This is the most dangerous UK government we have seen in our lifetimes

It used to be the case that a Prime Minister that had deliberately shut down parliament against its will might have felt sufficiently ashamed that they would have resigned when the courts found against them. It certainly would have been true for most of my lifetime that they would have shown some contrition when the verdict became clear. If you ask me to prove those claims of course I cannot, because no previous PM would have even thought it permissible to shut down parliament against its will. But since WWII many senior politicians have resigned when they made a mistake of this magnitude. But Johnson is a Prime Minister like none before him, as Steve Richards shows with authority.

If instead they had appeared unapologetic and kept insisting they were right, political parties in the past would have shown much disquiet over what had happened. Yet on Wednesday we saw the massed ranks of Conservative MPs cheering as the Prime Minister declared he thought he had done nothing wrong. He says he has respect for the law, but what respect is he giving it if he simply asserts all supreme court judges unanimously misunderstood the constitution. This is no criminal claiming his innocence as he is taken down to the cells, but a Prime Minister telling all 11 supreme court judges that he knows the law better than they do.

If you read the judgement of the supreme court it is obvious that they are correct and are acting as the ultimate upholders of the constitution. Parliament is supreme, and cannot be shut down against its will for the convenience of the executive. As they note, the government didn’t even offer any explanation of why they felt it necessary to prorogue parliament for 5 weeks when preparation for a Queen’s Speech normally takes 5 days. What they did claim is that it had nothing to do with their own political interest, yet the PM and his allies had the cheek to infer that the judges had decided for political reasons to do with Brexit. Of course that claim was a huge political tell, because that was exactly the motivation for them shutting down parliament.

What this case shows is that good government in this country relies on the executive acting within the constitution and obeying the law. This government is so dangerous because it seeks at every turn to ignore the constitution and use its power for its own ends, in the full knowledge that their actions will be challenged in the courts. So the PM says we will be leaving come what may on 31st October, despite an Act of Parliament telling him he must ask for an extension. He knows he will be breaking the law, but just as parliament will not get its lost days back, perhaps the UK will have crashed out of the EU before the courts make him follow the law.

Then there is language. Words like betrayal and surrender, once the preserve of the Brexit press, have now become the words of our Prime Minister. Words are chosen for their emotive effect alone: how can postponing the date we leave the EU be described as surrender. It is the most obvious manifestation of something that should be clear to everyone: Johnson is acting like Trump and employing the tactics of Trump quite deliberately. It is the language that violent thugs on the right happily repeat, and directly leads to a rise in hate crimes on our streets. It is the language and tactics of someone who wants to brush aside all checks on their absolute power, the language and tactics of an elected dictator.

One MP has already been murdered, and a plot by right wing thugs to murder another was foiled. Yet the response of the Prime Minister and his chief aide to concern about death threats from any MP that dares to oppose their policies is that they should do what the Prime Minister asks and the threats would end. Like many dictators they effectively use violence and threats of violence to help their cause..

The lesson we cannot avoid drawing is that this government has become dangerously rogue, and the party from which it comes is no better. People are no longer safe with it in charge. In the past, at least the press would have held the government to account, but now it eggs it on. A BBC that also might have told inconvenient facts has been threatened into submission. A rogue government is a big enough problem, but one that can control large parts of the media is able to pretend it represents the people versus the establishment.

All Johnson’s actions and provocations have one aim. He aims to pretend at the forthcoming general election that he alone is fighting for the people against an establishment of parliament, the judges and the EU that are combining to block the people’s will. Apparently calling an act of parliament a surrender bill polls well. He hopes the combination of a FPTP system and a divided opposition will mean he can win an election even though he commands the support of a minority of the British people. To this end the press that is his propaganda arm have attempted to demonise the leader of the main opposition so that too many say they could not possibly vote for him.

The real threat to this country today is not someone who champions Jewish causes outside Israel, or someone who sees that our current economic system is failing too many. The real threat lies in far right thugs and a government that wants to destroy our pluralist democracy. The only way we have to stop a Prime Minister whose over the top language is used in death threats to MPs, and who describes those who ask him to be careful as talking humbug, is to remove him from power.

