A Week in
Politics...
Recent
events have been so momentous that I am now moved to put pen to paper, or at
any rate finger to keyboard, to unburden myself of my own long-simmering
cogitations on the matters in hand.
Harold
Wilson once said that “A week is a long time in politics”. The last week or so,
as from Thursday, 23rd June, seems to have encompassed about twenty,
thirty, forty years worth of events. It is as if the film of politics has
suddenly been speeded up. To quote another politician, Lord Halifax, in the
immediate aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of September 1939 that
precipitated the Nazi onslaught on Poland and Britain’s consequent declaration
of war on Germany, “Every ism is now
a wasm.” I have never known a week
like it in British politics. British membership of the EU which had seemed to
be set in concrete has been dissolved; the EU itself is in crisis as a result;
the PM has resigned and precipitated a leadership and, ipso facto, a premiership contest; both major political parties
are in a state of turmoil with bitter recrimination and accusations of
treachery in one and near civil war in the other; the integrity of the UK
itself is again in question with Scotland threatening another independence
referendum and the Irish question suddenly re-appearing on the agenda; the
markets are going haywire; and the economy is topsy-turvy. Oh yes, and we get
the long awaited Chilcot report next week just in case there is a bit of a
lull. Phew!
The Referendum
Where to
start with all of this? Well, let’s start with the result of the referendum. It
was obviously going to be a close run thing but, and I speak as one who voted
‘Leave’ (I may as well declare my bias at the outset), I expected it to be
about 52%-48% for ‘Remain’. I was right about the percentages but wrong about
the direction. There is usually a swing back to the status quo in the run-up to
a vote of any sort – we witnessed it with the Scottish referendum a couple of
years ago – and anyway I was always a bit sceptical about the polls which
showed Leave ahead at some points. Also, I had a feeling that Remainers were
slightly more likely to turn out to vote than Brexiteers across the country.
(The pollsters again have not exactly covered themselves with glory.)
But it was
evident from the very first couple of results in Newcastle and Sunderland that
Brexit could well be heading for a surprise victory, with the former voting for
Remain more narrowly than was supposed and the latter voting for Brexit more
strongly than was supposed[1].
As I sat glued to the screen from before midnight until six in the morning, frantically
switching channels between the BBC, Sky and ITV to gobble up every morsel of
information, it was increasingly evident that Brexit was heading for an
unlikely victory and that British politics was never going to be the same
again. A parade of politicians and pundits were wheeled on and off as the night
progressed, many of them almost visibly stunned and trying to explain away what
was happening before our eyes.
It was also
glaringly evident that there was a very marked disparity between different
parts of the country with, as predicted, London, some of the other big cities
and Scotland voting strongly for Remain and the rest of the country in between
voting strongly Leave. This cut right across traditional Labour/Con or working
class/middle class divisions, with old working class redoubts in the north and
midlands joining hands with very middle class southern towns and seaside
resorts to vote Leave and, seemingly, all classes of people in cosmopolitan
London and metropolitan England aligning themselves with Scotland to vote
Remain. Truly extraordinary.
If social
class, income or party preference ceased to be good predictors of voting
intention it seemed that age, generation and level of education were much
better indicators, with the young and relatively young being preponderantly
Remain and the late middle-aged and elderly preponderantly Leave, and the
well-educated preponderantly Remain. This, I think, is unprecedented in that
age, per se, scarcely ever has a
significant effect on voting intention and views on political questions, even
those issues that disproportionately affect the young or the old such as
student loans or pensions. I feel that a major reason for this is that the
young and early middle-aged cannot remember a time when Britain was not in the
EU (or its’ predecessor incarnation as the ‘Common Market’) and view membership
of the EU as part of the political furniture; something which is scarcely worthy
of mention let alone contention and who are amazed that there are those who
should want to leave. The older voter, by contrast, can remember all too well
the time when we were not in Europe and may in some cases still yearn for those
days. This has led to the rather silly suggestion in some quarters that the
young have been betrayed by the old who will not have to live so long with the
consequences of the decision, and the utterly daft idea which I have heard
mooted even by ordinarily sane and intelligent people (such as a nincompoop on The Moral Maze the other day) that those
over a certain age should have been denied the vote or had their vote count for
less in some way. It simply begs the question of whether in fact we, as a
nation, will be worse off in the long-term. I don’t think so, but time will
tell. And anyway the franchise should of course be the same for the referendum
as for elections. Why on earth not. We all have to live with the consequences
of general elections as well as referenda. Admittedly, elections are more easy
to reverse but their effects are still often very long-lasting.
