Exemplary Leadership

The elections for the European Parliament have long attracted eccentrics and grandstanders, but this year's crop of candidates are particularly eye-catching in their delusions of significance. This is for two reasons. First, Brexit has turned these elections into a large-scale opinion poll in which the candidates' beliefs beyond the central issue are largely irrelevant. Ironically, Brexit means that the European elections have lost much of their political substance. Second, the launch of two new parties with hopes of winning seats, the Brexit Party and Change UK: The Independent Group, together with the reformation of UKIP, has led to the scraping of some pretty odd barrels. A feature of this candidate pool, beyond the usual over-representation of fatuous business types, is the assumption that media prominence (or notoriety) is helpful. Though neither Claire Fox nor Rachel Johnson would accept that they are the same as Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad, their utility is all about followers and name-recognition.

This scramble for "personalities" might appear like another unfortunate by-product of Brexit, but it is part of a wider, long-term trend away from political substance towards style: from Tony Crosland to Jess Phillips. Though the political establishment has decried the "unicornism" of Brexit and the anti-intellectualism of Trump, that same establishment lauded first Justin Trudeau and then Emmanuel Macron for their "refreshing" style and their refusal to be tied down to boring old substance on issues such as favours for the rich. The roots of this clearly go way back, through Blair and Clinton to John F Kennedy at least, but there has been a noticeable inflation during the neoliberal era as government has ceded more and more of the substance of the electorate's lives to the authority of the market, and it is no coincidence that those politicians who argue for the state to take a more substantial role, such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, are routinely criticised for their lack of leadership style as much as their "dangerous ideas". Similarly, civic groups taking a lead - eXtinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg being recent examples - are decried as cultists or harangued for having the temerity to speak out of turn.

Exemplary leadership in the neoliberal era is often confused with appropriate form, in the sense of speaking the right words and making the right gestures in the face of contingent circumstance (consider Blair's supposed coaching of the Queen in 1997 after the death of the Princess of Wales). The praise for Jacinda Arden after the Christchurch mosque attack was a recent example of this, with her largely emblematic decision to tighten New Zealand's gun laws being a case of pushing at an open door rather than persuading the country to change course through compelling argument. When government has set out to persuade, it has often proved unequal to the task, either because it lacks real commitment (the tragedy of the Iraq War was that all bar a handful of zealots knew it was a mistake from the start) or is simply incompetent (the 2016 remain campaign springs to mind). What the media meant by Arden's "leadership" was her (no doubt sincere) empathy and representation of public sentiment. In contrast, Theresa May's awkwardness and lack of empathy isn't historically unusual (cf Ted Heath), but it looks more obviously deficient in a Prime Minister who lacks substantive authority.

Much of contemporary politics can be seen as a failure of leadership, but one that reflects a systemic contradiction rather than an unfortunate dearth of talent. Neoliberalism places the CEO on a pedestal but then insists both that politicians should be more CEO-like and that politics must cede to the market. The result is politicians who are business administrators with delusions of Napoleonic grandeur. May's particular failure reflects both the division of the country and the division of the Conservative Party. Her personal culpability lies in her belief that superficially uniting the latter was more important than bridging the divide in the former. Within Tory ranks, the remain/leave divide has morphed into a more fundamental liberal/conservative culture war. According to Nick Timothy, "With Brexit and immigration the defining issues at stake, the Tories have no future as a metro, liberal party. They have to become the champions of community and solidarity. In other words, the National Party". As with earlier varieties of "realignment", such as Blue Labour and Red Toryism, this trades in imagined communities but goes the whole hog to use the N-word, rather than just euphemisms like patriotism, and implicitly yokes the national interest to reduced immigration.

