The influence of Europe’s – and in particular Britain’s – populist radical Right parties is a case in point.

Although we’ve been hearing about their rising support for years now, few of them have actually won sufficient seats in parliament to force their way into national office. And, as we’ve seen in Peterborough, some of them can’t even win high profile by-elections.

Yet – often with the help (if not necessarily the support) of a media that understandably craves conflict and novelty – they’ve managed to shift the centre of gravity strongly in their direction, particularly when it comes to questions of migration and multiculturalism.

For decades, many centre-Right parties either didn’t have to think very much about those questions (because the numbers coming to their country were so small) or, like the Conservative Party here, they had established a reputation in the minds of voters for being the tougher of the two main governing alternatives on such issues.

Suggested reading

How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

Once numbers began to increase, however, those centre-Right parties, already losing support as voters lost faith in their ability to produce the economic goods, were in a bind.

On the one hand, as market-friendly parties supported by business, they could see the case for maintaining a reasonably relaxed attitude: no point, after all, in cutting off a useful source of often cheap, hard-working and flexible labour. On the other, as self-appointed guardians both of their country’s traditional values and its sovereignty, they understood and sympathised with the cultural anxieties felt by many of their ‘natural voters’ – anxieties which more extreme alternatives on their right flanks were more than happy to exploit.

Social democratic parties on the Left, meanwhile, were losing support, particularly among the shrinking ranks of the traditional working class. And they were desperately casting around for reasons why. Rising support for the populist radical Right provided an easy, off-the-shelf explanation that avoided their having to ask whether the truth lay elsewhere – such as with their third-way embrace of less redistributive, less interventionist economic and social policies, and in the seemingly remorseless displacement of authentic working class voices by well-heeled, well-educated, and more professional politicians.

The evidence suggests that the centre-Left has always been significantly less likely to lose voters directly to the populist radical Right than its centre-right opponents. Take Denmark, which is much in the news at the moment. Yes, the Social Democrats, who’d considerably tightened up their already pretty restrictive immigration and integration policies, did well in this week’s general election. And yes, the populist radical Right Danish People’s Party did badly. But the one doesn’t necessarily explain the other – not when flow-of-the-vote calculations suggest that less than 10% of the former’s vote was made up of people who’d previously voted for the latter.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Yet, predisposed as they are to add two and two to make five, Labour and social democratic politicians all over Europe have been no less obsessed than conservative, Christian democratic and even liberal parties with trying to work out how to respond to a threat that can easily appear bigger than it is. What else explains Ed Miliband’s famous immigration mug, or Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to limit free movement not just of goods, services and capital but of people, too?

The mainstream’s first response is often to try to change the subject by talking about almost anything else other than immigration and integration. That’s not altogether impossible: after all, people still care about the economy and public services. But it’s very difficult to do when voters clearly are concerned about such things and, especially when there are plenty of politicians and journalists who know that ‘floods’ of migrants, their apparent ‘failure’ to ‘fit in’, and the supposed ‘strain’ they place on the welfare state make for such arresting headlines.

The mainstream’s response at that point is to try to fight fire with facts – which, as anyone who has tried it will attest, is normally about as effective as fighting with one hand tied behind your back, especially when not everyone in the mainstream (particularly on the centre-right, it has to be said) is averse to peddling some now-familiar myths themselves.

As a result, the most obvious recourse for both centre-Left and centre-Right parties is to claim ‘We’re listening’ and to start adopting – albeit in dilute form and couched in less inflammatory rhetoric – some of the diagnoses and the policy prescriptions of their more radical opponents. The hope, of course, is that voters, realising that their concerns (many of which revolve around the sheer rapidity of cultural change that they never explicitly consented to) are now apparently being taken seriously, will end their flirtation with the extreme and gratefully return to the mainstream.

Suggested reading

The Tory plot thickens

By Various contributors

Except it doesn’t always work like that. By ‘banging on’ about the urgent need to control migration and insisting that migrants mustn’t live separate lives, as well as about (to pick two not-so-random examples) net migration targets and the big bad EU, mainstream parties only serve to up the salience of such issues. And so, rather than undermining the populist radical Right, they actually do it a favour – not least because it can always trump any restrictive (or Eurosceptic) policy that a mainstream party can dream up with something much bigger and better.

Nigel Farage will no doubt be peeved by the Brexit Party’s failure to pull off a win in Peterborough. But it won’t wipe the smile off his face permanently. Farage knows from his days as UKIP leader that all he has to do to get what he wants (which, whatever he might say about taking over at Westminster, remains, in the end, a no-deal Brexit) is to score highly enough in polls and in European and by-elections to make sitting MPs believe that his candidates are capable of stealing enough of ‘their’ voters to gift their seats to their main opponent.

Right now, then, Farage has got both Labour and the Conservatives exactly where he wants them: living in fear and promising the undeliverable.

Nature is dying. Human existence is under threat like never before. Our air is polluted. Our rivers run dry. Our oceans have become dustbins of disposable plastic. From coral reefs to the earth’s forests, from bees to elephants, the planet faces existential threat. A million species are now threatened with extinction.

In ages past, natural catastrophes were designated acts of God – in other words, not a human responsibility. In the Anthropocene era, however, we humans are in the dock and our economic activity is being judged.

Our obsession with growth, with GDP as the measure of human success, has given more of us more wealth along with extraordinary technological toys. It is, apparently, one of the great success stories of the modern era. But it has come at too high a cost. Public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker may flatter the present generation with talk of our enormous progress – but the latest UN Report on the state of the planet shows that progress is being purchased at the price of our future existence.

Suggested reading

Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet, according to David Attenborough, “is either a madman or an economist”. Or a philosopher. Pinker is simply a thinking man’s Bernie Madoff, selling us a flashy Ponzi scheme that points the way to disaster.

“Things can only get better” sang Labour activists in 1997, on the way to Tony Blair’s first election victory, as even the Left parroted the virtues of economic growth. These days it is almost impossible to find a mainstream politician who doesn’t believe in the virtues of having more, the very engine of our coming environmental catastrophe.

There was a time when we thought a few lifestyle tweaks were the answer – a bit of re-cycling here, cutting down on meat and long-haul flights there. But we’re well beyond that now, far past what George Monbiot calls “micro-consumerist bollocks”. He goes on: “Instead of pissing around on the margins of the problem … We have to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.”

Suggested reading

Who will ride the Green wave?

By Peter Franklin

For Monbiot, the destruction of capitalism is not some Left-wing fantasy of universal equality, it is not about class warfare or Marxist politics, it is about survival plain and simple. Either we kill it or it kills us.

In this new world, two things will be necessary: we will have to learn to have less, learn to be poorer. And we will have to learn to be smaller. Scale down, don’t scale up. “Small is beautiful” as the people-centred economist E F Schumacher put it back in the 70’s.

The trouble is, not even the Green Party seems to believe in small any more. With Brexit, it too has caught the bigger is better bug. One honourable exception, though, would be Green Party member of the House of Lords, Jenny Jones. Writing in the Guardian in 2016, she observed:

“The most profound weakness of the EU, from the Green point of view, is that it is a super-sized, top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth. It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience and self-reliance.”