Education,
too, is clearly a factor in shaping opinion and there is a very strong bias in
favour of the EU within academia, the media, the civil service, the professions
and the bien pensant classes
generally. This has rather framed the debate with a distinctly elitist feel to
some of the arguments put forward on the Remain side, portraying at least some
(or even many) Brexiteers as ill-educated, ignorant, geriatric provincials
incapable of understanding the benefits of EU membership and the complexities
of the argument. In its more virulent form there is a tendency to characterise
some in the Brexit camp as reactionary, bigoted, xenophobic and racist. Will
Self, for example, has asserted that whilst not all Brexiteers are racist, all
racists are Brexiteers (almost certainly not true). Of course there is a great
deal of ill-informed and half-baked comment thrown into the mix, on both sides,
and doubtless some on the wilder shores of the Brexit campaign deserve some or
all of these epithets, but I am far from persuaded that the average Brexiteer
is any less astute or erudite than the average Remainer.
The Campaign
This brings
me to the vexed subject of the campaign itself, which I agree was generally
conducted on a very low plane, with the great TV debates often descending into
shouting matches and scarcely able to get much beyond the direly predictable
clichés trotted out with excruciating tedium. I feel the campaign was very
inferior to that of the 1975 referendum, though it may be argued that the inferior
quality of the debate this time around is due, at least in part, to an inferior
quality of politician, right across the spectrum of opinion. I don’t feel that
David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jeremy Corbyn,
Nigel Farage et al, are quite of the same calibre as Harold Wilson, Ted Heath,
Roy Jenkins, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Michael Foot, Tony Benn etc. from
1975, though maybe I am just an old curmudgeon.
This
campaign was marked by a level of crass hyperbole, mendacity and platitudinous
thinking surely unrivalled in the annals of British political discourse. It is
as if we were debating the structure of the calendar and one side absolutely
insisted that the week consisted of eight days to which their opponents would
respond that actually it is very definitely and incontrovertibly only six days.
The first lot would then say, that, no, they had made a miscalculation and that
really is was nine days and the other lot would say, no, they too had been
understating their case and that it was emphatically only five days.
To take a
few oft-cited examples from both sides the Vote Leave bunch repeatedly asserted
that Turkey’s accession to the EU was both certain and imminent when it is
surely nothing of the kind (having been on the table in one form or another
since 1959). David Cameron responded by saying that Turkey will not be ready
for membership until at least the year 3000, despite his having given a speech only
six years ago saying he was fully behind speeding up their application. If
Cameron told me there were seven days in the week I would check my diary. Then
again we have the matter of budgetary contributions and Vote Leave’s mantra,
emblazoned on their battle-bus, that our weekly contribution is £350 million,
omitting to mention that that is a gross figure and that half comes back in a
rebate and much (but not all) of the other half comes back in one form or
another as regional aid and such like. The Remain side respond by saying that
actually we are probably making a net gain from the EU when we are surely not.
The Brexiteers argue a variety of alternatives to EU membership, some saying
that we could somehow retain tariff-free access to the single market whilst
avoiding the free movement of labour; very obviously an impossibility under EU
rules as repeatedly underlined by various EU bigwigs. George Osborne has told
us that the average household would be worse-off by £4,500 a year outside the
EU; in other words by between a fifth and a sixth. An utterly preposterous
suggestion even given a “worst-case scenario”. I am surprised he didn’t end up by saying that
we would all be begging on the streets and foraging in dustbins. And on and on.
I am reminded of the celebrated Monty Python sketch where a group of old men
talk about how hard their childhoods were, each one trying to outdo the last,
until the final speaker announces that, as a lad, he lived in a cardboard box
in a swamp, had to work 25 hours a day, eight days a week, had to walk hundreds
of miles barefoot across broken glass to get to work where he had to pay his
boss rather than the other way around, and was regularly murdered by his father.
