Month: Jul 2024

What might happen next in France?

The news from France last evening briefly pushed aside Emma Raducanu, Starmer’s whistle-stop journey through Britain, and Lewis Hamilton winning the British Grand Prix. That last one got a cheer from me, but the defeat of the National Rally (RN) in France really lifted the spirits. I’m not just a bit of a political junkie, I’m a foreign affairs junkie. What goes on in India, Russia, Germany, above all the USA, really matters.

Starmer’s election had already lightened the mood. Now the news from France: the National Rally pushed into third place in the second round of the parliamentary elections by the New Popular Front (NPF), with Jean-Luc Mélenchon France Unbound the lead party, ahead of President Macron’s Ensemble alliance.

Big questions were raised weeks back over Macron’s decision to call a parliamentary election in France. Various shades of madness. Rory Stewart on the Rest is Politics podcast was appalled. It made no sense. But to Macron it did.

I’m writing this from what might just be a Macroniste point of view. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. But I’m intrigued as to why he called the election.

He had a marginal, just-about-working majority but the RN had just won big in the European elections, and they had momentum. And it was building. Delay until the presidential election in 2027 and Marine Le Pen might just have been a shoe-in. France’s record as one of the strongest European economies and a leader in Europe would have counted for nothing. Maybe better to face the issue head-on now.

The assumption seems to be that he expected a centrist majority. A coming together of centre left and centre right. But did he? He will surely have factored in the possibility of a strong hard-left showing.

The Mélenchon left is France is well-entrenched and opposed to Macron on key issues like pension reform and retirement age. The financial markets see the NPF as ‘dangerous for the economy’. They may be right, but I don’t see them as an existential threat. They are not threatening the institutions of democracy in the manner of Victor Orban in Hungary. (Though Mélenchon has only recently come out with full-hearted support of Ukraine.) Also, the far right’s nativist agenda is anathema to the French left.

While I can’t see Mélenchon compromising I can see others on the left working with Ensemble to form a left-of-centre government. The aim of any such government should surely be to target the biggest issue, in France as it is in the UK – the sense of being overlooked, left behind, by a city-based, out-of-touch and (in France’s case – not the UK’s) overly technocratic government.

It may be that Macron had factored in something like the outcome we had yesterday. The European election may have convinced him that some kind of change of direction was needed. And he may indeed have no choice but to tack toward the concerns of small town and rural France, where the RN’s base lies. We will see how things work out over the coming days. Before the Paris Olympics get underway?

Beyond that – will it be chaos? Or disaster? In either case, giving the RN a free run.

The day after election day

Elections are emotional occasions. And referenda: I remember lunchtime drinks after a night watching (literally, as a teller) as voting slips were unfolded in 2016. The empty glass. This time, a chunky bacon bap and a full cup of coffee at the local village hall.

As for the big-timers. Exultation: arm-waving and Sweet Caroline if you’re Ed Davey, big big smile if you’re Keir Starmer. Glad-I’m-out-of-it chuckle from Jacob Rees-Mogg. (He may be fooling us.) Hiding on the age of the stage, in a state of shock, thoroughly deserved, if you’re Liz Truss.

But then there’s Nigel Farage. He’s going for Labour, he says. He thinks their support is wafer-thin. That he can win folk round with his rabid ‘Britain is broken’, left-behind, anti-immigrant narrative. He’s now in parliament. He has a mouthpiece.

I’d like to disregard him, but he is a superb maker of noise. A favourite word of Labour in its early days was fellowship: Starmer is part of a long tradition. Compare Farage. A man without a sense of history. He pitches one group against another. He feeds off hostility behind that over-wide smile. He’s at home with Trump. Half-truth comes easily.

Contrast key words in Starmer’s Downing Street speech yesterday: ‘stability and moderation’ (two words working as one), and ‘service and respect’ (again, two as one). Compare the provocateur that Sunak had become, pushed by party and media.

One interesting stat: more than half the new intake of MPs are new to parliament. In 2019 only 21.5% were new. In every way, we’ve a clean sheet. Farage and his small team won’t be the only newbies, though they may shout more. 

Also catching my eye. Larry the cat has now over thirteen years outdated five Tory prime ministers. The green of Angela Rayner’s trouser suit walking to 10 Downing Street. (She is Stockport. Her, and my, home town. I’m proud of her.) And Wes Streeting lost in a sea of nautical metaphors. Don’t sail when you’re tired!

