Far From the Meddling Crowd

Foreign interference in domestic politics is as old as politics. Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War makes that clear. Over the long era from the early Middle Ages to the end of the Early Modern Period, politics was dominated by international dynastic relations in which state boundaries were often incidental. It was only with the Age of Revolutions and the emergence of the notion of a sovereign people that meddling became de trop among the leading nations, though this simply led to elite carve-ups, from the Congresss of Vienna onwards, and more indirect methods of pressure rather than an actual moratorium. At the same time, these same nations thought nothing of meddling in the affairs of "lesser" states in the old manner of peremptory demands and naked violence, and not just in the field of formal empire but in the informal empires of trade and economic exploitation.

The era of modern democracy did little to reduce meddling, though it did introduce new covers for old habits in the form of international mandates, peace-keeping and sanctions. The spectre of the inter-war Communist International fed into the Cold War belief in the West that meddling was essentially anti-democratic, which both damned Russian and later Chinese influence as subversion while excusing US and British interference as virtue. After 1989, meddling was largely privatised, with economic liberalisation doing the bulk of the work in facilitating influence, formally through notionally independent international bodies (the Washington Consensus) and informally through private business relations. What was consistent over the twentieth century, like the centuries before it, was the basic dynamic: the strong do the meddling, the weak are meddled with.

This has changed since the millennium. Now the relatively weak can equally meddle in the affairs of the relatively strong. The reasons for this are usually given as a mix of the facilities provided by the Internet and the expertise developed in managing public opinion in countries like Russia, which has allowed authoritarian states to exploit the vulnerabilities of more established democracies in a form of "asymmetric warfare" minus the shooting (give or take the occasional assassination). But we shouldn't forget the extent to which the leading democracies themselves still meddle, nor the extent to which global businesses pursue their interests through politics. Russian and Chinese paranoia about US Internet companies is not without foundation. A feature of the digital economy is that it flattens and universalises the sphere of meddling, hence Americans now worry about the influence of Facebook in the same way that non-Americans once worried about the influence of McDonalds.

This worry is articulated as a belief that commercial greed is allowing Facebook's platform to be abused by foreign states, but the reality is that those foreign actors are, like domestic lobbies, simply making intended use of a medium designed to meddle at the most granular level of society. Meddling has been both democratised and commercialised. It is no coincidence that the deregulation of American political campaign finance (the infamous Citizens United judgement) occurred at the same time as the growth of new and more intrusive media; and it is no coincidence that the titans of the new digital economy are making full use of that latitude, their data assets and their wealth to influence politics both domestically and internationally. While traditional pundits wonder which party Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will endorse, or even seek the nomination of, those gentlemen simply pursue their own political objectives directly, bypassing democratic accountability where possible.

The probable reason why the UK government had decided to shelve the Intelligence & Security Committee report on Russian meddling in British politics is not that it uncovers corruption in the Conservative party or embarrassing security breaches, but that it reveals an establishment culture that has blithely tolerated meddling as part of "doing business". It almost certainly chronicles an increase in hostile activities over the last decade coincident with greater technical capability and weaker regulation. The political risk is that the public may wonder whether the government has been dilatory in protecting the polity, a charge that could only realistically be laid at the door of the Conservatives in this timeframe. The more curious may wonder whether the scope of the ISC's investigation should have been wider than just Russian interference in the EU referendum.

It's no secret that Washington and a variety of mostly rightwing US lobby groups have sought to exert influence on British politics, and not just to open up the NHS to private health interests. This isn't new - ironically, the foundations were laid by British intervention in 1940 against isolationist candidates in US elections - but it has become much more obvious of late. For example, we recently had the spectacle of Donald Trump phoning-in to Nigel Farage's LBC radio show to rubbish Jeremy Corbyn. This might appear small beer for a President facing impeachment for meddling in Ukraine for partisan gain, but it highlights the extent to which the covert arm-twisting of the past now takes place in full public view. This isn't a sudden change brought about by Trump's gangsterism. Obama's "back of the queue" remark in 2016 would have been unthinkable twenty years earlier.

