British Politics Guide

[Ares Land]

If you want a say in the rules for the market— well, you had that, it was called EU membership. It was a good deal, in fact, because you didn't have to join the disastrous Euro. If you still want access to the market (and "Norway + customs union" is that), then you're losing quite a bit of economic sovereignty.

Agreed -- except that reports on the Euro being disastrous are greatly exaggerated!

The big question here is whether the Labour party actually exists or not.

Please forgive what's probably going to be a really stupid question for anyone who knows anything about British politics, but could the whole dilemma mean the Lib Dems could actually have a chance?

[chris_notts]

Please forgive what's probably going to be a really stupid question for anyone who knows anything about British politics, but could the whole dilemma mean the Lib Dems could actually have a chance?

A chance at what? At being the biggest party?

This is only my opinion, but I think it's unlikely without a very big political shake-up. They've generally had three problems in the past:

1. It's not obvious what they stand for. At one stage it seemed like they were somewhere to the left of New Labour, then when they actually got into power in the coalition it became obvious that the Orange Bookers were running everything and they were at best centre. The Lib Dems might be united on social liberalism, but on economics they're a bit all over the shop and their position seems to change with every leader. They're pretty dedicated to their pro-EU position, but it didn't win them many votes last time round.

2. In as much as they do stand for left liberal values, they're probably out of sync with the majority of the country. As Sal said before, if you want to win as a true left party, you probably also need to be a working class party, but the Lib Dems share little socially with the average working class voter. They're the party of bits of the non-Conservative middle class and university students.

3. they've always had the third party credibility problem. People don't vote for them because they don't think they can win.

I think their most likely chance would be to firmly occupy some of the centre space vacated by Labour. The problem is, they've been unconvincingly trying that for a while now and no-one's taking any notice. What they'd need is something to reinforce that perception and also convince people they could win. Maybe if Labour went into meltdown they could pick up some ex-Labour MPs looking for a home, which might help with both their claim to be the new moderates and convincing people they could win. The main reason why defecting MPs might want to join them is that the Lib Dems do have a working party machinery, and using theirs is easier than building a new party from scratch.

But we've been there before: part of the Labour right split off as the SDP and merged with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems in the first place, and the project failed because more people stuck with their traditional party than switched. They were crushed by the first past the post system. Unless the Conservative vote is also split, the likely impact of a second split of Labour would just be a massive Conservative majority and a very tiny increase in the very tiny number of Lib Dem MPs.

So maybe the way for them to win is if both the left and the right split. If there's sufficient disappointment and anger at the Conservatives to revive UKIP and split the right vote, and Labour implodes and the Lib Dems can gain credibility in the process, then maybe they might make some big gains. It doesn't seem particularly likely, though, and it would effectively be a complete realignment of UK politics, on a scale that hasn't happened since the early 20th century.

[Salmoneus]

I don't think I disagree with any of that, although I might come back and say a bit more on future prospect possibilities later.

For now, I'd just throw in three snippets. One is that the Lib Dems have a bizarre toxicity now: people hate them. This is because of the Coalition, and specifically the fact that they were unable to prevent the Conservatives from raising nominal student fees (which, to stress, are not really fees at all, but zero-interest progressive tax liabilities). The other parties can freely lie through their teeth about anything on a daily basis, and enact any policies they want, and people grumble and move on, but the Lib Dems demonstrated that a junior partner in a coalition isn't omnipotent, and they're "toxic" for the next generation.

Anyway, the result is that support for a generic party with Lib Dem policies is much, much higher than support for the Lib Dems; and as a result there's discussion about abolishing the party or renaming it or the like.

Two, the Lib Dems have the problem Labour have, but worse: Brexit and Tory infighting suck up so much of the oxygen that there's little media exposure for anybody else. Add in Labour's own spasmodic implosions, the startling rise of the SNP and the Scottish independence question, the northern ireland parties and the prospect of a return to violence, and the comic relief that UKIP has become, and it basically doesn't matter what the Lib Dems do or say, they'll never get on TV, which means people won't take them seriously.


Three, to illustrate the problem of the electoral system, here's what happened last time, in 1983. The Tories lost 700,000 votes compared to 1979. But they increased their majority by over 140 seats. Why? Because Labour split in two. The Tories got 42% of the vote, and Labour, the SDP and the Liberals together got 53%, but this translated into the Tories winning over 60% of seats. And on the left, Labour got 28%, just a few points ahead of the SDP/Liberal alliance on 25%... but Labour got 203 seats, while the alliance got 23.

