Tag: Lib Dems

Core vote or protest vote: what does Witney mean for the Lib Dems?

I seem to be one of the few Lib Dem activists in south England that did not go to the Witney by-election – though I was one of the earliest donors to the campaign fighting fund. The party stormed forwards from fourth place to a respectable second, with 30% of the vote, with the Conservative vote being cut to 45% and Labour holding on to 15% (they had been second). This result has predictably been spun a number of different ways. But what does it really mean?

Let me start with a couple of disappointments. First the swing of 19% to the Lib Dems was dramatic, but not good enough to secure the party much publicity. The coverage vanished quickly, and hardly registered at all in some channels. The Lib Dems badly need some eye-catching event to give them momentum, so that the public will start returning to voting for the party. My impression locally is that people are starting to move the party’s way again, but aren’t ready yet. This result will not do it. Only a win would have given the party real momentum, and that turned out to be too far for the party to reach. The result boosted morale internally, but I don’t see it having much more impact than that.

The second disappointment is that the result illustrates just how low the party has sunk in popularity. The party put out a widely quoted release that if the swing were repeated at a general election the party would win 26 seats from the Conservatives. My reaction: is that all? I wanted to insert a “just” in front of the number 26. It doesn’t seem that long ago when a swing like that would have taken the party into an absolute majority in parliament, with hundreds of new seats. Now it barely recovers half of what the party lost last year. And that was a by-election, where swings of that magnitude are hard to repeat more widely. That feels a distinct let-down.

Moving on, though, I have found two distinct narratives. First consider this from John Rentoul in the Independent, and this from Political Betting’s David Herdson. Both take the view that the Lib Dems are reverting to type as an inchoate protest party, that will say anything to pick up votes in a by-election, or anywhere else. This lack of coherence, they say, would be disastrous for the party if returned to a position of national influence, as whatever they did, they would annoy a large part of their electorate. The other narrative is totally different, and comes from The Economist’s Bagehot. He suggests that the party stuck to a core vote strategy, promoting the party’s open, and pro-European, credentials. Witney, near the university city of Oxford, is promising territory for such a core vote strategy – but it remains a minority strategy. In that light 30% is about the sort of result the party should have been looking for, considering the entrenched Conservative hold on the area.

So which version is nearer the truth? As I didn’t go there, I am at a disadvantage. From where I was sitting I could see evidence of both. There was much talk of squeezing voters (especially Labour ones) and using bar charts to persuade people to vote tactically. The campaign led off with a complaint about cuts to the local NHS, which hardly looked like a core vote thing. But the party also made something of its contentious stand on Brexit – where it is still firmly part of the resistance, compared to the Conservatives’ enthusiastic embrace of Brexit, and Labour’s reluctant one.  And the result, with the Labour vote holding up quite well, points to a core vote proposition.

In fact the party still faces a choice between the two strategies.  It might leap into the euphoria of protest politics, which was such a striking part of the party’s rise in the 1990s and early 2000s. Or it could stick with a more patient but in the long term more fulfilling core vote strategy – where the party builds up a loyal following based on its values, before chasing after floating voters.

Right now the two converge. The party’s core voters are angry and up for a bit of protest voting. But on the showing of Witney, people not in agreement with the party’s open values remain reluctant to vote for it. The party leadership needs to hold its nerve and stick with the core vote strategy.

The Tories take possession of Brexit; the Lib Dems will benefit

Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, closed the Conservative Party conference yesterday with a striking vision of her political direction, which was consistent with speeches made by other members of her government. This is a marked change of tone from her predecessor, the rather liberal David Cameron, and his Chancellor, George Osborne. Brexit is at the heart of it.

Earlier this week, FT columnist Janan Ganesh suggested that the stream of social policies coming out of the Conservatives were an attempt to deflect the politicians’ obsession with Brexit. But this is to misunderstand what these policies are about – they are an attempt by the Conservatives to tell people that voted for Brexit that they “get it”. The vote to leave the EU is the starting point of the whole thing.

