Two polls out tonight. One clear message.

Brexit, Brexit Party, Conservative Party
11 Comments

One by OpiniumResearch, fieldwork 24-26 July changes with respect to 5th July:

CON: 30% (+7)

LAB: 28% (+3)

LDEM: 16% (+1)

BREX: 15% (-7)

GRN: 5% (-3)

And one by DeltaPoll for the Mail on Sunday:

CON: 30 (+10)

LAB: 25 (-1)

LIB: 18 (+2)

BRX: 14 (-10)

CUK: 2 (-2)

The fearful symmetry of that +7, -7 and +10, -10 is burning bright in the tangled forests of polling data. I rejoice.

I do not rejoice for the Conservatives, or mourn for the Brexit party. When the Tories’ voters deserted them en masse for the Brexit Party just before the European Parliament elections I was happy for the same reason that I am happy now: those splendidly disloyal voters were sending the message “We voted to leave the European Union. Forget building high speed railways or cancelling them, or whatever other scheme you think matters, we want Brexit. And we will vote for whichever party has the best chance of getting it done.”

Edit: Good grief, there have now been four polls published tonight. They’re like No. 9 buses, you wait ages then four turn up at once. The two later polls did not give such dramatic rises for the Tories, but one of them, by ComRes, yet again followed the pattern of a rise for the Conservatives precisely mirrored by a fall for the Brexit Party. Only YouGov did not follow this pattern. It showed a rise for the Conservatives and a fall for the Brexit Party, all right, but they were not quite equal. I repeat: it is not the rise or fall of either party that interests me. What interests me is that this demonstrates there is a most un-blocky bloc of voters for whom Brexit is the key issue.

In recent weeks there has been a slew of comments from the Remain side that asked, with a pitying shake of the head, what would the poor shambling Leave voters actually do if Article 50 were revoked? Get out on the streets with their Zimmer frames and riot? (The search term riot Zimmer frame Brexit gets 51,600 results. Recycling is all very well, but someone needs to donate them a second joke.) Well, besides the route taken by one Brexit-supporting old girl who won’t see seventy again – become an MEP and make Greens cry – there is always the option of swing voting.

Boris on Corbyn’s friends

Conservative Party, Party politics, Westminster Parliament
3 Comments

Parliament has a different feel to it today.

He asks about Iran, the right honourable gentleman who has been paid by Press TV of Iran, who repeatedly sides with the mullahs of Tehran rather than our friends in the United States over what is happening in the Persian Gulf. How incredible that we should even think of entrusting that gentleman with the stewardship of this country’s security.

We all know it, but not everyone has been paying attention. I don’t know if it has been put so bluntly in Parliament before. And the rest of Boris Johnson’s answer is equally blunt. He has certainly added some energy to the proceedings. How much of this can Corbyn take?

Jo Swinson’s Dilemma

Liberal Democrats
8 Comments

“I want to thank all the people who put aside their normal party choice to vote for me today.” (Jo Swinson, acceptance speech, 2017 election – quoted from memory)

East Dumbartonshire was one of the top seven NO-voting districts in the Scottish indyref 5 years ago. Jo is well aware she is only an MP because a sufficient number of people (some of whom I know) who normally vote Tory or Labour put aside their party choice to prevent the SNP getting the seat. Of all the Scottish MPs in Westminster, none are more existentially committed to there being no second indyref.

Having won her seat, Jo has now won leadership of the LibDems and this too required her to commit to a couple of positions on a couple of referenda.

She wants a second brexitref. How to square that circle with her position on indyref? Could she say that, since she believes leaving a union of a few decades needs two affirming referenda, not just one, she naturally thinks leaving a union of a few centuries needs ten or twenty consecutive wins (plus another one to cancel out the referendum that the natz lost)? Suitably spaced, such win-them-all-or-lose neverendums would ensure the natz in effect kept their ‘once in a lifetime’ promise – even if they did not die before their time from mingled fury and boredom. I don’t see it ever working in real life – but meanwhile it’s a thing a politician can say.

So on the whole, I see her other referendum-related commitment as the more troublesome for her. The LibDem’s price for forming a coalition with Cameron was a referendum on ‘reforming’ (i.e. changing) our voting system. It was a crushing defeat for the idea and for the LibDems. Now Jo has made electoral reform the “front and centre” price of any coalition with anybody. Will the LibDems be content with the offer of two referendums (to be held sometime after a referendum on it that they must win just to annul their prior referendum defeat)? Will they be content with the offer of even just one referendum – even one in which their getting first to the post with just one vote extra would suffice for victory? This is another issue I hope never arises in real life – but meanwhile, what does a politician say?