But enough
of this tomfoolery. What happens now? I am far from convinced that we actually
will ever leave the EU. For a kick-off there are plenty of siren voices among
the Remainers who suggest we should have a second referendum of some sort and
at some time, perhaps only to decide on what form our departure should take, or
maybe even to re-run the whole thing, given that a lot of Brexiteers have
apparently repented of their sin in voting to leave or thought that they were
really voting on the Eurovision Song Contest. There is a lot of history of
countries voting against EU treaties only to be told to do it again and get it
right the second time, after a few cosmetic changes to the treaties themselves.
Admittedly this is a vote against membership itself not against a treaty, and Jean-Claude
Juncker, president of the Commission, and others have been adamant that there
can be no back-tracking or a new deal. Moreover the Tory leadership contenders
are all saying that the voter’s verdict must be respected etc and ‘Leave must
mean Leave’. But none of them seems too keen to actually invoke Article 50 to
commence Leave proceedings, and this could drag on for ages. The disengagement
process itself is expected to take two years, or even three, and who knows what
might happen in that period of time.
It looks
very likely, at the time of writing, that Theresa May, a Remainer (albeit a
very low key one), will win the leadership and may appoint other leading
Remainers to key posts undermining Britain’s negotiating position. Who knows
that we might not end up with some sort of deal that, whilst ostensibly freeing
us from the EU’s embrace, effectively gives us a form of associate membership
with qualified access to the single market but a qualified acceptance of free
movement and other EU impositions; a sort of Norway minus.
The Constitution
This brings
us on to the constitutional conundrums thrown up by the whole EU/referendum
imbroglio like sparks from carriage wheels flying over stony ground. The
referendum was technically non-binding, though of course the government of the
day is bound, politically and ethically, to ‘respect’ the outcome. But there’s
the rub. The government will effectively have changed in the intervening period
between the voting and the conclusion of the negotiations with the EU. Indeed,
even before the commencement of the negotiations, given that Article 50 has yet
to be invoked. There will be a new prime minister within two and a half months,
and although all the leadership contenders have committed themselves to give
effect to the Leave verdict of the referendum we cannot know how they will
behave behind closed doors.
Also, it is
argued by some constitutional experts that leaving the EU would require
Parliamentary approval in the form of the repeal of the European Communities
Act of 1972 that gave effect to Britain’s accession, and surely some
Parliamentary votes would be involved somewhere along the line. There is a very
large majority for the EU in the present House of Commons, taking all parties
combined. Labour is overwhelmingly pro-EU as is the SNP, the Liberal Democrats,
the various odds-and-sods and a majority, though not great, of the Conservative
Party. There is no reason why any of the Opposition parties should feel
themselves bound by the referendum result given that they had had no part in
its pledging or calling, and may well have thought it wrong in principle even
to hold such a referendum. Would any anti-EU legislation get through? And, if
not, what then? It would presumably trigger a general election (which is itself
problematic given the accursed Fixed Term Parliaments Act the coalition drove
through). And what might be the outcome of that? Another pro-EU Commons
probably, with a smaller or possibly even greater EU majority than before?
Suppose,
also, that one or more of the leadership contenders had come from the
backbenches rather than from within the ranks of government. Would they have
felt bound by the referendum result given that they had had no part in the
pledging or calling of it? They may have stood on a referendum platform at the
last election but might personally have opposed it to their constituents. More
seriously, whichever candidate wins the Tory leadership and premiership might
decide to call a snap election to obtain a renewed mandate, and might lose or
fail to obtain the mandate sought to take Britain out of the EU. It is
interesting that of the five contenders two are Remainers, including the
favourite, and so for all the talk of the new PM and Cabinet having to be Brexit
in composition or complexion it might well not be. In place of Cameron, Osborne
and Hammond we might get not Johnson, Gove and Leadsom but May, Osborne and
Hammond! The more things change the more
they stay the same.