[chris_notts]

Two, the Lib Dems have the problem Labour have, but worse: Brexit and Tory infighting suck up so much of the oxygen that there's little media exposure for anybody else. Add in Labour's own spasmodic implosions, the startling rise of the SNP and the Scottish independence question, the northern ireland parties and the prospect of a return to violence, and the comic relief that UKIP has become, and it basically doesn't matter what the Lib Dems do or say, they'll never get on TV, which means people won't take them seriously.

It's not just media time though. The Conservatives had become UKIP light before the terrible deal popped that bubble, and all the right wing nastiness has made them so toxic to a lot of ex-Lib Dem voters they might as well be radioactive. Those people not only won't vote for the Conservatives (a few might have voted for Cameron), they'll grit their teeth and vote Labour in an anything-to-stop-the-Tories strategy. People talk a lot about Labour's drift to the left, but the Conservatives have become equally toxic to a lot of moderate non-social democrats.

Paradoxically, when the two big parties vacate the centre, it actually seems to make it harder for a small centre party because the risks of letting the other guy in by mistake are higher.

[mèþru]

Honestly, I feel if that if Labour splits this time it would be the Lib Dems disappearing into the splinter faction rather than the other way around.

[MacAnDàil]

Labour under Corbyn got a massive boost in voting intention during the election campaign period just prior to the 2017 election.This resulted in the best swing they've had in decades. This could be repeated in the next general election.

[Salmoneus]

Labour under Corbyn got a massive boost in voting intention during the election campaign period just prior to the 2017 election.This resulted in the best swing they've had in decades. This could be repeated in the next general election.

Anything is possible. But that's not likely - Labour gained about 15% in about 6 weeks, and haven't lost much ground since then, although the Tories have taken first place and there's been a small but significant drift to the third parties. But that means that a similar swing would put them now at over 50% of the vote, and that's just not plausible. There will probably be drift from minor parties to the two main parties, like last time, but there's not much more life to be wrung out of those parties now. And surely the Tories can't possibly run AS catastrophically awful a campaign this time.

[chris_notts]

And surely the Tories can't possibly run AS catastrophically awful a campaign this time.

You think so? May was pretty terrible, but I honestly don't know who they gave who'd be more appealing. Who do they have with even a hint of charisma? And what could they possibly say to make people forget the last few years of completely dysfunctional government? It's not like that's even going to end if May passes her terrible agreement, we'll just enter a new phase in the war over the long term relationship.

[mèþru]

Wasn't JRM the most popular politician for a while?

[Salmoneus]

OK, a quick word on lib dems and future parties.


First off, the laws of party systems mean that, in general, there can't be third parties in simple plurality electoral systems. The survival of the Liberals is a freak of history, replicated in very few SP countries around the world. The Liberals survived their replacement by Labour for basically three reasons:
a) strong regional bases, particularly in the Celtic areas (they've now mostly lost those bases, on account of nationalists in Wales and Scotland, and the Leave orientation of the southwest); [regionalism is the normal reason why third parties survive]
b) a strong institutional legacy - while new parties have to try to leap from the ground to the heights of government in one go, and fall flat on their face if they fail, the Liberals always retained a strong presence in local government, which provided the local name recognition and talent recruitment pathways to act as a springboard into national politics;
c) the class-polarisation and geographical segregation of the electorate; this meant that there were lots of working-class voters who felt they could not vote Tory, and lots of middle-class voters who felt they could not vote Labour, and the Liberals acted as a protest vote for both groups. There were also in particular a lot of working-class rural voters who felt alienated by the industrial socialism of Labour, which is probably why the Liberals could do well in, for example, rural Cornwall or the Scottish Islands.

[and then of course they benefited from internal troubles in Labour]

These factors, and their decline, probably spell serious problems for the Lib Dems in the future. And the lack of them spells serious problems for any party attempting to enter into politics as anything other than a notional protest group.

----------

Now, it's easy to see why people see opportunity here. If you look at the Brexit vote, as I said at the time, it lines up much better with a Lib Dem vs UKIP axis than with a Labour vs Tory axis. And if you look at the parties since, you've got the Tories as a basically hard brexit party, and Labour remaining brexit-agnostic, which in theory means that the 48% of the electorate who voted Remain have no obvious home. Add in the shift to the left in Labour and the continual drift to the right in the Tories, and there's a great big gap just crying out to be filled, for a centre-left, liberal cosmopolitan pro-EU party and wow, wouldn't you know it, that's the Lib Dems, isn't it?