Yes, yes, and yes again. And there is a small but worthy Green Leaves movement (great name, btw) that agrees with her.

But, unfortunately, the wider Green movement has come to be hijacked by this whole corporatist top-down approach, prioritising free movement – including the free movement of film stars to take international flights to protest climate change – and free markets, insisting that the only way to tackle the big issue of climate change is through the very globalised structures that create it.

Suggested reading

Just how mad is the Green New Deal?

By Peter Franklin

The Greens, too, been suckered by the idea that being progressive is the path to climate restoration. Yet, in truth, those who believe in progress have little to offer the environment. Because it was under the gas-guzzling banner of progress that the current scourge on our planet was justified.

Indeed, it is probably conservatives who now offer the greatest hope for the future. By definition, they seek to conserve the best of what is threatened. You get a strong sense of this connection between conservatism and conservation in the writings of the novelist, poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, a man so anti-progressive he won’t even use a tractor:

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us”

Most conservatives have yet to recognise is that capitalism is not their friend. I noted in my Confessions interview with Roger Scruton that Capitalism is the greatest change agent the world has ever seen. And he acknowledged that this has become the great question for natural conservatives to wrestle with.

Trust conservatives to save the planet

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The problem, in the USA especially, is that conservatism has come to mean conserving free-market capitalism. But increasingly, this view is being challenged. In Peter Kolozi’s 2017 book, for example, Conservatives against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization, an older tradition of conservatism is appealed to. One that pre-dated the neo-liberal revolution. And, earlier this year, the deeply conservative Fox anchor and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson opened up the subject by providing a compelling critique of the cult of the free market, in a way that no ‘progressive’ Democrat would ever dare.

The Green Party, though, has been mugged by progressivism, which has left its environmental credentials surprisingly poor. When I was younger, the Green Party’s European position was all about contesting the terrible Common Agricultural Policy. Now that the butter mountains have gone, too many Greens assume that the issue has been resolved. But it hasn’t. Monbiot calls the CAP “among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the northern hemisphere.”

And here he makes common cause with the unlikely figure of Michael Gove:

“Each year, around £3.2 billion comes to U.K. farmers under the CAP. Of this, a full £2.6 billion is not paid according to how farmers manage their land but according to the size of their holdings. This perverse arrangement means public money flows to those who are already wealthy.”

All of which is just a little more evidence that our political goalposts are rapidly shifting. Left and Right are changing their meaning. My own diagnosis of this change follows the brilliant analysis of this by Nancy Fraser, that Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair made their peace with free-market capitalism at just about the same time as some on the Right were beginning to wonder whether capitalism was really their ally.

The shock of this re-alignment has yet to fully work itself out. But for those of us who have long been suspicious of unrestrained free markets and their effect on human flourishing, the thought has started to dawn that the old-fashioned Right – with its emphasis on family, religious belief and small-scale wellbeing – might be a better place from which to challenge the evils of capitalism, than from within the assumptions of the progressive Left. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the environment.

The Conservatives walk away with a national equivalent vote of just 28%. To put this in perspective, if it were replicated at a general election it would be a lower share of the vote than what Michael Howard presided over in 2005, and a lower share of the vote than what John Major presided over in 1997.

It would be the party’s lowest vote in history.

The results that they’ll still be poring over in Conservative headquarters reflect the continuation of trends that I first pointed to in the shadow of the 2017 general election, with my colleague Oliver Heath.

To understand the dilemma facing the Conservative Party you need to drill down into its electorate.

Ever since the vote for Brexit, the party has been polling stronger in pro-Brexit areas, among working-class voters and in communities where there are larger numbers of voters without degrees. They have been steadily losing territory, though, in economically secure, middle-class and pro-Remain areas where there are larger concentrations of graduates and social liberals.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

This tension was less of a risk when it looked as though the Conservative Party would deliver on Brexit and lead Britain out of the EU. Having done so, the party and a new leader could then have gone the country with a radically revamped domestic policy agenda, with as much for Remainers as Leavers.

But, as we know, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

With Theresa May having failed, so far, to deliver any sort of Brexit, the Conservative Party is getting hit on all sides. Their biggest setbacks were in Remain areas. And among the voters, the most important were not the 18-24-year olds that are generally obsessed over, but the slightly older, 30-and 40 somethings who swung hardest against them in 2017.

These voters comprise what I call the ‘Things Can Only Get Better Generation’; they are the middle-aged and young middle-aged who came of age under New Labour and Tony Blair and who probably today have young families of their own.

In focus groups, they tell me a lot.

They say they feel squeezed on multiple fronts. They are often struggling to pay for childcare and also worry about how on earth they are going to afford to send their kids to university in the future.

Suggested reading

Is Corbyn doing the country a favour?

By Tim Bale

The Things Can Only Get Better Generation is absolutely convinced that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they did, and that the future is going to be harder than the present.

They worry about how they will afford to look after their own Baby Boomer parents, who are retired and will soon need care.

They are probably renting or, if they are not, then heavy mortgage payments and few savings mean that their family is one crisis away from financial disaster. And they lean instinctively against Brexit, or if they voted for it then they have concluded that it is being managed disastrously. The Tories are losing them.

But most worrying of all is the fact that the party is now also losing ground among the older and more committed Leavers, albeit less dramatically than it is losing ground in Remainia. Many of those areas where the party lost council seats, or councils flipped into no overall control, had endorsed Brexit in 2016.

But their results could have been far worse.

The Conservatives were only saved from further embarrassment by Nigel Farage – and the fact that his Brexit Party decided not to contest these elections. If the populists had done so, then the Tories would have seen much more serious losses in pro-Leave areas.

Indeed, in polls for the European Parliament elections, the Brexit Party is already polling around the 30% mark, while it is taking around 14% in Westminster polls –more than enough to pave the way for Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. Much of this vote is coming from disillusioned 2017 Conservative voters and Leavers. Farage has already won over 52% of the former and 60% of the latter.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

The perfect storm that is approaching the Conservative Party is going to cause significant damage on all sides. The middle-class Remainers who are still in the party will finally jump ship or abstain, while Brexiteers will drift over to the Brexit Party or similarly decide that turning out to cast a vote at the next election is not worth it.

But nor did Labour fare particularly well at the polls. While Corbyn and his party did make some gains, their overall tally, compared with 2015, was a net loss of 82 seats.

An unwritten law at local elections is that the main party of opposition is supposed to enjoy gains not suffer losses. Nor is it supposed to suffer losses in its heartlands. That, though, is precisely what happened.

While it is true that the red Labour wave is continuing to sweep out beyond London, and into the commuter towns and parts of the South East, commentators who argued that Labour would suffer no costs for drifting toward Remain now find themselves having to explain serious Labour losses in northern pro-Leave areas – from Ashfield to Bolton, from Bolsover to Hartlepool, from Burnley to Darlington.

Suggested reading

Have Remainers lost perspective?

By Matthew Goodwin

The weakening of Labour’s relationship with its traditional working-class voters, which started to break down long before the 2016 referendum, and which I first pointed to in 2014, continues. And there isn’t much evidence that the challenge will ease.