The Conservative Party
This brings
us to the Conservative leadership contest. Michael Gove’s assassination of
Boris might come to look increasingly stupid if it turns out that he would have
been the only one capable of beating May (assuming of course that Gove’s
purpose was to ensure a true Brexiteer is in Number 10). Gove is way behind May
in MPs’ nominations at the moment and it is unclear if he will even get onto
the ballot of members. There is speculation that some of May’s supporters may
be backing Andrea Leadsom (currently second) specifically to deprive Gove of
sufficient support, confident that May will beat Leadsom easily amongst the
grassroots. Gove will anyway surely pay a price for his perfidy, at least
within the ranks of Conservative MPs.
The whole
business of Gove and Boris is assuming the proportions of Shakespearian tragedy
and the more one thinks about it the more mysterious it becomes. I was stunned
by Boris’s announcement, the more so coming as it did at the peroration of a
lengthy and involved speech. Quite a punchline. Hitting hard by not hitting at
all. Did Gove’s candidature really fatally hole Johnson’s bid below the
waterline? If many of Johnson’s supporters were apparently flocking to Gove
then why does Gove have so few supporters now amongst MPs? Did Johnson not have
many to start with? Or was it the comments that Gove made about Boris’s lack of
leadership qualities that made Johnson feel he was fatally compromised? Or was
it that he never really wanted the leadership at all, astonishing as it may
seem to say that? There are those who argue that Boris never thought he was
going to win the Brexit campaign and was only staking a claim to high office,
though Cameron had offered him that anyway to buy him off back in February. Did
he not relish the prospect of taking office to clear up the mess the Remainers
insist will be the fruits of Brexit, as Lord Heseltine claims?
And what of
Michael Gove? Why his last minute Damascene conversion? It is typical of
politicians to disavow any desire for the premiership or for high office at
all, but they do not usually couple that with complete self abasement insisting
they are totally unfitted for office, as Gove has done. Most pundits took
Gove’s oft-stated claims at face value, and not out of naïveté (they never for
example took Michael Heseltine’s disavowals of ambition seriously in the late
1980s). Was it a last minute conversion or had he been planning it all along? It
seems too Machiavellian even for Gove, but how else can we explain it? He had
been working alongside Boris for weeks and even months in the Brexit campaign
and had seen him operate at very close quarters. He must already have formed an
opinion of Boris’s capabilities as a leader, and they can surely only have been
enhanced by the success of the campaign. There must be a great deal of
chicanery that has yet to come out, and we may even have to wait for their
memoirs to appear decades hence before all is revealed (and probably not even
then). This will be meat for the historians for decades to come.
And as for
Cameron! Like so much else in this drama the turn of events is riven with irony
and paradox. He spent much of his political life posing as a eurosceptic, not
very convincingly in my view, but convincingly enough for much of the commentariat.
I always perceived him as euro-neutral rather than eurosceptic. He tried to
steer his party away from euroscepticism ever since assuming the leadership but
has been dogged by it. He then took a gamble to try to buy off his eurosceptic
backbenchers and shoot the UKIP fox by promising the referendum. He may well
have calculated that he was not going to win the 2015 election outright and that,
as in the period 2010-2015, he would be reliant on Liberal Democrat support
which would provide him with the pretext not to hold the pledged referendum –
‘I want to but those blasted Europhile Lib Dems in the Cabinet won’t let me’ he
was going to cry. It would not be the first time a prime minister sought refuge
from the die-hards in his own party in the embrace of a coalition partner. But he won and had to make good on his pledge,
and on other things he may not really have wanted to do.
But not to
worry. With the whole weight of the establishment on his side; big business,
the banks, most of the Labour Party, most of the trade unions, former PMs, the
panjandrums of the EU, the World Bank, the IMF, think tanks and research
institutes galore, showbiz celebrities, President Obama, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and
all he was sure to win. And then as the campaign progressed it was not at all
clear that he was going to win. More
and more artillery was wheeled into place to blast the recalcitrant electorate
into compliance; even museum pieces like Sir John Major and Lord Heseltine were
brought out of storage. And still the easy victory he had anticipated seemed
unclear on the horizon. Then the day of reckoning. Hoist by his own petard. And
then the bitter recriminations. The sheepish sojourn to Brussels and the
humiliation at the hands of the EU Council of Ministers. His treatment of
Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs was priceless. Not the usual pantomime stuff but words of
bitter scorn and a look of genuine and withering contempt at the Labour
leader’s failure to prosecute the campaign more enthusiastically on his behalf.
