Member State of Mind

Keir Starmer has been the leader of the Labour Party for a little under three years now, so you would expect the lineaments of Starmerism to be clear at this point. But it remains the case that Labour is better defined by what it's against rather than what it's for, notably against the waste and dereliction of duty of Tory government. Its poll leads are clearly an inverse reflection of the Conservative Party's unpopularity. Even where the Labour leadership's enthusiasms are evident, such as in its unwavering support for NATO or Israel, this is defined not in a progressive tone but in the negative register of a defence against the enemies of the West. There has been plenty of policy development under Starmer, at least over the last year, but to date this has produced little more than opaque vibes (Great British Energy) or simply reheated New Labour positions. Where Starmerism has become more concrete is in the institutional dimension: the iron grip on the party structure, the chilly relationship with the wider labour movement, and the forever war against the left.

In an amusing attempt to psychoanalyse Starmer (or at least the political persona), Oliver Eagleton highlights how the return of the "grown-up", much celebrated by centrists in 2020, has led not only to a crushing insistence that a significantly better future isn't possible (we must stop being infantile) but also to the loss of the élan that distinguished New Labour in the 1990s (the boring dad is now in charge): "Passivity is the surprising but necessary image of adulthood in this mode, where the ambition to grow up resolves itself negatively – in the absence of clear content – into a quest to punish everything identified as childish, and emulate others past and present who seemed like grown-ups. There is no programme beyond that, only masochism and mimicry." With the Tories now uncertain what they actually stand for (are tax cuts still good?), the consequence is the current sense of vacancy. As Eagleton puts it in respect of Labour, but in terms that apply more widely, "This is a mood, not a politics. It represents a failure to face the present, to grapple with its multiple crises by honing a political project to meet them."

A symptom of this vacancy is the growth of what we might call celebrity political populism, whereby trusted faces from light entertainment pick up the cudgels on behalf of an exasperated public. Carol Vorderman offers a recent example of this, not just in her "speaking truth to power" about corporate corruption but in the media's uneasy recognition that the "normality" they imagined both Starmer and Sunak would usher in hasn't returned. This "populist" approach has always disfigured the tabloids (particularly at election time - "I'll leave Britain if Labour gets in" etc), but it has infected the broadsheets and television now. This trend has run in parallel with another: the tendency of politicians to want to become light entertainment celebrities. There's always been a degree of crossover (Gyles Brandreth, Gloria Del Piero etc), and even a conscious toying with the boundary itself (recall Harold Wilson's post-PM stint as a chatshow host), but in recent years there has been a growing sense that politics is entertainment and that politicians are playing parts. That the new Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party wants to bring back capital punishment is just the latest example of a poorly-written character lacking in nuance.

This has made the establishment uneasy. Not only has it led to the elevation of clowns like Johnson and Truss, and the dumbing-down of political and economic reporting (cf the recent BBC review), but it has also undermined the UK's international standing as a sober and reliable player on the world stage, most obviously in the fallout from Brexit. Starmer and Sunak represent an attempt to restore dignity to the state as much as to their respective parties. An important aspect of this is the "masochism" that Eagleton identifies: the acceptance that the road ahead will be hard, that sacrifices will have to be made, and that we muist atone for past sins, whether the deluded optimism of 2016 or 2017. The jouissance of Boris Johnson - the idea that there are easy answers and that resolute will is all that we need (a belief shared by Liz Truss but without the same panache) - is to be rejected. But as Johnson's boosterism was little more than vibes, what this requires is a different mood rather than a political project, so the hazy "levelling up" is replaced by the equally hazy "devolution" and the same slogans ("Take back control") are recycled.

Though a Labour government is not a nailed-on certainty by 2025, the development of Starmerism as an institutional form gives us an insight into how the post-Brexit state will be refashioned. Perhaps paradoxically, Starmer's rejection of any immediate plans for rejoining the European Union give us a clear indication of just how much the UK will continue to be a "member state" in all but name. As Christopher Bickerton describes it, "It is certainly possible that whilst the UK has formally left the EU, it remains a member-state. This view would imply that the most distinguishing features of member-statehood are not to do with EU membership at all but point to something deeper, perhaps to the pathologies of the 21st-century post-democratic capitalist state. In this case, EU membership is of little real consequence. We are talking about a far broader category of statehood, one that encompasses much of the West and is tied to the globalization of the post-Cold War era".

To berate Starmer for accepting Brexit is to ignore that his government will be a continuation of an EU member state. It is this, rather than an early referendum, that will ultimately prepare the path to formal re-accession. And the reason for that continuation is not some elite conspiracy but the very nature of neoliberal governance and economy, in particular the commitment to the transnational institutions of the informal American empire, from NATO to the financial ties of the City of London with New York and the US Treasury. The Conservatives could agitate for a hard Brexit in the secure knowledge that they would never challenge the UK's position within that transnational regime, any more than they would seriously seek to revive the North of England. Labour under Corbyn offered the only, if tentative, path towards a different future, and that was promptly crushed. While Eagleton not unreasonably describes the remain cause in 2019 as "one of the most spectacular own-goals in British political history", it's arguable that it preserved more than it lost.

In other words, though the offical line of a Labour government will be that we have cleanly left the political union but will pursue economic convergence, the reality will be otherwise: we will maintain the culture of political union, increasing the commitment to other transnational institutions like NATO and the IMF in compensation, while allowing a mild degree of economic divergence (which will be driven by US as much as UK interests). That culture will be embodied in the state, which means a return to punitive social policy, the valorisation of business, and the need for sound money. All of this has been well-trailed by the Shadow Cabinet in recent months. Within Labour itself, there will be no let up on the delegitimisation of the left and the routine abuse of democracy. If the left no longer meaningfully exists within the party, it will be invented so that it can fulfill this necessary role as the permanent threat - the eternal impulse towards childishness in Eagleton's reading. Starmer, whether you like it or not, intends to become the father of the nation.

We The People

One of the more entertaining spin-offs of the short-lived European Super League has been the attempt to draw parallels with Brexit. For some rightwing leavers, remainers are hypocritical for refusing to join a project that would deepen European integration. Of course, this has brought the retort from liberals that what they're defending is competition in a free market. The left has been a little more realistic in focusing on the limited agency of fans and players, with many calling for the general application of the 50+1 "fan ownership" rule common in Germany (the reality isn't quite as democratic as this sounds - some clubs, like Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, are majority-controlled by companies, while RB Leipzig has restricted its membership to placemen). Where the left has been on-point is the focus on owners, who in the case of the English "big six" - all private companies - are mostly tone-deaf American capitalists or else oligarchs, sportswashing states and tax-exiles. Whether the UK government will have the gumption to legislate on club ownership is another matter. What I want to focus on here is not the prospects of a "fan-led review of the game" but the parallel between Brexit and the aborted league in terms of how we imagine "the people".

According to the Guardian this week, "The notion that the typical Brexit supporter was a working-class voter 'left behind' in a red-wall constituency or dilapidated seaside town has been upended by research that shows half of leave voters were comfortably well off". The idea that this "notion" has finally been "upended" is as risible as the claim that the Super League is an adjunct of the European superstate. It was obvious long before the referendum that the core leave vote comprised the middle classes of the non-metropolitan South and Midlands. Nigel Farage was popular with this constituency because he was representative. The focus on ex-miners and steelworkers in run-down Northern towns was always a distraction, which the vote distribution simply confirmed. For example, leave got 52% in the populous South East, mirroring the national split. Yet the discourse didn't change. Instead we got more safaris to interview grumpy pensioners in "hollowed-out" towns. This was partly due to the utility of this narrative in the emerging Labour civil war, but it also reflected a persistent failure to address the immediate causes of the growth of euroscepticism in favour of competing historical fictions. 

For the eurosceptic press, Brexit was presented as a matter of sovereignty. This both elevated it to the supra-political realm of patriotism and provided a historical justification based on freedoms that had supposedly been "lost" since 1973. For the europhile press, the dominant issue was the false consciousness of those "left behind" since 1979, misled in equal parts by lies about NHS funding and their own atavistic xenophobia. In both cases, Brexit was seen as the product of a secular trend that had been building for almost 40 years. This focus on the past occluded the more recent ratcheting-up of class hatred by those who had supported austerity after 2010. It also ignored the weaponisation of anti-asylum-seeker sentiment by both main parties, which started in the 1990s and peaked in the years leading up to 2016 with the fear of Syrian refugees. This was always a more emotive driver for leave than Poles picking potatoes outside Peterborough. As subsequent events have shown, from the government's points-based immigration system to the theatre of the "Channel Threat", gastarbeiter are welcome, but we refuse to accept any moral responsibility for the victims of conflict elsewhere (or, indeed, for the legacy of empire). This is not the attitude of the economically-stressed but of the entitled and unreformed.

