The election by numbers

After six weeks of campaigning the majority of British voters just want to put this election behind them, such has been the cynical nature of a plebiscite designed purely to give Boris Johnson a platform to continue doing whatever it is he wants to achieve as prime minister. Other than "getting Brexit done" most people do not know what he really wants. I suspect neither does he.

It has also been an election in which the issue of fake news has played a more witting role than in the past. We used to think that spin doctors had taken politics to new lows as they put the best gloss on their own policies whilst trashing the plans of the opposition. But today it is dominated by fake news merchants whose job is to repeat simple phrases ad infinitum, irrespective of whether they are true. In a bid to separate fact from fiction, my intention in this post is to boil down the election campaign into a series of key numbers which encapsulate the spin and counter spin of this unedifying campaign.

1. 83 billion. This is the amount of extra current spending (in pounds) that the Labour Party plans to undertake by fiscal year 2023-24. As noted in this post this is an attempt to finance Labour’s redistribution policy in which the biggest spending element is the £13.6bn cost of abolishing student tuition fees. This is offset by a huge rise in taxation, with more than half of the incidence falling on corporates, financial institutions and taxes on capital. Verdict: At least Labour are honest about their desire to raise tax and spending, but it does not appear to be going down well with the voters.
2. 58 billion. This is the amount of unfunded spending that Labour plans in order to recompense women who lost out on pension income as their retirement age was raised to match that of men. The IFS dismisses the policy thus: “The decision was taken at least 15 years before the increase in pension age and most in the group are relatively well off. To believe the whole group should receive compensation is a recipe for complete stasis in policy. How can you ever defend any policy which ever makes anyone worse off if you think this change in pension age, implemented with 15 years notice, designed to equalise treatment between men and women, and in the face of dramatic increases in life expectancy, is in some sense unethical?” Verdict: I’m with the IFS.
3. 50,000. The number of new nurses positions pledged by the Conservative government in its manifesto. But this figure includes an estimated 18,500 nurses who would otherwise quit the profession, implying that the number of new positions is only 31,500. Verdict: A shameless lie.
4. 20,000. The number of new police officers that a Conservative government intends to employ in the next parliament. It turns out to be a bone fide promise but it is only sufficient to restore the number of police officers back to where they were when the Conservatives assumed office in 2010. Verdict: A half truth.
5. 320. The number of seats that a government needs to win a parliamentary majority. The latest forecast from Electoral Calculus suggests that the Conservatives will win 348 seats (31 more than in 2017), giving a majority of 46. Verdict: The Conservatives look set for a convincing win although I would not want to put money on it, especially since the Tories are odds-on with the bookmakers’ at around 1-25 (i.e. you need to bet £25 in order to win £1).
6.  209. The lowest number of seats won by the Labour Party in the post-1945 era. This occurred in 1983 when the Labour Party fought on an avowedly left-wing agenda against a charismatic Conservative politician. Verdict: Labour likely to do better than in 1983 but the Electoral Calculus prediction of 225 would be the second lowest in the modern era. 
7. 49. The number of days between 13 December (the day after the election) and 31 January. This is the timeframe in which Boris Johnson believes he can “get Brexit done.” Verdict: Given a sufficiently large majority, the Conservatives could indeed get the Withdrawal Agreement Bill ratified by parliament, in which case the UK can leave the EU on 31 January. But Brexit will be far from done – the next stage is only just beginning.
8. 40. The number of new hospitals the Conservatives say they will build. In fact, the government has committed the money to upgrade just six hospitals by 2025. Up to 38 other hospitals have received money to plan for building work between 2025 and 2030, but not to actually begin any work. Verdict: Another distortion of economic reality by Boris Johnson's government.
9.  Zero. The probability that Nigel Farage will emerge as prime minister and to the nearest digit, the number of MPs that the Brexit Party is likely to send to Westminster. Verdict: Given Farage’s refusal to stand for parliament, having lost seven times previously, and given the Brexit Party’s lack of representation in Westminster, there is no justification for the British media to continue to give Farage a platform. If anything good comes out of the election, it will (hopefully) be the end of Farage as a semi-credible political force. 

