If Labour wins, Britain needs a strong opposition

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

When in the early hours of 2 May 1997 it became clear the Tories had been wiped out in Scotland, winning not a single parliamentary seat north of the border, it is said the incoming Prime Minister Tony Blair raised an eyebrow. 

Had they meant to do that? He wasn’t sure they had intended to go quite as far as leaving the Scottish Conservatives with no representation. New Labour wanted to win big, of course, but was it a good idea – constitutionally speaking – to wipe out the Conservatives north of the border? It turned out to be a very bad idea indeed and we are still living in Britain with the aftereffects.

Labour pledged to introduce a devolved Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, the largest constitutional change in the UK’s governing arrangements since entry in 1973 to what became the EU. In Scotland, the working assumption of Labour’s senior devolutionists in 1997 was that the introduction of a parliament in Edinburgh would in a modest way revive the Scottish Conservatives.

With Labour dominant and the Tories and the Lib Dems having a decent bloc of seats in the devolved parliament (established in 1999), it was envisaged there would be a permanent Unionist block on the separatist Scottish National Party getting into power. The Nats would be forever constrained, emasculated decade after decade. Devolution would prevent the SNP from menacing the Union.

That was the plan and it didn’t work. In the run up to 1997, Labour in its eagerness to win did far too vicious a job on the Scottish Tories. Labour spokesman used Nationalist rhetoric to “other” the Tories, presenting them as an alien, un-Scottish, almost inhuman force.

This would return to haunt Labour. The morning after the 1997 general election, the Tories, one of the parties expected to be a pillar of the project to keep the Nationalists out, had been eviscerated. The SNP emerged as the main opposition party in the Scottish parliament after the first devolved elections. By 2007, the SNP was in power at Holyrood with Alex Salmond as First Minister. This created the momentum for holding a referendum on breaking up the UK. In 2014 the Unionists only won that referendum relatively narrowly by 55-45.

In 2015, the SNP then did to Scottish Labour what Blair’s team had done to the Tories in the landslide. They all but wiped out Scottish Labour. The Nationalists turned that language Labour used to use against the Tories – the “othering”, presenting its opponent as un-Scottish, foreign, London-run – on Labour itself. Only now is Labour north of the border being rebuilt gradually, with polls suggesting at the general election it will take perhaps 25 seats, maybe more, off an SNP struggling since its former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon fell in disgrace. After that, Labour will have a go at winning power in the devolved parliament too.

The reason I mention all this obscure constitutional history, again, is that we appear to be on the cusp of another big Labour victory and it is worth remembering that these events have unintended consequences.

A government that has too big a majority can become arrogant, contemptuous of criticism and blind to warnings. This happened towards the end of the Thatcher era and it happened under New Labour too. On “culture war” territory, further constitutional reform and punitive taxation there is plenty of scope for Labour to make major mistakes. If it wins, it will need challenging.

If the opinion polls are correct, Labour today is somewhere between 17 and 24 points in front. That is a whopping lead and it is very hard to see a way in which the Tories can turn it around. It is said the gap will narrow. Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. If it doesn’t, Labour’s lead is so large that it could reduce the Tories to a rump when the next election comes, probably next Autumn.

When Britain’s first past the post system really swings it swings most violently. It amplifies the effect and, if votes are well-distributed, just a few points more on national vote share can turn a victory into a rout.

When this happens unpopular governing parties find themselves flung from office. The effect can be cathartic, especially when a party has been in charge for too long and has grown tired or run out of ideas. In 1945 voters decided to move on from war leader Churchill, electing a Labour government under Clement Attlee with a majority of 145 seats.

Even when it happens less violently, as in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher defeated Jim Callaghan’s Labour, the first past the post system gives the incoming government a solid majority and a mandate to make changes.

This is one of the system’s strengths, compared to proportional representation or any of the many other types of more proportional system.

There are downsides, however. The British system may no longer be an “elected dictatorship”, as it was called by Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) in the late 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, as an “elective dictatorship” because there were so few checks on a strong government. The rise of judicial activism means British governments are more constrained by the courts than they were a few decades ago. Still, a government with a clear majority has a great deal of power.

If that power is to be exercised sensibly, wisely, one of the most important of the checks and balances that, hopefully, constrains an administration is fear of defeat at the subsequent election. If the Tory party is going down to defeat then it is to be hoped there is enough of it left to provide serious challenge in parliament and rebuild sufficiently so the electorate is presented with a decent alternative choice.

We cannot expect opposition parties close to victory to worry too much about this. They are engaged in a desperate struggle for power and if they end up with too much power they will celebrate.

Just because opposition parties don’t worry about it doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t.


Bye bye Braverman

Matthew Parris is one of the greats. Even when he’s wrong (sorry, I mean when I disagree with him) he is a prose stylist of the highest order and a perceptive thinker.

On Saturday, in his column in The Times, Matthew said Rishi Sunak should be brave and fire Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary. He may do that this week, though on Wednesday there is the complication of the court judgment on the government’s Rwanda plan which involves sending migrants there who lose their asylum cases.