We can only have one of two Prime Ministers in 2020. It is essential for those who want to protect our pluralist democracy to ensure they vote tactically to remove the Prime Minister who threatens that democracy. If anyone believes our current Prime Minister will change his ways if he is in charge of a minority government just needs to watch him now. People tell me negative messages do not win elections. Preserving a pluralist democracy and not inciting far right violence surely promotes the positive messages of mutual respect, democracy rather than dictatorship, and for our MPs and others to work in peace rather than fearing the next violent attack. When a Prime Minster responds to the fears of MPs over death threats encouraged by his language by saying humbug, it is time for him to be removed. 

On the many meanings of ‘politically impossible’, with applications to Brexit

Many people, and perhaps particularly economists, will have been told at some point that whatever policy idea they are trying to put forward may make perfect sense but doing it is ‘politically impossible’. Sometimes this has some real meaning which the proposer needs to address, but sometimes the statement can stand for little more than village gossip, or the wisdom of crowds, where the village or crowd is Westminster, Washington or wherever.

Take, for example, simplifying the tax system. Any simplification generally creates winners and losers, and politicians are often reluctant to embark on such schemes because the losers always seem to matter more than the winners. In this case being politically impossible means something concrete.

But not always. As my first Brexit example take starting the Article 50 process. It seemed to me at the time that anyone with any expertise on the issue, or who had given it some thought, had concluded that starting A50 when the UK did was a terrible idea if you wanted to make a success of Brexit. It was, to be honest, blindingly obvious. As we are now all too well aware, the A50 process ends in the UK leaving in March 2019 whether a deal has been done and approved or not, unless the EU decides otherwise. It is a negotiation with a gun at the head of whichever country is leaving, and it was designed to be exactly that way.

Some argue that the UK had no choice because the EU refused to negotiate outside the A50 framework, and indeed were encouraging the UK to start as soon as possible. But given that the whole process was designed to put the screws on the leaving country they would of course say that. Even if they had given no hint at what was possible and what was not before that process began, the UK could have at least got their own act together before starting the process. As we now know, most of the two years was wasted because of internal negotiations within the Conservative party.

But at the time we did start A50, the consensus at Westminster was that it was politically impossible not to start. I think this is an example where politically impossible just meant the wisdom of the Westminster village. Brexiters and their press backers pushed for it because they couldn’t quite believe their luck at winning the referendum and feared popular support would quickly vanish, but that was never a rational reason for the majority who were not Brexiters to follow their twisted logic.

The responsibility for this failure in doing what was obviously the wrong thing to do must lie primarily with the Prime Minister. If she or her advisers had understood what a disaster an unplanned A50 process would be, she could have easily resisted her Brexiter MPs and press by going over their top to explain the dangers of an unprepared A50 process to the people. But instead her advisers probably told her it was politically impossible to delay. Once she had decided this it was difficult for the opposition to oppose, because to be frank they do not get the exposure and perhaps also it would have been personally embarrassing to Corbyn given his immediate reaction to the result.

I wonder whether we are seeing the same problem with planning after May’s deal is voted down. Sure the Brexiters want us to crash out with no deal, but the overwhelming majority of MPs do not. Yet many MPs seem to think that having come this far it is politically impossible not to end up with a deal of some sort. If not May’s deal, then some other deal. But this is nothing more than the wisdom of the Westminster crowd. The reality is that any deal is going to look terrible. You could reduce the economic damage with something closer to BINO, but that just makes the loss of a UK say in the rules it has to obey that more obvious.

There may be a similar problem with those calling for a second referendum, suggests Steve Richards here. It is deemed politically impossible for MPs themselves to revoke Article 50, because faith in democracy will be destroyed. Richards suggests a betrayal narrative will develop whatever parliament does: it is already there every time a second referendum is incredibly described as overruling the wishes of the people. If No Deal is not on the ballot (can we seriously risk the possibility of the Brexiters doing yet more damage through a No Deal win?) those who incredibly favour No Deal will say they have been disenfranchised. 

Whether its through a second referendum or directly revoking A50, it is time MPs started doing what is best for the country. We have had two years of chaos, economic damage and neglect of other issues because MPs have slavishly followed the result of a referendum illegally and narrowly won. That referendum result was based on a view of what is possible that events have shown is simply false. It is time for MPs to start winning back the trust of those who think the EU, or EU immigration, is at the heart of their problems by being honest, and enacting policies that actually addressed the problems of those who have been left behind. It is only this that will stem a revival of UKIP or worse: the EU referendum process is a lesson in why pandering to the false tales of the far right is a road to ruin. 

