There has been a long delay since the first two parts of this investigation because we wanted to assess changes in the overall political situation that might be relevant to the process. You may need reminding of what we are about. Our current situation was covered in a Blog Post in May. If anything, things have got worse. The Government is struggling to deal with problems of its own making. The economy faces, according to the Bank of England, three years of zero growth. Inflation is only slowly coming down and interest rates are rising. We are stuck in an unwinnable war that drains our Exchequer and undermines the global trading system. The Labour Opposition is flaccid and offers more of the same. The public is alienated from its political class. The methodology of our investigation was covered in a Blog Post in June.
Changes in the last three months were sufficient to delay analysis. We should note a number of factors that make a major change to our political system more likely after the failure of a Labour or Coalition Government (in other words somewhere around 2030) rather than as a result of the expected 2024 Election. This latter election is likely to be less interesting than the 2024 elections (Presidential in the US and European Parliamentary) elsewhere for one very simple reason - our national political culture still cannot get out of the mind-set of the solution to a bad Government being simply its replacement with an equally likely to fail Official Opposition. In order to effect serious change not only does the Tory Party be seen to have failed but Labour or whatever amalgam of established parties emerges out of the election must also be seen to fail. The key phrase is 'seen to fail' since, like a frog slowly boiling in water, the atomised British electorate has a tendency to fear radical change and to accept slow decline and moderate privation (or short term unstable asset growth and moderate taxation) rather than face the facts of national decline and weakening social cohesion.
In other words, if failure is not dramatic, there is a risk that the Buggin's Turn of British politics will continue for generations while the nation sinks remorselessly into provincial status at a global level (which may be no bad thing) and infrastructural collapse, mounting social conflict and deteriorating morale (which are very bad things) without any decisive action being taken
So what has happened in recent months? First, the situation of the Government has seen no recovery, its leading figures are scuttling and looking for new opportunities and there is no enthusiasm for its probable successor. Second, electoral revolt has started on specific single issues - initially on ULEZ and implicitly Net Zero. Third, Farage is back in play leading a highly focused anti-woke campaign on de-banking that has thrust him back into prominence on the national political stage. Fourth, national populism in Europe is becoming more viable and more aggressive in its challenge to the dominant liberal system (although it has its own internal contradictions) while Trump seems to be strengthened rather than weakened by the legal warfare operations being undertaken against him. Finally, the Ukraine War, although low on electoral priorities, looks like another elite failure of policy to follow the failures in Afganistan and Iraq.
In this context, the official Left has little to say that is not an opportunistic attempt to exploit the Centre-Right's troubles - the message is merely that Labour will be more effective than the Tories at managing a broken system (which is in itself barely credible) rather than being the agent of questioning whether anyone can be effective under a nineteenth century constitution underpinning a twentieth century state under conditions of twenty-first century complexity. In this context, only the populist Right appears to have something to say that might get public traction and it is poorly led in the absence of Farage.
The first of our five 'investigations' was, therefore, of "around nine broadly centre-right challengers to the Tory status quo" but including the Social Democrat Party which is arguably centre-left. The intention was to short list from the four or five categories under review (see relevant posting) and present them as a set of rational alternatives to the existing parties that dominate Parliament and which are clearly failing or may be expected to fail the British people. As we will see in a later blog posting, there is one potential serious alternative on the Left but the blunt truth is that, so long as the 'Corbynista Left' quixotically insists on blind loyalty to the Labour Party in the hope of take-over one sunny day, the energy for real change is mostly on the Right.
The SDP is definitely interesting. Reform UK, derived from Farage's earlier efforts but currently without his active involvement, has the more potential. The SDP could perhaps win a seat or two (it has a strong presence in Peterborough) but only Reform can strip votes from the Tories and from the Labour Red Wall to create a phalanx of MPs under FPTP that could be decisive in coalitional negotiations. Their commitment to proportional representation gives us the prospect of a pragmatic single issue alliance in Parliament with the Liberal Democrats that could transform British politics.
The fact that the SDP and Reform UK have announced an electoral alliance in advance of 2024 means that Reform UK are the best option for the material destruction of the Tory Party while the SDP permits 'revolutionaries' (in the context described in earlier postings, where there is no truly left-wing alternative, to support that destruction but from a moderate centre-left position and then hope to strengthen that position so that their guns can be turned on Labour and the Liberal Democrats at a much later stage.But this is a long game. The problem is that, without funds and reach (including dedicated activists), the danger is that sympathetic voters might simply remain at home or even vote for the least worst option in the establishment parties and implicitly endorse a broken system for another five depressing years.