Boiling down an election merely to numbers may be a crude way to distil the complexities of all parties' positions but this has been an exceptionally crude campaign. This is an election nobody wants at a time when people really have other things to look forward to. What a way to spend December.

Uninspired choices

It remains difficult to get excited by the impending election in the UK which seems to be more of a low-key event than in 2017. One reason for this is that the majority of voters are suffering from election fatigue, with this being the fourth major plebiscite in just over four years (or five in just over five years if you live in Scotland). Nor is the electorate particularly enamoured of the choices on offer: Boris Johnson is widely expected to win a parliamentary majority only because voters have an even lower opinion of Jeremy Corbyn. It is an unfortunate fact that politics is more about personalities than policies which is why, despite the Tories’ inability to deliver on the latter, Labour is doing even worse on the former.

I highlighted in my previous post the perils of taking opinion poll data at face value and this article in The Guardian illustrates why. The article reflects on 10 years of vox pops conducted around the country in a bid to get as far away from the Westminster bubble as possible and illustrates the extent to which dissatisfaction is still the predominant theme amongst voters. The overriding theme is the feeling of alienation amongst many of those living outside London – an issue which many of those in the capital perhaps fail to appreciate. One of the writers, John Harris, points to the “regular explosions of annoyance about audience members on BBC1’s Question Time” (one of the BBC’s flagship topical debating forums) as evidence of the dissonance in public debate.

A recent example of this was observed during a Question Time debate when an audience member refused to accept that his salary in excess of £80k per year put him in the top 5% of earners, and that it was unfair of a prospective Labour government to make him pay more tax. He is wrong on the first point as the evidence here on the distribution of pre-tax incomes makes clear. But it is less clear that he is wrong on his second point: The gentleman may earn significantly more than the average wage but he is not necessarily in the upper echelons of the wealth distribution, since according to ONS estimates, the wealth held by the top 10% of households is around five times greater than the wealth of the bottom half of all households combined. As Torsten Bell of the think-tank The Resolution Foundation has pointed out, the disparity between the ultra-rich and the well-off has widened in recent years with the result that someone in the top 5% of the income distribution has more in common with the median earner than with the ultra-rich.

Whilst it is easy to be dismissive of our man in the Question Time audience due to the irrationality of his argument in the face of the evidence, he is tapping into a bigger problem. A large swathe of the electorate is suffering from “squeezed middle syndrome.” Real average weekly earnings, for example, are still almost 3% below the 2007 peak. Productivity growth may have been lousy, having risen by only 3% over the past decade, but it is still outstripping real wage growth implying that someone else is reaping the benefits of whatever modest productivity gains have been made. This is not just a British phenomenon – the trend in the US has been even more pronounced over the past two decades (chart below). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that voters are dissatisfied.

Many people have the sense from the UK election campaign that politicians are not talking about issues that involve them. The Labour vision of an economy with a greater emphasis on welfare provision and the protection of workers right sounds good in theory but Brexit is (ironically) the most pressing issue for the electorate (chart below). Accordingly Boris Johnson’s slogan about “getting Brexit done” does tap into what voters want, even though anyone with any understanding of the issue realises that Brexit will not be “done” merely by the UK leaving the EU on 31 January. But this is not the only issue on the agenda and Labour’s refrain that the NHS is safe in their hands, rather than the Conservatives, remains their main angle of attack.

At a time when the electorate is confused and angry at politicians for failing to deliver any improvement in living standards over the past decade, the competing visions of what the main parties want the UK to be and what they can offer to the electorate, do nothing to pour oil on the waters of unrest. There is no sense of broader engagement between politicians and the electorate across a range of policy areas. Neither of the two extremes are what people really want and as a result we will end up with the prime minister who voters dislike the least rather than the one offering the most compelling vision. Inflicting Brexit on a divided country with the near certainty that it will impose short-term economic costs suggests that the malaise that has been hanging over the UK for the past three years is unlikely to lift soon.

Eyes on the prize

Boris Johnson has finally got what he wanted – a general election, to be held on 12 December. Never mind the fact that the parliament elected in 2015 should still be sitting and that the UK is headed for its third election in just over four years. Only Johnson has the chutzpah to preside over the legislative shambles that has characterised UK politics over the past two months and claim that he is trying to “get Brexit done”.

