Here’s an indication of just how radically Brexit, the process of Britain leaving the EU, has churned up British politics. The Brexit Party, which a couple of months ago did not exist at all, scored a primary vote of 32 per cent, just about the same primary vote as the Australian Labor Party, a venerable institution much more than 100 years old and one of our two natural governing parties, scored in Australia’s election a couple of weeks ago.
You might say, well, that’s the fluid time we live in. Old commitments no longer hold, especially old political commitments. All institutions in the West, especially mainstream political parties, are under attack. There’s a lot of truth to that, but it underestimates just what a wrenching, convulsive and deeply unpredictable issue the politics of the EU have become, most especially in Britain but all over Europe as well.
The EU is massively dysfunctional and its sovereignty-eroding dysfunction has produced a long-running crisis across Europe. The Europe-wide EU parliament elections were won by Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, edging President Emmanuel Macron’s party into second place. Matteo Salvini’s League, formerly the Northern League, doubled its general election vote to come first in Italy.
Some pro-EU commentators have tried to construe the Europe-wide elections as encouraging because while the Eurosceptic and sovereignty-focused parties, some perfectly respectable centre-right patriots and others a bit further to the right, made gains in most countries, they didn’t sweep the board.
But the plain fact is that Eurosceptic parties fiercely critical of the EU won the EU parliament elections in Britain, France and Italy. That is rebellion against the way the EU has evolved on a huge scale in countries at the heart of Europe. In any normal institution, that would lead to sober reassessment and course correction. Not for the EU, however, whose most zealous proponents, such as Macron, want yet more power stripped from national parliaments and national governments and transferred to Brussels.
At the same time, the polls were won in Poland and Hungary by parties that are fiercely critical of the EU. The determination of the central Europeans not to adopt the EU culture, the coercive elite faux liberalism of Brussels, is a fascinating dynamic at the heart of European politics today.
The Europe-wide results saw a new polarisation in European politics. The soggy centre was weakened, though certainly not destroyed. In many places voters abandoned the Centre-Left for the Greens. But at the same time, voters abandoned the old, status quo, establishment Centre-Right for harder-line nationalists.
But the results in Britain were an absolute earthquake. Brexit won the poll with 32 per cent of the vote. The hitherto recently moribund Liberal Democrats came second with 20 per cent. Labour was beaten into a humiliating third place, with 14 per cent of the vote, down 11 per cent on its effort at the past European election. The Greens did well, increasing their vote by half to a more than respectable 12 per cent. But the Conservatives, still under the leadership of Theresa May, crashed to their worst electoral result in any nationwide election. They were thrashed into the utter embarrassment and shame of coming fifth, with just 9 per cent of the vote.
You have to admire Farage’s brilliance as a political campaigner. His message is simple, clear and declarative. He wants Britain out of the EU, he wants May’s wretched withdrawal agreement rejected and he is happy to leave on a so-called no-deal basis, meaning that Britain would then trade with the EU on World Trade Organisation terms, as do Australia and the US.
Farage’s position is actually even stronger than it looks. His old party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, has been taken over by extremists. It has been excoriated or ignored by the media who justifiably hate it. But it too won more than 3 per cent of the vote. These are Farage votes under another name, so 35 per cent of Brits voting are immediately and emphatically in favour of leaving the EU with no deal if necessary.
The Lib Dems, on the other hand, basically want a second referendum to reverse the decision to leave the EU. If you add their votes to all the other strong Remain parties, such as the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, you get a similar size Remain vote as you got a Leave vote.
By the way, media attention is not everything in creating a new political phenomenon.
A group of Conservative MPs and Labour MPs, some of them very high profile, left their respective parties amid a blaze of publicity to form a new outfit called Change UK. It got oceans of publicity. All of its MPs are warm and cuddly. The British media lapped up everything it said and did. It desperately wants Britain to stay in the EU. It got almost exactly the same derisory vote as UKIP.
The EU elections have had, I think, an enormous consequence for both the Conservative and the Labour parties. The Conservatives face the prospect of something like extinction. I don’t believe it will come to that but the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in the early 1990s went from being in government to holding just two seats in parliament.
The looming EU elections finally forced May to resign as leader, or rather to promise to resign in a couple of weeks. But, much more important in a way, it has forced all the Brexiteer leadership candidates to embrace formally the prospect of a no-deal Brexit.
Boris Johnson, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and the two leading female Brexiteers, Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey, have all come out for a no-deal Brexit unless Brussels changes fundamentally the terms of the deal it is offering Britain. Conservatives know they must win back Farage’s 35 per cent to survive as a major party, much less hold on to government.
But the change in Labour is also fundamental. Labour went to the past election promising, like the Conservatives, to honour the popular vote to leave the EU at the referendum in 2016. Brexit was not a big deal at the past election partly because both parties promised to honour the referendum and leave the EU. And they won 80 per cent of the vote between them, while pro-remain parties languished. Part of the bitterness in much of the British electorate that has fuelled Farage is the clear betrayal of the election promise. Both major parties and the British establishment have contrived to frustrate the popular vote to leave the EU.
However, that is now the past. Labour needs the 35 per cent of the electorate that has just voted Remain if it is to survive. The British electorate has understood, in a way May never has, that the only coherent choice now is a no-deal Brexit or staying in the EU after all.
The next weeks, with the election of a new Conservative leader and therefore prime minister, will be crucial in British history.
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At last an election where the polls got it right. The polls predicted that Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party would win the elections in Britain for the European parliament and they did.