In this context, there should be an honourable mention for Fox and Daubney's Reclaim Party which might be regarded as part of the emerging populist coalition and which has the virtue of having the right attitude to the hysteria surrounding Ukraine. Although an out-rider organisationally, it provides a convenient home for those concerned about freedom of speech and the widespread manufacture of consent. However, its recent by-election vote was derisory and its cultural politics only resonate with a small minority as a voting issue - many more may agree with it but not enough to push economic interests aside. It could perhaps deliver 2% of the vote to someone who could use it better.
We might also note as interesting the minor anti-globalist right wing green party The Populist Party (in case it develops legs in the discontented Tory heartlands) and the populist right wing Heritage Party (because it seems to have the only coherent set of policies related to the Ukraine crisis on the centre-right despite probably being a tad too right wing even for most thinking populists). These last two parties both have some organisational potential and the latter appears to offer a threat to Reform UK. The damaging effect of sectarianism on the Right matches its effects on the dissident Left.
From this perspective 'revolutionary bourgeois' Leftists who cannot relate to what we call the 'real' Left (to be covered in a later blog posting) should contemplate joining the small SDP to strengthen it for the future while 'revolutionary' Rightists, swallowing some doubts about the influence of the Johnsonite troglodytes, should be attracted pragmatically to Reform UK, backing it to replace the Tories on the back benches in order to effect some key reforms. Those more concerned with core individual freedoms and resistance in the culture wars might consider a third member of the emergent coalition - Reclaim - but the chances of this making an impact are slight now.
The reference to the Johnsonite Troglodytes is important because the radical dissidents on both Right and Left have the same problem - infiltration by the discontented elements in the main establishment parties in such a way that the revolutionary potential of 'real' Left and national populists is shattered by the presence of these essentially conservative forces. For the newly emergent working class parties on the Left (see later blog postings), the danger is of a rush of urban liberal-left excitable public sector graduate Corbynistas trying to create the eco-liberal party they wanted Labour to become and disenchanted with Starmer.
For Reform UK (and so for the SDP) the risk is a rush of Tory pseudo-populists creating a new Party of war-mongering Atlanticists in return for a primitive small business low tax policy package based on an unworkable Trussanomics. The Tory pseudo-populists will be faced with a choice of capturing the Tory Party after defeat or taking over Reform UK. Such an outcome is likely not to be good for major national reconstruction - the parallel in Europe is the traditionalist conservatism of Meloni. For the discontented Left, the risk is of becoming Red-Greens on speed run by activists and graduates with no working class links.
But here we are only concerned with the centre-right populist challenge to the mainstream. In the next few weeks we will move on to look at the Far Right (where the probability but not certainty is of rejection as unviable for electorsal purposes), then to some centre 'process-driven' parties and thence to challengers to the Labour Party on the Left and to some single issue parties that we may perhaps add to the 'watch list'.But let us look at the centre-right contenders more closely. In the next couple of
weeks, I will be looking at the Far Right before moving on to the Centre
and Left.
The
Social Democrat Party is not the same as the Social Democratic Party of
the 1980s. This merged with the Liberal Democrats in 1988 but saw a
surviving breakaway group implode in 1990 only to be re-formed under yet
another breakaway group, emerging as a syncretic combination of
centre-left economics and centre-right cultural policies. It is small
but cogent in its policies which can be studied in summary in Wikipedia.
It has undertaken an electoral pact with Reform
UK in advance of the 2024 Election suggesting that it is positioning
itself as the left-wing (socio-economically) of any revival of British
populism. In policy terms it broadly meets the criteria laid out in our
initial posting with one exception - a strong historic allegiance to
NATO which fails to understand perhaps that the NATO of the era of
Dennis Healey and David Owen is very much a different animal from the
NATO of constant mission creep and complex global alliances that
bring the UK back into responsibility for politics and war East of Suez.
We consider this naive but not politically stupid since the majority of
voters are equally naive.
In all other respects, their policies are
sensible. The entire package would not be a million miles away from
the normal position of the moderate wing of the old Labour Party in the
pre-Thatcher era. Although organisationally it seems quite competent, it
is severely underfunded and relies on a dedicated team of outsiders so
it really needs to show that it can exploit any populist resentment of
the existing political class without being outplayed by the more
ruthless Reform UK. Despite doubts about its foreign and defence policy
(on the grounds of naivete in the modern world), the SDP gets
shortlisted as a potential long term challenger to the dominance of the
current bunch of clowns and comic singers. It is, however, a long play.
The
position on Ukraine (which we have made a marker during this process)
is, in fact, considered and measured. It suggests the SDP have some understanding
of NATO's mission creep but it clearly fails to understand the historical
context for the invasion. Nevertheless, this position is vastly more
intelligent (given the realities of British public ignorance) than that
of the rest of the official political class.