Blue-collar Britain, which leans heavily toward Brexit, is now being targeted by the Brexit Party, which is spending much of its time campaigning in pro-Brexit Labour heartlands, as well as seats that flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in 2017.

For Labour, this means that, once again, the party is going to have to fend off national populists in its pro-Brexit heartlands where, we tend to forget, UKIP often finished in second place at the 2015 general election.

But, for me, the most striking statistic of all from the local elections was that the combined share of the vote going to the two big parties tumbled to just 56% – the second lowest figure on record. A bad night Labour and the Tories was a good night for independents, Liberal Democrats and Greens.

In this sense, one of the peculiarities about Britain’s Brexit moment is that it is making our politics more European. Britain voted to leave the European Union but its political system is now fragmenting like many other EU member states. The old mainstream parties are being squeezed by an array of new challengers.

The weakening of Britain’s two-party system has been visible in the national polls for a while. In the past month, those challengers above alongside the Brexit Party and UKIP have been taking as much as 46% of the vote.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

This is a stunning turnaround from the general election less than two years ago when ‘the others’ took less than half this figure.

It is a remarkable shift. It is also a deeply problematic one for a political system that is organised around only two, or at a maximum, two-and-a-half parties. The longer this continues, the harder it becomes for either of the major parties to win a large majority. And the longer this continues, the stronger the case for electoral reform becomes.

It is tempting to trace all this to Brexit. But the picture is more complex.

The process of fragmentation that is unfolding in Britain began long ago and is one that our Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish neighbours know well, none of whom are grappling with leaving the EU.

As we argue in National Populism, what is happening in Britain and other advanced democracies is that many of our established, older and hence less flexible parties are struggling to absorb and navigate new issues that are cutting directly across their traditional electorates.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Brexit is certainly one of them but there are many others such as immigration, terrorism, refugees, climate change, minority rights and the steady advance of social liberalism, all of which are dividing voters and often because of their values rather than because of their specific views toward specific policies.

The arrival of these value conflicts is also coinciding with a breakdown of tribal loyalty to the main parties, which is making it easier for new populists and other challengers to break through. The firewall of party loyalty is today much weaker.

Meanwhile, deeper changes in the overall structure of societies are reshaping party coalitions from below, and will continue to do so for many years to come. These drivers include the expansion and now squeezing of the new middle-class, the rise of university graduates, our collective failure to respect and support those who choose, or are forced down, other paths, and the ongoing effects of unprecedented migration and demographic change.

Our established parties enjoyed a golden era when much of this was absent or had only just begun. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they are coming undone.

British politics has been pushed into a state of partial realignment with voters facing cross-cutting pressures and our political parties facing deeply divided electorates. Whether the Conservatives, and whoever succeeds Theresa May, can win voters back and build a new coalition remains to be seen. Likewise, whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour can cobble together a viable coalition for majority power is unknown. It’s entirely possible that the future holds a full-blown realignment.

For now, though, the only thing we can be certain of is that the fragmentation that has been working through our political system is set to continue. And as the old order struggles to cope, new challengers will take advantage of that volatility.

PEI’s 150,000 people don’t usually attract much attention. But today they go to the polls and might just become the first Province to elect a Green government.

It’s been a meteoric rise for the PEI Green Party, because just two years ago the pollsters had them on less than 10% of the vote.

But this is more than a Canadian curiosity. Though not quite as widespread as the populist surge, a Green wave is disrupting politics in countries across the West – and, as with the populists, it is the established parties of the centre-Left who are paying the price.

Further reading

The fall of social democracy

By Peter Franklin

In the Netherlands, the main green party, GroenLinks, has replaced the once dominant Dutch Labour Party as the leading party of the Left. The German Greens may well follow suit – they are now regularly outpolling the SPD. In the Finnish general election last week, the Green League gained ground. In France, Les Verts are set to do better than the Socialists in the forthcoming Euro elections (though that’s not the highest of bars these days). The Australian Greens are now established as the third force in politics – though still some distance behind the big two. There’s no breaking the America duopoly, but radical green policies such as the Green New Deal are a big influence on the Democrats.

So why do we see Green support at rising and record levels in so many countries?

In an interview with the International Politics and Society journal, Zack Grant of Oxford University provides some of the answers. As part of a team that analysed “340 general election results in 32 countries… over the course of 45 years”, he found that green parties do best in countries with devolved political systems:

“Non-proportional electoral systems are often blamed for the woes of minor parties in countries. Overall, however, our study found decentralisation… to be a better predictor of Green party strength than the electoral system. Minor parties find it easier to win seats at the subnational level… these are typically second-order elections which are perceived as less important by voters, and therefore allow for greater chances of minor party success. Consequently, parties like the Greens can build reputations as credible legislators which aids future national election campaigns.”

Green electoral success is also associated with “high levels of GDP per capita and lower rates of unemployment”, “countries [that are] highly dependent on nuclear power” and “countries which lack substantial support for ‘radical Left’ parties such as Syriza and Podemos”.

Then there’s profound change in the demographic make-up of the Left-leaning electorate:

“…survey data analysis in many different countries consistently paints a similar picture with regard to who are the “core” Green voters: young, university-educated people working in ‘sociocultural’ areas (healthcare, social services, the arts etc.) that hold liberal social values.”

It’s not surprising that a completely different set of people has chosen a different set of parties to put their support behind.

Further reading

Just how mad is the Green New Deal?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, Green parties haven’t prospered in every country. In the UK, the Greens have been overshadowed by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum. As Zack Grant puts it, there’s “a degree of functional equivalency between certain Green parties and the radical left”.

It’s not just the radical Left, though. Other movements, most notably Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, have been able to claim the young, urban, professional vote – and to do so from the centre or centre-Left (which, indeed, is where some Green parties position themselves).

In this age of insurgent Rightwing populism, it’s becoming clear that parties can prosper by presenting themselves as a counter-insurgency: seeking to provide an alternative to the political establishment, but diametrically opposing themselves to the national populists. Whereas the conventional parties of Left and Right seek to straddle the ‘Open-versus-Closed‘ divide (for instance on issues like immigration and EU integration), the populist and counter-populist parties are taking up positions at either end of the new spectrum.

I don’t expect the Open-versus-Closed agenda to entirely supplant Left-versus-Right, rather what we’re seeing is the rise of a messy and unstable four-cornered politics.

It’ll be made all the messier by the as yet unresolved contest between Greens, other parts of the anti-establishment Left, and liberal movements such as En Marche and Change UK to define the ‘Open’ politics of the next generation.

My money is on the Greens because, unlike the liberals, they’re not associated with establishment politics; and unlike the rest of the Left, they have don’t have to pay lip service to a working-class socialist tradition – and thus can focus their appeal to the college-educated, metropolitan voters most receptive to an ‘Open’ agenda.

Most importantly, Green parties can offer more than mere politics. As part of the wider environmental movement, they hold out the promise of purpose and belonging through a shared and value-laden lifestyle. For people with no other strong sense of identity that is a powerful offer – and, ironically, the one thing the Greens share with their populist opponents.