What Mrs May is trying to do is to adopt what I will call the “Brexit coalition” as a political base. This starts with her hinterland: the non-metropolitan middle classes – most especially their older members, as their children are going to university and becoming more metropolitan in outlook. This group has a nostalgic view of the past, and feel threatened by the cultural aspects of globalisation. All the talk of patriotism, the hard line on immigration and the attacks on liberal elites (Oh how sick I am of being told that I am part of a ruling elite when all I am is a school governor!). Other nostalgic policies, like promoting grammar schools are in the mix too.These are bedrock Conservatives, largely taken for granted by Mr Cameron.

What is more interesting is that Mrs May wants to add the disaffected working classes, who voted in droves for Brexit, notwithstanding the advice of the Labour Party. They share the cultural biases of the non-metropolitan middle classes, but add to this resentment about economic insecurity. Mrs May is making a particular pitch for this group: emphasising the struggles of people at the margins, though failing to observe how much austerity policies, such as changes to tax credits, have added to their hardship. For these people she made a strong pitch for “fairness”, and indicated that she would act on a series of economic problems, like housing costs and poor infrastructure. She also rounded on unscrupulous businesses. In parts she sounded not unlike Ed Miliband, Labour’s previous leader, allowing her to claim the “centre ground”. Strikingly she also included a pitch for ethnic minorities, acknowledging discrimination. Ethnic minorities make up large sections of the working class, after all – though the Brexit voters tend to be “I’m not racist but…” types who think it is them who are the victims of discrimination.

But one part of the Brexit coalition is being left behind by all this: the businessmen who called for a bonfire of regulations to make businesses more competitive. On the one hand Mrs May’s tough line on sovereignty, immigration and foreigners points to a hard Brexit, and so little need to heed EU regulations. On the other the threatened policies to limit immigration would add a very hefty layer of extra bureaucracy on businesses, and the appeals to “fairness” suggest a strong role for regulation and government intervention too. Regulation and democracy go together like a horse and carriage. They may be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But this part of the Brexit coalition always mattered more for its money than its voter appeal.

It is possible to admire the political cleverness of this. Ukip, who had been harrying the Tories on their nativist flank, are struggling at the moment, and this sort of thing should see them off, in Conservative constituencies at least. One might ask what the point of Ukip is. It also takes advantage of Labour’s disarray. At their own conference Labour failed to discuss Brexit. Their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seemed to embrace it – but (admirably) failed to bang the drum on immigration. Other Labour big hitters want it the other way round: oppose or soften Brexit, but wave the flag on immigration. This leaves muddle at the core of Labour’s message on the top issues of the day. The party will no doubt maintain its iron grip on public sector workers, and those vulnerable to government reforms (students, benefit claimants, etc.). I would also be very surprised if their grip on ethnic minority communities was seriously dented. But this falls way short of an election-winning combination. It is not clear what is their appeal to grumpy working class voters, to say nothing of the non-metropolitan middle classes that former Labour leader Tony Blair made inroads on the last time Labour won an election.

But speaking as an ordinary decent liberal and proud citizen of the world (subject to a sneering jibe in Mrs May’s speech), I am aghast at the direction the Tory Party has taken. The are stigmatising foreigners and implying that I am unpatriotic. Many of us are friends, neighbours and work colleagues with people who are not British citizens, and we look on them as equal human beings who have earned our respect and a place in our society. I find that impossible to reconcile with some of the rhetoric coming out of the Conservative Party. And it gets worse. The EU referendum unleashed a wave of hate crime and anti-social behaviour aimed at people who are seen as not belonging here (not just foreigners of course). Much as the leaders of the Brexit campaign claim that this is nothing to do with them, Conservatives run the risk of allowing these attitudes to take root, even as they claim that it is not their intention. In the same way Mr Corbyn will not call off the misogynistic hard left thugs that are part his own coalition, contenting himself with mild disclaimers.