He has defied many of the conventions that underpin the UK’s political system and may have done incalculable damage. His most significant move was to try and prorogue parliament, in a move later ruled to be unconstitutional, to prevent parliamentary oversight of his Brexit bill. But in the process he served only to alienate 21 of his Conservative colleagues who were suspended from the parliamentary party for daring to vote for legislation that would prevent prorogation from resulting in a car crash Brexit.

Johnson then did what he previously said was unacceptable by drawing up a Brexit plan which involved drawing a border down the Irish Sea. It is always worth recalling that in 2018 Johnson wrote, “the fatal error was not to challenge the EU’s position that the only way of avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland – an objective we all share – is for Northern Ireland to have the same regulations for trade as Ireland and the rest of the EU … That is obviously a non-starter.” Johnson then proceeded to sign up to an agreement in which Northern Ireland does indeed “have the same regulations for trade as Ireland and the rest of the EU” and in the process alienated the 10 DUP MPs upon whom his party has previously relied for parliamentary support.

His next trick was to try and force MPs to accept his Brexit bill without first seeing it – a measure which was rejected by parliament. The government was then forced to publish details of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill but was defeated when it became clear that it was intent on ramming it through parliament with only cursory debate. Let us not forget, however, that the WAB did pass its second reading in the House of Commons. In this sense, Johnson has already gone a step further than Theresa May by getting parliament to vote in favour of legislation enabling Brexit. From a tactical perspective, the government would have been well advised to concede that a delay of up to a month would be necessary to ensure that the WAB is passed, rather than doubling down on the 31 October deadline.

But having failed in his efforts to "get Brexit  done" by 31 October, Johnson has shamelessly pushed for an election only to fail to get sufficient support for this option under the terms of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act and has been forced to rely on circumventing it. In another of the great Brexit ironies, Conservative MPs have repeatedly told us that parliament is dysfunctional and we need a reboot in order to start passing legislation. But it is in this position precisely because of the way the executive has behaved over the past two months, potentially alienating 31 MPs who until recently were on their side. The government may want to reflect on the fact that any of their proposals that lost by a margin of less than 62 could have turned out differently had it not done its best to ride roughshod over the wishes of those who oppose it.

Early last month Johnson said he would rather be "dead in a ditch" than postpone his "do or die" Brexit beyond October. I am happy to report that the prime minister is hale and hearty, although his plans are dead from a glitch – the glitch being that MPs want to devote more care to getting Brexit done in order to serve the needs of their constituents than Johnson’s cavalier attitude will permit. But whilst what I have described so far sounds like a litany of government failures characteristic of a serial loser as it trampled over constitutional conventions, it will all stand Johnson in good stead in the December election that will clearly act as a quasi-referendum on Brexit. His pitch will be “I tried my best to deliver but I was thwarted by a Remainer parliament.”

And it will almost certainly work, for even though many long-standing Conservative voters will break the habit of a lifetime and lend their support to another party, Jeremy Corbyn is so reviled by centrist voters that Labour will not be in any position to capture their votes. In other words the swing away from the Conservatives will not follow the historical pattern of being matched by a swing towards Labour. 

But there is also another political narrative at work which is too often ignored. The conventional view is that politics is dysfunctional and we need a cleaning of the Augean Stables. Arguably, however, the institutional framework is standing up very well to the pressure exerted by government. The judiciary, for example, has consistently refused to be intimidated by the executive. Nor should MPs feel bound to support a policy proposed by their party if they do not believe it to be in the interests of their constituents. MPs are representatives of the people, paid by the taxpayer. They owe their allegiance first and foremost to the electorate rather than the prime minister, and those who appear to be blocking the path to Brexit are speaking for the near half of voters who feel they have not been heard over the past three years.

What the past three years have taught us is that the UK’s representative democratic system is not capable of dealing with an infusion of direct democracy. It is simply not acceptable for MPs, who we pay to resolve such problems, to throw an important question such as EU membership to the electorate without giving proper guidance and consideration. But having chosen to introduce direct democracy, it is equally unacceptable to then exclude the electorate from subsequent discussions. And whatever else the election may be about, it is not right to bind Brexit up with the host of other issues that need to be discussed during an election campaign.