Further reading

Crony capitalism is empowering the Left

By Peter Franklin

I admit, there is a kind of superficial plausibility to this view. Indeed, the call for more listening, like the call for more kindness or more generosity, is never something to decry. Moreover, as the crowds behind Self seemed perfectly to demonstrate, there is a destructive loop that is generated by the feeling of not being heard.

The frustration of not being listened to leads to louder shouting. And the louder people shout, the more others shut down; mute; block. The other side, still unheard, shouts louder still and so it continues. We are all trapped in our own feedback loop, subject to confirmation bias, hearing only what we want to hear.

Further reading

How politics makes us irrational

By Tom Chivers

As the philosopher Gemma Fiumara observes in The Other side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, there is a “crushing deafness produced by an assertive culture that is intoxicated by the effectiveness of its own ‘saying’, and increasingly incapable of paying ‘heed’”.

Even so, as a diagnosis of our current predicament, I think Self’s position falls short. And for two reasons.

First, the issue of listening speaks to a basic power imbalance. The Brexit debate can be characterised, without too much deformation, as one between a group of people who are used to being listened to and a group who are not. The Remain heartlands are in London, and university towns like Oxford and Cambridge. These places were most enthusiastic in signing up to the petition to cancel Article 50. They are used to being listened to.

On the other hand, the places that were least enthusiastic – seaside towns, former industrial towns in the north – are precisely those places that have been radically unattended to for decades. For Remainers to complain that they are the ones who are not being listened to is a bit rich: for generations, the sort of people who voted Remain have dominated the public conversation.

Further reading

Bring on the People's Peers

By Matthew Goodwin

Moreover, if the Leave vote was generated, in part, by a section of society that felt profoundly unheard, the desire of Remainers to find a way of bypassing the 2016 vote – with the clever ruse of another referendum, for instance – will inevitably be understood as confirmation that the educated, powerful, political class will never listen. And the frustration and anger at not being listened to will inevitably contaminate our common life for decades to come.

To an extent Self is correct. Brexit has become a perfect storm of not being listened to. But the charge of deafness falls more heavily on one side than the other.

The second problem with Self’s position is that it misses the fact that some political differences cannot be sorted out by better, more attentive listening. Writing a few years before he died, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz wrote a compelling series of essays under the title How to Cure a Fanatic. Here he excoriated the perspective of well-meaning liberal Europeans who think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict that can be addressed by better conversation:

“People in Europe keep sending me wonderful invitations to spend a rosy weekend in a delightful resort with Palestinian partners so that we can learn to know one another, to like one another, to drink a cup of coffee together, so that we can realise that no one has horns and tails – and the trouble will go away. This is based on a widespread sentimental European idea that every conflict is no more than a misunderstanding.”

There are, obviously, a million and one ways in which Brexit differs from the violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But this much can be taken from Oz’s wisdom: the call for better listening can sometimes be a cheap, sentimental form of avoidance – the avoidance of the political. Some differences are not simply differences of understanding. They represent different priorities, clashing commitments. And no amount of listening can solve that.

It seems pretty obvious why we do not listen in periods of political conflict: because giving too much heed to opposing perspectives, especially when it is feared that the compliment may not be returned, is to concede ground. To listen is to acknowledge that the other may be right and that you may be wrong – and that feels like a show of weakness, a lack of commitment. At its most fundamental, the fear of listening is something like this: to listen is to lose.

Further reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

I don’t know how to get round this. The home-spun wisdom is that to show you have truly listened to an argument so that you understand it, you must be able to be able to repeat it, summarising the thrust. But most Leavers could pretty effectively summarise the Remain position just as most Remainers could summarise the Leave position. This is little more that clever ventriloquy: it’s not that we don’t understand each other. It’s that we do not agree and neither side wants to lose.

That’s why I find myself suspicious of Will Self’s assertion that what we have with Brexit is a crisis of listening. He is obviously right that there is something profoundly unedifying about the way we are all now barking at each other, without anyone hearing a thing. But this can’t be resolved by telling a group of people who have been ignored for generations that they have, once again, to shut up and pay heed to the grown ups.

Indeed, what started as the anger of the unheard has grown beyond that – it is now a political struggle between two very different ways of seeing the world. Calling for a pause in the struggle to make time for coffee and listening will be experienced, perhaps rightly, as a ruse, just another way of playing for time.

No, the problem of listening is simple. Pin your ears back. In 2016, the clear majority of those who spoke asked to leave the EU. Yet ever since, the political class have pretended not to understand, thus insinuating that what was said was itself unclear. It wasn’t unclear, they just didn’t like it. And so what we need now is not more coffee and chat. We need a whole new political class.

In the middle of the drama, there is a tendency to focus on the personalities and the short-term dynamics behind the current Cabinet’s tension. To do so is to miss how today’s political weather reflects the long-term prospects for the climate.

What’s at stake for the Conservative party now is whether it can pivot to take advantage of the new political landscape that 2016 inaugurated. The alternative for the party is that it is broken by the forces that are pushing for a realignment of British politics. That would be bad news for the Conservative party. I think, on balance, that it would also be bad for the country, but there is less certainty here.

Suggested Reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

What is certain is that the traditional Left-Right division of politics is outdated. It fails to capture the complexity of the electorate’s actual political views. The Left-Right division is defined principally by economics: to what extent is prosperity best served by redistributive welfare policies and market intervention to correct its excesses, or by low taxes and letting the market rip?

A cluster of other issues are better defined as social. They concern what makes for a flourishing life, beyond how much money you have in the bank. The contrast in social attitudes is something like the following: to what extent is human flourishing best served by celebrating the power of individuals to seek the life they choose, or by pursuing committed relationships in stable, ordered communities?

The key policy area that elicits different reactions here is immigration, with supranational institutions a related touchstone. The difference in general outlook has wider ramifications: on law and order, family policy, human rights and civil liberties, defence and security, and so on.

In some work on the electorate in France – Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017) – Thomas Piketty used two questions to elicit where people stood on these two axes. Are you for or against more redistribution? Do you think there are too many immigrants in France? As both of these are yes/no questions, the electorate can then be divided up into four groups: those who are for more redistribution and more immigration; those who are opposed to more immigration and more redistribution; those who want more redistribution but less immigration; and those who want less redistribution and more migration. Interestingly, roughly a quarter of the electorate in France now falls into each of these categories.

Piketty’s working paper focuses on an important point, which is a populist one, that the heat of the Left-Right controversy between the major political parties has hidden their collusion in keeping immigration off the political agenda. In the terms of the title of his working paper, the ‘Brahmin Left’ and the ‘Merchant Right’ both support immigration, the first for social reasons, the latter for economic.

Piketty’s work does not answer, however, a different and crucial question: which of these cleavages is the more important one, in terms of how people look at the world? Do more people feel strongly about the economic cleavage, or about the social one?

The question of which cleavage is more salient matters because of the effects of a two-party political structure. A two-party structure forces you to identify only one of these cleavages as the central basis on which political debate occurs, and on which a party makes its policy offer to the electorate.

The UK’s existing two-party system has privileged the economic cleavage over the social one; so has the French one, until recently.

