Sunday 7 May 2023

A Tory split gets ever closer

As we all know, political parties often try to soften the blow of an impending election disaster by forecasting even greater losses than they are privately expecting. This is what the Conservatives did ahead of the local election results last week. In the event, they were far worse than the Conservative Party had been forecasting. Chairman Greg Hands was telling the press to expect 1,000 seats to go so he could present the 500-600 figure he actually thought they would lose, as a triumph.

As of this morning, they are down by 1,058 councilors.

Every other party, Labour, LibDems and Greens, made progress at the expense of the Tories and UKIP. Richard Tice’s Reform Party made no headway and UKIP lost every councillor that they have ever had. I really don’t think this can have come as a surprise given the state the country is in.

So, as I posted on Friday, I think the Tory party as we know it is finished. They are already turning on themselves. An article in The Telegraph blames the disaster on Sunak for ‘knifing’ what Johnson’s supporters call ‘the most successful election winner in 50 years’ - namely Johnson himself.

The Brexiteers don’t accept that Brexit has anything to do with it and Johnson’s supporters don’t think his chaotic reign was responsible either. Both factions lay the blame on Sunak. Meanwhile, moderates like Theresa May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell, think Sunak has steadied the ship after Truss and Johnson and is an asset to the party.

David Campbell- Bannerman lays into Lord Barwell in this tweet:

Polls tend to show Sunak is more popular than his party and usually about on par with Kier Starmer, so I don't believe DCB is right, but he will never accept it.

Sir John Curtice says the election results put Labour on a path to becoming the largest party with no overall majority, which may be an underestimate, but if they can work with the Lib Dems and the SNP it may prove to be a blessing, certainly as far as reversing Brexit is concerned.

I expect the Tories to split into two factions after the next election, if not before. Those who cling doggedly to the idea that Brexit can be a success if only the country can survive the next fifty years and those who recognise it has been a big mistake. The two sides are completely irreconcilable, making a split inevitable.  The former will further sub-divide into pro and anti-Johnson supporters.

Again, this will come as no surprise. If the Brexiteers were ever serious about Brexit they would have known that you cannot make a success of such a profound and long-term policy change unless the other political parties offered their support. They never did.  No other party except UKIP (extreme right-wing Tories in disguise) ever believed in Brexit. 

That was the reason a referendum was needed, which Cameron foolishly offered. But that was won by what Lord Heseltine called a "pack of lies" and they are unraveling at an ever-increasing pace. The British people may have been gullible in 2016 but they are not stupid and support for Brexit is ebbing away fast. Only yesterday, Omnisis recorded the largest gap (26 points no less) since the referendum between those who think we should rejoin and those who think we should stay out:

Brexiteers never bothered even to offer an olive branch to the 48% and went for the hardest possible Brexit they could, short of trading on bare WTO terms. In other words, they thought Brexit would succeed by osmosis and there was no need to work to bring nearly half the population on side. Worse, that 48% was predominantly the younger, more educated part of the electorate.

The project many of them had devoted their lives to was doomed to fail from the outset, not only because of the complex personal and industrial integration that had taken place over the last fifty years but because they failed to convince other parties and those who disagreed with them that it could ever be made to work.

Role reversal

Long before the 2016 referendum, eurosceptics were keen to blame every problem in Britain on our membership of the EU. Every week new myths appeared in national newspapers. No more bent bananas or mushy peas. Britain would be forced to use standard-sized coffins and so on.

The EU even had a team of officials manfully attempting to counter press stories of these ‘barmy Brussels bureaucrats’ etc. It was an uneven battle, the myth being read by millions in the mass circulation tabloids while the corrected version on the euromyths web page received a few thousand hits at most, sometimes just hundreds.

What has gone unnoticed is that all those negative stories stopped immediately after the referendum.  One might say this is because the press barons behind all the nonsense had achieved their goal but that doesn't quite answer the question. Readers may have been more convinced about Brexit if the stories had continued (assuming they were true, which they were not) but they didn't.

There was a hiatus between then and 2020 but now we have an amazing role reversal. The newspapers who spent decades blaming Brussels for everything that is wrong with this country, now deny the EU affects anything at all

The Daily Mail is the latest with a story attempting to explain a "worrying trend" that has emerged of "fewer companies wanting to list on London's stock market."


The article says government and city regulators have been looking at ways to respond to the trend in efforts to "make London a more attractive destination for public companies, but experts warn there are no easy answers."

However, the writers do acknowledge Brexit has had an effect:

"While it is not the only impediment to London’s pull when compared to rival markets like New York or Hong Kong, Brexit has weighed on Britain’s attractiveness as a destination to invest or list a business.

"Chief economist and head of research at investment bank Panmure Gordon Simon French said: ‘Historically large investors allocated more to the UK than its economy probably justified because it had decent returns, an outsized financial sector, and a relatively stable currency.

‘Since 2016, international investors haven’t taken a view on whether Brexit is good or bad, but they see it has created a lot of volatility in sterling and political instability. As a result, they reduced their exposure to the UK."

The Mail isn't alone of course.  The Telegraph and a small number of 'economists for Brexit' are Canute-like in their efforts to hold back the tide of bad news engulfing almost every sector of the UK economy and convincing an evermore sceptical public that Brexit is a good idea.

It isn't and they won't succeed.

Posted by at