Similarly, the state of Israel makes little attempt to disguise both its actions and its aims in pushing an anti-Labour propaganda campaign in the UK. My point here is not that it is inflaming the fears of the diaspora in order to bolster its policy in the Occupied Territories, but that it is conducting this campaign in full public view. This cannot be excused on the grounds that its interests dovetail with Labour's domestic opponents and so provide it with some common legitimacy. It is meddling in British politics and doesn't feel the need to apologise for its actions any more than Russia feels the need to apologise for its disinformatzya or the poisoning of its former citizens in exile. Likewise, India has decided that it can support para-state and diaspora campaigns against Labour in order to stymie criticism of its policy in Kashmir and elsewhere.

What all these examples have in common is the belief that a state, and often a dominant faction within the state, can pursue its interests without regard to borders, which in part explains why modern international relations are more evocative of the Borgias than Bismarck (it's worth noting in passing that the preferred genre representation of geopolitics has shifted from the relative subtlety of espionage to the zero sum of sword and sorcery, from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Game of Thrones). The 2019 UK general election is likely to become a textbook study of foreign political meddling, not just because of the number and variety of meddlers, or the ambiguous attitude of the British politico-media establishment, but because it will be overwhelmingly one-sided.

Uses and Abuses

After a four day wait, Granit Xhaka, the Arsenal captain, has released a statement about his behaviour in the 2-2 draw against Crystal Palace at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday. That he chose to do so via his personal Instagram account suggests that a statement acceptable to the club, which would have appeared through offical channels, could not be agreed. My interest here is not the rights and wrongs of the situation or Xhaka's role in Unai Emery's faltering team (I'll explore that at another time) but Xhaka's explanation of his behaviour: "My feeling of not being understood by fans, and repeated abusive comments at matches and in social media over the last weeks and months have hurt me deeply. People have said things like 'We will break your legs', 'Kill your wife' and 'Wish that your daughter gets cancer'. That has stirred me up and I reached boiling point when I felt the rejection in the stadium on Sunday".

A proper apology starts with a full acknowledgement of what is being apologised for. This is the same principle of honesty that constitutes the first of the famous twelve steps. Passive apologies - "I apologise if offence has been taken" - are an evasion. In Xhaka's case, his actions are obscured by the bland phrase "I let myself be carried away". I was in the stadium so can report on this first-hand. When Xhaka's number came up on the subs board, there was a mixture of both polite applause and some ironic cheering. The latter was initially humorous but quickly turned hostile when Xhaka decided to walk slowly to the touchline at a time when Arsenal were chasing a win, Palace having equalised 10 minutes earlier. In such a situation every player would sprint off. Dawdling is highly unusual. It was this petulance on his part that riled the fans. His further reaction, cupping his ear and swearing as he trudged off, then ripping off his shirt, merely exacerbated matters.

What I want to pick out here is Xhaka's claim that the abuse he has received from a small number of fans can be linked to "the rejection in the stadium". In other words, he is going beyond a justification of provocation to blaming the fanbase more generally, which was probably the sticking-point in the negotiations on wording with the club. This unfairly associates the great majority of his critics - i.e. fans who think he's the wrong player for the team or were simply disappointed in his performance on Sunday - with a minority whose behaviour they in no way endorse. It's also worth emphasising that the abuse Xhaka has experienced is par for the course for most footballers who face the double challenge of occasionally disgruntled fans of their own team as well as permanently hostile fans of rivals. Harry Kane gets far worse abuse from Arsenal fans than Xhaka does, while Raheem Sterling could point out that he has had to contend with abusive tabloid journalists as well.

This manoeuvre of deflection through guilt-by-association is well-known in politics. For example, the claim that Labour is "institutionally antisemitic" rests not on the policies and practices of the party as an institution but on holding the mass of the membership (deemed guilty by virtue of electing Corbyn as leader) responsible for the behaviour of a small number of online trolls, many of whom aren't even party members or supporters. The announcement that various MPs will be retiring this week provides another example, with the media focusing on the number of women and in particular the claim that they have been hounded out of public life by abuse: "Lib Dem Sarah Wollaston said those women leaving the Conservatives were much younger and had spent less time as MPs in the Commons - compared to the older men who were at the age of retirement. And that they were leaving sooner because of the abuse."

In fact, the number of women retiring is proportionate to the composition of the Commons, and there are clearly some for whom abuse was not a prime factor, such as Amber Rudd who was constructively dismissed by the Tory whips. The dimension that does stand out is age, but the suggestion that this is indicative of a problem with abuse is dubious. Many of the women MPs who are retiring entered Parliament in their 30s or 40s during the period between 1997 and 2015. They were beneficiaries of the pro-women policies of both the main parties: "Blair's babes" and the all women shortlists of Labour, and the more female-friendly open selections pioneered by the Cameroonian Tories (Wollaston was one such beneficiary). In other words, this concerns a generation of MPs who represented the movement of both parties towards the political centre. Their early departure reflects the reversal of that movement, not a spike in hate crimes.