Suggested Reading

Is Trump killing or curing American conservatism?

By Henry Olsen

The priority of the economic cleavage over the social cleavage was under strain before the 2016 referendum on EU membership. The dynamics of the referendum have decisively shifted this, however. The referendum question formally asked for your view on whether the UK should leave the institutions of the EU, and there are a variety of pros and cons about that policy.

Because we reason by heuristics and emotions – the hot, fast, cognitively frugal elements of what psychologists call ‘System 1’ – what the question actually elicited in the great majority of cases was your social outlook: cosmopolitan, individualist globalists vs rooted, communitarian nationalists. This is true for both Leavers and Remainers, and we’ve all spent three years rehearsing the reasons why our side is right.

I tend to follow the BBC’s output for roughly the reason that Kremlinologists read Pravda: that it’s the best way to know what the powers that be think. A recent piece, Allan Little’s ‘Looking for Brexitland’, had some insight, however:

“Brexit has driven a fracture through both the two big Westminster parties. The divide in the House of Commons might still, formally, be between a Conservative government and a Labour-dominated opposition. But in the country, politics has realigned. The divide out here, beyond the Westminster bubble, is between Remainers and Leavers.”

Some new polling by Michael Ashcroft has confirmed with data what Little – and you and I – have discerned anecdotally: that there has been a decisive shift towards the priority of the social cleavage over the economic.

Ashcroft showed two things. First, voters’ mental associations for the two existing parties are effectively unchanged in a decade. The Tories are the party of entitled aristocrats; Labour are the party of welfare scroungers. Both are still defined by their historic economic positions.

Second, he asked people to imagine there was a new offer. ‘New Party A’ would be supportive of immigration, want action on climate change, promote rehabilitation in criminal justice, support international aid and supranational institutions generally. ‘New Party B’ would reduce immigration, argue that climate change had been exaggerated, take a tougher line on law and order, spend the aid budget in the UK instead, think that traditional values had been neglected and that the UK was becoming a nanny state. Their respective positions on relations with the EU are obvious. Call these the ‘Progressives’ and the ‘Nationals’.

The results were striking. In this fictional contest, Conservative and Labour are reduced to rumps, at 18% and 14% respectively. The Progressives come second, at 24%. The Nationals come first, at 27%. The Progressives and the Nationals lead on social issues, while Conservative and Labour lead on economic. The point is that making social issues salient leads to decisive change in how people say they would vote.

What are the implications of this for the present political moment?

Because social issues now matter more than economic ones, for more people, there is a realignment coming at some point. The offer that the two parties give to the electorate will shift from being rival answers to how to cut (and bake) the pie. It will shift to a contest over which conception of society – diverse versus ordered – wins out. The precise mechanics of how this will happen are uncertain, but that it will happen just reflects the fact that one’s position on the social cleavage now matters to people.

For good or ill, the Conservatives have been the custodians of Brexit. If they fail to deliver it, in terms that Leavers recognise, they will permanently mark their brand as Merchant Right – interested in self-enrichment and disloyal to the country – and not to be trusted by those concerned for an ordered, communal focused view of society. That we are looking at a super-soft Brexit reflects Conservative MPs’ priorities, where pro-business and socially liberal outlooks are the norm. It does not reflect that of the majority of their voters.

Suggested Reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Among the many lessons that people ought to have learnt in 2016, one was delivered with force to Paul Ryan: parties that fail to represent their electorate’s actual views are in a precarious position. In the Republican party’s case, they were vulnerable to hostile take-over due to the primaries system.

In the Conservative party’s case, if it fails to pivot to the new reality, it will be vulnerable to political entrepreneurs who offer, outside the party, the social conservatism that a large portion of the electorate want. Labour’s offer is already defined by the kind of social liberalism that appeals to the tertiary educated who spend their time manipulating symbols on computer screens. This is not territory that the Conservative party will be able to win on, nor ought it to want to. If the Conservatives fail to provide a genuine alternative, someone else will.

Equally, if they manage to pivot to the new reality, there is a significant opportunity. This would be good for the party. Insofar as the coalition that the party would then provide is a moderating influence on the excesses of each wing, it would also, I think, be good for the country.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“

Attributed to the 19th-century writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it loosely translates as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”: perfect for a worldly-wise 900 words on why the latest brand new thing isn’t so new after all.

Now that the internet has turned comment journalism into a blood sport, world-weariness and using French words is, I regret, passé. And yet Karr’s epigram is as relevant as ever.

Last week, the MPs that formed the breakaway Independent Group announced the creation of a new party, Change UK. The irony, as many people have pointed out, is that the party’s purpose is to undo change – by keeping Britain inside the EU and by refloating the wreck of Blairism. Perhaps, as good Europeans, they should have called themselves Plus Ça Change UK.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

It’s not as if renewing New Labour is even a new thing to do. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair in 2007, he promised a “new kind of politics”. When, just three years later, Ed Miliband became leader, he dropped the ‘New’ from New Labour, but claimed to represent a “new generation” with “different ideas, different attitudes” and a “different way of doing politics.”

Five years later, the Labour Party was bored with that and turned to an old leftie, Jeremy Corbyn. But even he promised a “new kind of politics” – a “kinder politics”. By the start of this year, Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and the others could take no more of their comrades’ kindness and left to form The Independent Group – recalling the events of 1981 when the ‘Gang of Four’ quit a leftwing Labour Party to form the SDP. Plus ça change…

*

Though we seem to be stuck in an unending cycle of confected newness, a genuinely new kind of politics is tantalisingly close to breaking through.

It comes in several varieties and therefore has different labels attached to it – ‘communitarian’, ‘Blue Labour’, ‘Red Tory’, ‘hard centre’, ‘post-liberal’. Some or all of these have caught the attention of the mainstream political parties. For instance, Tony Blair flirted with communitarianism, as did Ed Miliband. The Conservative Party had its ‘Big Society’ moment under David Cameron, with related ideas influencing the early part of Theresa May’s leadership (i.e. when she was still popular). However, in each case it soon became clear that the party establishments were only after a fresh semblance of ‘newness’. Once it all got a bit too challenging, the same old same old reasserted itself.

So is the post-liberal agenda an ideological mirage – a vague set of ideas that appear on the horizon of politics only to vanish as one gets closer?

I wonder if a map would help. If we were to triangulate from the familiar points of the political spectrum, might we find the post-liberal promised land? Perhaps, but the traditional Left-Right political spectrum (past its sell-by date anyway) is of no use. If post-liberalism fits anywhere along the line, it is somewhere in the middle. Blue Labour would be a bit to the Left, Red Tories a bit to the Right – but overall they’d occupy the space as, er, the liberals they disagree with.

Further reading

Vanilla liberalism is past its sell-by date

By Peter Franklin

Maybe we need to add another spectrum. The first is reserved as a spectrum between the economic Left and the economic Right – partisans of public ownership and state planning at one end and fans of the freemarket and laissez- faire at the other. The second spectrum is about social and cultural issues. This would run from support for constraints on individual action (e.g. drug laws, immigration controls) through to opposition to such restrictions.