Talking of imagined communities, the poor calibre of The Independent Group of MPs at their launch, with unimpressive old hacks like Mike Gapes and Anne Coffey forced blinking into the limelight, was a sign that the embryonic party would struggle to make an impact once it lost its utility as a stick with which to beat Labour. While Tom Watson's decade-long image makeover hasn't erased the memory of his past sins as a Brownite enforcer, he has the obvious advantage over Chris Leslie and Chuka Umunna of still being part of the "struggle for Labour's soul", while they are now appreciating the disadvantage of not being personally popular among the natural promoters of "sensible politics" in the media, despite their ideological congeniality. Since their departure from Labour, the core members of TIG have failed to expand beyond an agenda of resentment and entitlement, and even seem surprised that they are expected to do the hard graft required of a smaller party to secure media coverage. Banging on about Labour anti-Semitism already feels stale, not to mention hypocritical in view of the evidence of bigotry among its newly-announced candidates for the European Parliament elections.

The addition of three Tory MPs hasn't helped, both because the inevitable tonal shift to the right has made the group even more loath to be pinned down on social and economic policy (beyond the implicit "no change") and because those Tories, Anna Soubry in particular, have also been lacking in anything approaching a political vision beyond "remain". Their unwillingness to express regret for austerity or to countenance voting down the current government is not just a reflection of their true conservative beliefs, it is an object lesson in strategic folly, passing up the opportunity to create a distinctive policy position between the two main parties while throwing away their limited leverage. It's as if they simply weren't paying attention to the DUP over the last two years. That Heidi Allen has been made interim leader suggests that the new Change UK party will be characterised by an inability to articulate meaningful change, with the result that its leadership will be at best anodyne and at worst tediously bitter.

The contrast with Nigel Farage and his new Brexit Party is stark. He may be a lazy chancer who flees from responsibility, but he understands what a campaigning party looks like and how to channel its energies and fortunes through a figurehead: the Farageprinzip, if you will (his decision to eschew a membership for subscribers is telling). That he is now emphasising both the "betrayal of democracy" and the need for more comprehensive change to the political system is astute as it offers a conservative radicalism that has potentially broad electoral appeal and also plays to the prejudices of many in the media (it is also amusing trolling of Change UK). Of course, this could never be translated into meaningful success in a Parliamentary election because any attempt to firm up its policy platform beyond Brexit and a nebulous critique of "the system" would result in the same tensions and embarrassments that dogged UKIP. Despite claims that it will finally unlock that elusive "Northern vote", the Brexit Party's role (beyond funding Farage's lifestyle) will be to act as a ginger group for the Conservatives.

As Nick Timothy's Telegraph article indicates, there is now an appetite within the Tory Party for a split. It is clear that around two-thirds of the membership would be happy with a "National Party" that featured not only Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg but Nigel Farage too. The parliamentary party is weighted more towards the liberal end of the spectrum, but many centrist MPs now know that preserving their political careers may require them to abandon the Conservatives and build a new support base in the form of a "metro, liberal party", in Nick Timothy's formulation. The obvious vehicle for this would be Change UK, which increasingly looks like a centre-right party and which would benefit from the focus that a full-throated commitment to liberal conservatism would bring (I suspect Leslie and Umunna could reconcile themselves to this). Were a major Conservative Party split to happen, it could potentially be terminal for the Liberal Democrats (that the collapse of both parties could be traced to the miscalculations of the coalition years would be some irony). The chief impediment to this scenario playing out is the lack of leadership, with both factions too riven by personal jealousies to easily separate and coalesce, but circumstances, most obviously a poor showing in the European Parliament elections, could force the issue.

The one party that currently appears to be in a healthy state in terms of its leadership is Labour, funnily enough. This isn't because Jeremy Corbyn is more cunning than he is given credit for, or simply because the party is on the right side of history, but because of its institutional preference for collegiate leadership. Viewed over its history, the "democratic centralisation" of the Blair years was the exception, not the rule. Corbyn has, perhaps more from habit than design, pursued an approach to leadership that is strong on genuine delegation, tolerant of disagreement and has little regard for stylistic affectation or the expectations of the media. This has been presented by both the wiseacres of the press and the Blairite rump of the PLP as weakness, division and a simple lack of suitability, which reflects both their overt hostility to Corbyn's politics and their ideological distaste for egalitarianism. The approach may well prove flawed in time, but over the last three and a half years it has been largely successful. David Cameron's "stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband" seems a long way away now.