The major contender for changing the structure of politics remains Reform UK, albeit that it is weak without Nigel Farage as Leader. It is successor party in turn to first UKIP and then the single issue The Brexit Party. Each
iteration becomes more politically sophisticated and more capable of
moving towards some sort of power although the latest version of British
populism is largely dependent on the possible collapse of the Tory Party
before 2024.
This means that a broad-based single-issue Party (based on
leaving the EU) has had to transform itself into a right-wing populist
party with a broader base of policy aiming to capture the discontented working class who
feel betrayed by both Labour and the Tory elite and the lower middle class Tory vote that simply feels betrayed. The class
tensions are evident: they push Reform UK into a mix of right wing
economics, aspirational libertarianism and cultural conservatism.
The
tension in this is expressed by the difference of position on the marker
policy of Ukraine between current leader Richard Tice, who adopts a
nationalist 'Western' line suitable for the Johnsonite trogs he needs to
attract and Farage, the populist king-in-waiting, whose
own public pronouncements show more sophistication and understanding of
what is really going on. In other words, Reform UK (which is already
capturing disillusioned Tories) is forced into becoming more Tory than
it should be in order to get any chance of breaking through to
Parliament in sufficient force to ensure proportional
representation (which will break the monopoly of power of the three
corrupted establishment parties) in, no doubt, cynical alliance with the
liberal-Left.
The electoral alliance with the SDP is thus rational
because the SDP can theoretically hold more left-wing and state interventionist
eurosceptic votes in trust and each can lend the other sufficient of its
base to divide non-Leftist political dissent between them. The SDP is
the weaker link and Reform UK better organised and financed but Reform
UK has to be on the short list for all its faults as the home for more
centre-right 'revolutionary' spirits. However, it is hard to see how the SDP could remain allied to Reform UK if the Ticean appeal to discontented Tories results in the adoption of absurd Trussonomics.
I would personally regret that
Farage seems (understandably) not to wish to return to front-line politics (although his righteous rage at de-banking might indicate a potential change of heart). I
find Tice's neo-Johnsonianism faintly ridiculous except as a strategy
for smashing the Tory Party, Nevertheless, this is the operation most capable of
breaking the spine of the current political structures and getting a
debate on change which includes the prospect of a proportional
representation decision capable of terminally weakening the three failed 'parties
of State' and returning more power to the wider population.
Wikipedia gives again a useful summary of the history and policies of Reform UK.
Despite the Thatcherite economics (in contrast to the SDP), not only
does it offer sensible policies in other areas but permits some
important leeway for national interest economic interventionism as well
as constitutional radicalism closer to the position of the Left.
Tice's
and so the Party's current position on the current international crisis
adopts the mythology of the West but remains critical of 'lack of
preparedness'. It actually contains wiggle room for a more sophisticated
position closer to that of Farage but its purpose is to reassure
Johnsonite right-wing trogs in the Tory Party that their idiotic foreign
policy will not be disrupted in the hands of Reform UK. This may be
unfortunate but it is logical since Reform UK is much less interested in
the Eastern bloodlands and pleasing Washington than in national
regeneration, keeping out of the EU and democratic reform. It has a
Trump aspect though that risks realigning the UK even more firmly with
Washington under a populist Presidency.
Farage's more intelligent but dissident position on Ukraine can be studied online. Given public sentiment and the mass of propaganda pouring out of the
establishment media where we see Tory elites, pro-Europeans and
Atlanticists combining on a narrative that must not be questioned,
Farage is almost certainly wise to remain in the background on this
issue and await events.
The
third on our Stage 3 list is the National Liberal Party which is
ideologically attractive as classic liberalism with a strong sense of
the importance of national self-determination. It seems to be largely
London-focused but organisationally very weak - a classic case of
placing ideas ahead of political reality. Reluctantly in some ways, we cannot take it seriously because the likelihood of it making any
significant impact even within London is small.
The
Alliance for Democracy and Freedom is one of a number of populist right
wing parties that have appeared in the wake of Brexit. It appears to
represent many of the concerns of the angry lower middle class -
eusoscepticism, anti-lockdowns, farming and fisheries concerns.
migration, anti-net zero and international aid, support for military
veterans combined with a broadly welfarist agenda alongside libertarian
economics. What is striking is how many small start-up parties have a
leadership cadre made up of ethnic minority British nationalists (see
NLP immediately above).
The best way to regard the ADF is as a source of
policy ideas (like the NLP , the ADF strikes me as an ideas rather than
an organisational party) but largely for the more right wing populist
side of the 'revolution'. This is not a serious contender for effecting
major change. In addition it is in danger, like many new small right
wing parties, of getting trapped in discontents that may be short term
in nature when political change is best ensured by hooking activists and
voters not into expressions of immediate anger or outrage but into a
long term determination to change the conditions of existence,
The Party
is strangely silent on recent foreign policy events which may suggest a
struggle to square right-wing impulses in the street with what had
stood as opposition to any embroilment in European defence. It is
probable that there is a serious split in the interpretation of the
world between Johnsonites who are essentially Atlanticist Cold Warriors
with some notion of 'the West' and Faragists who are essentially
nationalist isolationists with a more restricted view of national
defence as defence of the nation.