A second lesson is that the nature of politics has changed. The two party system that has characterised British politics for centuries is currently in a state of flux. It is difficult to imagine governments being able to secure the huge majorities which have characterised the recent past (of course, that may prove to be wrong at the next election). The current system of adversarial politics may have to change to accommodate a wider polarity of views.

This year has been one of the most fractious political years of modern times in the UK and over the next six weeks it is going to become more messy and unpleasant still. And even then, as I have repeatedly pointed out, this will not resolve the Brexit problems which will continue to fester for a long time to come. A December election is a bad idea for many reasons but for those of you with an interest in historical precedent, there were three elections held in December between 1910 and 1923 (the last time it happened). On each occasion the sitting prime minister lost. Food for thought!

No good options (only bad ones)

Regular readers will know that I am no fan of Boris Johnson, having been critical of his actions over the past three years. Johnson has a long history of lying when it suits his interests (here for a list of issues which renders him sufficiently untrustworthy to take his public pronouncements at face value). Brexit has brought out the worst in him: Remember the weekly savings of £350 million splashed all over the side of that bus? Or what about the fact that he constantly undermined his prime minister whilst sitting in her cabinet?

Despite all of this – or perhaps because of it – I have been of the view that Johnson does not want a no-deal Brexit. Even last week’s execrable decision to prorogue parliament could be justified as an attempt to put pressure on MPs to sign up to the much derided Withdrawal Agreement. As I pointed out in my last post, one interpretation of the strategy was to ensure that it was impossible to reach a deal with the EU so as to put pressure on MPs to ratify the Withdrawal Agreement and dare Labour to block it, knowing that they could be blamed for a no-deal Brexit in any subsequent election. I still think that is a plausible strategy.

But over the weekend, it has become evident that the government is prepared to trample over democratic norms to an extent that was previously unthinkable. We had the unedifying spectacle of Michael Gove refusing to commit the government to complying with any laws passed by parliament. This was followed up by the threat to deselect any Conservative MP who votes against the government in order to block a no-deal Brexit. I do not want to describe what is happening as a coup – a word which has been bandied around a lot recently – but there is a new strain of authoritarianism in British politics, the likes of which we have not seen before (at least in peacetime). This is not the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill (Johnson’s political hero). 

The sheer hypocrisy of the deselection policy beggars belief. As Tory MP Alistair Burt pointed out in response to the government’s call for MPs to support its Brexit policy, “I did. I voted for the conclusions of the negotiations brought to Parliament in the WA [Withdrawal Agreement]. JRM [Jacob Rees-Mogg], his friends and current Cabinet members did not. Why am I, having loyally supported, now being threatened and not them?” It is hard to dispute the logic of this claim. On 15 January, 118 Conservative MPs voted against the government’s stated policy of ratifying the Withdrawal Agreement. On 12 March this number was reduced to 75 and by the time of the final vote on 29 March there were still 34 recidivists. The 196 Tory MPs who voted with the government on three occasions will not be inclined to be threatened by those who have consistently showed a lack of loyalty to the former prime minister. What comes around goes around, and Johnson’s lack of loyalty in the past means he cannot count on the support of those who he has previously let down. 

Nor does the deselection tactic make a lot of immediate sense. The government has a majority of one: withdrawing the whip from Conservative MPs means that they are effectively excommunicated from the party, increasing the likelihood that they will vote against the government on a range of other issues. But if the ultimate objective is to hold an election sooner rather than later, there may be some method to the madness – why else would a government want to operate without a working majority? As David Gauke MP said in a radio interview this morning, “I think their strategy, to be honest, is to lose [an attempt to rule out a no-deal Brexit] this week and seek a general election having removed those of us who are not against Brexit or leaving the EU but believe we should do so with a deal.” Indeed, newspapers this afternoon were full of headlines suggesting that Johnson would be prepared to trigger an election if he lost a vote ruling out a no-deal Brexit. However, an election can only occur if the government loses a vote of no confidence in parliament or if two-thirds of MPs vote for it. Either way, it will require the consent of Labour MPs.

