The Realignment of British Politics in the Wake of Brexit
2019; Wiley; Volume: 90; Issue: S2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-923x.12643
ISSN1467-923X
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Economic history of UK and US
ResumoTHE referendum vote to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 has created a deep political and constitutional crisis. The terms on which Britain would leave or whether it would leave at all were still unclear two years after the referendum vote. The only certainty is that the process of determining a new relationship between Britain and the EU will stretch long beyond the date, 29 March 2019, on which Britain is set formally to leave the EU. As Brexit unfolds, it threatens to unleash disruptive changes in British politics and political economy. Here, I examine what it might mean for the party system. Will it mark a watershed in British politics, producing lasting political realignment of both voters and parties? Or will the existing system survive? British politics has been in turmoil since the referendum, because this was the first time a national referendum had gone against the recommendation of the government and against the status quo. It opened a split between parliamentary sovereignty and popular sovereignty. For Leave supporters, the referendum issued a clear instruction for Britain to leave the EU. But it quickly became apparent there were many different ways of doing so, and no agreement on what the best option might be, even among Leavers. A large majority of MPs had voted Remain and were opposed to any option which involved a hard Brexit, while a minority, mainly on the Conservative benches, argued that only the hardest Brexit possible would respect the referendum vote. Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to solve the problem by calling a general election in 2017 to give her the space and authority to negotiate with the EU. But instead of an increased majority, she lost the small majority she already had and to stay in office, was forced to conclude a confidence and supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist party (DUP), which narrowed her options even further. The negotiations were slow and arduous, because Theresa May was trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, finding a formula which could satisfy simultaneously the contradictory demands of Leave voters, the polarised factions in her party, the DUP, the business community, and the EU. This created a series of acute policy dilemmas, and along the way she lost Cabinet ministers and backing from crucial parts of the Conservative coalition and the Conservative media. By November 2018, with only four months to go before Britain formally was to leave the EU under Article 50, it was still uncertain whether the deal agreed painstakingly with the EU would command a majority in Parliament, because of the opposition of the DUP and the hard Brexit wing of the Conservative party. How the parliamentary impasse over Brexit is overcome could have profound consequences for the party system. Theresa May has defined the choice as between her deal, no-deal or no-Brexit. In November 2018, it seemed quite possible that there was no parliamentary majority for any of the three and that the existing party system would buckle. One or both of the two main parties would split, and a new political landscape would emerge, either immediately through a realignment of MPs within the existing Parliament to create a new parliamentary majority, or subsequently after an appeal to the people through a general election or a second referendum. Theresa May urged her party to support her deal against the alternatives, arguing that a no-deal Brexit would cause substantial short-term damage to the British economy and long-term damage to the reputation and standing of the Conservative party, while no Brexit at all would not respect the first referendum result and lead to a populist nationalist backlash. A YouGov poll in the Sunday Times1 in July 2018 suggested that 38 per cent of those questioned would support a new party promising a hard Brexit, including many (24 per cent of the whole sample) who wanted such a new party to be anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. 33 per cent would support a new centrist party offering a soft Brexit or no Brexit at all. That does not leave many supporting the two parties which have dominated British politics for the last hundred years. The risk for the Conservatives and for Labour is that in the aftermath of Brexit, they lose ground to both a new centrist pro-European party and to a new Britain First party. Throughout her premiership, May sought to preserve the Conservative party as a party of government and to resist the new polarisation between Leavers and Remainers already apparent in the 2017 election. Her deal was a messy compromise which gave no one what they wanted, but which she and her allies presented as the only way to maintain the Conservative party as a pragmatic party of government,2 focussed on delivering a Brexit which would cause as little damage to the economy as possible, at the same time avoiding a permanent split in the Conservative party and a resulting breakup of the party system. Realignments of political parties are rare. They take place when parties split over a fundamental issue of policy, which either anticipate or follow realignments of voters and electoral coalitions. Party realignments can happen in three main ways: when there is a formal split initiated by the party leader, as in 1846 and 1931; when senior party leaders lead a breakaway from a party as in 1886 and 1981; or when one party is taken over by one of its factions, and MPs and members aligned with other factions drift away or are driven out, as in the Conservative party after 1906. In 1846 and 1931, the Prime Minister concluded that the national emergency was so grave that it warranted splitting his party and forming a new administration with members from opposition parties. Robert Peel in 1846 proposed the repeal of the Corn Laws but was opposed by two-thirds of his MPs. A minority followed him into a new government with Liberals and independents. The Corn Laws were repealed. The Conservative party did not form a majority government again for more than thirty years. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald formed a national government to deal with the financial crisis. Only a small number of ministers and Labour MPs followed him, but he was joined by the Conservatives and some of the Liberals. At the subsequent general election Labour was reduced to fifty-two seats. The second type of split and realignment happened in 1886 over the issue of Irish home rule, when Joseph Chamberlain and his supporters broke with the Liberal party and created the Liberal Unionist party which supported the Conservatives and eventually merged with them, guaranteeing a long period of Conservative ascendancy. In 1981, the Labour party descended into bitter infighting over its future direction, and twenty-eight MPs left Labour and established a new party, the Social Democratic party (SDP). The SDP formed an alliance with the Liberals, before ultimately merging with them to become the Liberal Democrats. This new centrist alliance came close to breaking through in the 1983 election, but although it almost matched Labour in votes, the first past the post system meant that Labour—although heavily defeated by the Conservatives—still won more than 200 seats. The Alliance won just twenty-three. The third type of realignment occurred in the Conservative party after 1906. The party leader, Arthur Balfour, had been trying to hold his party together in a compromise between the protectionist and free trade wings of his party. After 1906, with the party back in opposition, that compromise broke down and the party moved to a hard-line protectionist position. Local associations deselected MPs with free trade views, and many MPs and members defected to the Liberals. The parties became increasingly polarised in the run-up to the First World War. One route to a potential party realignment would be if a Brexit deal gets through Parliament only because of support from opposition MPs, forming in effect a new parliamentary majority. Or it could come about by breakaways from one or both of the two main parties. Or it could be the third kind, a steady purging of MPs and members, creating a much more polarised political system. This is perhaps the most likely. It is very hard to displace one of the two main parties in a system which uses a simple plurality rule in single-member constituencies. The only time it has happened so far was when Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two main parties after 1918, but there were special circumstances, particularly the enlargement of the electorate through the extension of the franchise. Other third parties have had bursts of success, but have not been able to break the stranglehold of the two main parties. The most recent example is UKIP. Despite its success in winning more seats in the European Parliament than any other party, and winning four million votes in the 2015 general election, it only won one Westminster seat, and that was a seat held by a Conservative defector. If seats had been allocated proportionally in 2015, UKIP could have expected to win more than eighty. The main impact of third parties has been to reshape the policies, leadership and electoral strategies of the two main parties, rather than to replace them. Could Brexit change this? In the last fifteen years, both main parties have lost support to third parties. Two of the last three general elections have resulted in a hung Parliament, and the one that did not (2015) only gave the Conservatives a very small majority. That said, and even though the first post-Brexit election in 2017 gave no party a majority, it did see a swing back to the two main parties. Very unusually, both Labour and the Conservatives gained vote share at the expense of smaller parties, particularly UKIP. Together they had more than 80 per cent of the vote, the first time this had happened since 1979. The reason why 2017 saw a turn back to the two main parties was because of voter realignment. The referendum had highlighted the new electoral coalitions which were forming in British politics. The Leave vote was disproportionately made up of voters who were older, with fewer educational qualifications, and who lived in small towns and cities and the countryside. The Remain vote came disproportionately from the young, the more educated, and people living in the big cosmopolitan and multicultural cities. The 2017 election became defined for many voters as a Brexit election, and people voted for the party they thought best represented their referendum choice. There was a big surge of Leave voters to the Conservatives: 70 per cent of Leave voters in 2016 went on to back the Conservatives in 2017 (only 56 per cent of 2015 Conservative voters voted Leave in the referendum). There was also a big surge of Remain