Back to the essentials. How will Tories respond now? Penny Mordaunt, speaking when she lost her seat: make it a broad church. Robert Buckland and Grant Shapps are of similar mind.

Invite Farage in, match him with Braverman, and the Mail and Telegraph, and we will have division, and some pretty wild misreporting. If Starmer can push through his agenda, then Farage and the Tory far-right will have less and less to rant about. The far-right want there to be battle-lines. Play their game, put our liberal democracy into play, and the battle would become existential.

A Labour landslide – what next?

10.30, Friday 5th July. The day after an election in which Labour won a landslide victory. Mainly because the Tory vote imploded …

It’s raining as we wait for Rishi to say goodbye on Downing Street. As it was when he announced this election. It won’t dry up any time soon: this is a bad July. But, yes, good for Labour, though its share of the vote hasn’t changed from 2019. That’s remarkable. What matters, though, looking at it backwards, is that they haven’t lost voter share. They’ve held theirs, while everyone else, save for the Tories, has gained.

Yesterday’s vote was the ultimate anti-incumbent protest. No British government has, arguably, ever made such a mess, and they’ve kept it up over fourteen years. The electorate though hadn’t abandoned the Tories until Johnson partied and Truss went over the top.  Vast swathes then went in different directions, moderates to the LibDems and populists to Reform.

Underlying it all, and I’ve been doing a quick calculation with every result, and I was watching until 4am (lazy you might say – why not all night?), is the left-of-centre against right-of-centre vote, broadly defined. How do the combined votes of left and right stack up? On the left we have new Labour (mark 2) and old socialist, including one Jeremy Corbin. And we’ve the LibDems – wow! I didn’t expect that. And the Greens. And Plaid Cymru. They are all democrats, all part of a great tradition of evolving liberal democracy.

As for the right-of-centre, many will be died-in-the-wool Tories who simply couldn’t change their spots, or soften their deep-blue shading. But there are the Bravermans. And there is Reform.

How do the percentages work out? 52.6% for Labour, the LibDems and Greens, taken together. And 38% for the Tories and Reform. Others including the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Northern Ireland parties 9.4%. (Figures corrected from the first version of this post.)

I was watching those early results, from Sunderland and Blyth. The North East was so strongly Brexit and that left-behind, anti-sentiment now finds a home in Reform. It is those two descriptors – left-behind and anti-immigrant – that go far to define Reform.

What Labour has to do is take the North/South divide head-on. If they do their almost 35% share of the vote should increase next time. Labour has to re-establish that link with those old, and socially conservative, and indeed older-by-age working-class constituencies. It can still be a big-city party. Its performance will be judged, it goes without saying, by the performance of the economy, but also crucially by its attitudes to health and social care. They, even more jobs and housing and education and climate and indeed gender, will be the defining issues. Get them right, and so much else will follow. Not least a healthy and motivated workforce.

Stroud is my local constituency. High turnout, 71%, a Labour gain. Twickenham, my old constituency, LibDem hold on a 72% turnout. Compare Sunderland and Blyth, both 53%. There, Reform got their vote out. Vast numbers of others, maybe of the ‘they-are-all-useless’ persuasion, will have stayed away. Trade unions used to give voters an identity. No more. Devolving power and local accountability will help. But they must show tangible results. Otherwise, the Britain-is-broken, keep-the-bastards-out Reform mentality, the Farage farrago of false and half-truths, will entrench.

Look over the Channel. The second round of the French election is this coming weekend. I was listening to a radio piece about Langres, a rural French town with a grand cathedral, where I stayed several times on childhood trips through France. It has these days 25% unemployment. It votes National Rally (RN). The perceived gap between Paris and the provinces is, and is perceived as, vast. This gives the RN its way in, with all the anti-immigrant, find-a-culprit mentality that goes with it.

I don’t doubt Starmer and his crew are more than aware of all this. That’s what will make the next few weeks so interesting. It’s so crucial to get the direction right. France will probably have chaos before any resolution.  Macron has big ideas and big solutions, he’s been looking to the future, but, it seems, he hasn’t paid sufficient heed to the present. Starmer must take that hard lesson on board. Think small as well as big. Country as well city. Somewhere (where you’re rooted, where you’ve always been) as well anywhere (where you’ve left home, you’re metropolitan, you’ve been to uni).

Charisma helps. But then Farage has a warped mind of charisma. Being ordinary also has its big advantages.