But how do they actually grab that market share? As we've addressed, they've had some big problems - lingering toxicity, a near-total lack of coverage, and frankly timidity (they want to be the centre-left party and they don't want to campaign too hard on being the Remainer party because, like Labour, that would alienate some of their core voters).

--------------

How can any party reach the top two? It can't, not by itself. It requires one of the two big parties either to schism, with one part joining the third party, or to just implode completely. And if you look at Labour, either option is plausible right now.

But it's not easy. We've already seen this film, in the 1983, and it didn't work out. Sure, the SDP actually came pretty close to beating Labour, but they didn't, and in SP, 'pretty close' doesn't matter, it's all or nothing. So there's a lot of resistence among the Labour moderate to splitting again.

But it might happen. Indeed, it is happening. Two Labour MPs have become Independents, with at least one more and possibly a handful having apparently strongly suggested they're just waiting for the right moment to do so. There are big Blairite names who will not put up with being in the party of Corbyn forever.

But do the Lib Dems want them? Their leader does - he's been talking about a new centre alliance party, and he's been pushing to reform party rules to encourage entryism. But the rank and file mostly don't. They can see, as methru says, that what's on offer is a Blairite takeover of the Lib Dems, not a harmonious coalescence. As it was last time - the Lib Dems are more SDP with liberal trimmings than vice versa, at least the membership (though many of its leaders have come from the right). And now they're being asked to ally with the centre-right New Labour types. There's resistence. Particularly because New Labour weren't liberal. That doesn't seem to matter to 90% of the electorate anymore, but the small number it does matter to are most Lib Dem voters now. Sure, there's a lot of centrist ground where the two factions can meet economically, but New Labour is still the party of RIPA and the National Register, and a lot of Lib Dem members are not going to just sit still and watch the people they spent the 2000s fighting against on ideological grounds just take over their party.

-----------

But honestly, there's a bigger problem: nobody actually cares. There's a massive enthusiasm gap between Remain and Leave - the latter are passionate, and the former aren't. What's more, the latter have policies, and not just 'leave the EU'.

There was an interesting Yougov poll, asking people whether they felt represented by the current parties. Who didn't feel represented? Well, Leavers. Leavers overall feel there is no party representing their views in Parliament; Remainers are content. Likewise, people who are angry about criminal justice (i.e. we don't have hanging), people who are angry about immigrants (i.e. we don't hang immigrants), and people who are angry about the benefits system (i.e. we don't hang the poor or the disabled). And these are mostly the same people. Actually, two other issues people feel unhappy about are the failure to regulate businesses adequately (hang them!), and having a foreign policy (who cares if people hang them?), and while those are broader issues, a lot of people angry about them are the same as the ones angry about the other things.

In other words, the people really crying out for a party - the people Labour and the Tories are trying to fight over - are the Nationalists.

On the other side, only about 8% of people both believe in Remain AND believe that view isn't adequately represented (despite neither party holding that view!!!). And once Brexit has happened.... well, that 48% is real, but ideologically it's hard to pin them down to anything more than a general feeling of openness, internationalism, mild liberalism, multiculturalism... and those feelings may be nice, but the other parties can offer tax cuts, and spending increases, and can still pay lip service to Remainer ideals out of one side of their mouth while they do it, so... why would they need to go looking for another party?


-----

Chris: oh, the Tories are unlikely to do well in the next election. They could do catastrophically, if a No Deal Brexit devastates the country. But I don't expect a massive swing during the campaign again, because yes, that election was historically, unprecedentedly bad. I've seen a John Major campaign, and I've seen a Gordon Brown campaign, and wow, Theresa May's campaign was stunning in how much worse it was. Whoever they have next will have the advantage of not being Theresa May, and that'll get them a lot of benefit of the doubt.

After all, it's easy for a Labour voter to think people couldn't possibly want the Tories in power. But the Tories are currently ahead of Labour in the polls...