Even in today’s LibDem-friendly media environment, the new leader may not be able to avoid the occasional question about why she thinks we common people must vote ‘Leave’ twice before she’ll let us leave the EU, but she’ll let herself change what our votes mean through a mere parliamentary deal.

General election pacts

Brexit Party, Elections, Nigel Farage
3 Comments

The outraged #NotMyPM twitterati think that new prime minister Boris Johnson should call a general election, since he was only put in place by a handful of silly old Tory party members and has no mandate. One problem with a general election is that the Brexit vote could be split between the Brexit Party and the Conservatives. So Nigel Farage has suggested there is the possibility of an electoral pact, whereby the Brexit Party does not contest all seats.

It would be fascinating if, for example, previously safe Labour seats went to TBP due Corbyn’s promise that the Labour party would back Remain. Or if votes were split between Labour and Lib Dems, since Jo Swinson has ruled out a pact.

Boris’s next moves will greatly impact the shape of the Great Realignment. Via the medium of electoral arithmetic, Nigel Farage will have a great deal of influence, I suspect.

The ruling class of an unrecognised state

Brexit, European Union
2 Comments

In today’s Sunday Times, Matthew Goodwin reviews, favourably, The Great Betrayal by Rod Liddle. Goodwin writes,

Brexit was always destined to bring Britain to a constitutional crisis. After all, it was the first moment in British history when a majority of people outside of parliament asked for something that a majority of people who had been elected to represent their fellow citizens in parliament did not want to give. This profound disconnect is why, as my academic colleague Vernon Bogdanor argues, what happened on that fateful day in June 2016 is probably the most important constitutional event in Britain since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In one fell swoop, the shock vote left a lot of people who were used to feeling like winners suddenly feeling like losers and a lot of other people who had grown used to feeling like losers suddenly feeling like winners — at least for a while. For all of these reasons, what happened next was never going to end well.

Here I must interject that “it” has not ended yet. But Mr Goodwin is on to something with his focus on the shock and disbelief felt by those whose previous experience of electoral defeat had been the relatively trivial one of seeing “their” party dislodged for five years by some very similar people from the other party.

Just after the referendum Rafael Behr wrote a piece for the Guardian called “How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign”. Behr, a convinced Remainer, saw the same phenomenon then as Goodwin sees today:

But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.” Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer.

And yet I suspect from his more recent writings that Mr Behr regards talk of a “deep state” as Trumpian paranoia.

Culturally, and in some respects politically, I am closer to the ruling class than to most of those who wounded it so deeply on June 23rd 2016. Goodwin goes on to write,

Liddle chiefly rails against what one might call “double liberalism”, the relentless pursuit of social and economic liberalism and all that flows from it

and

On economics, meanwhile, most people worry about the growing gap between the rich and poor, between London and the regions, and have no problem with more equitable taxation and nationalisation.

I would put “equitable” in quotes and I do have a problem with nationalisation. I would be quite happy for our relentless pursuit of social and economic liberalism to end by successfully catching them both – though I mean “liberal” in the old sense. I would know the right answers to the questions on the Remanian citizenship test. I even believe some of them. But however wise and sensible and liberal it is, I do not accept that the “ruling class of the unrecognised state” is entitled to hold on to power after being voted out.

What would Boris lose by calling an election timed to take place just AFTER 31 October?

Brexit, Brexit Party, Conservative Party, Elections, European Union, Party politics, Shenanigans, Westminster Parliament
11 Comments

There has been speculation everywhere that Boris Johnson will call an election in order to get a parliamentary majority to secure Brexit. Some have said he would need to make an agreement with the Brexit Party before the election, others that the pact would need to come afterwards – but most of what I have read seems to assume that the order of events in the plan is: Call election > Win election (possibly with help) > Leave EU.

Have I missed something? Because it seems to me that Mr Johnson would get a better shot at all his goals by calling an election timed to occur just after Brexit.

The entry for Dissolution of Parliament on Parliament’s own website says,

What happens to Parliament at dissolution?
Parliament is dissolved 25 working days before a general election at a minute past midnight.

The formal end to the parliamentary session is called ‘prorogation’. This may take place a few days before dissolution.

So Mr Grieve’s ingenious scheme to make it harder for Parliament to be prorogued is rendered void. While MPs are locked out of the building, the gears turn unimpeded and eventually the great or terrible hour strikes.

