Those of us old enough to remember the last left-wing Labour governments from the sixties and seventies will know that underlying politics is the old left-right ideological divide. The state controlled economic model versus the lightly regulated, free-wheeling private enterprise system favoured by the Americans - or Singapore. Blair had an attempt at the third way and to an extent it worked, until the financial crash anyway.
I don't see these old arguments still holding sway in Europe and they certainly don't have the wild policy swings that we do and I think proportional representation (PR) has had a lot to do with that. The first past the post (FPTP) system we employ usually produces clear government but it does mean the constant reorganisation (they tend to use the word reform) of the state. First building up its role and then dismantling it before building it up again. And so on.
I mention this for two reasons. Firstly because there has been some talk of an EU-UK trade deal in which Britain would maintain the right to deviate from EU standards while the EU would be free to retaliate with tariffs if we did. This idea was floated in The Spectator a few days ago and is now to be found in the pages of the FT. On the surface it might seem appealing but as this tweet from a former No 10 adviser, Giles Wilkes, suggests it will be a source of permanent uncertainty and rancour:
I can't see how this can create anything but a slide into a permanently hostile relationship between UK and EU. "You change your laws, we whack you with tariffs" - a recipe for Brussels to be the permanent bogeyman in the UK tabloids https://t.co/CdLfxFSl6w pic.twitter.com/8tQ9PGox9t— Giles Wilkes (@Gilesyb) June 22, 2020
But I do think we are now entering a period where our relationship with Europe will introduce another ideological axis for the two main political parties to argue along.
Whereas we always had the left-right divide, now we will also add the pro-anti Europe divide. The Tory party will be advocating a distant relationship both politically and on matters of trade while Labour will adopt a much more pro-European position and whatever we agree in the next few months will probably be re-negotiated when a Labour government or a Lib-Lab coalition come to power - as they inevitably will.
Most European states have some sort of PR system which avoids these wild swings of policy so that governments are not either constantly building or demolishing the organs of the state or, as I anticipate, for the next few years anyway, constantly adjusting our position on the proximity-to-Europe scale.
It is time we adopted something similar so that government in Britain becomes more anchored in the centre ground.
The second reason I mention it is because of an article that appeared in The Telegraph by Tom Welsh described on Muckrack as the paper's Deputy Comments Editor - a position calculated to addle anyone's brain after a few months I imagine. The piece was: We have a Tory government, so why is the liberal establishment still in power?
It is essentially a rehashing of a familiar argument on the right that everybody in positions of power are really left-wingers trying to thwart the will of the people. Welsh talks about the governor of the Bank of England, the head of the BBC and the OBR. In his fevered imagination they are all part of a secret plot to stymie Tory governments. This is Welsh:
"The pandemic has shown all too clearly the failures of the bureaucracy. It has also shown how “sticky” bad Left-wing policy-making can be unless there are people in positions of authority to challenge them."
Juliet Samuels produced a similar piece in The Telegraoh a few days ago that I posted about HERE.
Welsh's piece provoked a Tweet from Shanker Singham that this was the problem with UK governance, while a general election was supposed to change things, in fact the people that he thinks of as actually "pulling the levers of power" remain in place.
George Peretz pointed out this wasn't the issue:
On the contrary. The real problem with UK governance is that vast powers are placed in the hands of a centralised govt elected by a system that randomly generates artificial majorities on a minority of the vote, with feeble checks on its appetite to take huge powers for itself. https://t.co/CyiUR2gQHN— George Peretz QC (@GeorgePeretzQC) June 10, 2020
It is the FPTP system that is the distortion - appearing to show a huge chunk of the population is in favour of the policies being pursued by the election winner because of what Peretz calls (rightly in my view) an "artificial" majority.
Singham and Welsh seem to think that an 80 seat majority for Johnson means a massive majority in the country want Brexit and the massive upheaval to come. Some of them undoubtedly do, but nowhere near a majority I suggest and this is at the heart of our problems.
Finally, I noticed a nice comment piece by Phillip Rycroft, the former permanent secretary at DEXEU under David Davis and Stephen Barclay. Writing in CSaP - the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University, he talks about the "potential third shock; the promise of this government to ‘fix Whitehall’."
Cummings' name isn't mentioned once but make no mistake this is his brainschild. The merging of DfID with the Foreign Office is just the first of many reorganisations to come. Rycroft says of the current crisis:
"Private companies, business leaders and the army have been brought in at various points to shake up or bypass the existing bureaucracy, much as the apparent agility of the ARPA programme is touted as a model for sparking innovation and economic development. Power has been further concentrated in No 10. Metro-mayors, and increasingly the devolved governments, have been left on the sidelines. Will these responses be a guide to future action on fixing Whitehall?
"This is not a government, it seems, much given to self-reflection. If it were, it might pause to ask itself whether these might be entirely the wrong lessons to draw from current exigencies."
And later:
"Concentration of power in very few hands makes for a brittle state. Quite apart from the tendency to unchallenged group think, the credibility of the enterprise rests on the reputation of too few actors, as we have witnessed in the current crisis. Does taking back control mean focusing even more power on the executive arm of the British state, held in the grip of a court-like No10? That would mean a further atrophying of the scope for the critique and challenge so essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy."
All of which means that government over the next few years will be characterised by a lot of navel gazing and deck-chair re-arranging. Meanwhile in continental Europe which, for the main players anyway, has a settled view of what the state is, what it does and how it does it, their focus will be on improving the lives of its citizens and the environment they live in while we are engaged in yet another reshuffle of government which will ultimately produce no tangible benefit to anyone.
But it will be done with maximum cost and ill-will.
