Last time I posted here, I was confidently forecasting the thumping that Labour were obviously going to take at the general election, and the hefty majority with which Theresa May would govern for the next parliament and more. I want to use this post, as much as anything, to explore the nature of the error that I and so many others made, and its implications for offering any sort of political commentary in Britain at the moment.
The fact is, pretty much all the data and historical precedent pointed towards the sort of result that was so widely forecast. At the start of the campaign, I felt a bit sorry for Matt Singh, the electoral analyst who predicted the polling miss in 2015 by making intelligent use of data outside regular voting intention polls. Having been the man of the hour in 2015, he had no way of impressing anyone this time round, because the result was so barn-door obvious. We had all got wise to the need to look beyond voting intention polling figures, but in any case the polls and the other indicators — local election results, and polling on perceptions of the parties and particularly their leaders — all pointed the same way.
In the event, Matt re-ran his 2015 model just before polling day and predicted, quite reasonably, an increased majority for Mrs May, albeit not in the mega-landslide territory so breathlessly talked about at the start of the campaign. And he was dead wrong, because past precedent offered no guide to what happened at the 2017 election. Unlike in 2015, when polling errors masked a growing Tory lead that was nonetheless evident from other indicators, this time round there was a genuine late net shift in voting intention during the campaign, of a sort that’s not really been seen before in modern British politics.
All of which renders the business of political commentary — offering it or consuming it — seem rather a waste of time. I remain a regular devourer of political punditry, with Stephen Bush in the New Statesman, the Talking Politics podcast (particularly Helen Thompson’s contributions) and Ian Dunt on both Politics.co.uk and Remainiacs among my particular favourites. But for all the keen-eyed insight and in-depth expertise they offer, which makes their output a reliably stimulating read or listen, it’s hard to escape the feeling that politics at the moment can turn in an instant, and that the commentariat can at best illuminate the past, but certainly not predict the future. Those of us with history degrees, who have fancied that the careful application of our skills and knowledge to the present will bestow on us some insight as to how things might play out have been rudely disabused. It’s an ultra-privileged, First World problem, but I can’t be alone in thinking that, if we’re being really honest, it all feels — however stupidly — a bit unfair.
So if you want any reliable indication of how things might pan out, the sensible thing to do would be to ignore all that follows, or even turn it on its head: to the extent that it considers the future at all (and it does so less than I would have felt confident doing in the past), it’s bound to be wrong.
But for all the hand-wringing caveats, I do think it’s possible to identify a couple of key things on which our medium-term future will turn — none of them controversial choices, though much commentary at the moment feels more comfortable in detail than looking at the critical big issues.
Obviously the first is Brexit. Remainiacs and others such as David Allen Green offer reliably insightful commentary on the unfolding nightmare in detail, but ultimately the key issue seems to be whether we get a transition deal or not. A meaningful transition, in which we remain inside the single market and customs union, will at least give us a fighting chance of sorting out the worst of the policy challenges arising from our exit. A cliff-edge exit in March 2019 will make it impossible.
The Prime Minister’s Florence speech gave a grudging but ultimately fairly clear signal that we’re not keen on going over the cliff-edge and want a transition deal. The shenanigans at the subsequent Conservative Party conference make it unclear whether politically she can commit the UK to such a deal, and EU negotiators have taken note of that. Liam Fox, in his conference speech, even directly contradicted Mrs May, stating: “We will leave the European Union, and with it, the single market and the customs union, at the end of March 2019.” Whether or not we can secure a transition period, or go over the cliff, therefore still appears wide open: it is not clear whether we will be capable of making the political choice to aim for a transition, and also unclear that we will have the wherewithal to negotiate one even if we plump for it.
As an aside, it does appear that the lesson of the last quarter-century of British politics is that if you give hard-line Eurosceptics an inch they’ll take a mile. During that period they have shifted the Conservative Party from being just about able to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty, to hostility to the Euro, then to promising a referendum on any future treaty, then to seeking to renegotiate our EU membership, then to a referendum, then to a hard Brexit. Throughout each shift, the party’s need to keep its hard-liners on board has driven its policy direction, and often the whole of British politics with it.