The rightwing press had long established a link between the EU and a "metropolitan liberal" political culture that restrained the return of a more punitive approach to welfare, a more exclusionary ideal of citizenship and a more conservative social policy (much the same process can be seen today in Hungary, where the European Union serves as a proxy for this threatening other). With the UK now outside of the EU, this reactionary impetus has been diverted into a more generalised "culture war" in which the integrity of the nation is threatened by a miscellaneous cast of deviants, from truculent ethnic minorities through the disrespectful "woke" young to the ungrateful Scots. This cultural dichotomy is often correlated with educational attainment by political scientists and journalists, but that in turn reinforces the idea of a class division in which not having a degree is characteristic of a working class background as much as socially conservative values. In fact, the significant gradient is simply age. 

Today's middle-aged social conservatives came to maturity before the expansion of higher education in the 1990s. What determines their values is not the lack of a degree but their class position. Many are self-consciously middle-class, but perhaps more significantly many are now (or will shortly be) dependent on private pension schemes and so believe their comfort is associated with the continuing health of capitalism. To add to this picture, the last 40 years have seen a significant internal migration of the young away from smaller towns to the metropolitan cities, in particular London. This is usually held up as evidence of sorting: the liberal young head to the cities and add to left-of-centre vote-banks while the small towns become more conservative and inclined to vote right. But this obscures that the generation that quit declining towns in the 1980s are now approaching retirement. Many are confirmed Tory voters who believe they followed Norman Tebbit's advice to get on their bikes. In short, the Brexit division is more temporal than geographical or cultural, and outlets like the Guardian have been as guilty in misrepresenting this as the Daily Mail.

The farcically abrupt end of the European Super League has generated a lot of noise about what is wrong with the modern game, though most of the ills highlighted are precisely the features that the Premier League and UEFA are defending, so there's a sense that the revolutionary backlash against the ESL might well take the ancien regime with it too (but it probably won't). Chief among these ills is the dominance of billionaires and Gulf states among the club owners. This has made the issue intensely political, leading to the bizarre sight of Boris Johnson offering a "legislative bomb" to halt the project in its tracks, though whether this was motivated by a desire to appeal to "red wall" voters (notorious munchers of lower league pies), or to deflect the accusation of "greed" onto someone not associated with the government, is not entirely clear. But as with Brexit, there has been an attempt to identify a "true people": the real fans. Unfortunately, this has quickly taken on a xenophobic hue in which the global fanbase, whose engagement is necessarily limited to TV and online, are seen as somehow less authentic that those who can turn up outside a stadium with a homemade sign.

To be fair, this turn was less the work of parochial UK fans and more the consequence of the ill-chosen language of the ESL's masterminds. Early reports of their rationale spoke of a division between "legacy fans" and "fans of the future who want superstar names", while Florentino Pérez, the President of Real Madrid, went so far as to claim that the 16-24 year old demographic is being lost due to the current lack of spectacle in the Champions League. This was at least open about the temporal nature of the fanbase: that what matters is less your proximity to the home ground and more your interest in mediated galaticos and classicos, and that clearly has a generational dimension in an era when live attendance is financially or logistically prohibitive for most young people. Critics of the ESL project fear that commercialisation simultaneously "seeks to sever the game from its base in the community" and poses "an existential threat, not only to local leagues, clubs, players and communities, but to the very future of the game as a potentially unifying global force". The desire is to reconcile the national and the global, but there's a distinct air of "soft Brexit" about this. Ultimately, the question remains: who will be sovereign? 

If it's not to be emotionally remote owners whose only interest is profit or the political benefits that association with the brand brings, and if we're not to follow the German example of clubs as wholly-owned subsidiaries of multinationals (albeit ones with demonstrable community ties), then some form of fan-ownership will be necessary. But what would this look like? Barcelona is perhaps the most famous fan-owned club in the world. It has over 140,000 socis, but these have to prove a familial connection to an existing member (or wait, and pay a fee, for three years) and annual membership fees are quite steep at €185. As a result, it's mostly those who attend a lot of games who become members, so it's very much the Catalan middle class who are in charge. But this presents a problem when it comes to raising equity: even if every member punted in €1,000, this would barely dent the club's current debts of over €1 billion, hence the attraction of the ESL. The largest club membership is Bayern Munich at 290,000, which includes many who don't regularly attend games at the Allianz Arena (unlike most German clubs, FC Bayern has a nationwide following), reflecting the more modest annual fee of €60.

The ESL proposal may have been cack-handed, but it is going with the grain of history. Football is now predominantly a streaming product, and that presents opportunities for clubs to take a larger slice of the game's income away from the TV companies and to reserve more of the pie for the clubs that generate the largest audiences. This isn't going to change, so the imperatives driving the Super League proposal will only get stronger. But it also means that the fanbase is increasingly international, if harder to pin down. For example, Arsenal's total "membership" is 1.6 million, but this includes "digital-only" members with no ticket rights (probably at least 90% of that total). Manchester United have around 200,000 UK-based members but claim a global following of up to 659 million. In terms of having a vote over the management of the club, it is likely that any moves towards greater fan control will be geared towards the smallest constituency: those likely to attend home games. But that population has already changed considerably since the introduction of all-seater stadia and the steady rise in ticket prices. As with Brexit, this "populist" revolt is likely to be driven by, and largely benefit, the middle classes. And that probably explains Boris Johnson's interest as much as how his opposition to the ESL has played with the voters of Hartlepool.

What Next?

The Irish writer and political commentator Fintan O'Toole has built a nice sideline writing for the British liberal press. The key to his method is twofold: to situate his analysis in a broad Whig history where progress is undermined by reactionary conservativism, and to flatter his audience by reinforcing their prejudices and complimenting them on their own clear-sightedness. In his latest piece for the Observer, he lays the flattery on with a trowel. "Two huge things in the history of the EU would not have been completed in the way they were without the Brits: the single market and enlargement. The problem with both, indeed, is that Britain pushed them forward without quite understanding their political implications." Naturally, he implicitly excludes the readers of the Observer from the charge. As remainers, they always understood the political dimension. Indeed, that was what made you a remainer. In fact, O'Toole's understanding of the UK's relationship with Europe is wrong-headed and the implication of that, which I am happy to make explicit, is that too many remainers have never properly understood the economic dimension.

The first of these achievements is Margaret Thatcher's finest hour in liberal mythology (that is, the one that can be spoken of - we draw a veil of discretion over her defeat of the unions): "The single market is the EU’s great achievement – protecting it was, ironically, the overwhelming aim in the negotiations on future trade with the UK. It simply would not have happened, when it happened, if Margaret Thatcher had not pressed so hard. ... The problem was that Thatcher could never accept that the workings of a single market would have to be counterbalanced by common social, environmental and safety standards, with the political, legal and administrative capacity to enforce them". In a spooky parallel, Thatcher's most avid pupil suffers the same flaw in respect of EU expansion: "It was Tony Blair who later pushed for Romania and Bulgaria to be allowed to join. Here, too, the implications of a British policy were not really understood in Britain. It was not explained that free movement would mean more immigration from these countries. Or that the governance of a much bigger EU would inevitably have to be more closely co-ordinated".

Here we have an image of Thatcher as vigorous but blinkered and Blair as progressive but naive. The one oblivious to the consequences of her (necessary) actions; the other oblivious to the risks of his (excusable) idealism. The truth is that the former was far more sensitive to European geopolitics than this caricature allows - she was notoriously against German reunification, for example - while the latter was far more cynical about EU enlargement and expected it to put the brakes on ever closer union, a continuation of the strategy established under John Major. The key to Thatcher was her belief that the Single Market would lead to greater market coordination of the European Union - i.e. the dominance of the private sector - and thus a move away from the functional coordination of the Common Market, which reflected the postwar tradition of cooperation between systemically-critical industries across national borders and thus institutionalised the role of the state in economic planning. In this she showed the influence of Hayek and his classical liberalism on her brand of neoliberalism, which was always at a slight angle to the Ordoliberal tradition of Germany in which the state was a legitimate coordinator of the economy.