That many of this cohort have chosen to join the Liberal Democrats rather than retire does not indicate a thicker skin on the part of some so much as a pragmatic career adjustment. Wollaston herself admitted as much: "Why would you put up with all that abuse, if at the same time you’re unhappy about the direction of travel?" (I don't think she meant to suggest that the abuse would be tolerable had the Conservative Party not changed direction). At this point it is important to bear in mind that most of what counts as "abuse" is simple raillery or insults, rather than threats of violence, but it has become commonplace to equate incivility with criminal incitement. This both marginalises legitimate dissent and treats anger as an illegitimate political expression. Just as Arsenal fans are entitled to be angry about their team's shortcomings, so the electorate are entitled to swear at MPs. Criticising the "mob" for a lack of virtue is anti-politics.

Predictably, old media has decided that the problem is the lack of regulation of new media. This has produced some startlingly poor reasoning, particularly from traditional defenders of press freedom. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian is happy to discriminate between old and new: "The British press has fought against state regulation, other than over monopoly and laws of libel. I think that is right, not out of principle but because statutory regulation is not justified by press misbehaviour or imbalance – or not yet. Self-regulation sort of works. At present it is not the mainstream media driving decent people out of politics". This appears on the same day as further reports about Keith Vaz, who is being driven out of politics not just by his own behaviour but by a classic tabloid sting. I use him as an example because Jenkins' appeal to virtue - "decent people" - is irrelevant. Vaz is a pompous arse and Parliament would be well rid of him, but he has as much right to a private life as anyone else.

Granit Xhaka's triggering of the home crowd last Sunday may not have been entirely spontaneous. He probably didn't expect to be hauled off, but I suspect he had already decided that he will move on from Arsenal in the next year or two. He has never given the impression that he intended to see out the rest of his career in North London (he's 27) and his technique and style would better suit a less frenetic league where his lack of pace and tendency towards clumsy fouls would be less exposed and his passing from deep would be more appreciated (he could well thrive as a regista in Serie A). Falling out with the fans in such a spectacular fashion will hasten his departure. Framing that rift as the fans' fault merely makes a climbdown less likely. In similar fashion, the emphasis on the abuse received by women MPs in the announcement of imminent retirements distracts from the political reconstitution underway and obscures a calculated career move with moralising guff.

You don't have to buy into the narrative of "polarisation" and movement towards the "extremes" to see that a generation of centrist politicians is being winnowed. That doesn't mean that they are an endangered species or must needs look to the Liberal Democrats as a life-raft. The damp squib of Labour's trigger ballots suggest that centrists can still prosper within its "broad church", while the Tories' partial reversal of their recent purge indicates that a simple loyalty oath may be enough to survive. That many of them are women simply reflects the recruitment and candidacy policies of the two major parties over the last two decades. That many of them have been on the end of vile abuse reflects an anti-politics culture that has been assiduously cultivated by the press since the 1970s. That Diane Abbott is the most abused female MP of the lot reflects less her own distinction as a prominent black woman than the fact that she has been targeted by right-leaning journalists, including many female ones, for decades.

Year Zero

The Labour MP Bridget Phillipson has an essay in the New Statesman on what she describes as the party's love of nostalgia. Of course, all political parties are nostalgic in the trivial sense that they are built around historical narratives in which previous triumphs compensate for current travails. The same can be said of football clubs. But what the member for Houghton and Sunderland South appears to be suggesting is that Labour is peculiarly wedded to nostalgia because of its roots in the social response to the industrial revolution and that this blinds it to the possibilities of progress: "We love nostalgia in the Labour Party. We pepper our politics with references to people in office seventy years ago. Sometimes we seem to drench our party political broadcasts in a sense of how things were better in the past, an implicit promise that our future will be a recapturing of past glories rather than something new and different".

