At last, Britain can leave the madhouse
Updated English original of article published in Italian by La Stampa on May 27th, who showed an appropriate lack of enthusiasm about British politics, eight years after Brexit
When it came it felt like a welcome relief, like being let out of a madhouse or being allowed to stop torturing yourself. The surprise announcement of Britain’s general election, even if it will occur only three or four months sooner than most politicians expected, was a pleasant shock for most Britons but also a reminder that political stability is not always a virtue in a democracy.
British politics has become dominated, stultified, in some ways crippled by the consequences of the Brexit referendum that was held eight long years ago. With the election, change will at last be possible. This doesn’t mean that Britain will soon try to rejoin the European Union, nor even start talking about it in a sensible way. It does mean that attitudes towards Europe could become much less ideological after the election and that Britain can look forward to a new, and more comfortable, form of stability.
Political commentators in London have long claimed, slightly smugly, that the British system brings strong government, especially compared with that of Italy, thanks to the fact that the past 35 years have been characterised by parties holding power for very long periods. Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the Conservatives were in power for nearly 18 years from 1979 to 1997; then Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ruled for the Labour Party for 13 years from 1997 to 2010; and since 2010 the Conservatives have now had a 14-year period in power.
That stability has sometimes been virtuous, allowing quite long-term thinking about public policy in a country in which a free and vibrant media and strong judiciary provide accountability. It is more debatable whether that stability can be seen as a deliberate preference among voters or whether it is just an outcome of a winner-takes-all electoral system. But in any case, this latest 14-year period of government has been an exception to the smug rule. We can accurately say that it has been a long period of extreme instability, with the instability inside the governing party itself.
It is not just the fact that in those 14 years the Conservatives have had five different prime ministers, four of them in the eight years since the referendum, encouraging Italians to make jokes about British political instability. This decade and a half has been shaped by the shock of the 2008 global financial crisis, a crisis which originated in America but hit the United Kingdom hard because of its dependence on the City of London and financial services. Unstable politics came as the aftershock.
The 2008 crisis brought the Conservatives to power in 2010, but at first forced them into coalition with the centre-left Liberal Democrats and made them vulnerable to right-wing competitors, particularly the anti-EU party led by Nigel Farage called the UK Independence Party. Mainstream parties, both Labour on the left and the Conservatives on the right, had been discredited by that 2008 crisis and by the cuts in public services that followed it.
That, really, is the story behind the Brexit referendum of 2016: an extremist minority within the Conservatives and in Farage’s UKIP succeeded in scaring the Conservative government into holding a referendum, which the then prime minister, David Cameron, was confident would confirm Britain’s place in the EU. The rest is a very unstable history: Britain voted narrowly to leave the EU but no one, not even those Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who had campaigned to leave, had worked out or debated amongst themselves a plan for how to leave and what course to follow after Brexit.
As a result, the eight years since that referendum have seen a kind of nervous breakdown in the Conservative political class, which is also why that party chose two leaders of a type they would never have selected in normal times: Boris Johnson, a super-salesman but an incompetent, deceitful and chaotic prime minister, and Liz Truss, a third-rate populist who shamed the late Margaret Thatcher by claiming to be her emulator and yet showed such un-Thatcherlike fiscal recklessness that she lasted in office for just 48 days. Thatcher would have dismissed Truss as the charlatan she was and is.
Now the prime minister calling the election is a more decent but also inexperienced leader, Rishi Sunak, who is well-regarded as a person but not as a politician. He therefore began his election campaign by making his announcement standing outside his Downing Street office under pouring rain, making him look weak, pathetic and politically inexpert. For the Tories, it was the worst possible start. A series of desperate-sounding announcements about reintroducing national service and handing more bungs to older voters have hardly improved matters.
The story of every election contest in every democracy has to include the fact that opinion polls become serious indicators only once voters are having to think seriously about how they will vote. So it is perfectly possible that the huge lead held by the Labour Party in opinion polls for the past year could shrink between now and July 4th.
However, the right assumption as this campaign begins is that Labour will nevertheless win on July 4th with a strong parliamentary majority. The party’s 20-point poll lead has been remarkably stable, and has been repeatedly confirmed in by-elections and local elections. It feels as if the voters have a settled view that whatever their opinion of Labour they want to get out of the madhouse represented by the Conservatives’ 14 years.
Moreover, Labour is favoured by one surprise consequence of Brexit. Many people forecast that Brexit would make the region of Scotland fight for and win a referendum on independence, for Scots had voted clearly to stay in the EU. In fact, the Scottish National Party, which has run the semi-autonomous region of Scotland for 17 years, is now deeply discredited, which should allow Labour to win back many Scottish parliamentary seats from the Nationalists, cushioning its national majority even if its overall poll lead narrows. A second, less surprising consequence of Brexit may also help Labour: the Conservative vote is now going to be fought for by the successor to UKIP, the Reform Party, which will split the Tory vote in many seats, making even the safest Conservative incumbents vulnerable on July 4th.
What would a Labour government do in office? Its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is an uncharismatic but decent and clever former public prosecutor, and that boringness will be seen as a virtue by the public and by international investors. Second, despite having limited room for fiscal manoeuvre, Labour will try to reallocate spending back towards welfare, public services and the green transition. Third, he will stick to a pro-NATO, anti-Russia foreign and defence policy, free of some of the ideologically driven anti-Europeanism of the Conservatives. This will become especially important if Donald Trump wins the US election in November.
As for every western country, Starmer’s most difficult task will be on immigration. For sure, he will cancel the Conservatives’ expensive and rather bonkers plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, a plan which has made the policy of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni (involving an asylum-processing centre in Albania, but keeping carefully inside international law) look moderate and sane. But what will he do instead? He will try to make legal routes for immigration stronger and more rigorous. He will try to do a better deal with France about policing the people-smuggling criminal gangs on both sides of the English Channel. But there is no magic solution. Let’s wish him luck.