Against Charisma

I’ve written about the popularity of Labour’s manifesto, which should more accurately be described as expanding the state rather than ending austerity. But I thought that Labour would do badly in GE2017 despite this, because Jeremy Corbyn was so unpopular as a potential Prime Minister before the campaign.

I still remember reading many, many years ago about Weber’s three forms of authority (as we macroeconomists do), and feeling a visceral distaste for authority due to charisma. Although Weber intended it as an alternative to authority based on law, I read it as an electorate choosing their leaders according to their charisma or personality within a democratic system (the extreme form of which is populism). It offended my rationalist outlook, and my view about what politics was about. As Tony Benn used to say and I believed, politics should be about issues not personalities.

And in my youth it was possible to believe that authority through charisma was something advanced democracies had indeed grown out of. After all, Edward Heath became Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home almost beat Wilson and Richard Nixon almost beat Kennedy. Perhaps at the time I should have noted that in each case the leader who did well even though they appeared to lack charisma happened to be from the right.

My view that advanced democracies had grown out of the need for their leaders to have charisma fell apart in the age of first Thatcher and Reagan, and then Blair and Bill Clinton. I also began to see how the right wing media ruthlessly exploited perceived character flaws. I think Ed Miliband would have made a fine Prime Minister, and Hillary Clinton a fine President (both far better than those who beat them). However their lack of the exceptional charisma of a Blair, Bill Clinton or Obama allowed their opponents to make mountains over perceived deficiencies in their character.

Before the 2017 UK General Election (GE2017) campaign, things seemed to be going the same way. Labour was unpopular, mainly because Jeremy Corbyn was extremely unpopular. He had real charisma, but only it seemed among his loyal supporters. This unpopularity was translated into votes in the local elections just a month before GE2017. It was for this reason that the Conservatives decided to run a presidential type of campaign. So what changed in a few weeks?

Part of the answer was Labour’s manifesto, which because of the leak (?) a week before, and because of general election rules for broadcasters, got extended coverage. It was popular because it was clever: money was spent on items that would have immediate appeal to the voters who were likely to respond and vote (rather than what might have been - in some eyes at least - worthier causes). The decision to borrow only to invest blunted the normal attack lines, and I suspect many voters no longer cared too much if ‘the sums didn’t add up’ because austerity had past its sell by date or they were happy to pay something towards these items of spending anyway. (Of course this didn’t stop me getting rather cross with those who seemed to make a fetish out of the need to balance the budget.)

Although all this came as a surprise to some commentators, it did not to me: one of the things I got right was that austerity’s appeal was time limited. Just a year ago it looked like internal divisions would drown out the message. This didn’t happen because of an impressive, and to me unexpected, display of unity after Corbyn’s second election. But I was still concerned that his perceived lack of charisma would trump issues, and the polls and May local elections did nothing to admonish that fear. It seemed that although Labour’s policies were popular, their leadership mattered more. As Stephen Cushion notes, this idea that personality trumped issues was often reinforced by broadcasters using Vox Pops.

So what changed? Does charisma really not matter any more? Unfortunately I suspect not. Instead what happened was that voters, particularly younger voters, discovered another side to Theresa May. May looks good in controlled situations: soundbites and speeches to the faithful. When she lost control after the launch of the Conservative manifesto, she looked evasive and robotic. The independent media, who tend to pounce on weaknesses, focused on this rather than the ‘old news’ about Corbyn’s past. [1] What is more, the qualities that May seemed to lack were exactly those that a much more confident Corbyn displayed: genuine passion rather than robotic spin. It was May’s inadequacies that allowed many voters to see Corbyn in a different light.

