Britain is not a place with a history of revolutions. I am not a natural populist or revolutionary. However, I increasingly feel like I can understand the feeling. Brexit has shown the UK’s political establishment to be woefully inadequate for the tasks facing them, but what will the future hold?
Ipsos-Mori polling in March 2019 reports that 86% of respondents are unhappy with how the government is running the country. Sixty-five percent of the public are dissatisfied with the job the Prime Minster is doing including one third of supporters of her own party. Nearly 80% are not confident in the government to get a good Brexit deal.
And yet the headline voting intention polls give the government a four-point lead. Why? Because the alternatives are even worse. Seventy percent of respondents are dissatisfied with Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition. Lib Dem leader Vince Cable has a 42% satisfaction rating, more than one third of voters ‘don’t know’.
What all this means is that the British party system is both dead and alive. The current set of circumstances seem to be mutually incompatible:
1) The government and its leader do not have the confidence of voters
2) The opposition faces every way on Brexit, is riven with complaints of antisemitism and has a hugely unpopular leader
3) Both main parties are polling relatively strongly
4) The third-largest national party is an irrelevance
What does this matter? Well, it means there could be an opening for far more than the often-mentioned new centrist party. On the 25th March the Telegraph ran a story that ‘Most voters believe Parliament is trying to block Brexit, poll reveals’. Douglas Carswell responded with a call to elect a new parliament, while BBC Radio 5 live coverage hints at public dissatisfaction with MPs trying to block Brexit and threatens the rise of other parties. Public dissatisfaction is perhaps not surprising given the way that MPs have behaved. The behaviour of MPs has been especially poor around Brexit.
· Many MPs wish to stop Brexit having been elected on a manifesto promising to deliver it.
· Many other MPs want the government’s withdrawal agreement to pass while they personally oppose it.
· Some want to use a narrative of betrayal to further their own ambitions.
The Conservative Party’s disastrous election in 2017 means that all parties are in on the act. In many ways a hung parliament could be a good way to approach the greatest political issue of modern times, if it meant that all MPs were involved in decisions rather than a government with a large majority able to pass everything too easily. But a functioning hung parliament requires MPs to put aside their party politics to work for the good of the country and compromise, as the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins wrote recently. They have singly failed to do that.
MPs must stop treating voters like fools. Most MPs were elected on manifestos which promised to deliver Brexit. The Independent Group want to overturn the 2016 referendum and stop Brexit. They want to do that via a second vote, arguing that things have changed. Yet they do not want to face byelections, when things certainly have changed for their constituents. They were elected for parties they have now left, on manifestos promising to deliver Brexit. That they so openly oppose what they were elected to do risks treating voters and democracy poorly. If they are voted out, they can have no complaints.
There is clearly public dissatisfaction with the performances of politicians, but there is a more structural reason to believe that political change may come. I long believed that Labour’s better-than-expected performance in the 2017 general election was the result of Labour’s die-hard supporters holding their noses and voting for Corbyn added to the disgruntled remain-supporters voting for whoever wasn’t a government implementing Brexit. Matthew Goodwin’s work indicates that I was wrong. If Goodwin is right, public dissatisfaction with mainstream politics is far deeper and more profound than just unhappy Remainers lashing out at Brexit. There are plenty of other upcoming challenges that mean the conditions for support for an alternative are only likely to increase. If the main parties are seen as unable to deliver, the conditions are ripe for a breakthrough from elsewhere - perhaps something radical and profoundly different.
@BeardySocialist