This is now becoming a real political opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. The party is now the best home for open-minded people who do not have a nativist outlook – or those of them appalled by developments in the Labour Party anyway. It becomes easier for the party to take credit for the better bits of the coalition years – which had accrued to Messrs Cameron and Osborne – rather than just the blame for the bad bits.

That opportunity for the Lib Dems will grow if the Conservatives fail to deliver on their new promises, as seems almost certain. As soft Brexit turns into a mirage, and hard Brexit turns out to be highly disruptive, and as the Tories fail to deliver economic gains, such as lower rents and better paid jobs, to working class and other struggling communities, and as the party’s small parliamentary majority bogs it down, then the appeal of Mrs May’s government will diminish. With Labour looking like an empty bubble of hope (or a pyramid scheme as suggested by the Economist’s Bagehot column), there is reason for the Lib Dems to gain.

Of course, the Lib Dems themselves have many serious questions to answer. But it may be easier than people think for it to double its vote share to 15-20% before coming under more serious scrutiny. As the keener Lib Dem activists travel to the latest by-election in Mr Cameron’s old seat in Witney, Oxfordshire, it is impossible not to notice the spring in their step. The bookies are already giving them second place (from fourth in 2015).

But this is a small shaft of light in a very gloomy British political landscape, as the wonton act of self-harm committed by its electorate in the referendum pushes events on a seemingly inevitable course.

TIm Farron aspires to lead the political left. This is optimistic

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader saved the best until last. His speech to close the party conference in Brighton yesterday was a barnstormer. He was interrupted by standing ovations several times. It was up to the standard set in Bournemouth last year. How much substance lies behind the expansive rhetoric?

The speech was ambitious. Tim set out make the Lib Dems the main opposition to the Conservative government, accusing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of abdicating the role. This is another example of the supreme, irrational optimism that, as former MP David Howarth pointed out in a fringe meeting, is the Lib Dems greatest strength and weakness.

Tim continues to use his big speeches to stake out the political ground for the party, on which we might hope for more substantial things to be built. The party’s policy motions at the conference failed to build anything much though. The many new members were no doubt delighted to meet up with so many like-minded people, and learn  about how politics works – but would have struggled to understand what the policy debates were for.

Tim places the party is the unambiguously on the left (or among the “progressives” in the favoured, rather misleading word), by defining it in opposition to the Tories. With the Conservatives hitched to Brexit, this is safer than it has been – but not as safe as trying to get the party to define its own, distinctive place in politics. Interestingly he made an appeal for the Lib Dems to be the party of business and free enterprise, and urged businesses to switch allegiance – and this went down quite well amongst the members. This is not the first time he has planted such hints, but I’m still unclear of what it will mean. Where I want it to go is a model of regional economic development not dependent of central state largesse. We shall see.

But the main policy fields sketched out were on Europe, health and social care, and education. The party is unambiguously pro EU, wishing to draw in Remain supporters. Tim advocates a referendum on whatever alternative to the EU the government eventually reaches. This may be cunning positioning, but I struggle with the idea as serious policy. The “destination” as he calls it probably will not be clear until Article 50 has been invoked and the bridges burnt. Hopes for some sort of middle way between hard Brexit (being outside the single market or a customs union) and full membership are fading. Still this is changing terrain and a more coherent pro-EU position may emerge. Nothing came out of the conference on the party’s vision for the EU itself, even though the institution is clearly in crisis. Where Tim was much stronger was in acknowledging the concerns of working class Brexit voters, referring to his own Lancashire working class roots. He is not trying to blame the voters, but to build bridges. This must be right, if not entirely consistent with some ideas of a “core vote” strategy.

He is much braver on health and social care. Tim, and his former leadership rival Norman Lamb, have identified that health and social care are in crisis. Norman, who remains highly respected in the party, is putting together a commission of experts to develop new vision – and one that will probably involve higher taxes. This is promising – it entails some thought leadership on an issue the public really cares about. With Labour bogged down in union vested interests, and the Tories lacking convincing policy, this development starts to answer the question “why the Liberal Democrats?”.