Thus Cameron seems to be evolving a strange new doctrine of Parliamentary
democracy whereby it is the function of the Opposition to support the
Government and to dig a prime minister out of a hole of his own making, even
when the Opposition never had any part in the manufacture of that hole and had
specifically advised against it. Hubris and nemesis. He may now be remembered
as the Prime Minister who took Britain out of the EU and perhaps precipitated
the break-up of the institution itself, the very last epitaph he would have
written for himself given the choice.
The Labour Party
And that brings us to the Labour Party. What a
farce! I am sure there has never been a situation quite like this in
Parliamentary history (how many times have I said that in this essay). The
present position, however, is the almost inevitable culmination of the decision
made to throw open the election of a leader to the wider membership (a decision
made by all the parties at different times), whatever form that may take. Inevitably
the occasion will eventually arise when the membership elects someone
unacceptable to the PLP. Something rather similar occurred to the Conservative
Party when Iain Duncan-Smith was elected by the membership but was then
eventually despatched by the Conservative Parliamentary Party, though
Duncan-Smith almost certainly had more support amongst his MPs than Corbyn
currently has amongst his.
Of course
that is why the party requires a candidate to secure a basic minimum proportion
of MP nominations, which Jeremy Corbyn duly achieved, though only because some
right-wing or centrist MPs nominated him to widen the debate. But many of these
did not vote for him and subsequently regretted their actions in nominating him.
Essentially the skids have been under Corbyn ever since his accession with a
large part of the Blairite right of the party simply refusing to accept his
leadership, and plotting to undermine him at every turn. Quite a few existing
shadow cabinet members refused to serve under him from the outset, not even
bothering to wait for his invitation. But nonetheless he seemed able to cobble
together a reasonable coalition of MPs to form a shadow cabinet though the
stresses showed over the vote on the bombing of Syria. However, it was really
only a matter of time before there was a serious move against him, and it might
have occurred after the local elections which were poor for an opposition party
(though not as poor as many liked to paint it) but the right stayed its hand
because of the looming referendum and the need, as they saw it, to hold the
party together to campaign for Remain.
Corbyn is a
veteran of the internal party battles of the 70s and 80s and retained the
anti-Europeanism of the hard left of those times, always voting in the
eurosceptic lobby. Yet he came out for Remain when the referendum campaign got
under way, probably under pressure. Whilst he was in a minority, and sometimes
a small minority, within the PLP on several issues he would have been in a tiny minority if he had come out for
Leave, and with almost the whole party campaigning for Remain his position would
have been utterly impossible. Even his grassroots base centred on ‘Momentum’
were overwhelmingly pro-EU. He compromised, in effect, by campaigning for
Remain in a half-hearted way, pointing out the negatives as well as the
positives of the EU, in a way that most of the party evidently found
infuriating. It was even suggested that he might actually have voted for Leave
in the privacy of the polling booth! Perhaps he calculated he would get the
best of both worlds this way, but he seems to have ended up with the worst of
both.
After the
referendum was lost the party came down on him like a ton of bricks for failing
to invigorate the Labour vote and even blamed him for the defeat of the whole
Remain campaign. Yet this was absurd. A large majority of Labour voters did
vote Remain, and it is very unlikely that a more whole-hearted effort on his
part would have made any difference. Those Labour voters who were prepared to
follow the party recommendation did so, and the rest were never going to do so.
But the Blairites seized on this ‘failure’ as just the opportunity they had
been craving to unseat Corbyn, aware that others on the left of the party also
took a dim view of Corbyn’s lacklustre campaign. Mass resignations from the
shadow cabinet ensued, which may or may not have been co-ordinated, on the
Sunday following the referendum, together with a no-confidence motion which was
tabled by the PLP and passed by an extraordinary 172-40. There were trenchant
calls from all and sundry for him to go, but he has been adamant up to this
point that he will not resign and if MPs want to unseat him they will have to
issue a challenge. He knows that given the level of support he still enjoys
among the grassroots he is likely to win another contest, though some of his
erstwhile support may have ebbed away for a variety of reasons. A vexed
question is whether, as incumbent, he would automatically be entitled to be on
the ballot, given that it is very unlikely he would garner enough nominations
from MPs, but the consensus of legal opinion is that he would be so entitled
(only the Labour Party could contrive to have rules so opaque for this very
basic issue to be in doubt).
