As is my wont, I'm crossposting my entry from the last list challenge. This month's challenge is themed around
The Workers, and there's still a week and a half left to enter! (Link in my sig).
Iraq And A Hard Place
2005-2012:
Ken Clarke (Conservative)
def 2005: (Majority) Tony Blair (Labour), Charles Kennedy (Liberal Democrats), Alex Salmond (SNP), George Galloway (Respect), Ieuan Wyn Jones (Plaid Cymru)
def 2010: (Minority with de facto Respect support) Gordon Brown (Labour), Norman Baker (Liberal Democrats), Lindsey German (Respect), Alex Salmond (SNP), Ieuan Wyn Jones (Plaid Cymru), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Caroline Lucas (Green)
2011-2019:
Jack Straw (Labour)
def 2011: (Majority) Ken Clarke (Conservative), Alex Salmond (SNP), Lindsey German, Norman Baker, and Natalie Bennett (People Power Coalition--Liberal Democrats, Green, Respect), Paul Nuttall (UKIP), Simon Thomas (Plaid Cymru)
def 2016: (Majority) David Davis (Conservative), Alex Salmond (SNP), collective leadership [de facto Lindsey German] (People Power), Patrick O'Flynn (UKIP), Rhun ap Iorweth (Cymru)
2019-2021:
Tom Watson (Labour working under "Rose Garden Agreement" with UKIP and SNP)
2020 Scottish Independence Referendum: cancelled due to pandemic; estimated 53% YES, 47% NO
2021-
xxxx: Richard Bacon (Conservative)
def 2021: (Coalition with People Power) Tom Watson (Labour), Alex Salmond (SNP), collective leadership [de facto contested between Layla Moran, Daz Nez, and Anas Altikriti] (People Power), Patrick O'Flynn (UKIP), Rhun ap Iorweth (Cymru), Douglas Carswell (Democracy Coalition)
Five Phrases To: Understand British Politics With!
1. Clarkemania
As youth icons go, a 81-year-old former director of British American Tobacco seems an unlikely candidate. Yet former Prime Minister Ken Clarke has been unironically embraced by a vaste trache of young Netizens.
In fairness, it isn't the first time Clarke has garnered teenager support. His victory in 2005 is often attributed to a "youthquake" of younger voters not wanting to participate in the Iraq War, even if the actual polling numbers suggested a more uniform swing. The new era of Ken Clarke memes, however, comes from people who can barely remember his time in office, and whose support springs more from his vocal backbench activities supporting European integration. While "vapourwave" edits of his recent speeches, fanfic placing him in a torrid romance with Jack Straw, and legions of tweenage girls with profile pics of his face wearing a flower crown may appear like a sideshow to the real issues, many of these memers are effectively full-time canvassers online.
The digital realm is increasingly important for campaigning and activism, and with the blue-rinse exodus, the Conservative Party is in dire need of boots on the ground. There's a good chance that the skinny lads putting
Night In Tunisia over a Metal Gear boss fight will be crucial to the Conservative's strategy next election--and might one day sit on the front bench.
2. NO2ID
When David Blunkett was preparing his agenda as Home Secretary, he jotted in the margin that he expected "some debate" over the ID cards policy. A decade later, we're still debating it--or are we?
While Ian Brown's by-election campaign under the NO2ID banner may have been a disappointment, his vocal opposition to the Identity Cards Act galvanised a wavering opposition to Straw after the end of the Iraq War--a legacy most visible in People Power's NO2ID Group, with its president, Ian Brown MP. "No to ID!" has become the ubiquitous campaign slogan of our times, visible at nearly every protest and a constant in graffiti. This is all despite--or perhaps because of--ID cards being a hideously unpopular political dead letter for several years, and one abolished promptly by the Conservatives once they took power.
