by Peter Kellner*
First, they contribute to the way the government has lost its parliamentary majority in the past few days. Tribal party loyalties are fracturing not just among the wider public but among members of Parliament (MPs) at Westminster.
Going right back to the nineteenth century, the Conservative Party has combined two impulses: an internationalist economic liberalism and a culturally traditional nationalism. When these have worked together, the Conservatives have been astonishingly successful at winning elections. When these two impulses have been in conflict—going right back to the fights over the Corn Laws in the 1840s—the party has been in trouble.
Today, that trouble is immense.
The nationalist faction has taken over completely. This is the underlying reason why Conservative Party leader and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has lost his majority in Parliament.
The casus belli was the vote of twenty-one MPs against his Brexit policy and their subsequent expulsion from the Conservative group in the House of Commons. Add in Amber Rudd, the cabinet minister who resigned at the weekend to join the twenty-one, and the five MPs who had already left the party, and the total number of defectors rises to 27.
All of them are, essentially, liberal internationalists. In short, Brexit has intensified the tension between the two Conservative impulses to the point where large parts of both factions cannot bear to be in the same party as each other.
The immediate consequence of this bitterness is that the prime minister has lost control of Parliament. The UK is due to leave the EU on October 31, with or without a deal on an orderly withdrawal. But MPs and peers have defied Johnson by passing a law saying that this deadline can be met only if a deal is agreed with the EU and then approved by Parliament. Otherwise, the prime minister must ask the EU for an extension of the Brexit deadline to January 2020.
Johnson’s response was to seek an early general election, in the hope of securing a majority in a new House of Commons, before October 31, so that Brexit can go ahead on time. But twice he has failed to secure the support he needs from MPs to call such an election.
One still looks likely before long, but, crucially, not until after October 31, when the chances are that Johnson will be weakened for not having fulfilled his promise of delivering Brexit on time, “do or die”.
The second immediate consequence of the weakening of tribal ties in UK politics is that the next election, whenever it takes place, could well lead to another hung parliament, in which no party enjoys an outright majority.
Unlike in many other countries, majority, single-party governments have been the norm in the UK. But two of the last three general elections have failed to produce such a majority, and the third only a narrow one.
One way or another, the Brexit saga will reach some sort of conclusion in the coming months, although the fallout and friction may last years. But the underlying shifts in Britain’s party system could take a decade or more to resolve. The long-standing contest between Conservative and Labour—both parties of historically big-tent coalitions of different notions of left and right—looks increasingly out of date.
Will it be replaced—and, if so, how, when, and with what? When the dust settles will there still be two big parties—and, if so, which two? Or will fragmentation and multi-party coalitions become the norm? It is quite feasible that the process will wreck our distinctive, centuries-old character of alternating rule by large, ideologically capacious parties.
If so, the crowning irony of the Brexit drama is that British politics will end up resembling politics in much of the rest of Europe.
*a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.His research focuses on Brexit, populism, and electoral democracy.
**first published in: carnegieeurope.eu
By: N. Peter Kramer
