years. They paid a heavy price for being part of the coalition, and supporting austerity. Since 2015, there have been few signs of a Liberal Democrat recovery. Their position changed little in 2017 and they continue to flatline below 10 per cent in the polls. They seemed to be a natural for Remain voters from both the Conservatives and Labour, but that has not happened The former in the is of constituencies which voted Leave. long as Brexit the political the Liberal Democrats may struggle to win them Liberal Democrats want to a new of the to take on the in both Labour and the They the at the of but was only possible because has a system. In the realignment to create a new centrist is more but not But to be it might a formal split in both parties and the of a new centrist parliamentary If such a realignment it might reshape British politics as as in 1846 and Brexit is the that might make it but there are such a realignment might not in a a new centrist was to the to a parliamentary majority, resulting in the of a it might be away when it came to a general election. party are still their parties is the last thing most MPs want to for a of and political That is why they quite and quite The to the SDP in was in the end than many and the to UKIP in only two Conservative MPs. Will Brexit be Party leaderships will generally everything they can to a the of and interest are too and parties split, but only after every other has been Brexit also has a The UK is a union and the three smaller from In the referendum, voted Leave in with it being a for Liberals, Labour and all of which and voted Remain, by than Leave won in the UK. In all four main parties the Conservatives have become a in politics by being and Labour a Corbynite leader, but has so far made only The lost ground in the 2017 election, but it the political in politics. The of a second referendum that have but if there is a hard Brexit, this may the because it voters that is being taken of the European Union against their voting from in the referendum to the of as different from A future Conservative hard Brexit government in Westminster would make the of from the union more also voted Here, the divisions are very with including the Social Democratic and Labour party voting Remain, along with some and centrist The minority Leave vote was by the Democratic By one of those of politics the election in 2017 made the DUP the at the Conservative government to on, but only by its dependent on DUP This has the of the government in the negotiations over the Irish The EU of a down the Irish was by the DUP on the that it would from the of the the fact that has been since the was first set up in the But the Irish quickly became one of the most of the even though British public particularly among was to Irish Since the referendum, the of voters they now support Remain to per cent in May and for the first time some a small majority of in favour of a other also has a much to than to and will be by any new for One of the long-term consequences of Brexit may well be the of which bring the breakup of the UK union Brexit seems likely to deliver a more polarised and a more polarised electorate as both the centre-right and centre-left are polarised party are the of civil as was the in and the United Brexit has been but it has deep which may the future parties which One of its may be a for the populist nationalist right. The of were already before the Chequers UKIP saw its vote in 2017, and was then in leadership which reduced it to But following the Brexit of the Chequers UKIP saw a in its There have also been of to a new populist nationalist party which would be and pro-Brexit, on the which a of and living have against and against other It would have the backing of the and the populist nationalist in Europe. The two main parties have been very in to their left and and them within a coalition which has been dominated for the most part by But a new period may be in which that to the has lost control in the Labour party, and the hold in the Conservative party is highly Theresa May the last of the centre-right in the Conservative party. If she a hard Brexit Conservative party may be to to the populist in the like populist Europe, are opposed to economic as well as to social They want a more not an ever more If such a party in it will be a to a hard Brexit Conservative party still about and as well as to a Corbynite Labour party. Both may be forced to shift their on its Brexit is a process which will go on British politics for a long time to If it is it has the potential to the British party and split both main parties. It has already a electoral realignment and the it has may a realignment of political parties. Both main political parties are and with so far success to manage its
Source: The Political Quarterly
Author: Andrew Gamble
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2912048636