Braverman represents the Tory Right and dislike of the Tory Right is a persistent theme in Matthew’s writing. They undermine and bring down every Tory leader in the end, he says. There’s no point trying to be nice to the Right, he says to Tory leaders, they’ll do you in anyway.

It’s possible to see what Matthew is getting at here, without agreeing. Braverman has in her antics in the last week, writing that inflammatory piece in The Times, made it more difficult for those who have legitimate criticisms of the police and multiculturalism because she discredits the arguments. 

Even when she has the gist of a point she over does it and undermines the critique. There is a degree of unfairness when certain groups who march are policed more sympathetically than others to avoid offending “community leaders”. 

But these days what is the Tory Right, of which Braverman is supposedly the standard bearer according to Matthew? How big is the Right in the Tory parliamentary party anyway?

It’s nothing like as powerful as Matthew says. The Tory party has defenestrated leaders on the Right – such as Iain Duncan Smith in 2003 – with every bit as much enthusiasm as it chased out Theresa May or Liz Truss. The test is electability. Incidentally, no Liz Truss is not on the conventional Tory Right. She is a libertarian, free market radical who is extremely relaxed on social matters.

The Braverman fan club in parliament is, according to reliable estimates, made up of only a dozen MPs, if that, and perhaps as few as only seven or eight MPs. There is always the danger in opposition that the party membership likes Braverman because she is, in front of a Tory association, or a Tory donor crowd, said to be combative and upbeat. She cheers them up. That is very different from making her a sensible choice as party leader.

Braverman’s favourability ratings in opinion polls were terrible before the last week when many normal voters had barely heard of her. Now she is notorious and is not – famous last words – on track to become the leader of anything.

At this stage my guess is that the Tory leadership race, if the party crashes to defeat, will be fought out between Kemi Badenoch and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. I could even envisage them doing a deal of some kind.
   

Britain’s antisemitism crisis is now an emergency

One brief word about Britain’s deepening anti-semitism crisis and the fear felt by Jewish Britons. I could give you 2,000 words on it, or 10,000, or 100,000, but what is needed is action. The situation is, as Lord Walney says, an emergency. Walney, the former Labour MP John Woodcock, is the government’s adviser on combating violent demonstrations. His review is likely to recommend the police be given new powers to block marches when there is a serious risk of antisemitism and racism being on display. It is getting worse every week in London on the pro-Palestine marches. Social media is awash with footage of placards, chants and comments that are right out of the 1930s Nazi playbook. The government must act.


Best of the Beatles

Last week on the Engelsberg Ideas podcast – EI Talks – we discussed the cultural legacy of the Beatles. The band’s final single is out and their classic greatest hits package from the 1970s – the Red and Blue double albums – have been remixed and reissued.

You can listen to the podcast here.

A friend got in touch last week saying, rightly, that I had been too harsh on Now and Then, the new single. As he said, it’s best understood as a prompt for happy memories. The band mean so much to millions of us.

I always find it difficult to talk about the Beatles. It is not only that there is little to say that has not been said many times. Talk about them for more than five minutes and I find myself – as a Beatle fan – stuck in a loop of wonder repeating the familiar list of superlatives.

On the podcast, which was very enjoyable to record, my colleague Alastair Benn flummoxed me completely with his final question. Name your three favourite Beatles songs, he said.

Faced with so much choice I suffered sensory overload and became confused.

The first choice – Paperback Writer – would always be in my top three. It is recorded at the peak of their powers, when they blended art-house aesthetics with popular appeal. The McCartney guitar riff is – Lennon said – an adapted variation on his Day Tripper riff from the previous year. The bass playing by McCartney is sublime. Everything is in its right place – including the punchy simplicity of Ringo’s drums and  the tongue in cheek harmonies. What a noise they made together. The lyrics are inherently English. And they looked at their coolest in this phase.

After that on the podcast I got stuck. Dozens of Beatles songs swirled around my head. Pressed for time I ended up with Come Together, the opening track on Abbey Road, the last album they recorded. And then I Saw Her Standing There, the opener on Please Please Me and perhaps the first proper, original English rock and roll record. Don’t get me wrong, I love both of those compositions and performances but they’re not Strawberry Fields Forever, or Revolution, or Eleanor Rigby.

One of the reasons the Beatles will live on, now the band members are fading away, is that boys (it’s usually boys) will carry on loving talking about the Beatles.


What I’m Watching

The Robbie Williams documentary series on Netflix. It’s filmed in the fashionable confessional showbiz style, in which the celebrity has final control over the content. Footage from the time is mixed in with home video and scenes from contemporary home life. As with the recent Beckham documentary, if you are interested in the 1990s and pop culture these documentaries are a great way to revisit and rethink.

For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Williams, he was in the 1990s an impish member of the pop sensation Take That. Then he became for a while Britain’s biggest pop-rock star. Then it went wrong. Then he found salvation in the form of his family.

The documentary has flaws. Inexplicably, Williams is interviewed, or interviews himself, in his underpants and a vest. That aside, he emerges as much more reflective, thoughtful and amusing than expected.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Iain Martin,
Publisher and CEO,
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