We have seen above how Reform UK has
to try and square these policy tensions in order to attract Johnsonites
while keeping Faragists queiscent in order to gain power. Whatever the
AFD believes, it looks as if another response to these tensions, in a
country whose consent for NATO expansion has been thoroughly
manufactured by state psychological operations and the media, is one of
silence until it all blows over. That, of course, is not good enough
when there is a direct correlation between the central problem of the
cost of living crisis and an inept foreign policy. This cannot be taken seriously for organisational reasons but also because of this evident
failure of nerve during the 'polycrisis'.
Reclaim
is yet another small populist party which tends to give primacy to
cultural politics, notably freedom of speech. It might be called more
Faragist than Reform UK nowadays but it is clear that there are good
relations between the two parties. It might be considered a vehicle
for pulling together 'culture wars' activists for a voice in any
emergent Reform UK-led populist success. It could be argued that it is
part of an informal coalition that includes the centre-left SDP as well
as Reform where differences of emphasis and economic policy are
overridden by a broadly shared ideology of national self-determination
and a cultural politics geared to 'British working and lower middle
class norms'.
It gets an honourable mention (see our introduction) and a place on the short
list as a potential home for those concerned primarily with cultural
restoration rather than economic policy and on the basis that it is part
of the 'transvaluation of values' required to contain and dismantle our
national security state and its strategies of manufactured consent.
Laurence
Fox, founder and leader of Reclaim, easily passes the Ukraine test if
only for causing total outrage at The Indie for having the most
intelligent reaction yet to the deification of Zelensky. In this sense
he is a foreign policy Faragist, will refuse to apologise (which in itself endears him
to me in an age of liberal buttock-baring at the first sign of offence)
and acts as a possible counter-balance to the growing troglodyte Tory element
transferring to Reform UK.
The
Libertarian Party is what is says on the tin and represents a
right-wing non-populist middle class position of small government and
low taxes. It has made little political progress and is not taken
enormously seriously except as the representation of an intellectual
position. If you are a libertarian of this type, you are probably a
member of the Tory Right already.
The
Libertarian Party certainly does not pass the Ukraine test with its
somewhat militarist concept of a citizen conscript army on the Swiss
model - these policies too are indistinguishable from the far reaches of the
establishment Tory Right. The reference to this policy has unfortunately disappeared from the internet so it may have changed since the late Spring.
The
English Constitution Party is a right wing English nationalist populist
party but committed to democracy (it might pass for the Far Right
'Andrew Bridgen' wing of the Tory Party) It gives the initial impression
of being primarily for rather cross pensioners and it is anti-vaxxer
and anti-immigration. It is on the verge of being classed as Far Right
(which we will deal with separately). There is as much of an argument
for English nationalism as for Scottish nationalism so it should not be
disregarded on those grounds but only as something that marginalises
itself with its own policies.
Curiously,
with its radical anti-globalist agenda which merges with that of some
left-wing parties (to be studied later), the ECP actually passes the
Ukraine test but swings too far in the direction of conspiracy theory,
almost certainly because of its interpretation of NWO control over
Ukraine and extreme view of the national self-determination rights of the Donbas, Crimea
etcet. as Russians. Athough its position was originally published in
2014, it was re-published to make a point in January before the invasion
so we do not know exactly what the position is on the invasion itself.
The
Populist Party is a new lower middle class anti-globalist right wing
Green Party which has a strong localist and ecolgical approach to
politics but interprets this through espousing some right wing policies
including immigration control and protection of the green belt. It is
hard to judge what appeal, if any, this Party may come to have so we are
putting it on a 'watch list'. Logically it is a threat to rural Tory
votes and, if it grew, one might expect the informal Reform UK coalition
to adopt its policies or find some other way to appropriate it. We can
find no reference to Ukraine on its web site but its stance of armed
neutrality suggests a critical attitude towards NATO.
Finally
we must note another London-based right wing populist party led by a
partially ethnic minority British politician, The Heritage Party, which
emerged out of the Brexit Party. Accusations of racism directed at the bulk of the populist wing of the Right look
increasingly absurd in relation to the facts of their activist
memberships. Their candidate actually beat Reform UK in the Hartlepool
By-Election so they should not be dismissed outright but the anti-vaxxer
position ensures that they will be classed as Far Right by the media regardless of
any other policy positions.
They
undoubtedly pass the Ukraine test with a very clear set of policies
that actually link sanctions and the cost of living issue and propose a
reasonably long term policy strategywith a strong No Net Zero focus.
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