We’re leaving the European Union on 31st January and there is no way to stop it now. Michael Heseltine, who bravely endured the scorn of his former conservative colleagues, has quite understandably thrown in the towel.
European leaders have abandoned us as a lost cause.
“We have been waiting for more than one year to know what Britain wants. Now we have clarity,” the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said at the EU summit on Friday.
ignoring the fact that more of us voted against Bojo the Clown than for him.
Yet the many millions of us who believe in the idea of a united Europe haven’t gone away. For quite a while to come we’re going to be unrepresented on the national stage. There’s no organised group to draw us together and provide leadership right now. The Labour Party will spend the next few years navel gazing and may descend into party civil war. The Liberals, my natural home, are considered toxic by the left because of their role in the coalition government, and a joke by the right because of their role in the coalition government. Even the People’s Vote Campaign, which mysteriously decided to implode the very week the election was called, has decided to “refocus its campaign to concentrate on vital social issues”, whatever that means.
The Clown’s whopping majority on Friday wasn’t that unexpected. Deep down, I think many of us in the Guardian reading metropolitan elite, as the rich boys from Eton like to call us, knew what was coming. It’s not easy to find crumbs of comfort in last week’s result. So, trying to find reasons to be cheerful, here’s my attempt to find some hope for the future.
First, there’s the numbers who voted. Under a more representative voting system, the new House of Commons would look very different. The electoral reform society has produced some nice graphics to illustrate this. First past the post produced the following HoC:
whereas proportional representation would have given us this:
Basically, the Tories would lose about 70 seats and the Liberal Democrats would pick up about 70. Greens, Labour and the Brexit party would each have gained about 10 extra seats. No party would have a majority by itself, reflecting the way the country actually voted.
Of course, no government with a huge FPTP majority is going to kick away the ladder that got it there. But it would be nice to get the debate back on the agenda. (You can sign a petition for this if you like.) Apart from coalition and national governments, not a single government since 1931 has represented a majority of the British people. In most of those elections, the majority of the votes were ignored.
Instead of government by the majority, we get government by the largest minority, and sometimes not even that. Instead of searching for ways to cooperate, it’s a system that encourages the politics of confrontation and leads to the kind of toxic level of debate that has spilled over into the recent Brexit fiasco, where Remainers are branded as traitors and Brexiteers are dismissed as thick.
Sadly, I don’t see much hope of the electoral reform debate being resurrected again any time soon. Still, it’s some comfort to know that those who oppose this government are in the majority.
Next there’s the demographic split. Of course, voting patterns change as people grow older, so there’s no guarantee that the popularity of the EU among younger people will still be there in 20 years time. Nothing in the future is certain apart from this, attitudes and circumstances will be different in decades to come. Things will change and, although I probably won’t live to see it, the idea of a united Europe will finally make it’s way to England and Wales one day.
In the meantime, there’s going to be exactly the same debate over the future trading relationship with the EU as there has been for the past three years. Either we continue to play by the EU’s rule book, or we switch to the USA’s rule book, or we reject both and have free trade with neither. This will be decided wholly by the Conservative Party over the next few years, with the rest of us relegated to being noisy bystanders. It will be interesting to see what the outcome is and who feels betrayed and let down by it.
The battle for what type of Brexit is about to begin and most of us are no longer in the fight.
Platitude of the Day 
Nice analysis. There’s a couple of interesting things that the charts show. The first is that even under the PR system, a Lib-Lab coalition would still be smaller than the Conservatives.
And it’s this that is the problem. It would be nice to think that our politicians would, in these circumstances, look to build consensus. But the reality is that they would do whatever deal was required with smaller parties to build a majority. Hence what tends to happen with PR is not that the main parties find common ground, it is that the extremist parties are given disproportionate power.
This is what happened last time with the DUP. In the case before, 2010, when two main parties were able to form a coalition, the LibDems were crucified for it in the next election.
Looking at the chart above, it is clear that the balance would be held by the SNP, or by a combination of Brexit / DUP / UUP. Now any or all of these might be exactly what you want, but I’m not sure it advances the cause of democracy to place this power in their hands this way.
This would happen in every election for the foreseeable future. In countries with PR, politics has tended to become more divisive, not less, because of the need to incorporate extremists into policy making.
To be honest, I don’t like FPTP. It clearly has a democratic deficit. But any new system should be capable of denying power to small extreme parties. I don’t know how this could be done – maybe saying that 2nd place votes count less, or that a party needs to pass a minimum vote threshold in order to be allowed into government.
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Yes, you’re quite right, every voting system has its problems. There’s also the question of what counts as an extremist. Is a libertarian or anarchist an extremist? What about a party that is otherwise socially liberal but believes in a totally command economy? I don’t think we can discount any of these positions or say that voting for them makes them invalid. We can only hope that they remain a minority taste.
Anyway, it’s now time to sit back and break out the popcorn and beer. The Tory party always wanted exclusive control of the Brexit agenda. Well, now they’ve got it, let’s see what they do.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
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“As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.”
Should be interesting. Oddly enough, in the early hours of Friday,when I was supposed to be going into meltdown, I was getting a bit demob happy. I’d done what I could , and could now take a more detached view of the process.
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I’m afraid I had to go through the meltdown phase first before coming out the other side and seeing the bright side.
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I think I did my meltdown in the run up to election day.
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I felt much the same. In the run-up I’d done half a dozen leafleting rounds for the Lib Dems, some of them in the pouring rain, and my immediate reaction at the 10pm exit poll was ‘Hell’s bells! What has this country done to itself?’ But 24 hours later I found myself, to my mild surprise, feeling fairly relieved it was all over, and particularly that Magic Grandpa and his crew were nowhere near No 10. And the size of BoJo’s majority, oddly, seems to make it easier to accept.
But, as the Hitch used to say in different circumstances, all his work is now before him. And not only does he have a whole new swathe of Tory voters to satisfy, he has a third-rate bunch of Ministerial candidates to do it for him. Let’s hope that, as some of his friends tell us, he really is a one-nation centrist Tory at heart, and is going to act as one in the years to come.
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