British members of parliament putting plans in their diaries should write them in pencil. Travel far from Westminster is not advised if parliament is sitting. The message from party whips is clear: Be ready to drop everything and vote — no excuses, no exceptions.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s £1.5 billion (Dh7.06 billion) deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) buys a sliver of security in the Commons. The Queen’s speech will pass, as should Tory budgets. The DUP offers insulation from no-confidence motions, but it is not a plump cushion. May’s working majority is 13. If seven Tories switch sides, or the DUP welch, the government faces defeat. The prime minister’s Ulster mercenaries aren’t contracted to reinforce her position on every bill and they can’t help much in the Lords.
That gives the opposition vast scope to wound the Conservatives. May’s purchase on power, even with the DUP, is thinner than the margin John Major won outright in 1992. That was sanded down to nothing. And Major’s odyssey of humiliation started with an unexpectedly triumphant election campaign. May embarks on her journey pre-humiliated.
A closer historical precedent might be the harrying of the Labour minority administration in the late 1970s — a period of knife-edge votes, frantic deal-making and ferocious whipping. In the end, Jim Callaghan lost a confidence motion by one vote. The prime minister had refused to sanction the deployment of Alfred Broughton, a desperately ill Labour MP, who had previously been carried from his sick bed to help prop up the government. Broughton was willing to do it again, although his doctors strongly warned against it. He died five days later.
The Commons has modernised a little since the late 1970s. The hours are a bit more sociable, the culture a bit less macho. What haven’t changed are the arcane methods that make legislative combat delightful to a minority of nerdy enthusiasts, and impenetrable for pretty much everyone else. A hung parliament invites all kinds of procedural ambush and sabotage: Surprise amendments; playing with programme motions (that allocate time for debate); moving “the previous question” (which truncates debate and, confusingly, has nothing to do with questions previously asked); plus other obscure devices that an enterprising MP can find by rummaging in the baroque inlaid box of constitutional tricks.
I suspect the appetite for that style of politics has shrunk in recent years. It was always a niche interest. The trend has been for free-range politics that frolics away from the factory farming methods of Westminster. The Leave side won the Brexit referendum with a message of liberation that was as much cultural as political and daubed in primary colours: Take control; stuff the establishment. Nigel Farage is a diminished figure now that his Brexit hobby horse has been rustled by the Tories, but in his heyday, he was a fluent messenger for the idea that “real” politics happens away from parliament’s den of corruption.
Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s following is animated by a similar spirit, albeit with a very different agenda. An ecstatic crowd at Glastonbury did not rally to the Labour leader because he came second in a race to control the most seats in the House of Commons. His support is more visceral and urgent. To his fans, Corbyn represents the promise of change on a scale that hasn’t felt available from politics as conducted by the old rules.
That culture clash reflects a phenomenon that isn’t easily charted on the traditional left-right ideological axis. It has a generational component, although that can be exaggerated. It is more a question of rival conceptions of what politics is supposed to look like. Crudely speaking, it is a contrast between a voluntary-activist mode and a professional-operator mode.
Each side tends to view the other with suspicion, even contempt. The activist sees the operator as cynical, unprincipled, morally adrift on a sea of shabby compromises. Operators see activists as naive, impractical, sacrificing the good in vain pursuit of the ideal. There is truth in both accounts and few individuals belong exclusively to one category or the other. It makes more sense to see them as shades of political temperament. An effective political movement, and indeed a healthy democracy, relies on both finding a way to coexist.
Technocratic pragmatism shrivels when it loses touch with its campaigning roots, as a generation of New Labour MPs discovered in their failure to challenge Corbyn’s ascendancy. But nor does the luminous rhetoric of radical change and tearing down establishments long survive contact with practical realities of government, as Brexiters are now learning. Vote Leave’s clever slogans aren’t much use now that leaving is an administrative, not a campaigning, imperative.
The very idea of Brexit might be vulnerable if the Labour leadership were to train its activist firepower straight at the target. But, to the frustration of pro-Europeans, Corbyn looks no readier to do that now than he was last June. Instead debate over Britain’s European relations is retreating into the realm of the operators, which was its natural milieu for decades before the referendum.
The practical mechanics of the EU have never excited much interest outside Westminster. The process of legal disentanglement will be complex enough before it is caught in hung-parliament trench warfare, trampled into the mud of incomprehension. There will be episodes of high drama. The protagonists will call it scrutiny, although it won’t be very transparent. The spectacle will be unedifying.
May didn’t have a lot of options, given the parliamentary arithmetic. But it is hard to avoid the feeling that she has missed an opportunity to do things differently, to combine an operator’s cunning and an activist’s imagination. She might have reached out a little further than the DUP; she might have noted that Brexit poses a national challenge and that any deal will be more legitimate if it is pursued in collaboration with MPs from across the spectrum. She might have surprised us.
Instead May has chosen to do things in conventional style, by the old rules, in accordance with precedent. It is a mistake. Hung parliament precedent suggests the rules can be used to bring her down.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Rafael Behr is a political columnist for the Guardian.