But it quickly becomes clear that Phillipson's own vision of progress suffers from the same blight: "It seems hard to believe that the last time we won a general election, fifteen years ago next spring, our slogan was 'forward not back'". What she is taking aim at is both old Labourism, with its anti-intellectual and misogynistic impulses, and what she sees as its continuation within the Corbyn project. The chief culprit in this charge of nostalgia is a narrative that "looks at how the status of white men in what had been reasonably secure jobs in our country saw a sudden, unwelcome, and unexpected decline, and identifies reversing that change as a central political challenge for socialists today". Linking the two is a stretch. Corbyn and McDonnell owe more to the New Left critics of old Labour than to the shibboleths of the 1950s TUC, while the idea that Diane Abbott wants to recreate a society fit for a disinterred Bernard Manning is obviously absurd.

In building what is essentially a defence of New Labour's rejection of both Labourism and the left, Phillipson creates a hybrid opponent: "For those who are sympathetic to this narrative, it offers, at least implicitly, some limited forms of policy prescription for Labour. Tighter controls on immigration, often wrapped in a language of 'legitimate concerns'. More socially conservative noises. A leaning towards an economic approach not based on full EU membership. An approach to the state's place in our society and economy where ill-defined and questionably responsive social enterprises are expected to fill key public roles, with neither the powers nor the resources necessary for success. With the Conservatives in power, the narrative focuses on organising social pressure to mitigate the outcomes of their public policy changes — through foodbanks and social solidarity — at least as much as on winning over voters or developing alternative strategies for a Labour government". The image is equal parts Sid the Sexist and Daniel Blake.

This exculpates New Labour for the role it played in promoting the language of "legitimate concerns", of voicing Euroscepticism (often reasonably, e.g. Brown's objections to the euro), and of filling key public service roles with private "partners" for whom the adjective "questionable" would be an under-statement. Clearly it is only the idea of a shared "narrative" that allows her to make strange bedfellows of the likes of John Mann, Blue Labour and Seumas Milne. Without the glue of nostalgia there is little commonality in theory, let alone in practice. There is also a hint of technocratic paranoia: "More prosaically, it implies changes to how Labour selects candidates, and a wariness around university-educated MPs regardless of their background." Phillipson is a local lass, elected in 2010 at the age of 27, who went to Oxford and whose working experience was limited to 3 years at a women's charity. This doesn't tick the "worked down pit" box, but it appears to have been enough to see her reselected unanimously earlier this month.

She understands the danger of looking backwards: "But the politics of nostalgia is not the politics of socialism. It starts not with an analysis of society today, but a very particular sort of history lesson, for it's about romanticising the past, not humanising the future. And once you start to pull it apart, that becomes all too obvious, and it also becomes very clear what lies behind it". Despite the nod to Marx (addressing society as it exists), who she even goes on to explicitly quote in her conclusion on the need for change (a rather tired Blairite trope in itself), her essay quickly turns into a plea for "modernisation". Ironically, this means piling up the nostalgic references to previous generations of modernisers and critics of nostalgia, from Anthony Crosland to Stuart Hall, but it also means presenting a counter-narrative of progress: "For there’s another story of the last fifty years that looks at what was going on for the people who weren't simply losing out from that transformation ... above all it's the story of women."

Again the ironies pile up. Phillipson references Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, but not Barbara Castle, who arguably did more for women that any other Labour politician before or since. Among contemporary female activists she singles out only Caroline Criado Perez. Once more the golden years are evoked: "The last Labour government rightly introduced or hastened many of these changes. Intervention after intervention, year after year: a steady drumbeat of progress for thirteen years … So I have little time for those who look back at the last Labour government’s domestic record without a great deal of admiration tempering their criticisms. I have less time still for those whose recipe for electoral advance is nostalgia for a world which had no place for my family and no place for me, who position - deliberately or inadvertently - women's access to modernity as threat and concern rather than as opportunity and triumph." Does she really mean to suggest that criticism of the Blair years is driven by misogyny?

Consider this: "Above all it is wrong to seek to redefine the Labour Party, and our historic purpose, in terms other than the redistribution of power, wealth, and opportunity, wrong to substitute culture war for achievable economic justice, wrong to put communitarian nostalgia in place of building a better future for all working people. We must avoid the temptation to sit round drinking out of vintage mugs, fondly remembering a world of culturally uniform slums where women didn’t get paid, men died young in industrial accidents, and Labour lost elections." That first sentence is spot on, but the second - the bait and switch - constructs a strawman that misrepresents the contemporary Labour party and creates a historical myth that flattens the actual cultural variety of the past (what happened to the Jews, the Irish, the Windrush generation?), the prevalence of working women and even the party's electoral success (I could have sworn that Labour won a number of elections before the annus mirabilis of 1997, and not even as far back as "seventy years ago").