Alas there was much less thought leadership on education. The party’s instincts are sound enough, but I don’t think Tim, or many in the party, have quite caught up with where schools really are, rather than some rather lurid caricatures. But with the Conservatives veering off to the blind alley of school selection, the political opportunity remains for the party. Yet it would be good if it could develop more ambition. There is a policy working group on education (I applied but was not included) – but these groups tend to square off the party’s internal pressure groups, rather than try to develop a wider public debate – which the health initiative is clearly intended to do.

Tim also developed a general direction of travel for economic policy. He wants more for the regions outside London and the southeast – led by infrastructure investment. He said that these areas had been let down by both the Thatcher and Brown/Blair governments, who were seduced by the bankers, and under-invested in infrastructure and skills. There is something in this. And he did not walk into the leftist trap of employing abstract villains, such as neoliberalism or austerity. This is all sound, but not very distinctive. He could have been much stronger on green investment, but I think the party has sound instincts on that.

But what of my question of last week, about how the party is developing a narrative on coalition? It still wants to play both sides on this, and Tim talks about it as little as possible. He neither sells the coalition’s achievements, nor condemns it as a mistake. I attended a very interesting fringe with former ministers David Laws and Chris Huhne on the coalition years. They acknowledged errors – on tuition fees, benefit reform and NHS reform in particualr, but still enthused on what the coalition had achieved. Fine, but the party still has to explain how it can be of the left and at the same time prop up a government of the right. “That was then, and this is now” is about as good as it gets. The truth is that it very hard for the party. Some members expressed frustration that it does not make more of its achievements – others find many of the things the coalition did (notably on benefits and legal aid) a betrayal of the party’s principles. Expect the muddle to continue for a while. Personally I want the party to rethink its exclusive identification with the left, while seeking to identify areas of agreement with it. The party will help the left by becoming semi-detached – but in the right circumstances it will work with the right too.

And that takes us to a further question. How will the party work with other parties to get things done? It is all very well for Tim Farron to condemn Mr Corbyn’s leadership of Labour as an abdication, but what if Labour, under Mr Corbyn or otherwise, gets its act together? Tim did not rule out working with other parties, and there was plenty of talk at the conference of working with Labour and the Greens. I have bought a book, The Alternative, which tries to develop this – and I will report back when I have read it. For now it is far too easy for us Lib Dems to simply rule out working with Labour and dream to replace them, rather than wake up to the cold, hard realities of how little party is trusted. Working with Labour is about the only way  the party is going to achieve anything practical if it rules out working with the Conservatives again. It is fanciful to suggest that Labour will collapse and leave the field clear for the resurgence of the Lib Dems. But the party can still pick off Tory seats beyond Labour’s reach. Surely we are better off trying to get some form of constructive engagement?

What is clear to me is that the left needs to develop a new policy agenda which is capable of capturing the imagination of a sceptical public. The Lib Dems are engaging in this process. But, to put it at its kindest, it is far to early for the party to imagine that it can lead it.

To progress the Lib Dems must confront the coalition years

This weekend the British Liberal Democrats go to their main annual conference, in Brighton. They expect little media coverage, but buoyant membership should ensure a lively event. These members face a troubling question: how to rebuild the party’s electoral base. To do this they will have overcome its ambiguous feelings about its recent past.

Notwithstanding increases in membership following the 2015 General Election and this year’s EU referendum, there can be no doubting the party’s dire straits. It lost the overwhelming majority of its elected representatives at all levels over the period 2010 to 2015, when it was in coalition with the Conservatives. It has just 8 MPs (down from 57). The party’s poll ratings bump along at about 8%, ahead of the Greens, but usually behind Ukip, and nowhere with sight of Labour, notwithstanding that party’s troubles, never mind the Tories. There have been gratifying local by election successes over the summer, but only where the party has sufficient ground strength to fight an intensive campaign; elsewhere the party’s vote is as like to shrink to 2-3% as to advance to the giddy heights of 10% or so. There is no sign of a substantive breakout.