Likewise, Blair was merely continuing the long British tradition of seeking a balance of powers within Europe - now the vertical balance between integration and expansion, rather than the traditional horizontal balance between states - and doing so in a manner that simultaneously maintained the UK's role as a broker between the US and the EU (hence NATO expansion proceeded in parallel with enthusiastic British support). If Major and Blair were heavily influenced by Foreign Office thinking, Thatcher was less enamoured by that department's traditional postwar realism, and had been since the Falklands War. For her, the Single Market represented a significant step not only in transforming the European Union from a political to an economic project but also in establishing the dominance of the commercial dimension in foreign affairs. The relative decline of the FCO, which was made clear by the creation of the Department for International Trade in 2016, is a continuation of this mercantilist turn. That the DIT is headed by Liz Truss, an unreconstructed Thacherite, is quite appropriate.

The attitudes of Thatcher and Blair towards Europe were never opposed. For all the mood music - her xenophobia, his globalism - they were really two sides of the same traditional coin: a belief that the UK's interests were best served by promoting commercial cooperation and free trade in Europe while remaining as detached as possible from any political entanglements on the continent. This has been the strategy of the UK state since the late 18th century. The British empire was never profitable in isolation: for all the resources it generated, it wasn't sufficiently populated to provide a large enough market for British goods, particularly after the loss of the American colonies. The one populous part, India, could only be turned into a market by destroying much of its native industry, notably textiles, but didn't have the per capita wealth to support a significant market beyond cheap, low-margin manufactures. The UK has always relied on Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the informal empire of South America) to provide the purchasing power to sustain British industry. 

After the Second World War, the UK initially kept aloof from Europe not because it hoped to preserve the empire (in practice, decolonisation rarely interrupted access to resources) but because Europe had little purchasing power. The initial moves towards continental integration, notably in coal and steel, were aimed at rebuilding industrial capacity after the depredations of the war years. For Britain, whose industrial capacity was largely intact at the end of hostilities, this offered little immediate gain. The eventual decision to join the Common Market was prompted by Europe's recovery in the 1950s: the Wirtschaftswunder of Germany and parallel rapid growth in France, Italy and the Benelux countries, which continued into the 1960s. Charles De Gaulle's political spite delayed the UK's accession by a decade, but this didn't alter the trajectory of the British economy. By the mid-70s, manufacturing was already in decline and the service economy was growing. 

In this light, the UK's decision to join the EEC was not merely pragmatic but forward-looking, and the focus on both deepening the economic relationship and expanding its geographical scale was strategically sensible, even if it was combined with a continuing wariness over closer political and currency union. When commentators like O'Toole point to the UK's championing of the Single Market as some sort of paradox, particularly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, they simply reveal their own shallow understanding (or, more cynically, their pandering to the illusions of remainers). If we follow the logic of this, Brexit needs to be decoded as a conscious economic choice on the part of the British people, not dismissed as an atavistic spasm or the consequence of decades of political naivety. The most credible explanation has nothing to do with free trade or global markets, let alone the emergence of novel technologies and industries. It is simply a rejection of the neoliberal dispensation of the last 40 years: the relative decline of the North and Midlands; the low-wage, precarious labour market; the worsening wealth and housing inequality. This may be motivated in part by nostalgia, but it is none the less a vision of a better future. The question is: how do we get there?

The left has historically been more realistic about the economic dimension of the UK's relationship with Europe, however its willingness to articulate an alternative hasn't advanced much beyond the AES of the 1970s or more recent riffs on that such as the "foundational economy" and universal basic services. Today, whether the perspective is backward-looking, such as David Edgerton's plea for a "bonfire of national illusions", or forward-looking, such as Larry Elliott chiding Labour for its "inability to envisage what a progressive government could do with Brexit", there is a common tendency to be sketchy about the UK's future economic strategy. The dominance of the City of London is accepted, or even lauded as a "specialism", rather than acknowledged as the product of state design. Low productivity and poverty wages are attributed to cheap labour, rather than an investment strike that has persisted for two decades. Brexit restores the potential for a planned national economy, but planned for what purpose beyond bromides such as "a better country"? Labour's 2019 manifesto pointed towards a more coherent vision, but we can be pretty sure its next one will be much less ambitious.

If today marks a pivotal moment in British history, what's remarkable about it is how vague the visions of the future are. Obviously the Prime Minister wasn't going to provide anything beyond bumptious waffle, but you'd have expected something more concrete from the Tories than glib phrases like "global Britain" and "levelling-up". This vagueness, like the associated retreat to the comfort of the Thatcherite past, suggests a lack of vision. The government really does look like it's going to be making it up as it goes along, much as it has done with the management of the pandemic. Those who think that the agreement signed with the EU suggests the UK has little intention of diverging on standards or state aid are probably correct. There doesn't appear to be a plan to do anything other than maintain the status quo, with perhaps a little more cronyism and public investment theatre at the margins. For its part, Labour under Keir Starmer seems happy to have its agenda shaped by the Tories (which, as Edgerton notes, is its historic default). For all the noise of the last five years, the political implications of Brexit appear nugatory, and that's because there is no economic strategy.

Shifting the Blame

Peter Mandelson's recent admisson that hard Brexit is "the price the rest of us in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit" has prompted much soul-searching among remainers, not to mention eye-rolling among those who insisted that the People's Vote campaign was always as much about undermining the then Labour leadership as reversing the referendum result. Of course, blame for the Brexit outcome cannot be attributed to one individual or group. It is clearly multi-factorial. But while much of the commentariat has been united in its desire to spread the blame widely, this has introduced another form of bias: namely the belief that all are equally to blame, but some are more equal than others. Behind this sits the overarching theory that we've painted ourselves into the corner of the hardest possible Brexit because of extremism, whether Continuity Remain's demand for the revocation of Article 50 or the purity of the Brexit ultras. What this obscures is the serial failures of the political centre since 1975.

In that distant year, the Common Market debate was dominated by material concerns, such as the price of foodstuffs, rather than the more nebulous issue of sovereignty or (in the context of the era) our obligations to the Commonwealth. What was notable about the 2016 referendum was that material considerations were largely marginalised in the discourse through the (often justified) derision of "project fear" and the airy assurances that a continuation of existing trading relations would be simple and straightforward. Though Brexiteers emphasised the commercial opportunities that would accrue once freed from the burden of Brussels, this was little more than an adjunct to the central claim that the EU was an unreasonable constraint on British autonomy, a point made concrete in the current debate over fishing rights in which no one genuinely expects the home fleet to massively expand when we take back control of our territorial waters (we'll just flog more licences to the French). This was a debate about power and authority, however ill-conceived or mistaken in its assumptions.

The operation of that power was always more concerned with the domestic realm than the international. Both major parties long connived in the myth that the government's hands were tied by the EU, leading to the expectation that a post-Brexit UK will be characterised more by state activism than trade deals. Danny Finkelstein in the Times noted the contradiction this produces: "Being outside the single market while still striving to be economically successful requires us to free businesses from excessive rules and costs. We’d have to do it sufficiently to offset the disadvantages of being outside the bloc. In other words, we’d have to offer firms lower taxes, fewer rules and reduced labour costs. This, then, was the economics of Brexit. But the politics of Brexit was quite different. Voting to leave the EU would be, and has been, interpreted as a rebellion by those who felt left out of Britain’s increasing prosperity. Satisfying their demands would lead the country towards higher social spending, a higher minimum wage, more regulations. In other words, in the opposite direction to the economics of Brexit."

However, his implication, that an interventionist, pro-social state would be indistinguishable from the EU model, should be challenged. An AES-inspired Lexit may have been no less a fantasy than a freebooting Brexit, but the idea that a genuinely social democratic dispensation - as distinct from both the EU's ordoliberal model and the UK's neoliberal variant - is beyond the bounds of the possible is simply begging the question. This merely relitigates the referendum by insisting there was only ever, and can only ever be, a binary choice, which in turn plays into the narrative that the country was torn between two extremes. Unsurprisingly, coming from a centre-right perspective, Finkelstein pins the blame on the most vocal Brexiteers: "the people responsible for Brexit are the people who advocated for it. The people responsible for a hard Brexit are those people who led us towards it". But he is strangely coy about naming names, presumably because he is only too well aware that the chief advocates of hard Brexit were not Nigel Farage or the ERG but his own mates in the press.