At this point you might wonder why I am shooting this particular fish in this particular barrel. It's because I spent my formative years in Washington and even attended the same comprehensive school as Phillipson, St Robert of Newminster, though two decades before her. Even then the milieu she presents - a "culture of large workplaces, union activity, clocking on and off together, of tight knit communities clustered round employment opportunities in villages and smaller towns" - was already history. Washington was developed in the last wave of new towns, whose very purpose was deracination and whose ethos from the beginning was post-Fordist. Already in the 1980s people were living atomised lives and striving for self-actualisation through commodities. The new Nissan plant, which opened in 1986, was served from the off by a dispersed, car-owning workforce. The region's structural problems are a dependence on large employers, poor local transport and the drain of talent south. This has been the case for a century.

Phillpson's claim that Labour is currently suffering from a debilitating nostalgia does not really stand up. For all the Davy lamps on mantelpieces and the popularity of Clem as a child's name (ironically, another Blairite signifier), Labour is no more subject to this than any other party. Consider the Tories' hagiography of Churchill and Thatcher, or even the Liberal Democrats' ancestor worship of Mill,  Gladstone and Asquith (their last league triumph means their nostalgia is even worse than Preston North End's). The most recent Labour Party conference committed to an unquestionably radical and progressive programme, while its fringe was dominated by The World Transformed. So what's Phillipson up to? Given her preferences (she backed David Miliband in 2010, Yvette Cooper in 2015 and Owen Smith in 2016) I suspect that the real target for her anti-nostalgia is the 2017 general election. What she is proposing is that Labour erases this from its memory, but a straight call to this effect would face derision. Far better to insist that Labour has a general nostalgia problem. But if you reset the clock to zero, who will remember the halcyon years of 1997 to 2010?

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.

Dreary Steeples

Ahead of the publication of their latest book, Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World, the British Election Study presented their key findings to the press this week. But what caught the attention of the fourth estate was not the volatility of the last decade but the suggestion that British politics has become extreme. As Lewis Goodall of Sky News put it in a tweet, summarising the words of Professor Geoff Evans: "British politics is basically now Northern Ireland politics. It’s moved away from 90s centrism, electoral incentives no longer at the centre but at the extremes. Centre parties or parties which adopt compromise positions get crushed and extremist parties rewarded." The idea that British politics is being remade in the image of the sectarian division of Northern Ireland is crass and misleading. That this is an interpretation of a government-funded body whose very name disregards Ireland is not the least of the ironies.

The BES's central claim is that we face the "Most volatile British electorate in modern times", which is simply the psephological equivalent of "It's up for grabs now". Of course, volatility is not how most people would characterise the entrenched politics of Northern Ireland. You could argue that the supplanting of the UUP and SDLP by the DUP and Sinn Féin respectively marked a move towards the extremes, but a more realistic assessment is that this was actually a move towards the centre: away from the gun and towards the ballot-box. So what we have here are two claims: that the electorate is more promiscuous in its preferences and that it is attracted to more extreme positions, leading to established parties shifting away from the centre and/or the emergence of new parties on their outer flank. Northern Ireland provides a questionable metaphor for the latter, but none whatsoever for the former.

According to Professor Edward Fieldhouse: "Given the UK's recent history of vote switching and the unpredictability of the current climate, it would be unwise for any political party or commentator to presume how voters will behave in a general election, particularly in the middle of an electoral shock. But we do expect to see big shifts defined largely by Brexit". The contradiction in this statement between the unpredictability of the electorate and the certainty of the Brexit factor is obvious, but it points to what is really being argued here: that Brexit has deranged politics, eroding party loyalties and encouraging the electorate to reform itself along different lines reflecting "values" or some notional "culture war" rather than material interest. This has been a near-constant theme of centrist political commentary over the last two years, hence the warm reception of the BES presentation this week.