To do this, as I have written before, the party is going to have to do two things, which are in tension. The first is to build up a loyal, core vote of people with open and liberal attitudes, that will stick with the party no matter what. The coalition years exposed the lack of such a core mercilessly. Even the 8% that party managed in 2015 can’t be classed as a core vote. And yet there are plenty of  people out there who are potential core supporters, if the party can build trust. This is the pitch made by election expert Mark Pack and former Cambridge MP David Howarth. I broadly support this, but the second thing the party needs to do is win over floating voters at elections – people who don’t quite get the party’s core values, but who can be persuaded to support the party temporarily on, usually, quite narrow grounds.

This tension haunts all political parties, but Lib Dems need to understand it better. The problem is this: Mark and David have shown persuasively that potential core voters are left-leaning. But the most promising pool of floating voters are right-leaning. No other party is going after soft conservatives – and these could be decisive. The Lib Dems need to be a left-leaning party that can appeal to right-leaning voters.

There’s another dimension to the problem though. It is the general disengagement of the public from the ins and outs of politics. A friend, Douglas Oliver, made this point to me recently. He made the same point to columnist Matthew Parris in 2012. Mr Parris coined two laws; Oliver’s first law: “Memories dilute each other” and Oliver’s second law: “In the study of politics, close attention distorts judgement.” What Douglas is suggesting is that we who follow politics closely lose the wood for the trees. We are concerned with events and details that never receive the attention of the wider public. This has two consequences. The public will base their judgements on a much narrower range of facts and ideas than experts. And they have much longer political memories than experts, because events do not crowd out memories in the same way. It took over 20 years for Labour to exorcise the memories of their disastrous rule of the 1970s – and only then after their leader, Tony Blair, made that exorcism his prime focus – putting it ahead of party unity. Equally, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s failure to be clear about Mr Blair’s legacy fatally undermined the party at the 2015 election, leading to one of its worst results ever. The public weren’t impressed by lots of fancy new policies and warm words, and Miliband’s idea that the party should focus on the future, not the past. But the past is the main thing ordinary voters know about political parties.

That’s tough for the Lib Dems, because about the only thing the public really knows about the party is its record in coalition.  All conversations by the party with ordinary voters will start with the coalition. The party might want to start somewhere else – Europe perhaps – but they are as unlikely to succeed as Mr Miliband was with energy prices, austerity or inequality. Which means that the party must decide what it thinks about its recent past.

There are two ways this can go. The first is to attempt what Tony Blair did with Labour. To exorcise the coalition years as a terrible mistake which the party will never repeat. This will need more than words. It will mean rebranding the party, perhaps even changing its name (though unfortunately there is another “Liberal Party” already registered – perhaps “the New Liberals”?), as well as relegating those closest to the coalition, such as former leader Nick Clegg, to the outer edges of darkness. If people leave the party, that only shows that it is serious. Confronting the past is more important than party unity, Tim Farron, the party’s leader, is sufficiently distant from the coalition to pull this off – though he would have to eat some words.

But it is risky. Because if you throw away the coalition, what are you left with? You have to build an alternative vision of what the party is about, and then then sell it to a public with a short attention-span. The vision needs to be different enough from the Green Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for ordinary people to care – and abstract dissertations about the nature of “liberalism” won’t do; there must be concrete contrasts on topics that matter.  I hear quite a bit of use of the word “radical” from people of this general inclination, but very little about what they want to be radical about – apart from opposing any attempt to reform public services that does not involve a lot of extra taxpayers’ money. Which the Labour left already do. I’m being unfair, perhaps, but politics is a brutal business – and that’s how it looks.

Which leaves us with the second route: embracing the coalition years and claiming that time has vindicated them. At first blush this is just as hopeless. After all, if the public agreed with that idea, they would not have deserted it in droves. And there are aspects of the coalition years, especially the breach of the pledge on student tuition fees, that have taken on a high symbolic importance. Do the Lib Dems acknowledge mistakes, diluting the message, or brazen it out?