If this story is right, it suggests charisma and personality are still important in elections. Just look at how well Ruth Davidson did in Scotland. I continue to think this is unfortunate, because people greatly overestimate how much they can accurately judge people from limited contact with them, whether it is in an interview for a job, for a place at university or being a prime minister. Cameron exuded confidence and competence as only the product of a top public school and Oxbridge can, but his faith in his own abilities did the country great harm in allowing Brexit to happen. People had decided based on limited and filtered information that Corbyn was hopeless, and now (particularly following the Grenfell fire) they can see his qualities, but I'm not sure they are much nearer knowing whether he will be a good or bad prime minister. 

Weber seems to have had a soft spot for charisma, but he died before Mussolini and Hitler came to power. I have no doubt that the personality and abilities of a leader matters. But quite how a politician’s personality interacts with events to determine whether they make good for bad decisions is something that is only really possible after the event (for a brilliant example, see Steve Richards). I can only think of only one occasion where I correctly guessed that a politician’s personality made him totally unsuited to high office, and the fact that millions of people came to the opposite conclusion about Donald Trump I think makes my case against charisma.

[1] I think this is important. The idea that the Labour manifesto and its presentation were foolproof is incorrect: journalists could have easily run with confusion over restoring benefit cuts, or over optimistic tax receipts. But on the whole independent journalists, quite rightly, chose bigger fish to fry.

The financial crisis, austerity and the drift from the centre

John Quiggin starts a recent post on Crooked Timber (more below) with the warning ‘Amateur political analysis ahead’, and that applies even more to what follows. I start with the UK, but then broaden the discussion out.

A recent piece by Steve Richards for The Independent has some similarities to a recent post of mine trying to explain the popularity of Corbyn and Sanders. His byline is “The financial crash of 2008 made it impossible for both parties to exist united in their current forms”. On Corbyn his argument is similar to my own. He writes

During Labour’s astonishing leadership contest, Corbyn pitched his message solely against the background of the financial crash. At the beginning of each speech he proclaimed that the 2008 crisis was not caused by “firefighters, nurses, street cleaners, but by deregulation and sheer levels of greed”. As a climactic he declared: “I want a civilised society where everyone cares for everyone else. Enough of free market economics! Enough of being told austerity works!”

In contrast some Labour MPs

were thrilled when Labour’s acting leader Harriet Harman declared her support for Osborne’s proposed welfare cuts immediately after the party’s election defeat. They argued this was a sign of a ‘responsible’ opposition showing Labour had learned its lessons about being ‘profligate’ in the run-up to the 2008 crash. If those MPs had retained that early position, they would have been to the right of Duncan Smith - who resigned over welfare cuts - and to the right of those Conservative MPs who rebelled against the cuts to tax credits on the working poor last autumn.

I would add that those MPs standing against Corbyn failed to place at centre stage the contradiction and injustice of how a crisis caused by the financial sector should lead to a reduction in the size of the state.

His account of the problems on the right, and how that too stems from the financial crisis, is as follows:

The row over the recent Budget, Duncan Smith’s resignation and the revolt over welfare cuts also has its roots in the financial crash. Osborne’s economic policy was shaped by what happened in 2008. After initially pretending to support Labour’s spending plans, he made deficit reduction his defining mission, missing his target in the last parliament and now resolved to reach a surplus in this one. But a significant number of Conservative MPs will not tolerate the spending cuts required for Osborne to keep to his chosen course. In effect they are rebelling against his highly contentious interpretation of what needed to be done after 2008.

There are two obvious points here. First, the much more serious divisions within the Conservatives appear to be over Europe, which also appear completely unconnected to the financial crisis. Second, which I will return to at the end, is the extent to which the financial crisis and austerity are linked.

To think about this further, and broaden it beyond the UK, I want to bring in John Quiggin’s ‘amateaur political analysis’. He writes

There are three major political forces in contemporary politics in developed countries: tribalism, neoliberalism and leftism (defined in more detail below). Until recently, the party system involved competition between different versions of neoliberalism. Since the Global Financial Crisis, neoliberals have remained in power almost everywhere, but can no longer command the electoral support needed to marginalise both tribalists and leftists at the same time. So, we are seeing the emergence of a three-party system, which is inherently unstable because of the Condorcet problem and for other reasons.

On neoliberalism he says

Neoliberalism is mostly used to mean one thing in the US (former liberals who have embraced some version of Third Way politics, most notably Bill Clinton) and something related, but different, everywhere else (market liberals dedicated to dismantling the social democratic welfare state, most notably Margaret Thatcher).