As this partly suggests, ultimately both of our two main parties are at risk of a debilitating split on Europe — and this is surely the second key driver of politics over the next few years. The risk is greater for the Tories because they are in office. There is a clear split between those insistent on a ‘romantic’ Brexit of a clean break, insisting that all will be well; and those who have engaged with the policy detail meaningfully. In practice, at some point this will mean choosing between the suicide-mission Brexit of no transition arrangement, and a measured option of a transition during which the UK will remain in the single market and customs union. Mrs May’s Florence speech appeared to signal that the choice has been made; subsequent politics cast doubt on this and suggest the choice will have to be faced again.
Morgan Stanley attracted some column inches with the prediction that the government will fall in 2018, presumably in roughly the same manner as Ramsey MacDonald’s did in 1931, with a chunk of the Cabinet unwilling to take steps that would be unpalatable to their political base and/or own ideological preferences but are nonetheless obviously necessary. But it is not at all clear that the Conservative Party wishes to have this kind of showdown: it doesn’t want a leadership election, and certainly doesn’t want a general election, and agitators on both sides of the split (Boris Johnson and Grant Shapps) appear to have repelled support by their actions rather than attracting it. Nor is it even clear that putting a new leader in charge would allow the government to make its Brexit choice, necessarily. So the party continues to muddle along, not confronting the choices about either its own leadership or the key questions of Brexit. Either it will have to at some point, risking a big split, or the Brexit negotiations will peter out and fail, taking us over the cliff edge.
Labour also has a potentially explosive Brexit split simmering, between (crudely speaking)pro-Corbyn hard Brexiteers and moderate, soft Brexiteers. But things are easier for the opposition: when the government’s policy goes wrong, they can simply point at it and coalesce around a position that amounts to “not that.” In both cases, however, just because these splits can be identified doesn’t mean that politics will play out along them — further twists could render other factors, currently obscure, more important as events unfold.
That said, it’s worth ending by thinking about the position Labour are in electorally following their recent defeat. Labour’s success was in ensuring that the next election is genuinely up for grabs. The current electoral map is one on which Labour can make enough gains to get into power on a realistically achievable level of swing. Labour got back to the level of their 2010 defeat under Brown, but even that’s not a fair comparison: Brown had the benefit of the solid bloc of Scottish seats that Labour has largely now lost, so this is a stronger result in England and Wales. They’ve even re-captured some of the ex-1997 landslide seats in England, swept away in 2010.
But let’s look at the result through the other end of the telescope. It produced an electoral map on which a decent Conservative fightback will take them to victory too. To win even a bare majority, Labour would still need to win more seats in one go than they ever have before, bar in 1997; and ideally, they’d want more than just that.
Let’s also consider just how much politics there is likely to be between now and the next election. If — and it’s a big if — the election is in 2022, it will be post-Brexit and with a new Conservative prime minister; if the former is politically damaging to the governing party, can the latter offset the harm? And surely Labour won’t be led by a man who would be 77 at the end of his first full term as PM if elected? Will it? So the question of the leadership of both parties will likely be fought out. Plus, for as long as Corbyn’s in place, let’s not allow his success as a campaigner (in elections, if not referendums) to whitewash his struggles as Leader of the Opposition — hostile media or no, he doesn’t make a great fist of business-as-usual politics. And let’s also not overlook just how badly 2017 went for the Conservatives: ConHome’s recent articles on the struggles of their party machine are effectively a textbook chapter on why snap elections are a bad idea; they surely won’t run such a cack-handed campaign with such a useless leader twice in a row; and ultimately they can still outspend Labour considerably, unless something big changes (which, of course, it might).
In short, I feel currently fashionable talk of a likely Labour or Labour-led government next time round is premature (though I acknowledge it could come to pass). It would require everything that went badly for the Conservatives this time to go badly again and then some, and everything that went well for Labour to go well again, and then some. The only way this won’t be the case is if there is a major change in the big-picture political context, which there could well be, but we surely can’t have any confidence in predicting what that might be. Yes, a cliff-edge Brexit will probably rebound massively to the disadvantage of the government of the day, if past precedent is anything to go by. But, as we can surely all agree, it isn’t really anything to go by any more. I agree with those who argue politics will be turbulent for a long time to come, and that we are living through an era-defining period that will shape the country decisively for the rest of most of our lifetimes. But I feel it’s a leap from there to seeing a Labour government on the horizon just yet. Decide for yourself whether that’s a forecast or a warning against making forecasts.