[Frislander]

First off, the laws of party systems mean that, in general, there can't be third parties in simple plurality electoral systems. The survival of the Liberals is a freak of history, replicated in very few SP countries around the world. The Liberals survived their replacement by Labour for basically three reasons:
a) strong regional bases, particularly in the Celtic areas (they've now mostly lost those bases, on account of nationalists in Wales and Scotland, and the Leave orientation of the southwest); [regionalism is the normal reason why third parties survive]
b) a strong institutional legacy - while new parties have to try to leap from the ground to the heights of government in one go, and fall flat on their face if they fail, the Liberals always retained a strong presence in local government, which provided the local name recognition and talent recruitment pathways to act as a springboard into national politics;
c) the class-polarisation and geographical segregation of the electorate; this meant that there were lots of working-class voters who felt they could not vote Tory, and lots of middle-class voters who felt they could not vote Labour, and the Liberals acted as a protest vote for both groups. There were also in particular a lot of working-class rural voters who felt alienated by the industrial socialism of Labour, which is probably why the Liberals could do well in, for example, rural Cornwall or the Scottish Islands.

Case in point: Berwick constituency (which is where the house we actually own is situated: my parents both being clergy the house we normally live in comes with the job) historically was a liberal constituency (and my dad maintains that in terms of ethos it still is), but since 2015 it's been Tory under Anne-Marie-Trevelyan, and I think she even strengthened her lead at the last election. The chances of the Lib Dems reclaiming an area like that (which was of course fairly strongly Leave) are fairly slim. In the places they've managed to keep hold of their MPs (notably Tim Farron's constituency of Westmorland and Lonsdale) they've managed to keep doing fairly well, but I can't see them getting back what they've lost like Berwick.

(they want to be the centre-left party and they don't want to campaign too hard on being the Remainer party because, like Labour, that would alienate some of their core voters).

The thing is though a I've said I think they'd already lost a lot of this support by the 2015 election, and frankly I don't see them getting much of it back without superhuman effort and a major miracle: I don't think they will die completely, and I would probably vote for them simply due to the sheer impotency of Labour under Corbyn, but I don't hold out much hope for anything more than that.

Also I can't help but feel they have had a particularly bad run of leaders. Cable is no more inspiring or invigorating a leader than Corbyn; Farron's views on homosexuality were badly handled (those of us in the know, i.e. liberally-inclined Christians, knew that that was almost certainly what he thought already, but we were OK with that because there is no way he would have been able to get any policies acting on those beliefs past the membership as a whole, but his unwillingness to be clear on that was not good at all); and, well, Nick Clegg we already know about (I mean come on, I saw Simon Hughes speak in my college, and his description of how the coalition agreement was drawn up was just mind-boggling, how they seemingly forgot to write in a clause saying they could vote against the government on certain issues, it frankly beggars belief that the people at the top of the party could be that stupid, but then of course given our current crop of Tories it perhaps doesn't seem so bad...).

[alice]

It's hypothetical, yes, but an intriguing thought-experiment: if the voting system changed to make new parties viable, what would we get? Almost certainly Labour would split into True Socialists and Pink Liberals, and the Conservatives would similarly devolve into pro-and anti-Europe factions; it's possible that the latter would absorb what remains of UKIP. What else?

[mèþru]

Actual 2015:

2015 using some kind of STV:

[MacAnDàil]

Two Labour MPs have become Independents

On the other hand, when I look at which two it was, it turns out to be Jared O'Mara, who was previously suspended for sexist and homophobic remarks, and Frank Field, who was deselected by his constiuency for siding with the government over Brexit. So they're both people who jumped when there was the obvious possibility of them being shoved overboard.

As for the failure to regulate businesses adequately, that's more a left-wing policy, and not necessarily correlative with the immigration or crime and punishment issues.

[Salmoneus]

There's an interesting thing just happened!

No, not Brext-related.

Instead, it's in the realm of constitutional theory. You may remember that a couple of times I've noted that Parliament's been getting pissed off by the way corporations regularly ignore the demands of parliamentary committees - these have the power to summon witnesses and demand evidence, but they never enforce these, so the oligarchs have largely learned they can ignore them. Eventually, I said, Parliament was going to test its powers to avoid becoming a laughing stock.

And now they have!

As background, Parliament has been angrily investigating Facebook for its various frauds and data thefts, but Facebook hasn't really co-operated (Zuckerberg did turn up at one point, but only to avoid actually answering any questions). In the US, however, another company is in a legal dispute with Facebook, and has successfully persuaded a court to force Facebook to hand over certain internal communications to this company, in the interests of a fair trial.