Later on

The difference between the two versions turns essentially on whether [globalised capitalism, dominated by the financial sector] requires destruction of the welfare state or merely “reform”.

This would place the majority of Labour party MPs as neoliberal using the US definition. We could describe the Republican establishment as neoliberals of the UK Conservative kind. Quiggin argues that the financial crisis discredited neoliberalism in both its forms (also the starting point of my post). In the US

Trump has shown that the tribalist vote can be mobilised more successfully if it is unmoored from the Wall Street agenda of orthodox rightwing Republicans like Cruz

Tribalism is “politics based on affirmation of some group identity against others”. We could make a similar argument about the rise of the ‘further right’ in Europe, and UKIP in the UK.

The final link is to spell out why the global financial crisis should lead to an increase in tribalism. The standard account is to blame the high unemployment (Eurozone) or lower real wages (UK, US) that followed the crisis, and how this can be easily blamed on immigration or those perceived to be living off the state. We could perhaps go further. Those in the Republican and Conservative parties (and their supporters) are happy to use and even encourage this tribalism as scapegoats to deflect criticism away from the financial sector and austerity policies. For some that works, but not always, and the tribalism can become detached from traditional right wing parties.

This account is neat as it seems to fit the current POTUS election. It could also supply the missing ingredient from Steve Richards’ account if the divisions over Europe on the right in the UK are tribal in Quiggin’s sense. However I think I would like to reframe this account in a slightly different way. Think of two separate one dimensional continuums: one economic, with neoliberal at one end and statist at the other, and the other something like identity. Identity can take many forms. It can be national identity (nationalism at one end and internationalism at the other), or race, or religion, or culture, or class.

Identity politics is stronger on the right, particularly since the left moved away from being the party of the working class. For the political right identity in terms of class can work happily with neoliberalism, but identity in terms of the nation state, culture and perhaps race less so. Neoliberalism tends to favour a more internationalist outlook (e.g. free movement of labour, low tariffs etc). When neoliberalism is discredited, this potential contradiction on the right becomes more evident. This is emphasised when politicians on the right use identity politics to deflect attention from the consequences of neoliberalism.

Why do I prefer this framing? First, in the case of the role of the state, I think it is artificial to make a division between those who are neoliberal and those who are not. I prefer to see neoliberalism as an extreme point or range on a continuum. Only when you do this can you see that there are the tensions on the right as well as the left over neoliberalism, which is the point that Steve Richards makes. (See here for a rather amusing example.) A right wing identification in terms of class does not inevitably imply a belief in neoliberalism. Second, I think an emphasis on identity has always been strong on the right, so it is a little misleading to see it as only something that the right uses in an instrumental way. Third, seeing identity in its various forms as a continuum can explain continuing debates on the left on this issue: here is an example I read only yesterday.

None of this detracts from the basic point that Quiggin makes: the apparent drift from the political centre ground is a consequence, for both left and right, of the financial crisis. I would add that what today counts as the centre in economic terms, which is pretty neoliberal, is rather different from what was thought of as centre ground politics before the 1990s. Now some of those on the left would like to think that this collapse of the centre was an inevitable consequence of the financial crisis. I am less sure about that. On its own, that crisis might have shifted the centre on economic issues to be a bit less neoliberal, and that might have been that.

One interesting question for me is how much the current situation has been magnified by austerity. If a larger fiscal stimulus had been put in place in 2009, and we had not shifted to austerity in 2010, would the political fragmentation we are now seeing have still occurred? If the answer is no, to what extent was austerity an inevitable political consequence of the financial crisis, or did it owe much more to opportunism by neoliberals on the right, using popular concern about the deficit as a means by which to achieve a smaller state? Why did we have austerity in this recession and not in earlier recessions? I think these are questions a lot more people on the right as well as the left should be asking.

Will Trident be Corbyn’s undoing?

and why Trident is not like austerity

Not being a Labour Party person, I’ve not until now thought much about what Corbyn should do about the Trident issue. (For non-UK readers Trident is the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.) On a personal level I have never heard a convincing argument for keeping Trident, and a great many bad ones, and it is a very large amount of money. So unless anyone convinces me otherwise I would happily votes against keeping it.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is firmly against Trident, but current Labour policy and many Labour MPs strongly hold the opposite view. It is a far more fundamental issue for Labour MPs, with deep roots, than any debate about Syria. (Postscript: this LRB article by David Runciman is well worth reading.) This post/article from Steve Richards of The Independent, coupled with the recent Labour reshuffle, suggests it may define Corbyn’s leadership.