James Kirkup,writing in the Spectator, also sees this as the product of radicalism, but in his view that label can also be attached to the People's Vote campaign: "But after [Theresa May's] early election disaster, there was genuine scope for her deal to pass the Commons on more than one occasion. ... The centre could have held. That it didn’t was down to the radicals on both sides who sought to destroy any common ground in pursuit of purity. The dance of death between the ERG and PV killed softer Brexit. Who led that dance? It doesn’t matter, because it takes two to tango, and it took two sides to destroy every attempt at compromise." Here we see the emerging myth, shared by both centre-right and centre-left (and even some ostensible leftists), that it was the fault of "radicals on both sides". The People's Vote actually received sympathetic press coverage even by pro-leave newspapers in 2018 and 2019, which reflected the split loyalties of the readership as much as the issue's utility in undermining Labour. That this impeccably centrist campaign, which pushed for a second referendum rather than outright revocation, has now been recast as "radical" is frankly bizarre.

Anand Menon and Jill Rutter provide a more comprehensive list of suspects in their long Prospect article, Who killed soft Brexit? Though this liberally spreads the blame, it does so by focusing on errors of tactical judgement rather than the inevitable culmination of a strategic failing that was decades in the making. So Theresa May is blamed for triggering Article 50 without a clear plan and for boxing herself in with her "red lines"; Jeremy Corbyn is blamed for insisting on opposing the government instead of supporting May's deal, while the PLP is accused of cowardice in not breaking the whip; and the Liberal Democrats and SNP are accused of deluded opportunism in commiting to a revocation of Article 50 and supporting Johnson's call for a general election. The charge-sheet extends to the poor performance of Britain's institutions (parliament, the civil service, the press), and even to the defensiveness of the EU. Some of these charges are justified: May's wounds were clearly self-inflicted and the smaller parties' opportunism gave the lie to their cant about "the national interest". But some is unjustified: the EU27 had every reason to be defensive given their experience of the UK as a negotiating partner, while Labour had good reason to believe after 2017 that it could bring down the government.

Menon and Rutter's conclusion is that a soft Brexit was there for the taking but also that it was a compromise that was simply too unpalatable for too many: "For all the various culprits that conspired to kill it off, it may be that soft Brexit always carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. At least some of those around the top table feared that it was in fact not the obvious compromise, but instead the “worst of all worlds,” where you are locked out of the room but still locked into most of the rules. Soft Brexit was something, in other words, that all sides could agree to disagree with". The reason for this antipathy was not simply the shortcomings of being a rule-taker, but the difficulty of securing a trade-off in a political environment unsuited to such pragmatism: "could a political mindset that prizes adversarialism over collaboration ever buy the inherently unsatisfactory compromise of a soft Brexit?" This theme was expanded on in their summary for the Guardian, which pins the blame on "our wantonly destructive politics" (amusingly, this shorter piece omits any mention of the Liberal Democrats, who were the most wantonly destructive party at Westminster in 2019).

Though they come from different points on the ideological spectrum, these interpretations share the belief that what has led to hard Brexit is the failure of the political centre to cohere and collaborate. But rather than taking this as evidence of the centre's intellectual poverty and incompetence, there is a tendency, particularly with Menon and Rutter, to view it as the tragedy of an antiquated political system that lacks both a consititution (which might have prevented the 2016 referendum being embarked upon so blithely) and the collaborative practices of proportional representation. This means that the hunt for the deeper historical roots of the tactical mis-steps of the last four years is diverted into the conventional territory of constitutional and electoral reform, something that many on the left have been happy to buy into too. Such reform may be necessary, but what the abstraction of Brexit boils down to is power over our own lives: for most leavers, autonomy is a more relevant concept than sovereignty. Providing the political class with more modern tools ignores that the erosion of popular autonomy has been virgorously pursued by that same class for over 40 years and, as the course of the pandemic shows, the question of power over our own lives remains central to popular concern.

I think Menon and Rutter are right that while a soft Brexit was plausible - and even popular, as they concede - it was politically impossible, but the reason for this has little to do with a preference for the adversarial (except in the limited sense of factionalism within Labour) or an inclination towards the wantonly destructive. British politics between 1992 and 2016 was characterised by triangulation and pragmatism, so the charge that collaboration and compromise were too alien really doesn't stick. A more plausible explanation is that the British political class lacked sufficient imagination to see the UK as anything other than either a wholly independent nation or a fully-integrated member of the European Union. The UK has always been a hybrid state, both in its constitutional form (the peculiarities of devolution and the anomalous situation of Northern Ireland) and in its geopolitical role as a bridge between the US and the EU. But it has managed to absorb both of these into a worldview in which Westminster remained dominant and the UK was seen as a first-rank global power. Soft Brexit would have required us to adopt another hybrid self-image, and one that couldn't be so easily finessed to satisfy our collective ego. Becoming Norway, or even Canada, was seen as too much of a step down in the world.

Starmerism

The Politics Professor Alan Finlayson thinks it's time to define Starmerism. His reasoning is practical: "Political “isms” give movements a sense of direction and purpose. They redraw the lines of disagreement and provide a compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here". In searching for hints about what Starmerism might be, he alights on The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley, the former Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Labour's recently-appointed Director of Policy, but what he finds is a notable absence: "Ainsley’s trenchant criticism of political and cultural elites’ 'systematic dismantling of working-class institutions' and 'denigration of what it means to be working class' is not matched by an analysis of economic elites. At times, her book treats shifts in labour markets and changes to people’s working lives and incomes as natural occurrences rather than things that are done by some people to others." 

I've not read Ainsley's 2018 book, but the impression I get from the limited reviews is that it is typical of recent politically-oriented, non-academic sociology in that it ignores actual social relations and history in favour of a dubious tale of cultural decay and fragmented identity. This may explain why it appears to have garnered as much interest on the right as the left. According to Mark Bergfeld, Ainsley assumes that the working class was historically homogenous and cohesive, and that the shift from manufacturing to service jobs, with a concommitant loss of pride and identity, has occured only in recent decades. The reality is that the working class has always been multifarious, while the service sector has been the largest by employment for over a century. It is also worth noting that the neat alignment of class and party affiliation that informs the myth of homogeneity was an artefact of postwar social democracy, just as today's alignment of party by age and education is the product of neoliberalism. 

This should be a clue as to how material conditions and social relations inform electoral choice, but Ainsley appears to be less interested in these than vogueish "values". Those she considers central to the new working class - family, fairness, hard work and decency - have a worryingly Blue Labour air about them, reinforcing the suspicion that the overlap between her and David Goodhart may be considerable. The lack of a structural critique may make Ainsley's analysis more palatable to the right, but it also risks treating the working class as the problem, with all that this entails in terms of policy coercion. What she has proposed is both modest and top-down (ironic given her critique of how the working class has been failed by political elites). As Bergfeld puts it in his recent review, "the book falls flat at times as it is by no means as inspirational as the Labour Party’s 2017 or 2019 Manifestos. Moreover, most of these policy proposals have been overtaken by the multiple crises of Covid-19, the environment and the economy". 

Ainsley's unwillingness to see class within an agonistic frame, and her consequent reluctance to point the finger of blame for the condition of the contemporary working class, may turn out to be more indicative of Starmerism than the policy specifics. As Finlayson notes, "Our leaders have harmed the economy by treating common interests as a hindrance to the wealth accumulation of a few, and neglected the institutions, people and professions most needed in a time of crisis. Alongside recognising these truths, Labour needs to offer a compelling explanation for why we got here, what we have to overcome, and who we need to be to create a better future than the overheating dystopia that we feel in our bones is already here". What has been notable about Starmer's public expressions since he became leader is not merely the narrowing of culpability to the political field and the focus on competence, but the absence of any story that explains "how we got here" in the manner of Thatcher (an overgrown state) or Blair (a lack of modernisation). Finlayson attributes this to Starmer's lack of a political career prior to 2015, but I think there are two other reasons for this.