Former PM Tony Blair has warned Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against falling into the “elephant trap” of calling for an election. Blair’s words should be heeded. As much as people are opposed to Brexit and the way in which Johnson has ridden roughshod over the British constitution, there is no guarantee that voters will flock to Corbyn as an alternative. In fact, I am pretty sure they won’t. Obviously Corbyn does not see it that way but I would be prepared to bet that he will not improve on the relative success of the 2017 election result.

If Corbyn really wants to put pressure on Johnson, his strategy should be to get as many Tory rebels as possible to sign up to a motion which commits parliament to ruling out a no-deal Brexit, whilst refusing to rise to the bait of any vote which would trigger a general election. This has the disadvantage that if Brexit can be delivered without collapsing the economy it will hand Johnson an electoral boost. But a more likely outcome is that since the EU will not cave in on the Irish backstop, which the hardliners in the Conservative Party will not be able to accept, a disciplined Labour Party can hold the Tories’ feet to the flames for a much longer period and possibly even force the party to split which would be to Labour’s electoral advantage.

Unfortunately, this would mean a continuation of the political wrangling that has characterised the last twelve months – and that is definitely not in the electorate’s interest. But an election is not in the country’s interest either. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 was designed to prevent governments controlling the timing of elections for their own purposes (which it spectacularly failed to do in 2017). If the terms of the Act had been adhered to, we would not have had an election since 2015 and would not have to face the prospect of another one until summer 2020. The 2017 election was a device to suit the government’s convenience – as will any plebiscite in 2019. If there is another election this year, it will further undermine the claim that a second EU referendum would be to disrespect the “will of the people.” 

Is there a way out of this political nightmare? It is hard to see one. We are paying the price for a litany of past mistakes – from the decision to hold a referendum at all; to drawing red lines around membership of the single market and customs union, to Johnson’s plan to resolve the issue by 31 October.  Whatever happens now, half the electorate will be left disaffected and angry. There are no good options – only bad ones.

The end of May

Game of Thrones, the TV series which ended its 8-year run this week, followed the fortunes of various political dynasties as they pursued their claims to the Iron Throne which would allow them to rule all the seven kingdoms of Westeros. The path to the top was brutal with various leading contenders beng executed, murdered or dying in battle. As a piece of television fiction it was compelling but it is highly improbable that such levels of brutality could be sustained in real life. That said, the behaviour of the Conservative Party increasingly resembles a GoT plot line which is unlikely to end well.

It appears that MPs believe compromise is for the weak

As regular readers of this blog will know I have been highly critical of the way in which Theresa May has conducted Brexit policy over the course of the last three years. She has tried to "own" the issue, pandering to the right-wing of her party, when in reality cross-party support was always going to be required in order to find a consensus, particularly following the needless 2017 general election which cost the Conservatives their majority. When May finally cottoned onto the need for a cross-party solution last month, her political position was so weak that the Labour Party had little incentive to cooperate in order to get the Withdrawal Agreement ratified by parliament. But the reaction this week to May’s ten-point plan to get the Withdrawal Agreement Bill through parliament said more about MPs than it did about the prime minister. Having listened to what the right-wing of her party want, what Remainers want and the issues raised by the Labour Party, the PM offered something for everyone and ended up pleasing no-one.

So it came to pass that the day before the European Parliament elections, the UK news was dominated by stories discussing how long the prime minister was likely to keep her job. As a campaign message it was the most spectacular of own goals: Not that the Tories have bothered to campaign for an election in which the PM promised the UK would not have to take part, and they could well trail a distant fourth in terms of the vote share. Yet as ineptly as May has handled Brexit – so much so that she has created space for a Nigel Farage resurrection – and as inflexible as she is on policy issues, the problem is less the prime minister than an inability of MPs to compromise. Whilst there are many good reasons for not liking the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated with the EU last November – it essentially compels the UK to be an EU rule-taker during the transition period, which runs to end-2020 – it is still the least worst outcome that the UK could have obtained.

It has now become an article of faith amongst the ultras that the only good Brexit is a hard Brexit, yet three years ago even the most ardent proponents of leaving the EU were not advocating such a policy. Somewhere along the line, the Brexiteers have convinced themselves that leaving the EU at any cost is the only goal worth pursuing and it is impossible to convince them otherwise. This is not a rational, evidence-based policy: It is faith-based zealotry. And the more the faithful proclaim their litany, the greater the pushback by their ideological opponents. Indeed, in the fly-on-the-wall documentary, Brexit: Behind Closed Doors, in which cameras followed the EU Parliament’s Brexit representative Guy Verhofstadt for two years, the former Belgian prime minister warned that the Remainers were increasingly becoming a problem due to their inability to know when to compromise.