But there are advantages to embracing the coalition. It is a good starting point for a conversation with centre-right floating voters. Look at what happened when the Tories governed without a coalition: Brexit, grammar schools, tax breaks for the rich, etc. It is more challenging for the left-inclined potential core voters – but at least it drives a hard line between the party and the Greens and  Labour. It shows that the party stands beyond tribalism for a new sort of politics; when needs must the party will deal with the Tories, provided that certain red lines aren’t crossed. That’s a tough message, but a distinctive one.

I am not a fan of internal party “democracy” (self-selecting groups like political parties are fundamentally undemocratic), but this is something that is best decided by party members. The most interesting thing about Brighton will be to see how that group of more motivated party supporters thinks about the coalition years. I doubt that they are yet ready to confront the party’s past in the way they need to, but there should be signs of which way the wind is blowing.

The Lib Dems mission must be to pick up disillusioned Tory voters

Not so long ago the idea of a “progressive majority” was popular amongst leftish intellectuals. They noted that if you added together the poll ratings, and even general election votes, of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and (for some people) the Scots and Welsh Nationalists, there was a clear majority of the electorate, outnumbering the hated Conservatives and Ukip. This majority was regarded as a state of nature, and so, it was argued, proportional representation would lock it into the political system for good.

It was always optimistic. Both Labour and the Lib Dems drew voters who would happily support parties that were not “progressive”. This word is left’s own favoured description for itself. Since, in practice,  most “progressives” oppose any kind of reform to make the state or the economy more efficient, I really can’t bear not to place it in quotation marks when it is used to represent the broad left, rather than those who genuinely favour ideas that stand for the positive progress of society..

The flaw in the progressive majority idea is now open for all to see. In the 2015 General Election the Conservatives and Ukip outpolled the “progressive” parties. And that is before any disqualification of the Lib Dems after they entered coalition with the Conservatives. And if that wasn’t enough, the clear majority for Brexit, not supported by the “progressive” parties, confirmed it. Most parliamentary seats for “progressive” parties voted to leave the EU.

This is a fact that the far left (I almost used the word “radical”, but once more the word would be seriously misplaced for a bunch that includes so many people nostalgic for the 1970s). Many are convinced that Labour did so badly in 2015 because it was not left wing enough, with its half-hearted embrace of austerity. Challenged, they suggest that there is an army of disillusioned non-voters who could be drawn into voting for a party of the true left. Certainly there are a number of under-30s that could fit that description, but not enough. In fact most people who explore the polling data suggest people who do not vote are often less-educated and supportive of populist right wing policies. The Brexit referendum was relatively successful in bringing these non-voters out, and they did not vote Remain.

And yet calls for a progressive alliance persist. The Labour left is sceptical, to be sure – to them Labour alone should be the progressive alliance. But many Greens and Lib Dems would contemplate ganging up with other parties in order to push forward progressive reforms. These include constitutional and electoral reform, sustainable economics, and stronger environmental protection. In principle I would support such an alliance, but only with a Labour Party genuinely committed to political pluralism – which rules out the current leadership.

And yet, even if Labour could be brought into the picture, the numbers don’t add up, even if the SNP could be brought into it. An alliance would need to present a serious challenge to the Conservatives in English constituencies. Labour and Green support might help the Lib Dems recover some of their lost seats; the Greens might pick up one or two seats. But it is very hard to see how Green and Lib Dem support would give enough help to Labour. Instead it is more likely that the Tories would successfully exploit Labour muddle to destroy the whole alliance.

So, is it game over for progressive politics? Not quite. Brexit may have won the referendum, but Remain still managed 48% of the vote. But that 48% includes a lot of people who normally vote Conservative. If a way can be found to peel these voters away into a progressive alliance, then it could be back in business.