First, a fundamental analysis that focused on economic injustice will inevitably end up sounding like "Corbynism without Corbyn", and it is now abundantly clear that Starmerism will be defined first and foremost as not-Corbynism. But for all its unorthodoxy, the policy platform associated with the former party leader was little more than mild social democracy and an open-mindedness to ideas circulating on the left. The unacceptability of that to the right of the party has limited Starmer's room for manoeuvre, but he has also consciously reduced the boundary of the permissible further by his embrace of conservative stances on emblematic issues such as pulling down statues. This isn't merely virtue-signalling to the readership of the Daily Mail, it is a reflection of his very identity as a lawyer. He is a proceduralist, hence his beef with the toppling of Colston was not that the statue should have remained in place but that it should have been removed legally by the council years ago. The second reason then is that Starmer sees himself as a defender of order. He may have progressive and reformist instincts, but he is, to use the vernacular, a "cop".

This reluctance to formulate an analysis of how modern Britain ended up the way it is extends beyond economic justice. As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted about the necropolitics of the Covid-19 crisis, "The Tories wanted to depoliticise the dead, and they've found a willing partner in the Leader of the Opposition. The strictly limited terms of Keir Starmer's opposition is a stress on Tory incompetence. A wider critique is off the cards: contesting the politics of coronavirus is limited to only nibbling at the edges". An even more obvious example of this arose at Prime Minister's Question time on Wednesday when Starmer decided to not question Johnson on reports that the government intended to legislate to give itself the authority to ignore parts of the EU Withdrawal Agreement. This was greeted as a masterly display of good sense by the same pundits who throughout 2019 condemned Jeremy Corbyn for asking questions on any topic other than Brexit, even after he acceded to their demands that Labour support a second referendum.

The reality is that Starmer avoided the subject not because he is a clever lawyer who adroitly evaded being labelled an obstructive remainer but because he is engaged in airbrushing the last two years from history, in particular the bad faith of the People's Vote campaign and the electoral sabotage of the likes of Alistair Campbell from which he, Starmer, ultimately profited. As Owen Jones (who was himself also culpable) ruefully noted, "as Brexit returns to the headlines and there is consensus in the commentariat that the opposition is cleverly sidestepping Johnson’s trap, let us conclude that that should have been everyone’s approach from the very beginning. We could have accepted the referendum, negotiated a close relationship, and pivoted back to the domestic issues that really matter." The apparent disappearance of Brexit as a live political issue confirms the suspicions of many: that the call for a second referendum would have remained a fringe interest had it not been leveraged by those keen to undermine Labour and remove Corbyn.

Keir Starmer's "clean skin" reputation helped him into Parliament in 2015 and it has now propelled him to the leadership of the Labour party, but he cannot pretend to have been elsewhere when the shadow cabinet argued over Brexit, not least because that was his brief, hence the collective decision of the liberal media to consign the history of "remainia" to the memory hole. It looks as if the electoral strategy is to continue to present him as both more competent than Boris Johnson and also unburdened by any socialist baggage. If British politics is becoming more presidential, Starmer's inspiration appears to be Barack Obama, and I suggest that the parallel would probably continue in government. Alan Finlayson is going to remain disappointed. There will be no "compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here", both because that would risk unearthing too many skeletons, from the activities of rich donors to Tony Blair's baleful influence, and because it would distract from Starmer's own backstory of meritocratic mobility and competent (and conservative) public service.

Boosterism

On the BBC's News at Ten yesterday it was claimed that Boris Johnson had achieved something "that people said couldn't be done". This achievement was to agree a withdrawal deal with the EU27, which was exactly what Theresa May had done before him. You could quibble that the claim referred to the apparent impossibility of squaring the trilemma presented by the conflicting demands of the EU, the ERG and the DUP, which did for May, but as Johnson has proved, this could always be resolved simply by stitching-up the least powerful of those three, which is what he has done. This rewriting of history on-the-fly has become something of a BBC habit in recent years, revealing the extent to which supporting the "national interest" (i.e. the government) has overtaken objectivity in the Corporation's reporting. You'd expect the state broadcaster to be biased, and so discount its interpretation to a degree, but the decline of scepticism at the BBC over the last decade has been alarming.

Despite "No deal is better than a bad deal" and "Do or die", a deal has always been more likely than not, given the associated risks and given also that positive support for no-deal is a minority in both Parliament and among the wider electorate (if not among Conservative Party members). That said, I confess I was one of those who thought that Johnson had decided to try and make the best of a no-deal outcome in early September, when he withdrew the whip from 21 Conservative MPs, though I didn't think he'd get to the end of October without an extension. Insofar as his administration has had a definite strategy, it appears to have been to accept that the government could not effectively operate with the current parliament. Repeatedly losing votes in the Commons simply confirmed this. Prorogation was therefore not just a tactic to minimise scrutiny, it was a way of suspending business to allow a focus on securing an 11th hour deal that would open the way to a general election.

This meant that any kind of deal was acceptable to Johnson, who is after all an opportunist rather than an ideologue. A deal that commands the support of the ERG, who appear to have been won over by the promise of a loose free trade relationship with Europe and maximum deregulation, could not be dismissed as Brexit in name only, thereby securing the Tories' flank against Farage and the Brexit Party. A deal that the EU27, and in particular the Republic of Ireland, can tolerate (and which in its essentials is the original offer they made over two years ago) takes some of the wind out of the sails of those advocating a soft Brexit, even if the eventual outcome will be a long way from EFTA membership. Alienating the DUP, on the other hand, has little in the way of a political cost, both because the unionists have few friends (and haven't used their moment in the sun since 2017 to make new ones) and because their utility as a prop for the government has gone.

The outcome of tomorrow's Commons vote on the deal is too close to call. Johnson's calculation is presumably that he can offset the loss of the DUP by minimising Tory rebels on both the remain and leave flanks (i.e. both the whipless and the ERG will largely fall in line) while picking up a useful number of pro-deal Labour rebels. My guess is that the latter will turn out to be fewer than the number bruited by the media, but I also suspect that the Tory rebels on both sides of the leave/remain debate will be reduced in number and that this may be sufficient to get the deal over the line (though you can bet if only one Labour MP votes for the deal, this will be enough for the Liberal Democrats and others to blame Labour generally). If the government is defeated, then the Benn Act will kick-in, but I get the sense that this very outcome, intended to ensure a soft landing, is increasingly being viewed with dread by many MPs who supported it but are keenly aware of the wider frustration in the country.

It is in the context of this frustration that the attitude of the BBC and the government-friendly press should be read. There is a not-unreasonable assumption that the population is sick and tired of Brexit, that it will accept any halfway tolerable deal to end the Article 50 process, and that it believes the sectional interests of Northern Irish unionists should not hold the country to ransom. However, the dominance of this set of beliefs in the minds of the media, including at pro-remain newspapers such as the Guardian, has led to insufficient scepticism about the substance of the deal and a tendency to characterise dissenting voices as unhelpful and out of tune with the popular mood. Whether this media momentum will be sufficient to cow MPs into supporting the government is open to question, but it highlights the extent to which brainless cheerleading has bled from the tabloids through the broadsheets to the BBC over the last decade.

The relationship of British Prime Ministers with the BBC has followed a distinct trajectory over the years. From the deference shown to the patrician Macmillan to the brief indulgence of Harold Wilson as a talkshow host, the common thread in the 60s and 70s was mutual respect as much as wariness. This changed, as so much else did, during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. Her assumption of a regal style exploited the BBC's institutional deference while aggravating the scepticism of many of its journalists, leading to a number of bitter clashes and the defenestration of Seumas Milne's dad. This antagonism was continued by Tony Blair, who cultivated a more presidential style but also insisted on the supportive role of the state broadcaster, particularly on the issue of Iraq. One of David Cameron's lasting legacies was to tone down this peremptory attitude by Number 10 while ensuring supportive appointments to key editorial positions to reduce the possibility of friction.

This move from antagonism towards manipulation hasn't shifted the BBC on the political spectrum (it's always been centre-right) but it has dulled its journalism. It's easy enough to highlight bias and bad editorial decisions, from the unbalanced Panorama investigation into antisemitism within the Labour Party to Newsnight's habit of giving a platform to unsavoury far-right figures, but this is to ignore the more profound degradation in the Corporation's willingness to hold the government to account. The consequence is the premiership of Boris Johnson. His ascent to the top job was not facilitated chiefly by the press, despite the mea culpas and recent fawning support. The key was the indulgence shown towards him by the BBC in his time as Mayor of London. It was this, rather than his over-rated appearance on Have I Got News For You, that made him a national figure. Nothing succeeds like success, and it appears his supporters at the BBC think that Johnson has now pulled out a plum.