Sanctuary

The cramped room in which Julian Assange has lived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London these past seven years can credibly be considered a "site of memory", in Pierre Nora's famous phrase, even if its historical resonance and layers of accreted history (and shit, apparently) are no match for Notre Dame de Paris. The latter has been described without a hint of irony by various commentators, from the far right to the centre of the political spectrum, as a symbol of "Western Civilisation", as if that term was free of any negative historical connotations. Few of these enthusiasts have focused on the cathedral's emblematic role as a place of refuge, despite Victor Hugo's best efforts on that score, presumably because asylum remains a touchy subject, not least in view of the same commentators robust insistence that dragging the dishevelled Assange out of his bolt-hole was entirely right and proper. The substantive connection between these two lieux de mémoire is, of course, the concept of sanctuary.

Though it has come to mean a place of safety, often for endangered plants or animals (such as "a cracking owl sanctuary"), it was originally a privileged piece of land where secular law did not apply. This didn't mean it was anarchic, but that ecclesiastical law and traditions dating back to Roman practice took precedence. In other words, the concept of sanctuary was itself a site of contest between church and state and could be seen as emblematic of a wider struggle over the ownership and control of land (similarly, "liberties", in the sense of areas enjoying commercial or social privileges, marked the contest between crown and bourgeois). The topic of land ownership is once more in the news with a report that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. This sort of eye-catching statistic is a reliable news filler both because it functions as an emblem of inequality and because it rarely changes. We can safely rediscover it every decade. However, that immutability has little to do with the persistence of inequality and owes more to the nature of land as a store of wealth.

The high concentration of land ownership in the UK dates from late Tudor times. Though the dissolution of the monasteries initially broadened ownership in the form of the "landed gentry", the emergence of an agrarian capitalism committed to "improvement", which was memorably delineated in Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origins of Capitalism, soon created a dynamic towards consolidation that would persist across centuries. Land was highly productive relative to other stores of wealth, it was increasingly tradable and rents were set by market forces rather than feudal convention. The agricultural revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain stimulated enclosure and the growth of larger farms, along with the dominance of tenancy over owner-occupation, but it also reduced the demand for agricultural labour, thereby helping to grow the larger towns that provided both a livelihood and a market for agricultural produce.

The industrial revolution amplified this process, both by reducing the proportion of the population directly dependent on the land, and thus having an interest in ownership, and by providing a safe store of wealth for the reinvestment of industrial profits that had the added bonus of providing social status through the "rinsing" effect of absorption into the gentry. Though this tendency would later be denigrated as a chief cause of 20th century decline - the bourgeoisie seeking to ape the aristocracy by buying country estates for the sake of prestige - it actually made perfect economic sense. While globalisation would lead to a domestic agricultural depression in the late 19th century, land remained valuable, not least because of the demand for new build homes and factories as suburban railways and arterial roads were built out beyond the still-expanding towns and cities. Though agricultural rents would remain depressed until the 1950s, land ownership remained central to wealth.

One significant change in the composition of ownership over recent decades has been the extent to which the public sector has given way as a significant landowner to corporations. This is not just because of privatisation (notably of utilities such as water and energy) and the relentless trimming of local government responsibilities and funding. It also reflects the recycling of redundant land following deindustrialisation (the London Docklands Development Corporation being a notable early example) and the tendency of corporations to buy land both as a safe asset and as a speculative investment in an era of high property prices, a development that has been fuelled in part by foreign wealth flowing into the UK (Russian oligarchs buying country estates etc). "Land hoarding" does happen, but it is often done by businesses with an eye to wider commercial opportunities rather than just builders looking to ration the supply of land suitable for housing.