Who really wants to take on the impossible job?

It has thus become impossible to meet in the middle and it does not matter who is the prime minister in the current environment. At the time of writing, it is reported that May is likely to announce her departure within the next 24 hours. Her successor, who is expected to be a Brexiteer, will inherit a minority government reliant on the DUP and a party divided over Brexit. If, as widely tipped, that person is Boris Johnson it is difficult to imagine any improvement in the current parliamentary impasse. Johnson is widely loathed by large numbers of Conservative MPs who do not trust him due to his duplicity during the Brexit referendum campaign and his dreadful tenure as Foreign Secretary. His advocacy of a no-deal Brexit will not win him any friends outside the coterie of backbench Tory MPs who believe such an outcome is somehow in the UK’s best interests. This is to say nothing of the fact that he is also reviled by many European leaders and he would be the last person to send to Brussels to plead for any concessions. 

However, Johnson is not guaranteed to get the top job. Although he is the favourite, we all know what happened in 2016 and Oddschecker.com is offering odds on dozens of MPs so it is a crowded field. But none of them set the pulses racing and none have the brand recognition that the Tories need. If he does beat off the challenge of MPs to go forward as one of the two candidates from which members of the Conservative Party will choose a new leader, he will probably win a majority of the 120,000 party members eligible to vote. Johnson will then have a maximum of three years before he faces the 46 million eligible to vote in a general election which will determine whether he is the Heineken candidate of old (reaching the parts other mainstream politicians cannot reach) or whether he is now Marmite Man (loathed at least as much as he is loved).

The bottom line is that Brexit has indeed upended politics in a way that even Nigel Farage did not envisage in 2016. It has certainly changed the Conservative Party and severely damaged its reputation for competence. Worse still, it has completely eroded many people’s faith in politics, the echo of which will resonate for many years.

Sometimes it pays to pass up the top job

I have often used the Alex Ferguson syndrome to describe the poisoned chalice of taking on the prime minister’s job in the current circumstances and it is a metaphor worth revisiting. Recall that following Ferguson’s departure as Manchester United manager in 2013 his replacement, David Moyes, seemed to find the job too daunting and was gone in less than a year. It was thus decided that a bigger, more well-known figure was required to fill the post and the board duly appointed the highly acclaimed Dutch manger Louis van Gaal. He lasted two years before being sacked with the board deciding that insufficient progress was being made. May reminds me of Moyes – a low profile character who is out of their depth in the top job. Johnson has many of the characteristics of van Gaal – confident and up for the fight. Yet the Manchester job proved to be van Gaal’s last in football.

The moral of this story, and indeed the same is true of Game of Thrones, is that being in the right place at the right time is important and even extraordinary people will struggle with mammoth tasks if they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Succeeding Theresa May will be like walking into the lion’s den. I suspect whoever they are they will eventually be chewed up and spat out by the complexities of Brexit.

Local difficulties

Local elections in the UK tend to be fairly parochial affairs: They do excite domestic media which treats them as a barometer of support levels for the main parties but that is usually it. This year, however, matters were very different with coverage making it into newspapers across Europe. The reason is, of course, Brexit with the elections acting as a measure of how the public has responded to the interminable political wrangling of recent months.

It did not make pretty reading for the main parties. There were 8412 local council seats up for grabs, of which the Conservatives held 58%. They lost 1334 to reduce their share to 42% of the contested seats. Labour also lost ground, but to a far lesser degree (its share fell from 25% to 24.1% of the contested seats). UKIP continued its spectacular implosion following its local council successes in 2015 whilst the biggest winners were the Liberal Democrats (up from 7.7% to 16.1%) and other parties representing a variety of local interests (up from 6.1% to 14%).