The intersection of the two spectrums creates the familiar ‘Political Compass‘ chart, which is divided into four quadrants – representing the socially conservative and socially liberal tendencies of the economic Left and economic Right. At first sight this would appear to solve our problem. We can put liberals in the bottom right quadrant and post-liberals diametrically opposite in the top left. No more occupying the same space. Meanwhile we can put conventional conservatives in the top-right quadrant and their ‘progressive’ opponents in the bottom-left. Nice and neat.

*

But there’s a further problem. In fact, several further problems.

The first problem is that mainstream parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left aren’t quite as distinct from one another as they would seem. Basically, they are all liberals on economic and social issues alike – meaning that what they’re mostly interested in is individual freedom of action in both spheres. The main thing they disagree about is to what extent the state should get involved in order to facilitate that freedom of action. In general (though not in every case) the liberal Left favours a bigger, more active state, while the liberal Right a smaller, less interfering one. For instance, the former emphasises redistribution to give the poor economic agency; while the latter emphasises the right of people to keep the fruits of their own enterprise.

This is not an insignificant difference in perspective; until recently it was the defining issue of politics. However, it boils down to an argument over means not ends – the ultimate and shared objective is the maximisation of personal autonomy.

The second problem is something I’ve written about in more detail here. It’s to do with the mismatch between where most people place themselves on the political compass and where the political and cultural elites place themselves. The latter are heavily biased to the bottom-right liberal quadrant – though the leftier ones spill over into the neighbouring progressive quadrant. In some countries, especially America, the conventional conservative quadrant also claims a corner of the establishment – think Fox News and the Republican National Convention.

Further reading

Can we tame democracy's demons?

By Adrian Pabst

However, when the Voter Study Group asked the American public to place themselves on the chart, a very different distribution was revealed. There were a load of people in the progressive quadrant and unsurprisingly most of them voted for Hillary Clinton. There were another bunch of voters in the conservative quadrant – almost all of whom voted for Donald Trump. The liberal quadrant was mixed but there were very few people in it – and most of those tended towards the centre of the chart. But the real surprise was the much larger number of people in the fourth quadrant – those who were neither economically nor socially liberal. In 2016, Trump won significantly more of these votes than Clinton, which proved crucial in the swing states that won him the Presidency.

It is remarkable that such a large and important group of voters have no elite institutions to speak for them – no newspapers, no broadcasters, no think tanks, no mainstream political parties. It’s therefore unsurprising that in country after country we’ve seen populist movements sweep in to claim them for their own.

Which brings me to the third problem – which is that identifying post-liberalism with the fourth quadrant associates it with populism, especially national populism. Furthermore, by defining this quadrant against social and economic liberalism, the conclusion that some people will draw is that post-liberal is just a euphemism for anti-liberal. And yet to any fair-minded person it should be obvious that Blue Labourites such as Maurice Glasman and Red Tories like Phillip Blond are not of the same ilk as Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini.

What, then, separates post-liberalism from crude populism?

*

Let’s start with what liberalism means in this context. It is not mere support for individual liberty, because almost everyone (except those on the furthest fringes of politics) could sign up for that. Rather, liberalism is the belief that the maximisation of individual liberty is the main and perhaps only purpose of politics. It’s not that liberals don’t believe that other things are important in life, but that they see these things as matters for the individual, and free associations of individuals, not politics.

Post-liberals, like liberals, are pro-liberty; but unlike liberals they do not believe that the maximisation of personal freedom is the be-all-and-end-all of politics. Other things are important too – like family, community, nation, fairness and beauty – and therefore there are balances to be struck and conflicts to be resolved as an essential part of the democratic process. Post-liberals therefore believe that individuals have rights and duties. Moreover, duties aren’t just about obeying the law as a mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between individual freedoms; people also owe a duty to the common good, which can be defined and justified on grounds other than the maximisation of liberty.

For instance, we should defend free speech not only because it is an important freedom, but also because truth matters and people should be able to speak it (even if they don’t agree on what it is). Another example is environmentalism – the main reason why we should protect an endangered species is not because our children and grandchildren should have the opportunity to see it, or because it plays an important role in ecosystems we rely on, but simply because we have no right to destroy it. Consider animal welfare: the reason why we should punish cruelty to animals is not primarily because it upsets people, but because to inflict suffering on a sentient being is objectively evil.

There are very few absolute liberals. To varying extents, most accept the idea that duties exist alongside rights and that freedom, while precious, isn’t everything. However, post-liberals would go further – recognising a growing imbalance between the goal of furthering liberty and the other things on which a good society depends. Indeed, they diagnose it as the primary cause of our 21st-century malaise. ‘More balance!’, not ‘more freedom!’, is the post-liberal rallying cry.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, we need to re-draw the political compass – instead of economic and social spectrums that run from liberal to illiberal, they should run from ‘maximising liberty’ to ‘balancing liberty’. This pushes the worst of the populists – those with undeniably totalitarian, anti-democratic tendencies – right off the chart. However, that still leaves post-liberals sharing a quadrant with the less extreme kind of populist, which for reasons I describe here is far from ideal.

*

The solution is to add a third spectrum to the chart – one that clearly distinguishes post-liberalism from populism. To my mind, it should revolve around the principle of human dignity – which is the idea that every person, without exception, is of infinite worth and must be treated as such. It is, therefore, incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism – because we can only achieve our full personhood in relationship to others. Though of infinite worth, we are, in this life, finite in our capacities. As such, we cannot owe the same duty of care to all – and therefore owe more to those relationally closest to us, starting with our families and extending outward to community and nation.

However, what we can do without limit is to recognise and respect the dignity of all people, no matter how close or distant our relationship to them. There are no good reasons for not doing so – just the dark motivations of prejudice and the cynical politics of divide and rule. It is on this spectrum that post-liberalism can be distinguished from populism, lifted not only into another quadrant, but onto a higher plane.

But even the forces of creative destruction unleashed by Brexit may not be enough to overcome the strict logic of Durverger’s law. This states that electoral systems like ours – in which voters have a single vote, cast for a single candidate, in a district where only one legislative seat is available – inevitably favour the overwhelming dominance of two parties. There are, within this set-up, no prizes for coming second. We’re left with the two fatbergs of the Labour and Conservative parties clogging up the Parliamentary plumbing. The only solvent that could possibly dissolve these bloated beasts is a form of Proportional Representation (PR).

I have never had much time for PR. The logic of FPTP works best with small constituencies, and PR – depending upon which version, of course – requires much larger ones. I like small constituencies because they preserve the romantic idea I have of an intimate link between a member of Parliament and the people who vote for them.

An MP should be responsive to the ordinary people who employ them, their constituents, and the idea of a MP tootling around their constituency, drinking in the pub, being seen on the bus etc – a bit like a vicar in his or her parish – preserves the directness of the connection between people and power. Indeed, one of the major reasons I am an enthusiastic Brexiter is because I hold that, as Tony Benn rightly insisted, constituents are an MP’s employers, and it is not for MPs to give away powers that have been lent to them at an election.