The problem of land ownership is not its inequitable distribution across the population. Land reform, in the traditional sense of breaking up large estates and distributing freeholds to small farmers, hasn't been an appropriate solution for all bar the fringe of the UK since the seventeenth century. What reform has taken place saw land taken out of private hands for public benefit, whether in the form of nationalised coal mines, council playing fields or national parks (in 1979 the public sector owned 19% of the land - it now owns under 9%). The problem with the debate over land ownership is that it treats land as a fetish. Consider this from the Guardian report cited above: "The figures show that if the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre". We're clearly not going to revert to a society based on subsistence farming and recurrent famines, so this sort of statistic in irrelevant. The issue is clearly not the distribution of land itself. The problem of land is one of taxation.

Not only is land privileged through lower taxes on capital gains and dividends, and not only is it easy to avoid inheritance tax on large estates, but many landowners enjoy significant subsidies from the state. Land has become a sanctuary from taxation. While this might conjure up images of tweedy aristocrats posing in front of imposing country piles, it is worth emphasising that the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries do not wear wellies or own a Labrador. They are more likely to be City bankers or large shareholders in agri-businesses. That homeowners only account for 5% of land ownership should remind us both that developed land is a small fraction of the total and that the vast majority of "property" has nothing to do with bricks and mortar. The solution to the "land problem" is not initiatives to encourage more diverse ownership, or even a reversal of public sector sales, but the introduction of a land value tax (LVT). Likewise, the way to fund the rebuilding of Notre Dame is not to rely on the faux-generosity of individual billionaires but to tax them as a class.

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.

Institutional Failure

Too much of the commentary on Brexit has been personalised, from the all-too-evident limitations of Theresa May to the idea that Jeremy Corbyn has a magic "Stop Brexit" button that he refuses to push. This has reached a new peak of absurdity with an article in the New Statesman by Anthony Seldon, entitled "J’Accuse! The guilty men and women of the Brexit debacle", in which he liberally spreads the blame across the political class before insisting that "Britain badly needs statesmen of deep humanity and imagination to steer us into the next phase of our history". This holding-out-for-a-hero isn't surprising from one of Tony Blair's political biographers, but it is no less naïve than the calls of the ultras who reckon we could achieve a clean and beneficial Brexit simply through force of will, or indeed those who imagine that in its hour of need the nation is simply waiting for someone with the balls to revoke Article 50 to step forward. As ever, a focus on personal culpability and the associated dream of a saviour serves to distract from a structural understanding of the problem.

Seldon makes gestures towards a more systemic analysis, but this doesn't amount to much beyond the progressive shibboleth that the institutions of the state are no longer fit for purpose. In his view, this necessitates a constitutional convention "to determine whether we should be a parliamentary or popular democracy", though he doesn't explain whether he sees this as a citizens' assembly or just another meeting of the great and good, either of which would beg the question. He also argues for a reconstitution of the civil service, though he doesn't explain why this is needed, and he also revives our old friend "root and branch reform" of Parliament, as if this were some novelty in our political history. He provides no analysis of institutional failure, covering this void with the hyperbole of "national humiliation", and you can safely bet that his idea of parliamentary reform (which he doesn't sketch out) would be both gradualist and elitist.

The point about Zola's original denunciation of the Dreyfus Affair, from which Seldon takes his title, wasn't that it arose from the evil machinations of individuals, but that it was a systemic response that revealed a corruption within the military and political institutions of France. A topical parallel would be the handling of the Yorkshire Ripper case, which was detailed in Liza Williams' three-part documentary on BBC4 this week. Institutional classism, misogyny and racism, compounded by an obsession with prostitution and a lack of "respectability", led to Peter Sutcliffe remaining at large for far longer than should have been the case. While the incompetence of the "top cops" was all too clear, this was primarily an institutional failure exhibited in groupthink, a deference to traditional "coppering", and a hermetic culture centred on contempt for disadvantaged sections of the community.