I have written in the past that Corbyn’s election by Labour Party members was in good part a response to the inept drift in policy that the other three candidates were associated with. (As Jolyon Maugham says, it may be unfair on the non-Corbyn candidates that they were so clearly associated with this failed strategy, but elections are often unfair in this sense.) I suspect the many Labour MPs and commentators who think that Corbyn got elected because most party members prefer purity to government do this because they do not want to admit how hopeless their own electoral strategy clearly was. I have talked about this before, but Chris Dillow does it better.

The implications are that if in the few years a rival candidate emerges who seriously looked like they could beat the Conservatives while remaining close to the policies of the Blair/Brown government (minus Iraq and City regulation, obviously), I suspect they could easily win against Corbyn if the Corbyn/McDonnell combination looked like it was both incompetent and unable to lead more than a small number of their MPs.

That is why I have also written that Corbyn/McDonnell are likely to play a long game: to adopt for now policies that the majority of Labour MPs can unite behind, and try and gradually change the platform once they had shown that they could competently lead this majority (which means after 2020). As a poll disaster could still ruin this strategy, what they should also do (but I have always doubted that they would do) is focus on improving the Labour party’s spin machine. (Notions that Corbyn would automatically galvanise disenfranchised working class voters seem problematic for various reasons. The fact that almost no one in the media supports the current Labour leadership means that more, not less, energy has to be put into getting their message across.)

You can see why trying to change the Trident policy might go against that strategy of playing a long game. Damian Carrington, who has done more work exposing the government’s flooding débâcle than anyone I know, recently tweeted: “when @UKLabour shd have been holding Cameron to account for huge failings on #flooding, they put on a late Christmas pantomime”. It is pointless to say it is not his fault but that of the Labour MPs and media, because these are facts that Corbyn has to work with.

Please note that I’m not arguing that Trident might be better left as a battle to be fought on another day because most voters want to keep Trident. Voters views on the issue of Trident are not as clear as some Trident supporters like to pretend, and any poll that does not make the opportunity cost clear in any question (how many less teachers, nurses …) is meaningless anyway. The Conservatives are going to argue that Labour threaten national security whatever Labour’s actual policy is as long as Corbyn is leader. I am arguing that anything that breaks the long game strategy is not in Corbyn’s own interest. Remember also that Corbyn’s choice will have no influence on what actually happens to Trident before 2020, because the Conservatives will win any vote in parliament.

Now someone might say I’m being inconsistent here, because I would not apply the same argument to the macroeconomic policy of austerity. Is this because I have a deep professional interest in macroeconomics but not in defence policy? It is a good point, but my response would be this. If Labour under any leader agreed to follow Osborne’s fiscal charter, they would be going down exactly the same road as the parliamentary party seemed to heading before Corbyn was elected - the road to nowhere. Or as John Harris put it, they were “in danger of shrinking into meaninglessness”. Their ambivalence on the austerity issue under Miliband/Balls (having a sensible policy but trying not to talk about it) helped lose them the election for a variety of reasons I have talked about before.¹ Austerity, not Trident, was a key reason that Corbyn was elected. 

The Trident issue may therefore be critical for Corbyn. He would obviously like to campaign in 2020 on a manifesto that clearly pledges to scrap it, and there may even be electoral advantages in clarity. But if in doing so he alienates so many Labour MPs that the only image in voters minds for the next few years is Labour disunity, he may lose his support among the majority of party members, who actually meet those voters on the doorstep. Compared to getting this choice right, fixing his economic policy right must seem easy.

1 My previous posts have focused on Labour’s huge tactical failure: the only area before the election where the the Conservatives had real strength was economic competence, and how this was based on a false narrative that Labour failed to challenge. I have briefly talked about the demise of the European left more generally in terms of ‘political capture’ by the dominant elite’s narrative: some more articulate thoughts are discussed by Henry Farrell here.