By Douglas Murray
Tuesday, April 16, 2019 1:47 PM
A great question looms over British politics. Should we
smash the major parties? By “major parties” I obviously mean the Conservative
and Labour parties. And when I say “we” I mean, of course, the British voting
public. Since the government delayed Brexit once again this month, it seems
that Britons will soon be asked to vote in this year’s European Parliament
election. That will be three years after we voted to leave the European Union.
With the Conservative government showing a monumental incompetence in matters
great and small it looks as though we might also face a general election before
this parliament comes to its purported end in 2022. Suddenly it looks as though
the two-party system which was meant to be uncrackable could finally crack.
A YouGov poll carried out last week showed Labour coming
top of the forthcoming EU elections (24 percent) and the Conservatives down 8
percent to only 16 percent. Only just behind them are Nigel Farage’s new Brexit
party (15 percent) and Nigel Farage’s old Brexit party, UKIP (14 percent). So
in the EU Parliament elections the Conservatives could well be beaten by a
party that didn’t exist until last week. Some Conservatives appear to think,
“Well that’s just the European elections: the public were always badly behaved
during those.” Except that the British public’s ill-discipline no longer
appears to be limiting itself to European elections. A YouGov poll on voting
intentions in a general (domestic) election shows the Conservatives four points
behind Labour at just 28 percent. For such an election the Brexit party and
UKIP poll 8 percent and 6 percent respectively. And so we see the possibility
here not just of a Labour government but of the Conservative party being destroyed.
Like a lot of Conservative voters, I no longer abhor the
prospect. Not because we relish a Corbyn government — very far from it. A
Corbyn government would put Britain on a road to national decline that would
make the 1970s look like our heydays. But the Corbyn Labour party has its own
problems. It is fighting against its own parliamentary party and in the country
as a whole there is now a clear divide between the pro-EU Labour party that
dominates in metropolitan areas like Islington (Corbyn’s own constituency) and
the vast swathes of the north of England who voted to leave the European Union
and are the Labour party’s only remaining base.
The obvious thing for Labour is also to split. Something
that began to happen in February when half a dozen Labour MPs (lead by Chuka
Ummuna, once a Blairite hopeful for the party) walked out to form the
“Independent Group,” which has now also been joined by a gaggle of “Remain”
Conservative-elected MPs. This group also plans to run at forthcoming
elections. And so when the British people next go to the ballot we might at
least have a party to vote for that really wants to leave the EU and a party
that really wants to stay in, rather than two parties that pretend that they
want to leave.
If Britain’s relationship with the EU is going to
continue to dominate our politics then this all has its advantages. But there
are two meaningful problems. The first comes if Britain actually manages to
leave the EU. In such a situation both new parties would surely slump — the
main order of the day having been at least temporarily addressed. Each may
continue to campaign to take us in their favored direction some years down the
line, but a broad majority of the public would most likely believe the question
to have been addressed at that point, and wish other questions — education,
health, the economy, the rest of the world — to be addressed at some stage.
The second problem — and the only reason not to favor the
constructive destruction of both main political parties — is the possibility of
even greater chaos. One of the greatest causes of conservatism itself is the
realization, which only grows throughout life, that everything can always get
worse. When you imagine that Ed Milliband is the worst Labour leader you can
get you soon find yourself facing Jeremy Corbyn. You imagine Theresa May is the
worst prime minister imaginable and then you see some of the talent the
Conservative party is seriously throwing up as aspiring PM material. So when
people say that we couldn’t have worse representation than we currently have
from either party I say we should be able to imagine an awful lot worse,
because there is a lot of ruin in dying, once-great parties.
Still neither of these quibbles alters the essential
point which is that the Conservative and Labour parties have both — in the last
three years — shown themselves unfit to govern, unfit to claim to represent the
people and unfit really to put themselves up for election. I am all for
creative solutions to this impasse, and would welcome the views of readers. All
I know is that the idea of voting for either party at the next election is
becoming an impossibility. The Conservative party, whose sole redeeming feature
used to be a reputation for competency, has shown itself to be ill-disciplined
and incompetent. I can see how the European elections can go. The Brexit bloc
can vote around the Conservative party, and the Leave bloc can presumably vote
around Labour. But what do we do next time we have a Westminster election? The
desire to wield the wrecking ball can rarely have been felt among many
otherwise generally anti-wrecking types.
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