Conspiracy or Cock-up?

It's looking unlikely that the government will be able to agree a revised withdrawal agreement with the EU27, largely due to the impossibility of reconciling an open border in Ireland with the UK quitting the EU Customs Union. This isn't a surprise: it has been obvious for at least two years. Theresa May's ploy of extending the backstop to cover the whole of the UK was a fudge that might have worked if there was a consensus among the Conservative Party to secure close alignment on trade and standards in the future, but as became all too clear during the tortuous progress of the Withdrawal Bill, the emerging consensus was for divergence, which made the backstop toxic for the leave ultras. Boris Johnson has been able to reconcile the different factions within the boundaries of the Conservative party's consensus, and also get the DUP onside, but this has only been possible at the cost of presenting a proposal that cannot be accepted by the EU.

It is against this backdrop that we should interpret the government's confirmation that it will obey the Benn Act, and the Scottish court's subsequent  acceptance of its sincerity. For all the imaginative talk of loopholes and Dominic Cummings' cunning, Occam's Razor suggests that Johnson intends to comply with the Act because he has no alternative. He may instruct a civil servant to sign the letter, and he will certainly publicly decry it, but an extension is now likely. As someone with a long track record of reneging on promises and shrugging off culpability, I doubt he will feel honour-bound to resign either. He will blame the opposition, and the 21 Tory rebels, for tying his hands; the EU, and in particular the Republic of Ireland, for being intransigent; and the institutions of Parliament and the Supreme Court for foiling the will of the people. This will simply be preparation for a general election.

Similarly, the impasse among the opposition over a possible caretaker government should be seen for what it is: manoeuvring ahead of that election. The claim by the Liberal Democrats that Jeremy Corbyn lacks support within the Commons is not merely a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is an attempt to discredit him with the electorate but without the need to actually critique his (popular) policies. Likewise, the SNP's willingness to countenance a Corbyn administration is part of their strategy to discredit the Liberal Democrats as a serious political party in Scotland. Labour's position, that Corbyn should head a government as the leader of the largest party after the Conservatives, is both reasonable and conventional, but it is also intended to highlight that the Liberal Democrats are more willing to tolerate a Tory government steering towards no-deal than enable a Labour one committed to a second referendum.

In reality, the Benn Act killed off the possibility of a caretaker government even as it made it more salient in commentary. Despite the wild talk of a coup by Johnson to frustrate the Act's intent, the central belief among his opponents has been that he will be obliged to comply. The Supreme Court's judgement against the government over its attempted prorogation of Parliament has also encouraged a perhaps complacent belief that the judiciary can prevent any chicanery that would lead to the UK crashing out with no-deal at the end of this month. The risk still remains, but inadvertantly encouraging the electorate to see Corbyn as non-threatening and constitutionally respectable now appears to be the greater danger in the minds of many. Should no-deal occur, it will be this centrist caution and blackballing of the Labour leader that will be most to blame.

The even more unlikely scenario of a "government of national unity", headed by a remainer and committed to a second referendum before an election, would be an oxymoron. Even if we assume that sentiment has shifted since 2016 - the polls suggest it has but only marginally - then the kind of centrist administration proposed by commentators would be objectionable to at least half the country - i.e. most leavers and many leftwing remainers. This is the very opposite of "unity". By definition, a GNU would only be worthy of the name if it were headed by someone prepared to countenance both leave and remain and if it committed to a policy that didn't discriminate between the two. The nearest thing to that would be a Labour government headed by Corbyn, both because of the party's even-handed policy and his supposed sympathies, so it looks like the GNU is a beast whose sole purpose is to avoid admitting that a Corbyn caretaker government is the only option if Johnson has to be unseated.

A remainer GNU is even more unlikely, not least because there isn't any consensus among remainers on what the referendum option pitted against remain would be. Would it be May's deal, no-deal, or an alternative soft Brexit? It's also likely that such a referendum would be boycotted by leavers as illegitimate regardless of the options. A remain victory on the back of a boycott wouldn't settle Brexit, instead it would embolden the Tories to commit to re-invoking Article 50 at the earliest opportunity. The most optimistic scenario would be a Labour election win on a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum where the options would be a renegotiated soft Brexit and remain, but the Tories might well still boycott this as presenting an inadequate choice. A Tory-endorsed third option could only be either May's deal or no-deal, but Labour would be unlikely to agree to the latter while the Tories could not unite around the former. The Brexit Party would naturally demand no-deal, so a boycott of the referendum would still be likely unless Labour were prepared to take the risk of adding no-deal to a three-way choice.

Once the extension is agreed to by the EU27 (which is almost certain - there is surely no Hungarian gambit and Macron isn't going to do more than grumble), there will probably be either a vote of no confidence in the government or the government itself will submit a short bill to call a general election on a simple majority ("Notwithstanding the Fixed Term Parliaments Act …" etc). In theory the Conservatives could attempt to hang on as a minority administration, reliant on the DUP and the support of the 21 ex-Tory MPs, but this would mean attempting to revive Johnson's moribund deal or admitting that a managed no-deal was now the preferred outcome, both of which would lead to the Benn Act part 2. Assuming the extension is only to the end of January, there seems little point in repeating the whole process over the next three months, not least because the "do or die" rhetoric will have lost its potency.

Johnson's strategy appears to be to go to the country on a people versus Parliament platform before the end of the year and hope that he can marginalise the Brexit Party among leave voters while the Liberal Democrats obligingly damage Labour among remain voters. The only way he can reliably do this is by committing to no-deal. The expulsion of the 21 rebels and the insincerity of the current phase of negotiations with the EU27 suggest that he mentally burnt his boats on this some weeks if not months ago. Though the conventional wisdom is that signing the letter mandated by the Benn Act will damage his credibility in the eyes of leavers, I suspect that he thinks he can brazen it out and even turn the issue to account by loudly complaining that his government was stabbed in the back by remainers. The forthcoming general election may well turn on whether leave voters see this latest delay as the product of an establishment plot or another chapter in the Conservative Party's history of executive incompetence.

Against The Clock

So what have we learnt this week? First, Boris Johnson is going all-in on no-deal. The absence of any substantive proposals to amend the Withdrawal Agreement is clear evidence of this. To that end, marginalising senior anti-no-dealers within the Tory ranks, like Philip Hammond and David Gauke, makes sense. Symbolically, it marks the death of "One Nation Toryism" and its replacement by a more distinctly nationalist temper, which will be seen by many on the right as the fulfilment of Thatcher's project. The risk is that this not only alienates Tory-voting remainers, but that it also disturbs centrist Conservatives who fear the associated social and economic baggage of a sharp turn to the right. As Thatcher discovered, they'll suppress their qualms and support you while you're winning, but they'll drop you sharpish if defeat looms. Johnson knows he is running against the clock, hence his determination to meet the 31st of October deadline.

Second, it's now clear that Johnson always intended to call an early general election. The lengthy prorogation looks less like a wheeze to ensure no-deal by blocking MPs' counter-measures and more like a plan to create a benign environment, in which the government is free from scrutiny in the Commons and can rely on sympathetic TV and press coverage, before the start of the official election campaign. That most of Johnson's public commitments this week have been campaign photo opportunities suggests that Number 10's plan is to use the infrastructure of the state for partisan advantage. The prompt removal of the whip from 21 MPs suggests that he always intended to terminate the current parliament rather than compromise to maintain the government's slender majority. Again, Johnson's brutality in defenestrating veterans such as Ken Clarke and Nicholas Soames makes tactical sense, even if it does risk alienating some party members and makes it uncomfortable for his media supporters.

The general assumption is that a more Faragist party will not only recover the reactionary voters who peeled off to UKIP or abstained under Cameron and May, but it will also win a significant part of the "white working class" vote, particularly in Labour's "Northern heartlands". Of course there has never been a shortage of reactionary working class voters, but they have traditionally cleaved to the Conservative Party in any case. What's doubtful is whether the Tories can widen their appeal to Labour voters for whom patriotism and social conservatism are part of a bundle with an interventionist state and well-funded public services. Media safaris to the North of England will no doubt continue to find plenty of "lifelong" Labour voters who will now back the Tories because of Brexit, but there is little evidence to date of a sustained shift in voting patterns. The Tories are widely mistrusted among working class voters and that isn't going to change overnight, particularly when they are led by a man with a reputation for deceit and treachery.

