The Rock and Referendum Election
In which the British Electorate is dragged back to the polls to complete its unfinished business; Boris Johnson finds out whether he’s really that charming; and Jeremy Corbyn has to write a manifesto which satisfies his Conference.
Since 2016 British politics has increasingly resembled the swansong tour of one of those rock bands with randomised umlauts. Jack Böx and the Zömbies. The original Jack died of an overdose in 1987, but here’s the band, still going strong. Or, if not strong, at least loud.
Boris Johnson, in the role of Böx 2019, will finally discover whether he’s charming and wild enough to make up for an absolute inability to play guitar, hold a tune, or indeed do anything associated with the front man’s job. The Zömbies are clustered around him really hoping the answer’s yes, because if Jack goes, so also the rest of them, off the edge of notoriety into the badlands of the music industry’s merciful amnesia.
Meanwhile their arch-rivals, prog folk sensation Together We Ride, are now fronted by a traditional mandolin player who may or may not have the fast fingers needed to make a neo-Dylan protest version of John Dowland’s Come Heavy Sleep the toast of this election. Yes, it’s Jeremy Corbyn, who can sing and play but often, being a gentleman, chooses not to. One of his biggest hits at the moment is actually a cover: the Green New Deal was co-authored by Caroline Lucas and helmed by Ann Pettifor, who was one of the artistically different economic backing singers Corbyn let go after they refused to get on board with his Philip Glass-inspired Brexit solo album.
The Brexit Party, on that note, are supposed to be a threat to everyone, but I’m not making up a band for them and here’s why: Nigel Farage was last seen coat-tailing Donald Trump in the US. Just how desperate do you have to be for a gig that you’d follow America’s Titanic president on his journey to the impeachberg?
Just about the only person sticking to the agreed running order is Swingin’ Jo Swinson, whose Celine Dion power ballads are the soggy embrace desperately sought by mellower Conservative voters whose vicarage tea Party has abruptly turned into a gathering of all the awkward relatives they usually forget to invite.
Maybe out of this unpromising lineup will come a vibrant new scene, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is less the UK’s political Burning Man than the Milton Keynes branch of Fyre Festival. No one really wants to be here. That’s to say that almost everyone is angry with the present situation — not wrongly, there’s plenty to be angry about — but only the most die-hard political headbangers are really looking forward to the UK’s third election in four years, especially when you factor in the better-than-average chance that it will resolve exactly nothing. For all that Boris Johnson has an apparent lead, it’s well within the margin of go-fuck-yourself in 2019. Similarly, you have to be a pretty optimistic Labour stalwart to see your party riding a wave of poll-inverting leftism to a majority in the House. Johnson’s lead and Corbyn’s 2017 surge notwithstanding, we could well be back here on 13th December with nothing to show for six weeks of angry and largely irrelevant bullshit. The problem isn’t really the House of Commons, after all: it’s Brexit. The House can’t agree because there is no reasonable middle any more. Even Brexiters don’t agree on what Brexit should look like. Like Boris Johnson, who denounced a sea border with Northern Ireland in fiery terms a few months ago and is now advocating one as an almost angelic solution to the impasse, they often don’t even agree with themselves. The Norway option, once touted as the thinking person’s politically liberating (rather than economically damaging) Brexit, is now an unmentionable and craven surrender. An afternoon is now a long time in politics.
For all the thunder about how Parliament has failed to untangle the problem and must now be renewed (read “stacked”) to achieve a solution, actually if you think about it this Parliament has done pretty well in the face of exactly no help at all from the executive, the media, or the public. Various members have attempted to find compromises, however unpalatable, and been shot down by their own leaders and reviled in the red tops, and a number of talented people are just tired of the abuse and have handed in their notice. All the same, the House of Commons has fought hard and repeatedly won the right to perform its critical constitutional function: scrutiny and amendment of legislation in the public interest. Even the indicative voting process could have yielded a useful result, but Theresa May shut it down lest it deliver what seems to be the somewhat incoherent middle ground of staying in the Customs Union plus close relationship with (but not membership of) the Single Market, this posture to be confirmed by a second referendum.
Both Labour and the Tories have run shy of a second referendum. Labour has belatedly embraced it — Corbyn was wriggling on the hook of whether he’d offer one against Remain on any deal until a fairly long way into this year — but still declined to get behind this most persuasive iteration of it, as advanced by Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson for what now feels like decades. The thing is that, absent a second referendum per se, this election will inevitably partly be one. The other (crucial) arguments about the future and near present of the UK will be lensed through Brexit, which is why the Tory party field is increasingly Buccaneer Brexity and the Liberal Democrats — until quite recently still in the national dog house because of the austerity coalition — are hoovering up votes from right and to some extent left as well. And since the country is demonstrably down to the wire on Brexit, it seems likely that even our clunky, blockish voting system will still manage to deliver a hung parliament. At which point: it’s Groundhog Day.
Again.
We already know, broadly, what the Tory manifesto will say. It’ll tumpet Johnson’s deal, claim to be the party of the NHS (wait, what?) and lean hard on Law N Order, low taxes and nebulous trade deal futures. But what will Labour’s say? Conference handed out some formidable policies. Will the party really incorporate a commitment to retain and even expand Freedom of Movement? I can’t imagine that it will, but if it did that would go a long way to drawing back strayed Remainer voters — at the cost of tabloid headlines of surpassing rage. Doubtful. Will it really write the Green New Deal with a 2030 target date into this manifesto, despite union misgivings? That would be HUGE. It might even be enough to cut through the Brexit noise, because what’s implied in that is more radical by far than anything else in the UK’s febrile political atmosphere. I’m guessing… not quite. The GND will be in there, but there’ll be some careful framing and the target date may go missing.
I care deeply about that — and so should you — but I don’t think a lot of column inches will be burned on it between now and 12th December. No. This will be, like it or not, another Brexit election. It seems that direct democracy really does beget direct democracy. The referendum didn’t get Brexit out of the way; incomplete and undefined, Brexit has infected every subseqent public vote with a quality of referendumness. Sir John Curtice told LBC recently that we might elect more than 100 MPs not from the two main parties. That makes it harder for the Conservatives, because they have few friends in the rest of the House. Labour doesn’t have to win this election outright to unseat the Tories; we, the electorate, just have to deny Johnson his majority and install one which favours fact over the Brexit dreamscape. Vote smart, for the best or least-worst option, and finally, when we’ve done that and resolved this four-year shouting match, we could have something approaching functional politics to tackle the crises of this moment which are not self-inflicted, but external, structural, and real.