Parliament has seen that this has happened, and decided it quite wanted to see what was in those files too. But the company wouldn't share them. Unfortunately for this company, however, its CEO decided to have a work trip to London. So Parliament raided his hotel - the Serjeant-at-Arms went to his hotel, and demanded the files. The CEO refused to comply. At which point the Serjeant took the CEO into custody and brought him to Parliament, where he was threatened with imprisonment if he did not hand over the files (also, the Serjeant has a big sword). So he handed over the files.

Now, the thing to notice here is that the Serjeant is not a police officer (though he has the right to compel police officers, and any other public officials, to assist him in his duties). The CEO was not subject to a warrant issued by a judge or a court, and nor were the files. Nor was this action ordered by the government. The Serjeant (Kamal El-Hajji) was simply following the instructions of an MP, Damian Collins (Chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee).

In theory, Parliament absolutely has the power to compel witnesses, seize evidence, fine people, and imprison them. But sending out the Serjeant to apprehend someone like this is almost unprecedented in recent times. The fine the CEO was threatened with hasn't been levied since 1666, and Parliament hasn't imprisoned anybody since 1880. Collins was almost certainly bluffing.

Almost certainly. [the process if the CEO had held out would be that Collins would have his committee declare to the House that he had committed a contempt, at which point the House can decide what penalties to apply].

But frustration has been building on this point for years now, and it may not be a total coincidence that this has happened now. The government (of all parties) has always - well, for the last few centuries, at least - refused to take any action to support Parliament's investigatory rights. (there is, for instance, no equivalent of the US system whereby legislative sub poenas can be enforced judicially in at least some situations, and penalties for perjury under oath exist). This is because, while the Committees may get the most attention when they go after businessmen, their main job is holding government to account. And if government ministers could actually be penalised for perjury, that would be a disaster for the entire British system of government!

I suspect Collins' objective here is at least in part to signal to government that it needs to put some new rules in place, or else parliament will eventually just go back to using its old ones.

[the official excuse for not addressing this problem has been that letting the courts enforce parliamentary decisions would to some extent give the courts influence over parliament - and the absolutely independence of parliament from the legal system is a cornerstone of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.]


Anyway, Facebook's rather angry response has been to say that Parliament may call itself sovereign, but that really it's subordinate to US district courts and need to do what the Americans fucking tell it and give back their files. This couldn't be a worse PR move if it tried because, as the last few years have amply shown, neither Parliament nor the British public much like the idea that we might be subject to another country.

[chris_notts]

Of course, they've got Nick Clegg to advise them now so all will be well. He's a very popular guy with his finger on the political pulse of the country.

[Travis B.]

Part of me is delighted about this, but part of me deplores the erosion of any kind of real due process w.r.t. the seizing of data from people in foreign countries. Sure, the data is originally from Facebook and this helps expose potential (likely) wrong doing on their part, but at the same time this sort of thing shows why when going to a foreign country one should not only bring along no data that is at all unnecessary, but furthermore, if possible, lock oneself out of one's own accounts (require two-part authentication to a phone that one intentionally leaves home) to prevent authorities in the foreign country from compelling one to turn over data. (I know Google does just this now with business travelers - they give them "clean" laptops with no extra data on them and lock them out of Google accounts that are not absolute necessary to prevent them from being compelled to turn over data.)

Remember, the UK is the country that innovated legally compelling people to decrypt data. I haven't forgotten that.

[Salmoneus]

Or, you know, you could not commit crimes in foreign countries.

[Travis B.]

The company whose founder was forced to turn over data to the British parliament had not committed any crimes as far as I am aware. Rather, he was forced to turn over data for the purposes of investigating a third party, Facebook, from which they had originally obtained said data by decision of a US court. Of course you know this.

Also, it is naive to think that foreign countries force people to turn over data solely in investigation of actual crimes. There are other reasons, such as state-aided industrial espionage (this is far more common than one might presume), harassing people whom said foreign governments do not like (e.g. journalists, human rights activists, etc.), and so on.

[chris_notts]

Travis: all that would be fine, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The problem is that the US is infamous for (a) acting as if their laws have global jurisdiction and using dubious means to pressure other countries into helping them, (b) committing or aiding crimes on the foreign soil of countries with which they're not at war (extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations), and abusing congressional / senate powers for party political reasons.

How can the US government make any argument against this when they have no respect at all for the rights of non-US nationals or respect for the limits of the their jurisdiction? They are really the precedent setters when it comes to abusive behaviour.

EDIT: there is plenty of evidence that the US isn't innocent on the industrial espionage front either.