Labour's declining support in the polls since April has largely been the counterpart to a rise in support for the Liberal Democrats. Given the binary choice of the next election, assuming it happens before Brexit, there is likely to be a shift back to Labour. Likewise, the oscillation in Tory support finds its counterpart in support for the Brexit Party. Johnson's primary aim is to attract that party's supporters back to the Tory fold. Attracting Labour voters is a secondary consideration, even if it suits the media to emphasise it as part of the anti-Labour narrative. Johnson needs not only to focus the campaign on Brexit, he also needs to convince leave voters who want no-deal that he can be trusted to deliver. To that end, he needs to rule out the possibility of a last-minute deal with the EU - in effect a revival of May's deal - hence he can now only commit to no-deal. The opposition's emphasis on Johnson's untrustworthiness is tactically sensible, as it helps shore up support for the Brexit Party, but this could be neutralised if Farage formally endorses him as part of an electoral pact.

Fighting an election before the 31st of October would give Johnson momentum, while also stymieing the possibility of a counter-revolution within the Conservative party. The clarion call would be less "kick out the bums", though that would undoubtedly figure, than the trusty old demand to "give me the tools to finish the job". A later election would be more defensive: save Brexit rather than win a clean break. If Parliament enacts the Benn bill, which would require Johnson to go cap in hand to the EU27 and request a further extension, there is a chance that he will simply resign. A caretaker government under Jeremy Corbyn, which now looks more likely simply because the Tories would see it as in their interest to abstain in a vote of confidence short-term, would then have to take responsibility for the extension, thus getting the Tory leader off the hook.

This would be an outcome that would satisfy both Johnson and Corbyn. The former could campaign against a Parliament that "stole" Brexit, while the latter could point out that the roof didn't fall in while he was in Number 10 and could (bizarre thought) fight the election as the incumbent Prime Minister. Though Johnson's failure to deliver Brexit by the end of next month would be an embarrassment, an extension of the Article 50 process to the end of January means that he can still advance the demand for a majority big enough to secure Brexit in an election in November. The belief that he would be fatally damaged by this setback ignores that he is a politician who routinely rises above his own failures and is incapable of embarrassment (witness his response on Wednesday to the demand he apologise for this "letterbox" comments). Johnson has the ability to survive blows that would fell any other politician.

What he doesn't have is time. This week he has fractured the Conservative Party. While it would probably hang together were an election campaign underway, it will almost certainly descend into civil war at the earliest opportunity. Johnson's hopes of reconstituting the party with Farage's foot soldiers may prove forlorn. Once a no-deal Brexit is formally achieved, there is no guarantee that this constituency won't fragment and disperse as it did in 2017, and until Brexit happens it will remain a thorn in his side. Johnson needs Brexit done and a quick election victory, preferably in October, to give him the five years it will take to rebuild the Conservative Party and to defray the likely costs and compromises that will arise from our departure from the EU. If the election is put off till November, or even December, he risks the Tory civil war erupting during conference season.

Turn to Stone

The legal commentator David Allen Green has suggested that statues should be erected outside the Palace of Westminster to honour Gina Miller, John Bercow, Dominic Grieve and Yvette Coper for their "genuine regard for parliamentary democracy in the face of aggressive, authoritarian populism". As he made this suggestion on Twitter, he isn't being entirely serious, however that hasn't stopped furious leavers taking the bait and performatively replying with aggressive, authoritarian populism. The serious point here is the clash between popular democracy and the parliamentary kind, and Allen Green can certainly be criticised for being dismissive of the former, but what he is really talking about is the more recondite struggle between Parliament and the executive. This, rather than the will of the people, has been the defining feature of Brexit since 2016. However, his belief that there is an equivalence between the four named individuals in this regard strikes me as questionable.

For all Grieve and Cooper's bill-amending efforts, which have been extensively covered by the media and repeatedly trailed as the silver bullet that will kill the Brexit beast, we are still in a situation where the executive can use the Commons order of business to ensure a no-deal outcome at the end of October simply by sitting on its hands. The government may even be able to employ the misbegotten Fixed Term Parliaments Act to achieve the same end in the event of a vote of no confidence, prompting much wringing of hands over the possibility that the Queen might have to intervene and sack Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. While Miller's & Bercow's interventions, the first to establish that Parliament had to vote to invoke Article 50 and the second to allow a vote on an amendment to a government business motion, have both reduced the executive's prerogative authority, this shift in power to Parliament has not been built upon.

Contrary to excitable claims, MPs have not "seized control" of the Brexit process. What MPs have done is repeatedly block the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement presented by Theresa May, however that achievement reflects the government's loss of its majority in 2017 rather than any constitutional power-shift. While the new Johnson administration is in no better a position as regards support in the Commons, it has the advantage that it is (at least publicly) happy to accept a no-deal outcome. The idea that no-deal can be blocked, as opposed to merely deplored, by an amendment moved by Grieve or Cooper looks increasingly fanciful. Not only does the government retain control of the order paper, but potential Tory rebels know that a general election is likely within the next six months and therefore their parliamentary careers are on the line. With no Commons majority for soft Brexit, revocation or a second referendum, the benefit of another amendment that merely prolongs the agony is unlikely to outweigh the personal cost.

Though MPs have voted narrowly against no-deal in the past, they haven't voted for any positive action that would oblige the government to extend the Article 50 notice period beyond October or submit to a second referendum. The only realistic hope of achieving either, and thereby stopping a no-deal crash-out in the Autumn, is a vote of no confidence in the government. The realisation of this has led to the marginalisation of the People's Vote campaign and the semi-retirement of Alastair Campbell, which is no bad thing, but it has also produced the ridiculous idea that such a vote could, indeed should, lead to the formation of a government of national unity led by a backbencher such as [drum roll ...] Yvette Cooper. That this is an attempt to blackball Jeremy Corbyn is clear enough, even before the usual suspects in the media start imagining a cabinet featuring the likes of Heidi Allen and Jess Phillips.

What the feverish media speculation has tended to ignore is that there will always be enough Labour MPs opposed to such an administration to prevent one being formed. This includes not only those who actively want to see Corbyn installed as Prime Minister, but many Corbyn-sceptic Labour MPs who understandably believe that any Labour government should be preferred (it's in their job description, after all), and that's before you consider the historic connotations of a "national government" in the minds of Labour party members, the contradiction of a "unity" government that alienates half the country, and the risk that such an elite coup would further undermine democracy. With the leadership opposed, the suggestion of a coalition is necessarily a proposal to dismantle the Labour party, so it isn't going to happen. By constitutional convention and the terms of the FTPA, the Queen would have to invite Corbyn, as leader of the opposition, to form a government if Johnson's administration loses a vote of no confidence and cannot win another within 14 days, though this might become irrelevant if Johnson then moves for a general election.

Corbyn's opponents will insist that he cannot command the confidence of the House, and that is undoubtedly true today. Even if every Labour MP obeys the whip, he will still have to rely on the support of the smaller parties and at least a handful of Conservative MPs to form an administration and progress any substantive business on Brexit. The Liberal Democrats have already indicated that they believe him to be beyond the political pale, much as the DUP have, though given that they are a deeply dishonest and self-interested lot, they could change their minds. The SNP have made their quid pro quo clear, and Labour look likely to agree to it. A minority Labour government could survive if it were to commit to promptly securing an Article 50 extension and a conclusive referendum. Whether there should be a further attempt at renegotiation with the EU27, or what the referendum options should be, would have to be debated.

Alternatively, a Labour administration might simply secure an extension and then move for a general election itself (it might be obliged to do this anyway if a Commons majority cannot be found for the renegotiation proposal). The Tories would probably be secretly pleased with this outcome, as it would allow them to shift the blame for Brexit not happening onto Labour. The choice in such an election would presumably be between an immediate no-deal (i.e. the Tories would have to commit to terminate the extension early or leave themselves vulnerable to being outflanked by the Brexit party) and a Labour proposal to renegotiate and submit to a second referendum on a deal versus remain basis (i.e. excluding a no-deal option). There would be an informal agreement for SNP support (they'd support a minority Labour government in return for another independence referendum), but there would be no kind of deal with the Liberal Democrats.