House of Commons
When Parliament is dissolved, every seat in the House of Commons becomes vacant. All business in the House comes to an end. MPs stop representing their constituencies. There will be no MPs until after the general election.

And until after Brexit.

MPs can come into Parliament for a few days after dissolution to clear their offices.

Those who wish to be MPs again must stand again as candidates for election.

They will be standing and campaigning for a seat in the post-Brexit House. The whole political environment will be different, and much more favourable to the Conservatives. If Brexit seems inevitable, much of the justification for the Brexit Party’s existence melts away, and so does the incentive for pro-Remain parties to unite in an electoral pact to stop Brexit. To an exhausted electorate “Rejoin” is a much less appealing message than “Don’t leave”, and the attitude of the major opposition parties to it is more split. The Liberal Democrats would want it, but Labour, especially if Mr Corbyn is still at the helm, would probably be happy to kick it into the long grass as a vaguely worded aspiration.

Role of the Commons Speaker at dissolution

The Speaker is no longer an MP once Parliament is dissolved.

Like every other MP, the Speaker must stand for re-election. The Speaker will stand as ‘Speaker seeking re-election’.

However, the Speaker retains responsibility for the management of the House of Commons as they remain the chair of the House of Commons Commission until a new Speaker is elected.

In the circumstances I have described Mr Bercow’s long-delayed departure would be seen by the Tories as the icing on the cake.

It might be that Mr Johnson could be stopped from holding a general election by the opposition voting to deny the government the two thirds majority that the Fixed Term Parliament Act requires it to have to call an election. But when I try to imagine Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell going through the division lobbies to deny themselves the chance of power, or stranger yet to protest that they do indeed have confidence in a Johnson government, I cannot make the vision form.

I probably have missed something quite obvious. Tell me what it is and I will get on with my day.

Brexit radicalisation and the prime reason thereof

Brexit, Brexit Party, Westminster Parliament
2 Comments

Most Leavers wanted a Good Deal, rather than No Deal, but then realised all the deals that were actually acceptable to the UK establishment were entirely about ensuring Brexit-in-name-only. The gulf between rhetoric and action became so wide that distrust in Westminster and its institution became near total. It is this collapse in trust that has driven support for a No Deal/WTO Brexit, not a fundamental desire on the behalf of most Brexiteers to leave the EU with No Deal. The birth and meteoric growth of the Brexit Party is a direct product of this collapse.

I am strongly of the view that if a deal with the EU could be reached that left the UK free to make whatever trade deals it wished with agreeable third parties, very few Leave voters would oppose it.

The key element needed is it has to be a deal that does not permit EU institutions and EU regulations any authority whatsoever over the UK except when it is trading with the EU (either directly or via automatic harmonisation of UK regulations with EU regulations, which would the very definition of a ‘Brexit’ that was Brexit-in-name-only).

Parliament is not aligned with the people

Quotes & snippets
2 Comments

A comment on Guido Fawkes:

This has gone on far too long. A simple democratic exercise (not to mention the largest such in our history) has been obstructed by the very parliament that voted to put the question to the people in the first place and then promised to enact the result. It is becoming clearer by the day that the only way we will be able to preserve our precious democracy and deliver on that result is to vote in a new parliament. That will involve the de-selection of large numbers of MPs who have been complicit in this betrayal of their manifesto promises or the wholesale defection of their previous supporters to the Brexit Party. Whichever it is, even if it leads to a Corbyn-led coalition (which would be a far bigger national disaster than any form of “hard” Brexit could ever be) the responsibility will rest squarely and solely on the shoulders of these dishonourable MPs.

The only deal on offer now or in the future from the EU is a very bad deal. Ruling out no deal effectively means remaining in the EU. They can dress it up any way they like but the public are not stupid and know this full well. Any appeal from the Tory Party to trust it again for fear of getting Corbyn (unless the above de-selections have thoroughly purged candidates who will not support Brexit) will simply fall onto deaf ears and they would be very stupid to think otherwise. Millions will have their Brexit or they will have their revenge. In an ideal world they will have both.

“No deal” is easy

Brexit
6 Comments

Philip Hammond, the chancellor, has said it is “terrifying” that one of Boris Johnson’s close allies, Jacob Rees-Mogg, believes a no-deal Brexit will boost the economy.

Look, this is not difficult.

Leave tomorrow with no deal. Declare unilateral free trade. Watch the economy grow. Preferably abolish corporation tax and get to work abolishing regulations, too. “Trade deals” are unnecessary since people trade with people and all governments can do is get in the way.

Objections?