And it isn’t hard to see what might do this. The Prime Minister Theresa May is enjoying a political honeymoon, but her party is at sixes and sevens over Brexit. It is not at all clear what shape a post Brexit Britain will take because her party is hopelessly divided on it. The moderates want to create a cosy relationship with the EU, in order to protect investment and the economy. But the Eurosceptics that make up so much of the party will not stomach the compromises that entails. Meanwhile, if the British economy goes into recession, as many fear, the pressure on government finances will drive further division. It is not beyond imagination that the only way out will involve a second referendum.

The Conservatives might split under the strain. That is unlikely. As Labour will find out as its MPs contemplate their position, the pressures for the large parties to stay in one unit under Britain’s electoral system are huge. There are no safe seats for breakaway parties, and safe seats are most MPs have no real idea of how to fight a hard seat or the stomach to do it. But the splits will undermine the Tory credibility, giving the chance for other parties to take their votes.

And surely this is the historic mission for the recovering Liberal Democrats. Labour has lost interest in anybody that has contemplated voting Conservative (as both leadership contenders vie to prove how left-wing they are), and the Greens have never had it. There is nobody else to fill the vacant space. For once the coalition experience may prove a positive. That might then revive the idea of a progressive alliance, though the credibility of the Labour Party would be a major obstacle. It remains the best chance for progressive politics.

The Lib Dems are understandably focusing on their core vote, and not on scooping up flighty floating voters. But in order to achieve anything the party will have to return to appealing to these voters in due course. Disillusioned Labour voters will not be enough. The party will have to detach centre-right voters too. That should be food for thought for the party as it tries to redefine itself in British voters’ minds.

Was the coalition’s austerity policy a colossal mistake?

Politics is dominated by historical myths, about which the different political camps disagree. Examining these myths critically is one way that societies can find reconciliation. While “austerity”, the favoured shorthand for government cutbacks, is fast sinking as an issue in British politics, long since overtaken by Brexit, its mythology remains a defining issue. This mythology has right and left versions. I want to look at the mythology of the left.

Few in the Labour Party would disagree with Oxford Economist Simon Wren-Lewis in a recent article that austerity “will go down in history as probably the most costly macroeconomic policy mistake since the 1930s, causing a great deal of misery to many people’s lives.” We in the Lib Dems are implicated in this criticism, as part of the coalition government of 2010-2015 that implemented austerity. It is exhibit B in the Labour case that the Lib Dems should cease to exist as a political party, and that all “progressives” should simply join their party (exhibit A being the tuition fees fiasco). So what are we to make of it?

Mr Wren-Lewis sets out this narrative very clearly in his article. He is an open Labour supporter, so his comments come with a political slant – but he is a proper economist and the case he makes is a substantial one.

This narrative runs something like this: in 2008-2009 Britain followed the world into a severe recession, brought about by a global banking crisis. This inevitably created a government deficit, of which he says: “We experienced record deficits in 2010 simply because the recession was unusually severe.” The Labour government used fiscal stimulus to moderate the effects of the recession, but the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that came to power in 2010 rejected this approach and focused obsessively (so the story goes) with reducing the deficit, using austerity policies – cutting government spending severely. He claims that this focus on austerity had no economic merit, and is best understood as a political exercise to reduce the size of government, with misery as its by-product.

Mr Wren-Lewis says that the government defended its policy with three arguments: that innovative monetary policy would provide the necessary stimulus; that improved business and consumer confidence would do the trick; and that financial markets would not finance the national debt unless action was taken. He demolishes each of these arguments, and I would not disagree with him, though there is an element of hindsight and the first two ideas came good in the end. As a result, he says, the British recovery was extremely slow, costing the average household £4,000 a year – coincidentally about the same as the Treasury’s estimate of the costs of Brexit.

But Mr Wren-Lewis is being disingenuous. There was a fourth argument for austerity. And that was that most of the deficit in in 2010 was “structural” – in other words had a deeper cause the recession. If I remember correctly, the Office of Budget Responsibility estimated that about 8% or so of the 11% deficit was structural. In other words a lot of the pre-crash tax revenues were gone for good, and would require more than short term demand management to bring them back.There is plenty of scope for disagreement amongst professional economists here – but it does suggest an alternative narrative, to which I personally subscribe.