If ever politicians needed a wakeup call that their handling of Brexit deliberations has turned voters off, this was it. But what exactly did the results tell us? It is too simplistic to suggest that voters wreaked their vengeance on the Conservatives because they have changed their minds about Brexit but analysis of the results suggests that they lost one-third of the seats they contested in majority-Remain areas. Meanwhile the Lib Dems, which avowedly support a second EU referendum, picked up gains across both sides of the Leave-Remain divide. This would appear to suggest they gained as a result of dissatisfaction with the main political parties following the parliamentary debacle of recent months, in which both Labour and the Conservatives played a key role. However, the Lib Dems could also have picked up votes from potential Labour supporters who have been discouraged by the party’s attempt to back away from a commitment to holding a confirmatory EU referendum. That said, Labour performed badly in majority Leave-supporting areas, indicating voters’ dissatisfaction with politicians’ efforts to deliver Brexit.

What the results do suggest is that voters want an end to the political wrangling. But it is less clear that they want the sort of Brexit that Theresa May has in mind – it is far from clear that they want Brexit at all. And it remains highly disingenuous of the prime minister to accuse the Scottish First Minister of wanting to "re-run the independence referendum because she did not like the decision of the people of Scotland" and to "re-run the EU referendum because she did not like the decision of the people of the UK" when that is exactly May has tried to do in ramming her deal through the Westminster parliament. And the prime minister knows only too well that the electorate can change its mind. After all, there were only two years between the general elections of 2015 and 2017 when voters changed their mind about electing a majority Conservative government, and we are now almost three years on from the EU referendum. And as the arch-Brexiteer David Davis once said, ”if a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”

What the results also suggested is that voters are currently not aligned along party political lines and instead have become more issue-driven. That is not the same thing as saying the two-party hegemony is over for good, as some of the more excitable political commentators have suggested, but party loyalties are currently being tested. Brexit obviously tops the domestic political agenda but the strong performance of the Greens might indicate that environmental issues are playing a bigger role in voters’ thinking following the recent publicity surrounding 16-year old Greta Thunberg’s castigation of politicians’ treatment of climate change issues. Indeed, intra-generational issues are likely to be high up the UK agenda as issues such as health funding, access to education and affordable housing are all items which have been pushed down the political agenda in favour of Brexit.

As for where we go on the Brexit debate from here, both Labour and the Conservatives realise it is in their interests to find an agreement before the October deadline. Theresa May could thus be tempted to accommodate Labour demands for a customs union with the EU whilst Jeremy Corbyn shows every sign of wanting to back away from the commitment to a second referendum. Of course, neither of these options would please members of their respective parties, with large numbers of Labour Party members particularly in favour of a second referendum.

The debate is only going to heat up as we are less than three weeks away from European elections in which the UK believed it would not have to participate. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is currently polling at 30% making it the largest single party although we should not overstate this result. It merely tells us that large numbers of Brexit supporters have found a new home. However, if repeated in the European elections, this will reaffirm the government’s view that it is required to deliver some form of Brexit and preferably sooner rather than later. Most people I speak to share my view that the last three weeks have proven to be a welcome Brexit-free break. Unfortunately, it might be about to come to a noisy and fractious end.

Not out

I assumed two years ago that I would be waking up on 30 March 2019 with the UK as an ex-member of the EU. After all, parliament voted by 498 to 114 in favour of triggering Article 50 in a vote on 1 February 2017, in the full knowledge that this was what the legislation entailed. But no. A litany of errors and political miscalculations over the last two years means that Brexit has, at the very least, been postponed for two weeks. 

Why is Brexit so difficult to deliver? 

The intellectual dishonesty at the heart of Brexit becomes more apparent by the day. It was always clear that triggering Article 50 meant accepting whatever compromise was agreed at the end of the negotiation period, otherwise the UK would have to leave the EU and rely on relationships governed by general international public law (e.g. trade would be subject to WTO rules). Of course, that would not be a problem because, according to Liam Fox, we would now be in a position to have rolled over the 40 trade deals with third counties that are currently covered by EU trade arrangements. He has managed just 8, the largest of which is with Switzerland. He also said that doing a trade deal with the EU would be "one of the easiest in human history." Nobody seems to have told his parliamentary colleagues.