voters to Labour, seen as the party most likely to soften or obstruct Brexit, which enabled it to win unlikely seats such as Canterbury and Kensington, while losing former mining seats like Mansfield. In the referendum, two-thirds of Labour voters had voted Remain, but two-thirds of Labour-held constituencies had voted Leave. Both party leaderships sought to hold their old and their new electoral coalitions together by being vague about what kind of Brexit they supported. As the negotiations dragged on, the compromise soft Brexit positions adopted by both party leaderships upset those who saw the Leave/Remain split as the big question on which everything else depended. The Conservatives are most at risk of splitting over Brexit. Their civil war on Europe has been going on for thirty years. David Cameron called the referendum to manage internal party divisions and blunt the rise of UKIP. He failed. The referendum, far from ending the civil war in the party over Europe, has intensified it. While the c.100,000 members of Conservative Associations were strongly in favour of Leave, a majority of Conservative MPs were not, and a majority of business leaders, the core interest group which supports the Conservatives, opposed a hard Brexit, especially one involving no-deal. But that is what the hard Brexit wing of the party has embraced. Without a majority after 2017, party discipline frayed and the Conservative government became vulnerable to pressure from its different factions, as well as from the DUP. May, however, has been an exceptionally stubborn leader. Refusing to abandon her Chequers plan, she clinched agreement with the EU in November 2018 on the legal terms of British withdrawal. She left Conservative rebels with only two alternatives: either they had to swallow hard and support her deal, accepting Michael Gove's argument that the important thing was to secure British departure from the EU in March 2019, following which the Conservatives could elect a leader to deliver a real Brexit; or they had to vote down her deal in Parliament and remove May as party leader, knowing that would provoke an irrevocable split in the parliamentary party and the fall of the government. Theresa May is a highly cautious, pragmatic politician, who will not want to be remembered for breaking up her party. But it is becoming very hard to see how the present Conservative party can be reunited again as a broad centre-right party, whether or not her deal is rejected. Its different factions cannot agree on what form of Brexit they want, in part because they cannot agree on what kind of future they want for the UK. But however the immediate parliamentary deadlock is resolved, a shift to a hard Brexit party seems inevitable once Theresa May departs, and the purge of pro-Europeans begins in earnest. Some Conservative columnists have already begun calling for deselections.3 The hard Brexit wing feels that time is on their side because as long as the members remain so strongly pro-Brexit, then the next leadership election, when it comes, will deliver a pro-Brexit leader. The Remain faction is in a weaker position, because any Remainer candidate for leader will struggle so long as the test—in the eyes of party members—of being a true Conservative is defined as supporting a hard Brexit. The Remain wing of the Conservative party is also the One Nation wing, and contains those most supportive of changing tack on austerity, investing in public services, and pursuing an industrial strategy to rebalance the economy. The hard Brexit wing generally favours more deregulation, a low tax economy, more privatisation, and further cuts in public spending. Their Global Britain envisages Britain more attached to countries in the Anglosphere, and especially to the United States, than to Europe.4 These differences on economic and social policy, and on Britain's place in the world, make the chasm in the party seem very deep indeed. Both wings see themselves as representing the interests of business and the economy. But for Remainers, the business interest they support is the one that has developed over the last four decades of EU membership, while Leavers are more willing to see corporate Britain as another sectional interest, and make no secret of the fact that many existing businesses will have to adjust or disappear post-Brexit, because they have become too dependent on their links with the European economy. They favour instead businesses and entrepreneurs who are focussed on the opportunities of global, not European, markets. If May is blocked by her party, she could follow Robert Peel and try to pass her deal, or some variant of it, with opposition votes. That would bring a spectacular realignment of British politics. More likely is the prospect that she is challenged or resigns and is replaced by a hard Brexit leader who will be unable to unite the party. The Remainers will either break away in a group or will be steadily purged. Conservative members and voters are now both strongly Leave. There would still be some tensions. A hard Brexit Conservative party would be led by believers in Global Britain rather than Britain First. Their priorities are free trade agreements and deregulation rather than the priorities of most people who voted Leave, which are immigration control and economic protectionism. If they fail to manage the expectations of their new social base, they might see support drifting away to the populist nationalist right. The Conservatives are a party of Brexiteers led by a Remainer, while Labour is a party