That the same features were to be found in many cases of inept policing and miscarriages of justice explains why the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Steven Lawrence was able to make a charge of institutional racism stick. The police had never denied that racism was part of its "canteen culture", but they had denied that it was part of the institutional fabric, preferring to blame "rotten apples". What the various retrospective critiques of failures such as the Birmingham Six and Hillsborough showed is that the police were so institutionally biased as to be functionally ineffective in respect of their duties. They were, in simple terms, incompetent. What other scandals such as the policing of the Miners' Strike showed was that the police were politically compromised in the 1980s and had consequently lost the trust of much of the public. They were, in simple terms, partisan. These two aspects - competence and neutrality - are a useful way of thinking about institutional failure in a system based on public trust, as they often feed on each other (for example, the increasing partisanship of the BBC's political coverage is matched by its growing incompetence).

A better question to ask rather than "Who is to blame?" would be: is Brexit an institutional failure and/or an institutional crisis? In other words, was Brexit the result of a dysfunctional state and political system, or is it a black swan event that the institutions of the state have proven incapable of dealing with, or indeed both? To put it another way, is Brexit like the Dreyfus affair: a symptom of something rotten in the UK state and thus an inevitable development that couldn't be avoided, no matter how adroit our politicians? Or is it like the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation: evidence that Parliament, government and Whitehall are constitutionally incapable of responding to a crisis brought about by an exceptional event, in this case an exercise in popular sovereignty that failed to align with the interests of the establishment?

The central focus of criticism over the execution of Brexit has been the twinned failures of Theresa May's administration to pass its Withdrawal bill (defeated for the third time today) and the failure of the House of Commons to agree an alternative (though it's possible that this might still happen next week). However, neither actually suggests an institutional failure, and you could argue both indicate institutional good health as the legislature furthers its centuries-old desire to constrain the executive and individual MPs insist on their independent consciences. Another government might well have made a better fist of the job, particularly if it had not been dependent on the DUP and could therefore have agreed an exceptional status for Northern Ireland, while a different composition in the Commons might have quickly produced a consensus on a customs union-based soft Brexit or perhaps EFTA membership. The current impasse is contingent, being largely the result of the 2017 general election. Theresa May has driven Brexit into the ditch, but that was not inevitable.

A more plausible argument is that Brexit was the result of tensions arising from a strategy of hybrid membership of the European project that in turn arose from lingering exceptionalism and a fetishised sovereignty in the post-war years. Had the UK state reformed itself in the 1960s - implementing devolution, replacing the unelected Lords and modernising the Civil Service - then it might have stood a better chance of integrating more seamlessly with the mainstream of European political development: a bourgeois democracy, a cautious federalism and a commitment to technocratic governance. In other words, Ted Heath was undone as much by the constitutional timidity of Labour during the 1964-70 administrations of Harold Wilson as he was by the National Union of Mineworkers in the early 70s. However, many of those reforms were eventually enacted by the UK state in the 1980s and 90s, but far from neutralising the issue of sovereignty they served to accentuate it, suggesting that the problem may lie elsewhere.

So perhaps Brexit was a black swan event: an exceptional moment that arose when a press-led obsession with EU "meddling" and immigration collided with the social despair of austerity, releasing the genie of popular sovereignty from the bottle of establishment politics. Perhaps the hollowing out of the civil service in the neoliberal era and the outsourcing of a raft of competencies to the EU has left the UK state incapable of responding to the challenge. Emblematic of this was the creation of the Department for Exiting the EU, a project-based approach for an undefined project that was eventually subsumed by Number 10. In fact, the marginalisation of DExEU could be read as a sign of the resilience of the civil service as individual government departments started to gear up for no-deal, while the repatriation of competencies is not likely to be that challenging, despite the early panic over trade negotiators (that not many trade deals have been agreed has less to do with capability than the unwillingness of other countries to conclude them before the UK's future relationship with the EU is clear).