Suggested reading

Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

By Giles Fraser

Power must be returned to the people undiluted when a new election is called. The gap between people and power must be as small as is practicable; power must not be ceded to some geographically distant body, like Brussels.

But I’m changing my mind about PR. As Brexit is showing, the two party system, as maintained by first past the post, is unable to capture the complexity of our political situation. The Conservative party is at least two parties – a pro-business, free market one and a one nation party that seeks to preserve traditional forms of community life. These parties face in very different directions not least because capitalism – the core ideology of the pro-business wing – is the greatest change agent the world has ever known. And thus frequently at odds with conserving traditional forms of life. I explored this tension in my UnHerd Confessions podcast with Roger Scruton.

The Labour party is similarly divided, between (broadly) a socialist/communitarian wing and a liberal wing that prioritises individual freedom, identity politics, human rights etc. Listen to my Confessions episode with Maurice Glasman, to hear him speaking out of that first tradition, in tension with the second.

The breadth of the bandwidth of opinion that the two major parties have to cover is such that the party leaders are forced to appeal to hugely different, even contradictory, views. How does Jeremy Corbyn speak to the Remain voters of north London and the Leave voters of Sunderland at the same time? Answer: he is forced to engage in what Henry Kissenger dubbed as “constructive ambiguity”, speaking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. If this is not exactly lying, then it is certainly a long way from being frank with voters.

Similarly, with Teresa May. She is forced to appeal, at the same time, to the Little Englander ‘family, faith and flag’ instincts of the Edward Leigh wing of the party and also the free trade, big business, GDP priority sympathies of someone like George Osborne. She hasn’t the luxury of constructive ambiguity, because she has to acheive practical results. And when she makes a turn, this way or that, one side screams betrayal.

And the first past the post system squeezes all these considerable differences into two uneasy coalitions. We are a four-party system – broadly, left and right liberals and left and right communitarians – cohabiting as a two-party system because they cannot afford to do otherwise.

Suggested listening

How British politics is failing

By Peter Kellner

Brexit, meanwhile, is making everything worse. Cameron’s referendum failed to heal the running divisions within the Tory party over Europe. The Labour party is split too, with a leadership that is way more Eurosceptic than its membership and young Momentum activists trying their best to unseat those traditional Labour stalwarts like Frank Field who don’t pass their narrow ideological tests. Because of these aggressive tensions, party management has to be put before the country.

The benefit of a Parliament of smaller parties would be that the differences that exist within society could be played out publicly, within the chamber, rather than privately, behind closed doors – as exercises in party management. There would be no need to for party whips to be so nervous of internal division if parties were smaller and more homogeneous. All politics requires coalitions, of course. Within the present system coalitions exist within parties, under PR they would be between parties.

PR could also revivify a political set up that has lost many of us. The great thing about the Brexit referendum was that every vote mattered. That’s partly why the turnout was so high. But if there were a general election tomorrow, I do not know who I would vote for. I instinctively vote Labour, and would want to do so again. But the Labour MP here is a staunch Remainer and supporter of a second referendum. And I would never do anything to enable that. So, I have no one to vote for. And there are millions like me, stuck in a constituency where their vote will never make a difference.

The two big parties have a death grip on British politics. And they prefer to act out of their own interest rather than that of the nation as a whole. The traditional wisdom on first past the post is that it delivers stability. But Brexit has revealed that this is no longer the case.

Signs of the malaise can be clearly seen in an exclusive survey for UnHerd conducted by Deltapoll. It shows a remarkable lack of faith in both main party leaders, not just by voters generally but by high proportions of their own voters. Loyalties are being tested as never before.  

In the past, one party leader has occasionally had a shaky reputation among their own supporters on one or two characteristics. In the early 1980s, many Labour voters thought Michael Foot was weak; towards the end of her premiership, many Tories considered Margaret Thatcher out of touch. But I have never seen so many supporters of both parties simultaneously hold such low opinions of their own leaders across the board.  

Here is the evidence. The following table shows the main findings. 

Consider first the two columns, in black type, showing the responses of all voters. Both leaders have strongly negative ratings on all counts. That is unusual enough. But when we look at the blue figures, showing how Conservative voters view Theresa May, and the red figures, showing how Labour voters view Jeremy Corbyn, the scale of the drama becomes clear. The positive scores for May range from 57% of Conservative supporters who say she is strong, down to 40% who back her on Brexit. Her average score among Tory voters is 45%. Labour voters give Corbyn positive scores ranging from 64 to 38%; his average is 50%. Among all voters, the averages are, of course, even worse: May 26%, Corbyn 28%. 

To put these figures in context, a successful leader would expect average scores of around 80% among their party’s own voters and 40% among the general public. For both leaders to fall so far short of these figures should set off alarm bells in both parties. 

Here, though, is the paradox. Precisely because both leaders have terrible ratings, the scale of the problem is less obvious than it would be if only one was doing badly. In that case (as when Foot led Labour and towards the end of Thatcher’s premiership), their party would have support well below 30% in the polls and facing a landslide defeat. Instead, nothing much seems to have changed since the 2017 election. An average of recent polls shows the two parties still close together, and with almost as many supporters as 18 months ago. The high commands in both parties, though plainly struggling over Brexit, see no wider reason to panic. 

Suggested reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

In truth, they should be terrified. For the poll shows that the disenchantment with the main parties and their leaders has spread throughout Britain. Within Westminster, it is rare to find any backbench Labour or Conservative MP who, giving their candid views in private, will say their leader is any good or that their party is in anything other than deep trouble. But some hope this despair is a feature of the Westminster bubble, and that real voters away from London have not changed their views of politicians and parties that much. 

In fact, it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of voters Left and Right are losing faith in the people who either govern us today or aspire to do so in the future. 

Which brings us to the possible long-term consequences of current public attitudes. In any country with a different electoral system, the chances are that support for both Labour and the Conservatives would have crashed by now. Across Europe, countries with more proportional voting systems have seen the traditional big parties slump in recent years – even with leaders less widely derided than Britain’s.  

Here, first-past-the-post creates a huge barrier to entry. Elsewhere, small parties ranging from the Greens to the far right have obtained a foothold in their parliaments with as little as 5% support, and then managed to increase their credibility. Here, they can’t. In 1983, the Liberal/SDP Alliance won 26% and only 23 seats; in 2015 Ukip’s 14% gave them just a single seat.  

Suggested reading

Our new political order: Ins v Outs, not Left v Right

By Henry Olsen

The party that might have benefited from the Tory and Labour travails is the Liberal Democrats. But they paid a heavy price for their role in the 2010-15 coalition government. While their support has picked up a little in recent months, they are still scarred by decisions they took almost a decade ago. 

It is, of course, possible that when the Brexit drama has played out, normal service will resume. Perhaps May and Corbyn will both be replaced by leaders who have greater personal appeal to the electorate. 

I am not so sure. My reason is that May and Corbyn’s truly awful ratings do not flow solely from their personal attributes. Both lead deeply divided parties, and these divisions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The faultlines will remain: inward-looking nationalism versus outward-looking enterprise with the Tories; ambitious socialism versus progressive capitalism with Labour. A leader that combined the strategic ability of Napoleon with the genius of Einstein and the moral courage of Mandela would still struggle to win public approval if they could not reunite their parties. The Deltapoll figures providence symptoms of a deeper crisis. 