Two years on and we are now in a position where the UK parliament has rejected the deal negotiated with the EU three times and is scrambling to find an alternative before it crashes out of the EU without any form of backstop on 12 April. The political system is simply not capable of dealing with the complexities of the Brexit problem. Over recent weeks, the executive (government) and legislative (parliament) arms of government have blamed each other for the current impasse but in reality they are both to blame. Starting with the government, there has been an appalling lack of leadership from Downing Street. Article 50 was triggered without giving any thought as to what the UK wanted from the negotiations and what it could realistically achieve. Theresa May then made a serious error of judgement in calling an election AFTER triggering Article 50 which not only wasted valuable negotiating time but resulted in the Conservatives losing their parliamentary majority. May’s inability to instil discipline on her own party has allowed backbench MPs to act with impunity, thus undermining the government at every turn.

However MPs as a whole have failed to cover themselves in glory either, and are held in low regard by most of the country. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s band of Brexit ultras has failed to heed the warnings that a no-deal Brexit threatens major economic disruption and are so obsessed with delivering an ideologically pure Brexit that the concerns of the electorate have been totally ignored. Rees-Mogg, lest we forget, has long derided the withdrawal agreement and claimed that the UK will become a “vassal state” if it signed up to it. This week, he indicated he would then back the deal if the DUP would do so. They didn’t but he supported it anyway. Meanwhile the Labour Party continues to suggest that an election is the only way forward because it will somehow be able to deliver a Brexit that has eluded the Conservatives, and has focused its energies on this issue rather than the task at hand. Then there are self-obsessed mavericks such as Boris Johnson who care not one jot for anything other than their own self-interest.

But perhaps the biggest problem over the past two years is that whilst the Brexit referendum was conducted on cross-party lines, with MPs free to campaign as their conscience dictated, the post-referendum process has been conducted along party lines. Both the Conservatives and Labour have tried to play the Brexit process purely for their own advantage and it has been clear all along that the Tories were attempting to “own” Brexit. They surely must regret that decision now. It is becoming clear that any attempt to find a Brexit resolution requires a cross-party consensus. Indeed, I did suggest in May 2017 that the negotiating team should be representative of parliament as whole rather than a single party. But what is now a crisis of government (or governance, if you prefer) clearly requires a different approach. I thus have some sympathy with those calling for the formation of a cross-party government. After all, the first national government of 1931 was formed in the wake of the economic fallout from the crash of 1929, and lasted for two months – perhaps just enough time to find a Brexit compromise. 

The way(s) forward 

I noted two years ago (here) that it was difficult to see how the UK would, in the prime minister’s words, “emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before.” Indeed, I pointed out that the UK was likely to be weaker, less united and more inward looking and I take no pleasure in being right about that. Nor, increasingly, can we be sure that Brexit even represents the will of the people anymore. Indeed, it only ever represented the will of just over half of those who turned out to vote. Although I have never been a supporter of a second referendum, the fact that politicians cannot decide what to do next suggests there is a case for putting the argument back to the people. After all, MPs have had three votes on the critical piece of legislation and have rejected it each time. The intellectual case against a second referendum gets weaker by the day.

However, I have long had a sneaking suspicion that the withdrawal agreement could go through at the fourth attempt. After all, the trend is running in the PM’s favour. Here is how it could be done: Assuming that on Monday parliament asks the government to consider a customs union with the EU, and that it agrees to this suggestion, the EU could simply revise the political declaration (the non-binding element of the legislation which is designed to chart the broad course of the future relationship with the EU). The declaration would then be aligned with official Labour policy and the government could put both the withdrawal agreement and revised political declaration before parliament for a fourth time in the expectation that Labour will support it. This would allow the government to deliver Brexit without a long delay as Theresa May evidently wishes.

If that fails, the UK might then have to face up to a general election. The government is clearly exhausted by its unsuccessful efforts to deliver Brexit and as the prime minister said yesterday in the wake of her third defeat on the withdrawal agreement, “I fear we are reaching the limits of this process in this house.” But perhaps the quote which best sums up where we are in the whole sorry mess came from an unnamed cabinet minister who, when asked by a BBC reporter why Theresa May was putting up the withdrawal agreement for a third vote despite the fact she was almost certain to lose, replied “F*** knows. I’m past caring. It’s like the living dead in here.” That at least is something we can all agree on.