The PLP has
been very reluctant to produce a challenger to come forward, though it seems
both Angela Eagle and Owen Smith have got the requisite number of nominations,
largely because they know that Corbyn would probably win again, so there is at
present a stand-off with continuing demands for his resignation, even from
David Cameron, while Corbyn seals himself off and plods along, emboldened by
his Praetorian guard of John McDonnell and Seamas Milne. He still apparently
has the support of most of the big unions, though deputy leader Tom Watson has
quite openly been trying to wrestle them away from him. It is a preposterous
situation, and it is hard not to see the only possible resolution as a split in
the party, either before or after a leadership contest. If Corbyn were to be
victorious he would still not command the support of the PLP. At present he
cannot even populate the Shadow Cabinet, with several posts vacant and some
people doubling up. New bodies have been drafted in, but one resigned after
only two days in the job – a new Parliamentary record! Paul Flynn has been sent
to the frontline, at 81 the oldest front-bencher since Gladstone! It has got
beyond a joke but there is yet no denouement in prospect.
Scotland
The SNP has
long been seeking the excuse it needs to hold a second independence referendum,
ever since losing the first one, and has long threatened that if the UK were to
‘take Scotland out of the EU against its will’ it would duly deliver. Sure
enough in the wake of the EU referendum Nicola Sturgeon swung into action
preparing the ground for it, and has also been to see EU leaders to try to
negotiate directly with them over a Scottish application to join, even if
Scotland were still part of the UK. Unfortunately for her the EU will not play
ball with this one not least because several of them fear their own separatist
movements (e.g. Spain vis a vis
Catalonia) and do not want to give them any encouragement. Moreover, Sturgeon
will be very cautious about actually calling a referendum unless she is sure
she will win it, which is highly debatable at present given that Scotland would
have to join the Euro as all new members are required, and the price of oil
upon which the Scottish economy is heavily dependent is low. A second
referendum defeat within a space of two to three years would kill it off for
the foreseeable future.
I am not at
all impressed with the Scottish nationalist argument anyway. They are still
part of the UK, and, unlike any other part of the UK, have actually voted
expressly to remain part of it. As such they have to accept the result of the
nation as a whole and be governed by it. London and some other big cities also
voted Remain but they are not demanding independence or continued adherence to
the EU (except for a humorous call for London to be a city state). One might
just as well ask what right Scotland would have to keep Britain in if England
and Wales voted strongly out, as they did. Sturgeon pleads that there has been
a material change of circumstances but things change all the time and if every
such change provoked another referendum there would never be an end to it.
Moreover, she is not constitutionally able to block Brexit as she has
suggested, so matters north of the border are hanging in the air as elsewhere.
The European Union
What of the
institution itself at the heart of the whole imbroglio?
The EU has
been crisis-ridden for several years now over the euro and the migrant influx,
and now Brexit had added to the brew. Brexit will embolden other members to
hold in-out referenda, euroscepticism now sweeping the continent, and there
seems to be a real fear within the EU that the whole project might be de-railed
and even break-up. Polls show that euroscepticism is even stronger in France
than it is in Britain and nationalist movements and anti-EU parties, on both
left and right, are on the march in several countries. However, I doubt that
the EU will disintegrate. Paradoxically the exit of Britain may even produce
another bout of integration as a reflex defence. Though they are all expressing
regret at the departure of Britain there might be some who see it as a blessing
since we have so often been a drag anchor on their projects, not in the euro
and not in the Schengen area, always reluctant Europeans.