of Remainers led by a Brexiteer. Labour was, for a time under Kinnock and Blair, solidly pro-European, but that changed with the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. His election revived the long-standing conflict between the parliamentary party and the extra-parliamentary movement. Attempts to depose Corbyn by MPs after the referendum failed, and the 2017 election consolidated his position still further. Despite Corbyn being a long-standing critic of the EU and voting against every European treaty, the switch of Remain voters to the Labour party in 2017 helped him defy the widespread expectation that he would preside over a Labour rout similar to 1983. A few MPs and some party members have begun to leave the party, but although there has been no organised attempt so far to deselect MPs, there has also been little attempt by the Corbyn leadership to maintain Labour as a broad-based party of the centre-left. The Corbyn project seeks to recreate Labour as an extra-parliamentary party of the radical, populist left rather than as a centre-left parliamentary party. The Corbyn leadership is keen to avoid a formal split, but a gradual purging of the party of its social democrats, similar to what happened to the Conservatives after 1906, seems likely. Within Corbyn's Labour there is a tension between Labour members, 85 per cent of whom support a second referendum on the terms of Brexit, and 90 per cent of whom would vote Remain in such a referendum, and up to a third of Labour voters, particularly in northern cities, who voted Leave. The Corbyn leadership and its trade union allies want Labour to accept Britain's departure from the EU and an end to free movement in order to preserve its old social base, but that is hard to reconcile with the enthusiasm of most party members and most Labour voters for a ‘people's vote’ and for staying in the EU. Labour's pro-Brexit stance may eventually disillusion many Remain supporters, and lose votes to anti-Brexit parties like the LibDems and the Greens. Labour wants to hang on to its core working class vote in Wales, the north and the Midlands, with a class message about jobs and services and a Brexit message that Labour will not go back on Brexit (particularly free movement). Combining this with a message that can win over centrist Remain voters will be extremely difficult. Large numbers of voters will feel unrepresented either by a hard Brexit Conservative party or a soft Brexit Corbynite Labour party. Many on the pro-European wing of the party may in time conclude that the party is no longer for them, while many Labour Leave voters may shift either to the Conservatives or more likely to a new populist nationalist movement if ‘proper’ Brexit is not delivered. What part might the Liberal Democrats play in any realignment post-Brexit? They are the one national UK party with an uncomplicated and unwavering commitment to Europe. They campaigned hard to keep Britain in, and ever since have been campaigning hard for Britain to stay in. But they suffered a big electoral defeat in 2015 which saw them go down from fifty-seven MPs to eight, undoing the work of fifty years. They paid a heavy price for being part of the coalition, and supporting austerity. Since 2015, there have been few signs of a Liberal Democrat recovery. Their position changed little in 2017 and they continue to flatline below 10 per cent in the polls. They seemed to be a natural haven for Remain voters from both the Conservatives and Labour, but that has not happened yet. The party's former stronghold in the south-west is full of constituencies which voted Leave. So long as Brexit dominates the political agenda, the Liberal Democrats may struggle to win them back. Liberal Democrats want to encourage a new grouping of the radical centre to take on the extremes in both Labour and the Conservatives. They look enviously across the channel at the exploits of Emmanuel Macron, but Macron's breakthrough was only possible because France has a presidential system. In the UK, realignment to create a new centrist force is more difficult, but not impossible. But to be credible, it might require a formal split in both major parties and the formation of a new centrist parliamentary grouping. If such a realignment happened, it might reshape British politics as decisively as in 1846 and 1931. Brexit is the catalyst that might make it happen, but there are formidable obstacles. First, such a realignment might not succeed. Even in a scenario where a new centrist grouping was to emerge and—against the odds—managed to gain a parliamentary majority, resulting in the formation of a government, it might be swept away when it came to a general election. Second, party loyalties are still strong. Leaving their parties is the last thing most MPs want to do, for a host of personal and political reasons. That is why defections—when they happen—are quite rare and often quite small. The defection to the SDP in 1981 was in the end less than many anticipated, and the defection to UKIP in 2014 only claimed two sitting Conservative MPs. Will Brexit be different? Party leaderships will generally do everything they can to prevent a significant breakaway. Sometimes, the issues of principle and interest are too great and parties do split, but usually only after every other avenue has been exhausted first. Brexit also has a territorial dimension. The UK is a union state and the three smaller nations often diverge from England. In the referendum, Wales voted Leave in line with England, despite it traditionally being a stronghold for Liberals, Labour and Plaid Cymru, all of which backed Remain. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain, by greater margins than Leave won overall in the UK. In Scotland, all four main parties backed Remain. Under Ruth Davidson, the Conservatives have become a serious force in Scottish politics again, by being liberal, non-sectarian, pro-Remain, and pro-union; meanwhile Labour elected a Corbynite leader, but has so far made only limited gains. The SNP lost ground in the 2017 election, but it remains the dominant political force in Scottish politics. The chances of holding a second referendum that delivers independence have receded, but if there is a hard Brexit, this may help the SNP, because it reminds Scottish voters that Scotland is being taken out of the European Union against their will. Scotland voting differently from England in the referendum tends to reinforce the idea of Scottish identity as different from English identity. A future Conservative hard Brexit government in Westminster would make the eventual separation of Scotland from the union more certain. Northern Ireland also voted Remain. Here, the divisions are very deep, with nationalists including the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) voting Remain, along with some unionists and centrist voters. The minority Leave vote was marshalled by the Democratic Unionists. By one of those strange unanticipated quirks of politics the botched election in 2017 made the DUP the kingmakers at Westminster, allowing the Conservative government to carry on, but only by making its programme dependent on DUP approval. This has tied the hands of the government in the negotiations over the Irish border. The EU solution of a border down the Irish Sea was flatly rejected by the DUP on the grounds that it would treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, ignoring the fact that Northern Ireland has been treated differently since the province was first set up in the 1920s. But the Irish border quickly became one of the most intractable problems of the talks, even though British public opinion, particularly among Leavers, was largely indifferent to Irish concerns. Since the referendum, polling shows the proportion of Northern Ireland voters saying they now support Remain rising to 69 per cent in May 2018,5 and for the first time some polls show a small majority of Northern Ireland citizens in favour of a united Ireland (though other polls contradict this).6 Northern Ireland also has a much closer cultural connection to Scotland than to England, and will be influenced by any new push for Scottish independence. One of the long-term consequences of Brexit may well be the strengthening of forces which bring closer the breakup of the UK union state. Brexit seems likely to deliver a more polarised two-party system, and a more polarised electorate as both the centre-right and centre-left traditions are weakened. Such polarised party systems often are the product of civil war, as was the case in Ireland and the United States. Brexit has been peaceful, but it has stirred deep passions which may determine the future parties which succeed. One of its legacies may be a greater presence for the populist nationalist right. The drums of betrayal were already beating before the Chequers agreement. UKIP saw its vote collapse in 2017, and was then embroiled in leadership in-fighting, which reduced it to insignificance. But following the Brexit press treatment of the Chequers agreement, UKIP saw a spike in its support. There have also been persistent rumours of plans to launch a new populist nationalist party which would be anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and pro-Brexit, drawing on the resentments which a decade of austerity and stagnant living standards have fostered against elites and against other cultures. It would have the backing of the US alt-right and the populist nationalist right in Europe. The two main parties have always been very successful in recruiting forces to their left and right and holding them within a coalition which has been dominated for the most part by each party's centre. But a new period may be opening in which that pattern ceases to hold. Already, the centre has lost control in the Labour party, and the centre's hold in the Conservative party is highly fragile. Theresa May represents the last hope of the centre-right in the Conservative party. If she fails, a hard Brexit Conservative party may be obliged to move right to contain the populist challenge. Populist nationalists in the UK, like populist nationalists throughout Europe, are opposed to economic liberalism as well as to social liberalism. They want a more closed society, not an ever more open one. If such a party succeeds in establishing itself, it will be a serious rival to a hard Brexit Conservative party still entertaining fantasies about English exceptionalism and global Britain,7 as well as to a Corbynite Labour party. Both may be forced to shift their positions—particularly on immigration—to stop its advance. Brexit is a process which will go on dominating British politics for a long time to come. If it is mishandled, it has the potential to explode the British party system, and split both main parties. It has already produced a significant electoral realignment and the forces it has unleashed may yet force a realignment of political parties. Both main political parties are divided and struggling with so far limited success to manage its destructive fall-out.
Referência(s)