Suggested reading

The political void that Labour needs to fill

By Paul Embery

In short, both main parties are more fragile and less stable than for many decades. First-past-the-post could save both Labour and the Conservatives from the consequences of their current divisions. But it is no longer ridiculous to image a different future. Once the adhesive glue of our electoral system starts to crack, things can change with bewildering speed. A century ago, amid the stresses of post-First-World-War Britain and the divisions within the Liberal Party, realignment happened quickly. Labour climbed from fourth place in 1918 to government in 1924.  

Will Brexit end up having the same glue-cracking effect? And if it does, will the beneficiaries be existing herbivores such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens; or some new centre party created by disenchanted Labour and Tory moderates; or carnivores on the outer fringes of Right and Left? Is the century-long dominance of Britain’s Parliament by competing forces on the centre Right and centre Left about to end? 

Ask me again in 10 years’ time and I shall tell you. Meanwhile I wouldn’t bet a great deal against changes that could be immense, and which not everyone will like. 

We might think that’s how it works. But this sort of sifting is only part of the story. We also – and to a greater extent – shift our political views to align with our political parties, and – importantly – to also distinguish ourselves from our political opponents.

During the 2016 presidential election, American voters were more divided than ever on questions of race and gender. But, as Matt Grossmann points out in a piece for the politics-stats-nerd site FiveThirtyEight, research using ‘panel studies‘ found that, for instance, white Democratic voters became took harder stances on race and sex discrimination in response to Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments on those topics, rather than already having those stances and then being appropriately appalled by the comments.

Suggested reading

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

It’s not only political parties that have this effect. We also align ourselves with more loosely defined tribes, such as Leave and Remain, or centrist, or conservative, or socialist – and we change our views to match our alignment.

We already know this, though. We know that our views are a product of more than just reasoned reflection. We know that even though we feel like our logical brains are in charge, they’re not. In the words of Jonathan Haidt, they are more like a press secretary than a president, justifying our emotional decisions in rational language. And part of our emotional response is socially mediated: say, my in-group is Democrat voters (or Labour voters, or Remain voters), so I want to signal that I share views with them. My out-group is Trump/Tory/Leave, so I want to signal that I have very different views to them. So I plant my flag deeper into the territory to remove any ambiguity.

But that knowledge doesn’t make it any less unsettling. I don’t like the idea that my views on, say, the #MeToo movement or trans rights or Black Lives Matter are not fully my own. Worse, it undermines my confidence in my own opinions. If I know I’ll probably change my political opinions – have already changed my opinions – because of a subconscious need to fit in with my in-group, then I might not be so certain that I went for the right ones in the first place.

Suggested reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

It’s not just the big moral questions we shift on, but also specific policies. Rob Ford, a political scientist at Manchester who I spoke to while writing this piece, points to a situation in Denmark. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the then prime minister, changed her mind on an issue to do with the state pension. (It doesn’t really matter what the issue was.) At first, voters for her Social Democrat party were against it, as she was. But when Thorning-Schmidt changed her mind, so too did a large percentage of SD voters: their views changed to match the party.

You will want to say: “But I arrived at my views through reasoned reflection! I hold my views on the gender pay gap and what to do about it not because of my political tribe, but because they are the right ones.” But you don’t. They may or may not be the right ones, but you arrived at them, partly, through tribal effects.

It’s like vision: we think we’re getting a true, unmediated view of the world through our eyes. But actually we’re constantly filling in the picture in from our expectations – something that certain optical illusions reveal.

Similarly, you can see via experiment how tribal allegiances affect our beliefs. Ford gave me a simple example: he asks new undergraduates to rate two speeches, one by Barack Obama and one by George W Bush. The undergrads, unsurprisingly, always prefer the Obama one.

He then reveals that, in a mean little trick, he’d actually switched them around. The one they thought was Bush was Obama and vice versa. The students are, consistently, “shocked and upset” to find that their opinions of the speech are driven by their political opinions of the speaker rather than the content of the speech itself.

Suggested reading

What the populists get right

By Matt Goodwin

It’s also worth noting that when we change our mind, we don’t remember doing so. We believe we always believed what we believe now.  For example, a majority (54%) of British people supported the Iraq war at the time – but when they were polled in 2015, only 37% of people said they had backed it. In the US those figures were 63% and 38%. Millions of people changed their minds without noticing, and backdated it so that in their memory they always believed it. These tribal effects happen insidiously: when our tribe changes its view, we change with it, and we forget that we ever thought differently.

We also change our views to distinguish ourselves from our opponents’ tribes. There really is a ‘backlash’. This gets satirised as “fascists only become fascist because we called them fascist”, but while that stupid caricature is obviously false, it is absolutely true that people become more entrenched and extreme when their political opponents do.

So the thing that really made Americans get on board with Obamacare was Donald Trump trying to repeal it. Democrats took ever-more liberal stances on race because they were defining themselves against Trump. Remainers in Britain started waving EU flags around and caring very deeply about the Customs Union in part to distinguish themselves from Leavers (and vice versa).

Again, you can see this in specific examples. New Zealanders voted in two referendums in 2015 and 2016 on whether to change their flag. The centre-Right National Party leader, John Key, came out in favour. A study out last week found that, just as with Thorning-Schmidt, National Party supporters changed their views to match their party – but many centre-Left Labour voters who previously supported the change shifted to oppose it.

Suggested reading

Why I helped Trump kill the old Republican Party

By Frank Buckley

This “negative partisanship”, defining yourself in opposition to a party or group, is a real thing, and Right-wingers absolutely will change their views to become less like the Democrats or Labour. And, yes, that means their views will become less liberal on issues of race and sex – “more racist and sexist”, if you prefer – as a response to movements in the other direction from the other side.

You can, if you’re on the Left/progressive/liberal side of the argument, shrug that off and say “Well if it only took me calling Right-wingers racist to make them racist, I guess they were always racist”. But we live in polarising societies. We push ourselves further to the extremes in response to our opponents doing the same. If I’m trying to get my views as far away from Brexiteers’ views as I can, and Brexiteers are doing the same to me, then we’re going to end up a long way away from each other.

And, sure, you might want to be a long way away from your opponents, because they’re bad and terrible people. And, true, it’s not that the virtuous position is halfway between “Nazi” and “non-Nazi”; there really are some things which are morally wrong and which we ought to distance ourselves from.

Suggested reading

The dark games played by political extremists

By Douglas Murray

But you, good and virtuous person that you are, do not believe what you believe solely because you have weighed the pros and cons and risks and benefits and arrived at the moral truth. Nor have I. We have done so, partly, to signal membership of one tribe and opposition to another. And by doing it we push others to do the same. Angrily denouncing “communist” Corbynites or “racist” Brexiteers will push those people further into their camps, making them more of the thing we purport to dislike. The end result is two wooden palisades marked “liberal” and “conservative”, each filled with people sure of their own righteousness and the enemy’s evil, staring at each other uneasily through rifle sights.