Tag: Tory Party

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.

Missing the tide

We had Boris quoting Julius Caesar. He might have tried another quote, this time Cassius to Brutus:

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.’

Only we’re not. The European tide is turning in our direction, and what do we do – we hide in the sand dunes.

The politics of the Tory party mean that departing Europe (and, yes, I mean Europe, not just the EU) at precisely the wrong time. We’ve not been the only country drawing back from a federalist agenda. In Germany they’re having the same debate but not as yet with the same foolish consequences. Take Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, as an example. ‘Originally a European federalist in favour of an ever-close union (he) has concluded that the referendum signifies that Europe will not stomach yet more centralisation.’ (The Economist.) In Schauble’s own words, ‘Now is not the time for visions.’

On the other side of the argument we have members of the German SPD, Angela Merkel’s coalition partners, who want to push harder for closer integration: the president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, argues for ‘refounding Europe.’

The debate illustrates how much Germany is pivotal to the debates about Europe’s future. It would have been Merkel and Cameron, Germany and the U.K., pushing for a wiser, less hands-on, less intrusive Europe, and yet a Europe that took forward the European ideals of openness and cooperation.

Schauble would like to see Europe concentrate on a few problems, and solve them – good examples would be the refugee crisis, or a Europe-wide energy grid. And if the commission fails to act ‘we must take control and solve problems among our governments’, an inter-governmental not a supra-governmental approach’, moving power from the Commission to the Council of Ministers. (See The Economist’s Charlemagne column.)

This is the process we should have been a part of, working with Germany, putting federalist ambitions out to grass. Instead we have two characters, Fox and Davis, who’ve survived on the fringes of British politics for a few years, pushed into the limelight to negotiate an exit from an organisation that it’s transparently in our interests to be a part of.

The best outcome will be that we negotiate something pretty close to what we have now. But in the meantime we’ll have lost the opportunity to influence the EU, and we’re all the poorer for that.

A cabinet of curiosities

To quote my last post: ‘…the …outright lies which fuelled the Leave campaign….’

One of those who lied is the new Foreign Secretary. The French Foreign Minister recently referred to the lies of the Leave campaign. When asked for a response Boris Johnson referred to ‘the inevitable plaster falling off the ceilings of a few European chancelries’ in the aftermath of the Leave vote. I love the phrase, it’s glib, it’s fun, it’s evocative – and it doesn’t justify for a moment the mendacity of the Leave campaign, and Johnson’s own battle bus. Lies are lies.

Liam Fox and David Davis were always good for quotes in the Leave campaign. The former especially. Mainly of the ‘that’s wrong’ variety, when some hard truth came from an expert source on the Remain side. My guess is that Theresa May in giving them key positions (heading up Brexit negotiations and international trade) has said to them – ‘now deliver’. And it will be they, not the middle-ground compromisers who the Tory right would have slated in the event of a soft Brexit, who take the flak. It’s a the highest risk strategy imaginable. But otherwise her party will remain split. And for them Europe as an issue will never go away.

A resolution, maybe, of decades of Tory party divisions. At whose expense?

‘Take the flak.’ Someone somewhere sometime soon the line is going to find themsleves facing some very hard truths.