NO2ID means much more, these days. Against the digital-economy titans, against heavy-handed anti-terrorist actions, against mandatory vaccination measures--in general, an opposition to all attempts to number and corral the British population by centralised powers, and a firm belief in the right to privacy and free speech. With mask mandates and social distancing to combat the Hubei Flu increasingly controversial among the public, the Met Police under scrutiny, and Linkedin's misuse of personal data, this movement can only grow.
3. Rose Garden Agreement
With a teetering government minority after mass defections, Tom Watson faced two options--call a fresh election and almost certainly lose, or tie his government to a grab-bag of minor parties that mostly hated each other. He tried for a third, which somehow worked out worse.
Intervention in Syria was the final straw for the SCG, and Straw's ham-handed tactics with them ended up forcing both he and them out of the party--one to the opposition, the other to the backbenches. Watson needed to fill seats or lose his, but a full coalition was clearly untenable. The informal agreement--hashed out, despite the name, indoors, and merely announced in the Rose Garden--was like a confidence-and-supply agreement, but not quote. Both parties were obligated to support the Budget, the SNP bills on the environment and Europe, and UKIP bills on defense and home affairs. In exchange, further European integration was officially halted, as was plain cigarette packaging, Holyrood would gain greater economic power, the planned enlargement of Trident was halted, and two referendums were scheduled for the next year.
The plan was without precedent, and quickly divided all the parties involved. More liberal elements in Labour chafed at the idea of working with UKIP, and Scottish Labour felt betrayed by collaboration with the SNP. On the opposition side, most of the UKIP right went into open revolt over the idea of supporting more government spending, and the SNP's left, feeling they'd been ripped off with tokens, grumbled relentlessly. The electoral fallout left all parties involved scarred, and unlikely to repeat the process--yet with the traditional left-right spectrum breaking down, and hung parliaments more and more common, it wouldn't be wise to rule out another ad-hoc deal.
4. "Leadership By Argument"
With defections on votes for climate bills, for medical bills, and for education bills, People Power seem like a party in disarray. The backbiting is so endless, you'd think their leadership contest never ended. You'd be right.
The collective leadership began, like most poorly-functioning things, as a compromise. While they shared a commitment to staying out of American wars on terror, the three parties had little other common ground, and there was a fear that one of the three would dominate--the Lib Dems with their greater number of parliamentary seats, Respect with their dedicated activist base, or the Greens with their large membership. The collective leadership was supposed to preserve the independence of all factions, by preventing centralisation. People Power spent seven years with no official leader. The leader they did not oficially have was Lindsey German.
A veteran of the anti-war movement, German's relatively light-touch approach to party disclipine allowed the party to digest mass Labour defections, but her retirement has left behind her a party in disarray. As it stands, People Power is split three ways between the environmentalist and socially liberal Word Transformed Campaign, the libertarian and anti-surveillance NO2ID Group, and the anti-interventionist and Muslim-dominated rump of Respect, with each faction rallying behind a preferred spokesman. The notion of People Power as a unified party is very shaky indeed.
5. The Intervention Struggle
Across the world, it seems like "left" and "right" are breaking down as definitions. What is it that divides politics? David Goodhart claims he's got the key--but first, let go of the economy.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism (so his argument goes), the class struggle also gave out, ended by the victory of the upper class. With common prosperity making "proletariat" and "capitalist" a meaningless division, the primary struggle in politics is now between the "interferers" and the "leave-aloners", those who accept orders from above and those who chafe at them. In this framework, parties are differentiated by how
much they want to intervene--in the economy, in foreign countries, in the lives of their citizens--rather than what they want to do with that intervention.
Academics still debate the truth of these claims, highlighting other nations which haven't gone through this. Considering how the Conservatives have pivoted from being the party of the Falklands War, Section 28, and Orgreave to being the party of peace in Iraq, same-sex partnerships, and the Davis Enquiry, and Labour have gone from championing disarmament, the free press, and Windrush to championing Trident, the Media Standards Act, and border controls, it's possible Goodhart's onto something.
--Menshn: The Rundown, 9th October 2022