Brexit and the Future of British Politics
<Talk given at UK in a Changing EU Conference, London 29th March 2019>
As the events of the last week seem to push us closer to a general election it is important not to be fooled by the two-party share of the vote 2017. This did not herald the return of two-party politics but is rather a temporary respite in the fragmentation of our political parties and the electorate.
There are now two distinct divides between our parties and within the electorate. The ‘old’ divide which we are quite familiar with between left-right defined in terms of economic justice and which is the main dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives and a new divide crystallised by the leave remain binary of the EU referendum but more deeply represented by values relating to social issues, which here I call social liberalism. This divide is very good at predicting leave and remain support. It also allows us to divide Green party voters from UKIP voters (something we cannot do on the basis of the left-right divide).
This illustrated in the chart below. The data are drawn from the British Election Study Panel Survey (though much the same pattern is observed in other data sources).
Two sets of 5 items each are used to measure economic left-right and social liberal values. The first includes items on redistribution, whether ordinary working people get their fair share of wealth and big business. The social liberalism scale includes attitudes to the death penalty, censorship and whether young people have enough respect for traditional values. In each case these are scaled to run from 0–10 with low value being ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ positions.
Key points from the chart:
· Conservative voters (both leave and remain voters) are more economically to the right than all other groups.
· There is a large gap on social liberalism between Labour leave and Labour remain voters (this is a key source of the difficulties the party faced even before Brexit as the ‘left’ vote is fragmented)
· Labour, Green and LibDem remainers occupy much the same part of the value space — they are all competing for the same voters (and it is very likely Change-UK will be in broadly the same space).
· Green party voters, Labour party voters (regardless of EU referendum vote) and UKIP voters are all indistinguishable on the traditional left-right divide. (Note there are too few Green-Leave or UKIP-Remain voters to plot separately)
These two distinct divides in our politics are cross-cutting. There is little success in predicting one from the other. But this works in both directions. While everything we have seen in parliament in recent weeks has shown that Brexit divides the parties; as soon as focus switches to domestic economic issues (assuming it ever does) this unites Labour and the Conservatives and divides Leave and Remain voters.
The constant emphasis on Brexit ensures that the social liberalism scale remains salient in our politics. And there seems to be some further polarisation on this dimension, as on average remain voters become a little more liberal between 2015 and 2017 (similar processes have been seen in polling from the US among Democrats). While it remains salient our political parties will continue to struggle to unite their voters (and MPs). Fragmentation seems to be likely to continue.
Current polling suggests the two-party share has been declining and it is all too easy to think that support bouncing around the 35% mark for both major parties is an indicator of stability. But tucked away in the detailed tables pollsters produce we find that the proportion of the electorate saying don’t know has been rising. This week’s yougov poll had 1 in 5 voters in all categories of previous vote and demographics undecided how they would vote, a margin of 3 or 4 percentage points between the parties dwarfs in comparison to these undecided voters. The party system and the electorate remain volatile. While FPTP has helped to keep this fragmentation in check this is looking increasingly strained and further hung parliaments and all the parliamentary games that entails seem set to continue.