Within the
next few months Britain will surely invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to
trigger the exit negotiations, which can take up to two years (or even three if
extended). Exactly what will then be negotiated is very unclear, since the
Brexiteers were divided amongst themselves about what future for Britain they
envisaged; the Norway option, the Canada option, the Albanian option (!?), etc,
etc. The main question seems to be whether we can negotiate some sort of
tariff-free access to the single market perhaps in return for a concession
regarding the free movement of labour, but then it was opposition to free
movement that was the chief driver for people voting out. The Brexiteers seem
to think their ace card is that Europe exports far more to us than we export to
them, and that therefore the imposition of reciprocal tariffs would not be to
their advantage. The other ace up their sleeve is the putative negotiation of trade
deals with the expanding economies in the third world (as was) but it remains
to be seen what that will yield in the long term.
What is
negotiated will also depend on who is doing the negotiating, which depends on
who the new Prime Minister is and who is appointed as “Minister for Brexit”. At
the time of writing (8th July) the contest has been narrowed down to
Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom, thus guaranteeing us our second female PM, with Michael Gove having been eliminated –
probably paying the penalty for knifing Boris Johnson. May is heavy favourite,
being by far the more experienced with a record six years under her belt as
Home Secretary, but Leadsom has the advantage of being a prominent Brexiteer,
and many party members being predominantly eurosceptic might yet opt for her.
If May wins perhaps Leadsom will be the negotiator, and if Leadsom wins perhaps
Gove. What ultimately emerges may be a kind of soft Brexit.
Chilcot
Just when
you thought it was safe to watch the current affairs programmes again along
comes the long-awaited Chilcot report on the Iraq war (it is impossible not to
affix the adjective long-awaited given that it has taken seven years to plop
weightily onto the mat). In its very measured way it has delivered a stinging
indictment of Blair and his cabinet, the decision to go to war, the quality and
use of the intelligence, the process whereby legality was established, the lack
of preparation for the occupation post-conflict, the failure to properly equip
British forces still using vehicles and equipment designed for other earlier
conflicts such as Northern Ireland, etc., etc. Never I would imagine has a PM
or government been so savaged by an independent official enquiry. Blair held his
own press conference in the wake of Chilcot, repeating his mantra of
self-justification, that he was convinced it was right to get rid of Saddam and
that he would do the same again, and rejects any charge of falsifying
intelligence (which Chilcot acquits him of anyway). But Blair now looks a
haunted man, a ghost of his former self. He may have felt the hand of history
on his shoulder but, with a motion to impeach him for misleading Parliament now
being moved by Alex Salmond and supported by David Davis and probably Jeremy
Corbyn, he may soon feel the heavy hand of the law on his collar. It is
unlikely that any of this will lead anywhere vis a vis Blair, though there may be civil actions for negligence
against the Ministry of Defence by bereaved families of slain service
personnel.
Summary
Everything
is so much up in the air that it is difficult to know what things will look
like when matters have settled again. Having begun this essay by quoting one
deceased politician let me conclude by quoting another, to wit Enoch Powell’s
oft-repeated axiom that ‘all political lives end in failure...’. It is a cruel
irony that Blair, for all his achievements in office and his feat of winning
three successive elections for Labour, will now be remembered chiefly for the Iraq
fiasco and Cameron in an equally cruel irony as the man who caused Britain to crash
out of Europe and perhaps presaged the break-up of the United Kingdom. In
Cameron’s case the irony is even more poignant given that he had long posed as
a eurosceptic and then apparently underwent a Damascene conversion to the
benefits of the EU, only to have the electors not unsurprisingly incline to
question his sincerity. The stage is strewn with corpses: Cameron, Boris, Gove
and now Leadsom (as I write) on the Conservative side and, perhaps, Corbyn on
the Labour side, not to mention Nigel Farage who has yet again resigned as UKIP
leader. It now seems certain given Leadsom’s withdrawal that we will have May
as new Tory leader and PM very shortly. What sort of Brexit will she negotiate
and will the Tory Party be united under her, or will the cracks start to show
again once negotiations with Europe are under way? And Labour looks to be
heading for a split whatever now happens, with Angela Eagle standing and Corbyn
standing firm.
A week is a
long time in politics and two and a half weeks (23rd June to 11th
July) an eternity.
Neville
Twitchell
11th
July 2016
[1] On a psephological note I assume
that the pollsters must have done surveys for the broadcasting organisations in
each local authority area to gauge the likely outcome so as to have a baseline
against which to measure the actual results, given that there is no precedent
to use to measure ‘swing’ as would be the case in an election.