The BES sees Brexit as one of five "electoral shocks" that have affected UK politics since 2010, the others being immigration and the rise of UKIP, the 2008 crash, the 2010-15 coalition and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. But characterising these as shocks, with the implication that they were unforeseen, is dubious. Immigration has been an issue since the 1960s, though its impact on voting has been marginal at best; the 2008 crash was the culmination of thirty years of financialisation, but it didn't reconfigure the political landscape; the Liberal Democrats' volatility between 2010 and 2015, far from being unusual, echoed similar third party yo-yoing at the polls in the 1970s and 80s; and Labour had been hollowed-out in Scotland well before the electoral slump of 2015. Brexit itself is the result of a festering sore in the Conservative Party that dates back to Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech in 1988. This isn't volatility so much as routine political churn.

In terms of longer history, the BES records only two similar periods of voter promiscuity, in 1918 and 1931, though it is questionable whether these can be taken as evidence of volatility given that the first was under a radically expanded franchise and both were won by contingent coalitions that temporarily coalesced the political centre. As subsequent events would show, the basic division between left and right that was introduced by universal suffrage remained in place. The argument for the period since 2010 is that these "shocks" have gradually weakened party identities leading to the current volatile state. An assumption here is that the reversion to the traditional duopoly in 2017, when the Conservatives and Labour combined got over 82% of the vote, does not mark a return to electoral stability, but history would suggest otherwise.

Inevitably, the panjandrums of liberalism have not been slow to spot an opportunity, with Martin Kettle particularly taken by Geoff Evans's question, "Could the Liberal Democrats be the Sinn Féin of all this?". I think it's safe to say that the answer to that is "No". Kettle's take on the "Ulsterisation of British politics" is that Brexit has created two electorates: "But if Brexit is reshaping the electoral battle, it is in reality two separate battles. The Tories and the Brexit party are battling for leave voters, while Labour, the Lib Dems, Greens and nationalists battle for remainers. Very few voters sit in the middle of the road on Brexit or the cultural issues that are so closely associated with it". That Labour actually does sit in the middle of the road on Brexit, and has been loudly criticised by Kettle and many others for that very reason, doesn't seem to give him pause for thought. Nor does he seem bothered that promoting the idea of a new political alignment based on leave versus remain, or proxies such as "open" and "closed", is echoing Nigel Farage.

There is clearly a deeper rationale at work here. It is the idea that the political division between capital and labour is a distraction from the real social and cultural antagonism between progress and conservatism. Though many liberals have made the claim that the capital/labour division is outmoded, they have been making exactly the same claim since the second half of the nineteenth century when the electoral implications of this division became clear. As universal suffrage formalised this division after the Great War, marginalising the old Liberal party in the process, the critique became a polite way of deprecating democracy. Since then, liberals have repeatedly claimed to see the tectonic plates of politics shifting in their favour as populations "became more liberal" under the delightful duress of globalised capitalism. In the political sphere, this led in the 1990s to the post-democracy of managerialist parties and an equanimity in the face of declining voter participation. That the return of politics is regarded as a "shock" tells you how tenacious this anti-democratic mentality is.

As Kettle notes, "Only the Labour party acts as if the election will be about more traditional issues". The Labour leadership is surely right to do so. All the polling suggests that voters are both tired of Brexit and increasingly engaged with other issues, from wages and housing to crime and climate change. As Stephen Bush separately noted, "They think that far from representing a new fissure, the apparent divide over age and education is in fact one driven by the new contours of class in Britain. A socially liberal graduate renting a flat lacks capital or security of tenure – while a socially authoritarian pensioner, living in his or her own home or a council house, has at least one of those, and possibly both". Depending on what happens over the next few weeks, and assuming a general election is going to happen within the next few months, the vote may be largely about Brexit or the topic could have plummeted to a status similar to foreign policy. I suspect it is more likely to be the latter, not least because no party other than the Liberal Democrats wants the election to be a de facto second referendum.

To a degree, the reformation of politics in "culture war" terms is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which probably explains much of the attraction for liberals. The change seen between the 2015 and 2017 general election results was partly down to the more pronounced authoritarian and progressive cues of the main parties, which helped re-establish the sharp division between the Conservatives and Labour in the minds of the electorate. This rather than Brexit "identities" appears to have revived the two-party duopoly after the centrism of the New Labour and Cameron years. What this in turn suggests is that Brexit, and whatever collection of attitudes and values it stands proxy for, will simply be overlaid onto the existing political formation. Ultimately, the better parallel to make with Northern Ireland is that while faces come and go and attitudes evolve, the underlying political division remains stable. As Winston Churchill said in a different context, "The whole map of Europe has been changed … but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again".