The problem for Jo Swinson and her merry band of pranksters is that the electorate is sophisticated enough to vote tactically. This will help the party in Tory-Lib Dem marginals, where they can expect to pick up Labour votes (as in Brecon and Radnorshire), but will count against them in Labour-Tory marginals. They may end up with more seats on a barely improved total vote, as they did in 2017 (the first past the post system does sometimes work in their favour), but they will be less likely to hold the balance of power than the SNP. That said, the one possibility is a coalition with the Conservatives. That might look wildly implausible given their stance on Brexit, but they could possibly forge a marriage of convenience on the basis of a second referendum that offered the binary choice of no-deal versus remain. Given their congeniality during the 2010-15 coalition, and bearing in mind the ideological congruence of the Orange Bookers and the Britannia Unchained crowd, both parties might be able to live with such a compromise.

What this speculation suggests is that MPs in favour of soft Brexit or no Brexit should vote against the Johnson government on a Labour confidence motion and then support a minority Labour administration. That's the only realistic route to a renegotiation with the EU27, and also the only route to a second referendum that doesn't offer the no-deal suicide pill. The Liberal Democrat strategy is high-risk and reckless. It could ensure no-deal either by delivering an electoral victory to the Tories or by forcing a polarised referendum that might play out as an echo of 2016, despite the very different leave prospectus. This might mean tolerating Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street for some months, but Labour wouldn't be in a position to move contentious (non-Brexit) legislation and once the terms of the second referendum were agreed, the government would probably move for a general election to be scheduled (possibly for the same day as the referendum). There's a way out of this madness, but it doesn't involve a government of national unity and it will absolutely require the marginalisation of the Liberal Democrats. I doubt there will be a statue erected to Corbyn at the end of it, however.

Brexit and the Constitution

It might appear that the current apocalyptic tone in British politics is a unique and contingent result of Brexit, but the claim that "politics is broken" has a long pedigree, while the twin suggestions that the institutions of the state are on the point of collapse and the established political parties are about to be swept away by the winds of change are as old as the institutions of the state and political parties. But just as none of this is really novel, so we shouldn't assume that there isn't change afoot. The archaism of Parliamentary procedure lends an absurd air to contemporary events, but it also obscures the extent to which the unwritten constitution is being dynamically rewritten before our eyes, most obviously in establishing the right of the Commons to seize control of the order of business in extraordinary circumstances. The Queen isn't about to prorogue Parliament, but the fact that this could be seriously suggested indicates the fluid nature of the times.

That the constitution requires continuous but careful reform is the central, motivating belief of British liberalism. Though it has never dominated the parliamentary agenda to the extent that social and economic reform has, it remains the ne plus ultra of liberal parliamentarianism. No liberal administration, from Gladstone to Blair, has been complete without an attempt to refine and improve the constitution in a "progressive" direction. That modern initiatives, such as electoral reform or changes to the composition of the Lords, have often been ridiculous in both conception and execution is irrelevant. They serve a catechistic purpose in reaffirming both the parliamentary road to liberalism and the supremacy of the executive as the engineer of the state. While many have claimed that gay marriage was the signature liberal achievement of the coalition years, the failed 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote was just as symbolic, and would now be held as the crowning achievement of the Liberal Democrats if it had been approved.

The reconfiguration of British politics, i.e. the emergence of a centre party that will marginalise both Labour and the Conservatives, is obviously a constant desire of a certain strand of media commentary, but it is no more likely today than it has ever been. Just as Renew failed to make an impression in the Newport West by-election, despite the Guardian's hopes and subsequent claims that the 2017 return of two-party politics is now over, we can be confident that Change UK will fail to trouble the scorers come the next general election and probably won't even make much of an impact should the European Parliament elections go ahead in May (not least because they will further split the irreconcilable remain vote with the Lib-Dems and Greens). The realisation that Chuka Umunna is never going to be a British Macron, along with the clear indication from Tom Watson that the Labour right isn't going to split, has helped shift liberal expectations away from an insurgent third party towards the emergence of a pro-EU centre-right grouping from the ruins of the Conservative Party. As this would literally be business-as-usual, it has to be seasoned with the spice of constitutional reform.

Tom Clark in Prospect catches the mood: "British liberals have long yearned to rationalise the far-flung pieces of parchment and vellum, as well as all the half-forgotten precedents on which our governance often rests. The Brexit crisis ought to be the moment that finally chivvies us into getting around to it". One thing this ignores is the extent to which liberals successfully altered the constitution in the years immediately prior to the 2016 referendum, most notably in the passage of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act in 2011. It can plausibly be argued that the current impasse is both the result of the FTPA - without which the government's repeated defeat on its Withdrawal Agreement would have been taken as a vote of no confidence, thus leading to a general election - and Theresa May's cynical attempt to circumvent the Act to her advantage in 2017 by calling a snap general election, which backfired and produced a hung parliament.

It is amusing to note the liberal reservations about the Act now that it is in practice, particularly the prospect that a vote of no confidence might produce a new administration. As Clark continues: "The assumption has been that the first chance would go to the leader of the opposition, but is that necessarily right? -Tradition has it that the monarch should send for whoever is best placed to command the confidence of the House—which probably isn’t Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Just three years ago, his own benches voted for him to quit, and many of them continue to mutter he isn’t fit for No 10; Tories who agree on nothing else can all agree on that. In theory at least, it seems more plausible that someone like an Amber Rudd figure on the Tory left or Yvette Cooper on Labour’s centre-right would stand a better chance of securing the cross-party acquiescence required to sustain an administration through the emergency. But who is to say whether they will get a go?"

What this points to is an element of continuity in liberal thought: that democratic legitimacy is of less constitutional significance that parliamentary consensus. This is not just an objection to a left-wing Labour leader, i.e. a belief that the judgement of the PLP must trump that of the party membership, but extends to the Conservative Party as well: "But it is on the government side where zealous party activists are—now that May has signalled she’ll go—set to pick a serving prime minister for the first time in history. If a Johnson or a Rees-Mogg emerges, as they very well could, moderate Tory MPs could refuse to recognise them, leaving a minority government to crumble away. Under Conservative rules, the parliamentary party could soon table a vote of no confidence in a leader foisted on it by the voluntary party." That "foisted" is the essence of liberal constitutional thought: whatever we do, we must preserve the political settlement from the danger of democracy.

We are clearly in a period of constitutional flux. An "advisory" referendum has been recast as "the will of people" and honouring it has been elevated to the supreme duty of the legislature. A government that lost a parliamentary majority and has been defeated three times on its primary legislation remains in office and could legitimately stay there till 2022. The leader of the opposition has been blackballed not only by the government (recent events notwithstanding) but by the overwhelming majority of the media, retired military figures and even a faction of his own party's MPs, leading to the serious possibility that a general election victory for Labour could result in a literal coup. While a liberal "state of exception" remains unlikely, the heightening of rhetoric - from the hyperbole of Russian meddling to the contempt directed at leave voters - suggests that the style of populist authoritarianism could just as easily be employed by a liberal "strongman".

The likelihood that the UK will see an acceleration of constitutional reform over the next decade has increased. Brexit will have serious ramifications for the authorities and competencies of devolved government, and has already called the value of the union into question. The Supreme Court has become a site of political contest, and one that can only become more fractious as it takes on more responsibility in future. The House of Lords has once again proven itself to be worthless, unless you imagine that giving a platform to the hysteria of Andrew Adonis has been helpful, while the role of the Commons Speaker has clearly been enhanced for reasons that have nothing to do with John Bercow's personal foibles. The legislature has continued its centuries long push to encroach on the rights of the executive and the collective discipline of cabinet (and shadow cabinet) has been further weakened.

The 2016 referendum - which was perfectly proportional and ensured everyone's vote had equal weight, making it superior on at least two counts to traditional constituency elections - has led to a liberal turning away from popular democracy, which is now increasingly characterised as crude and divisive because of its binary nature. Don't be surprised if future referendums are outlawed without the "checks and balances" of citizens' assemblies and the censorship of political advertising on social media (propaganda masquerading as comment in newspapers will, of course, remain untouched). In other words, the constitutional consequence of Brexit is likely to be a redoubled effort to impose a managed democracy, which is ironic as it was the tendency towards this in the decades on either side of the millennium that led to much of the frustration and anger that would eventually find an outlet in the 2016 vote.