{"id":2632,"date":"2019-06-08T07:30:25","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T07:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2632"},"modified":"2019-07-10T10:10:48","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T10:10:48","slug":"a-crisis-for-both-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2632","title":{"rendered":"A Crisis for Both Parties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Watching the Conservative leadership campaign would be an\nentertaining spectator sport, were it not that the winner will be prime\nminister, even if briefly. The exorbitant number of contenders and the range of\ntheir views makes clear what an achievement it was for Theresa May to hang on\nto office for as long as she did. True, the threat of ejection by her party\nforced her hand, causing her to draw too many red lines in the Brexit\nnegotiations and, ultimately, to fail to achieve a compromise with Labour. Now\nthere is open warfare, and it is hard to see how a new leader can achieve\nBrexit and prevent a split in the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This situation should be wonderful for the opposition, but\nactually it is full of pitfalls for Labour. The fear must be that, if the\nConservative party splits, a new centrist contingent will emerge and tempt more\ndefections by Labour MPs. This dual force is the great difference between the\nresurgent centre today and the Social Democrats in the 1980s. The SDP was a\nproduct of an internal battle on the left about how best to combat Thatcherism,\nwhereas the contemporary defectors could prefigure a wholesale change in the\nparty system. New parties can hope to build on new political cleavages: notably\na pronounced generational and educational divide. If these cleavages map onto\ngeography, as\nJennings and Stoker suggested they do<\/a>, then first-past-the-post voting will\nnot uphold the two party system. Instead, different pairwise battles will be\nfought in different parts of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looked at this way, it would seem that Labour has an interest\nin preventing a Conservative collapse, to maintain the existing duopoly. This\nis possible if Brexit, and the cleavages that go with it, can be made to go\naway. Then the structure of political competition can resume its left-right\nalignment, with each party making sporadic grabs for the high ground on\ncross-cutting issues such as immigration and climate change. This, surely, was\nthe driver behind the talks between Theresa May\u2019s office and the Labour\nleadership on reaching a compromise over Brexit. The framing was that \u2018the\ncountry wants us to get on with it\u2019; the subtext was a shared interest in\nsuppressing the divisions that Brexit has exposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those talks failed, and we have to question whether any\ncross-party deal could ever be possible. There are two ways of looking at it.\nWe can ask how deep the divisions really are, or how capable the parties are of\nmanaging them. Those who think that Brexit can be made to go away can point to\nabundant evidence that most of the country is not preoccupied with the question\nof Europe. This was manifest in the European elections, where 63% of the\nelectorate chose not to participate in a poll which was only meaningful if\ntreated as a referendum on leave or remain. There is a great appetite for\nreturning to the familiar electoral territory of the NHS and education. Even\nimmigration, which burst into salience in the first half of this decade and got\nentangled with EU membership, now seems to be dropping out of the headlines.\nSurely a compromise over a customs union could see off Brexit? John Erik\nFossum has provided a salutary word of caution<\/a> from Norway in the pages of\nthis journal. The EU generates a continuous requirement for decisions by its close\nneighbours \u2013 not (necessarily) because it is driving relentlessly towards\nfederation, but because it regulates economic relationships which change and\ndevelop. These decisions can be kept at a low political level, out of the\nlimelight, if the parties can agree to do so, but this demands a kind of tacit\ncooperation which has not been a feature of British politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, there is certainly an argument that the electorate\nwould like the Conservatives and Labour to achieve a soft Brexit and make it\nboring, but this would require some astute strategising by the duopoly. This\nbrings us to the other perspective: the parties\u2019 capacity to structure the\npolitical agenda along their preferred lines of competition. Here, things could\ngo gravely wrong. All eyes have been on the supposed failings of Theresa May\u2019s\nleadership, but they should have been on the state of her party in the\nconstituencies. It is active, energised and utterly obsessed with Brexit. It\nseems likely to favour Boris Johnson as leader, despite the risk that this will\nsplit the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent decades, commentators have bemoaned the\nprofessionalisation of politics, and the breaking of the close ties between\ncitizens and the political classes that mass party membership brings. But\nprofessionalisation brings with it a capacity to respond to shifting divisions\nof opinion and steer a flexible course towards assembling a majority. It may\nnot be attractive, but it is effective. It always used to be a great strength\nof the Conservative party that the leadership had this flexibility, as it had\nno pretensions to being a democratic party. The party existed because of the\nneed to take concerted action in parliament, and the role of party members was\nto support the parliamentary party, not to steer it. But since William Hague\nset about picking up the tattered pieces of party organisation after 1997,\nthere has been an idea of attracting members with the offer of participation\nand power: notably, the right to choose between two candidates for the\nleadership. In the 2016 contest, this right was vitiated by the decision of\nConservative MPs to agree on the \u2018coronation\u2019 of Theresa May, but a contest is\nunavoidable this time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facing the Conservative leader across the aisle is a Labour\nleader who has been the beneficiary of party democracy: indeed, Corbyn is\nliving evidence that the best-laid plans of promoting citizen participation can\ngo awry. If the new generation of Labour members mirrors its Conservative\ncounterpart by regarding EU membership as a defining issue, then the prospects\nfor restoring the old lines of party competition and relegating Brexit to a\nnetherworld of quiet politics are poor. That Corbyn has been able to resist\nthis pressure is evidence that Labour is a broader church than the current\nConservative party: pragmatic voices are trying to keep the party together for\na world beyond Brexit. But the forces of party democracy are against sustaining\nthis strategy for much longer.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the main parties are too democratic to strategise\neffectively, one remarkable implication is that parties with no membership base\nmay be the agile beneficiaries. The Brexit party exemplifies this. It has no\nmembers, only supporters, so no need for internal democratic processes to\nselect candidates or debate policy positions. How exactly it raised its funds\nis something of a mystery, but then the Conservatives have never raised much of\ntheir money from members either. The Brexit party is a product of the online\nage in several ways: not only does it rely on social media rather than\ndoor-knocking, but also the party itself is basically an online platform, with\nlittle by way of formal arrangements for convening meetings to make decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bigger picture is that Brexit may well be the trigger for\nwider party system change. This is not because it is the most important or\ndefining issue for the public, but rather because the two main incumbent\nparties are so constrained by their memberships that they cannot produce\nprogrammes with sufficiently wide political appeal to maintain their duopoly.\nThe party system is changing anyway, due to devolution. Scotland already has a\ndifferent party system to England; Northern Ireland\u2019s is completely separate.\nAt the next general election, we may see new geographical divides crystallise\nin England. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With hindsight, the outright victory of the Conservatives in 2015 was the aberrant result of the decade: coalition in 2010 and minority government in 2017 are a better signal of what is to come. Theresa May was accused of approaching the task of government as if she had a majority, but her need to maintain a dual mandate, as leader of the Conservative party as well as Prime Minister, explained much about her approach to Brexit. Critics say that she put the unity of the party before the interests of the country, but she did not have the luxury of ignoring the party. In a new era of multiple parties and minority or coalition governments, party members will have to play a lesser role. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives is prepared for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A longer version\u00a0<\/a>of this article originally appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>Political Quarterly\u00a0journal.<\/em>
<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching the Conservative leadership campaign would be an entertaining spectator sport, were it not that the winner will be prime minister, even if briefly. The exorbitant number of contenders and the range of their views makes clear what an achievement it was for Theresa May to hang on to office for as long as she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":2633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1390,1399,1405,1396],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1468],"class_list":["post-2632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","category-elections","category-government","category-uk"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/A-Crisis-for-Both-Parties-46267265354_6b8b0f9fbd_h.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}