My own interpretation is that while the British state is rickety in appearance and dysfunctional in key areas, these failings are often symptomatic of deliberate policies being successfully pursued, and not just long-term rot, notably the avoidance of democratic reform through archaic practice, the erosion of welfare and the commercialisation of public services. Brexit isn't a contradiction produced by the dysfunctional institutions of the state, and nor is the failure of the Article 50 process to date an inevitable outcome of the incompetence of the state's agencies. It arises rather from the institutional failure of the Conservative Party. Though Labour is often analysed in institutional terms, not least the conflict between the PLP and CLPs and the shifting balance of interests on the NEC, similar analyses of the Tories are much rarer (this is partly hegemonic - the Tories as a permanent fixture in the British political universe - and partly media bias - the idea that Labour is pathological). The result is that analysis of the institution is replaced by analysis of factions and personalities: the "Tory Civil War" and the jockeying for leadership.

The key institutional failing of the Conservative Party is its decline from the largest mass-membership party in the post-war years to an ageing and increasingly reactionary hardcore today. Theresa May is clearly no one's idea of a capable Prime Minister now, but history will probably see her as the last desperate attempt of the establishment to install a rational Tory leader before the party membership elected a Brexit ultra (whether an opportunist or a true-believer). A parallel development was the outsourcing of the party's policy development and electoral strategy to think-tanks and consultancies, something that was notably accelerated under Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in the 70s. Though this has been a general trend across politics, parties of the left have tended to preserve a degree of autonomy due to their democratic structures. It has been more pronounced on the right and the British Conservative Party, together with the US Republicans, has been at the forefront of this development.

The consequence of these two trends is that policy has become more driven by the rich and niche capitalist interests (financial engineering, fracking etc), while mostly-retired party members, with limited current experience of business or social developments beyond their own milieu, have become more receptive to the sugar-rush of identity politics and the "culture wars". The British Conservative Party is increasingly clientelistic and populist, which means it is ironically converging with a style more familiar in continental polities. The tragedy from the perspective of Ted Heath's spinning corpse is that the trend is more towards Forza Italia than the CDU. Compounding this institutional dysfunction is the inability of the party to respond adequately to the challenge of Euroscepticism, an inability that has been evident since John Major's days and his frustration with the "bastards". This was not because those who would become known as leavers were strong within the party hierarchy, or had compelling arguments, but because the dominant remain faction was incapable of articulating a truly positive case for the EU in the face of a membership who were predominantly and increasingly Eurosceptic.

That Theresa May has steered government policy with the primary goal of maintaining Tory unity and ensuring the party would be on the right side of any Brexit-centred general election is generally acknowledged, though this hasn't stopped media commentators whining about politicians in general not putting nation before party, as if Labour rolling over would magically resolve the Conservatives' institutional problems. Brexit is not just a product of the Tory Party's internal ideological divisions, or the changing and fragmenting interests of UK capitalism, it is also the result of a party that has neglected its wider social base - in part because the conditions for a hegemonic conservatism no longer exist - and allowed its institutional structure to atrophy. If Labour has seen some nutters washed in on the tide of its rapid membership growth, the Tories have suffered as the tide has gone out to reveal too many nutters clinging limpet-like to the rocks.

Leaving the Lectern

One thing we can say with confidence is that yesterday's "Put it to the People" march will have little impact. The 2003 "Stop the War" march also failed in its objective, but it proved consequential in helping to shift public opinion towards a greater scepticism about both the integrity of the state and the honesty and motivations of New Labour. This wasn't an overnight conversion but one of a number of incidents on a steady, descending path that commenced with the disappointments of the first Blair administration and ended with the exhaustion of Gordon Brown's premiership, the latter including the concession of the Chilcott Inquiry into the prosecution of the Iraq War that would eventually prove the 2003 marchers to have been justified. In contrast, not only will the Commons almost certainly reject a motion for a second referendum next week, but the low opinion of both Theresa May's competence and the British state's capability has been priced-in for many months. That supporters of the march are focusing their energies on claiming it was bigger than the 2003 demo is a sign of its inconsequentiality, not its significance.

The real story of the weekend is that the Conservative Party has decided that Theresa May's time as Prime Minister is up, with rumours of a mass cabinet walkout on Monday if she doesn't agree to resign. A dozen or so walking a few yards is more likely to break the political logjam than a million marching a mile. That said, Tory coups, like Tory rebellions, are rarer than popular history imagines, and objectively May could face this one down after the failure of the parliamentary party's confidence vote in December. The optics would be appalling, but when you are already lying prostrate on the floor there is no further distance to fall. Short of a breakdown, the psychology of May as revealed through her career suggests she will cling on for as long as possible, or at least until she is utterly powerless. In practice this could come about if the planned indicative votes next week produce a majority for a softer Brexit, but for that reason she may well decide to pre-empt matters. Though her options have narrowed, there are two possible courses of action: either committing to a "managed no-deal" (i.e. shifting further to the right) or calling a general election to secure a mandate for her deal.

Given that her guiding star has been the preservation of the Conservative Party, she may decide that embracing no-deal is her best chance of both maintaining unity and remaining as leader. That no-deal has been rejected by the Commons is irrelevant: it remains the default outcome (now on the 12th of April) unless the government falls and/or an alternative deal is agreed. Even though this would void the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration, it's likely the EU27 would still agree to a transition period (they get the certainty of the UK leaving but avoid the damage of an abrupt departure), during which a looser trade agreement (roughly the Canada model) could be negotiated. While this would be popular with the party membership, it would risk alienating a small but numerically significant number of Tories (Kenneth Clarke, Dominic Grieve etc) who might then feel obliged (finally) to vote against the government on a confidence motion, so the end result might still be a general election, but one in which the Tories would have a coherent platform that could galvanise most of their core voters and perhaps the reactionary segment that turned out in 2016.

If May could not bring herself to adopt a no-deal stance, then calling a general election with the intention of putting her own battered deal to the people (something she hinted at in last Wednesday's scolding sermon) would require the support of two-thirds of all MPs. As the opposition parties would automatically support this (though maybe not the Independent Group), she would need the support of approximately one-third of Conservative MPs, so roughly 105. Given that 235 of them voted for her deal when it was submitted for a second time earlier this month (and 196 did so in January), there is probably a large enough bloc willing to take the deal to the country, even allowing for the reluctance of those who fear the election result might be worse than 2017 and those who believe she is the wrong leader for such a campaign. As Labour would probably stand on a platform of a renegotiated soft Brexit plus a confirmatory vote (with remain on the ballot), the Tories' offer would essentially be "guaranteed Brexit now". Despite the unpopularity of her deal, this would give May a fighting chance.

The decision of the EU27 last week to take control of the timetable, together with the likelihood that the Commons will take control of the process of working out a deal that can command a majority of MPs this week, suggests that May's grip on power has irrevocably weakened and her days are numbered, but a cabinet coup on Monday might prove as premature as the party vote of no confidence in December did. May's strategy has always been to assume that her deal will be the last one standing when all other alternatives have failed, so her end very much depends on the Commons coming to a compromise over the next few days. If it cannot, then she would be entitled to submit her deal for a third time with the clear understanding that a further rejection will mean a no-deal exit in April. The suggestion this weekend that she won't submit her deal next week if there appears to be insufficient support doesn't mean she's giving up, but that she is still waiting for the opposition to give up first.

Insofar as we can discern a compromise behind daft labels such as "Common Market 2.0", it would essentially be Labour's plan for a customs union and single market for goods as a minimum, with horse-trading around other aspects of the single market such as state-aid and freedom of movement. The biggest impediment to such a compromise emerging is the unwillingness of the smaller parties (particularly the SNP) and the media to give Labour any credit for it, even if the specifics are negotiated by Keir Starmer and vocally supported by Jess Phillips. For all the talk of Labour's incoherence and Corbyn's leaver sympathies, this soft-Brexit compromise has been staring us in the face for over two years now. It has also been staring Theresa May in the face, and I suspect she has always considered it to be both the greatest threat to her deal and to the unity of the Conservative Party. For that reason, I imagine she perversely took some comfort from Saturday's march: both the uncompromising demands for revocation or referendum and the anti-Corbyn spin of the media.