This narrative posits that the British economy was not in a stable position when recession struck. It had already been pumped up by excess fiscal stimulus; there was too much private sector debt; and there was an unhealthy dependence on international finance and, to a lesser degree, North Sea oil. The evidence for this is not just the precipitate nature of the crash – bigger in Britain than in other developed nations – but the large current account deficit before, during and after the crash, and the high level of Sterling beforehand, and its abrupt fall. It is true that the public deficit did not look outsized by international standards before the crash, but, as my macroeconomics lecturer pointed out at the time, the overall economic context had classic signs unsustainable fiscal stimulus. The crash was more than an ordinary business-cycle downturn, it was Britain’s financial chickens coming home to roost.

So what does that mean? It means that fiscal stimulus as a response to the recession would have only a limited impact, and would not have restored the economy to its previous health, and in particular it would not have solved the government’s deficit problem. Before long the additional demand generated would have led to inflation (in fact unlikely outside economics textbooks) or (much more likely) a worsening current account deficit, i.e. stimulating other countries’ economies rather than ours. That put the British government in a bind. There was a case for stimulating demand through fiscal policy, and yet government expenditure had to be cut back towards something sustainable in the medium term. The government in fact plotted a middle way and, far from obsessively focusing on deficit reduction, moderated the cuts when the recovery proved slower than they expected. The trajectory of deficit reduction was close to that projected by the outgoing Labour government in 2010.

But many distinguished economists were and remain highly critical of the coalition’s austerity policies. Labour supporters can quote any number of famous names. But you need to read what these distinguished people actually said, rather than the mood music they fed into. In fact they hedged their bets. They focused criticism on the lack of public investment, and not across the board austerity. Investment, in theory anyway, is a magic bullet in this context. It generates future productivity growth, so helps to put the economy on a more sustainable future path, while at the same time providing short-term demand. This is a perfectly valid criticism of the coalition record, shared by many Lib Dems who were part of the government. But it does not suggest that the majority of austerity policies were wrong in principle. Taxes and spending were badly out of line and something had to be done to return them to balance. All I can say in the government’s defence is that public investment is much harder to do in practice than in theory – so often the money ends up in wasteful white elephant projects. But it would have relatively easy to allow the building of more council homes, for example.

Where I agree with Mr Wren-Lewis (though he does not explicitly say it) is that the macro-economic policy presented by Labour at the General Election in 2015, under Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, was much more sensible than the one presented for the Conservatives by George Osborne. Mr Osborne proposed a charge towards fiscal surplus that made little economic sense – and one year on it is being buried by his successor. The Labour strategy would have knocked some of the hard edges off austerity, while promoting a higher level of investment. The left is right to call to call it “austerity-lite”, but wrong to suggest that this was a bad thing.

So criticism of austerity is warranted, but this does not amount to what the left wants it to do: to prove that cuts to government spending and benefits were unnecessary, and still less that they can be reversed. Extra spending will require higher taxes. Economists may feel that austerity policies are self-defeating in many instances, such as in some of the Eurozone adjustment programmes. But there is also growing recognition of a deeper weakness in many advanced economies, including Britain’s, signified by the stagnation of productivity. That is limiting tax revenues and what governments can afford to do. That weakness should be the central topic of political debate.

 

 

How should Lib Dems embrace economic policy?

The British Liberal Democrats are setting up a policy working group on the “21st Century Economy”. I was among over 200 people to volunteer to take part, but sadly I was not picked. Those that have been picked will face truly daunting quantities of advice and  reading material, but nevertheless but doesn’t stop me from offering my thoughts today. This time I won’ focus on the hard content of any new policy, but on its all-important political framing.

So far as content is concerned, regular readers will have got the hang of it. I blogged about it last year as part of another Lib Dem initiative, recommending Four Themes. These themes are green growth, small is beautiful, humane public services and redistribution of imbalances.

This line of thinking is very compatible with Lib Dem values and should go down well with the membership. But it presents a political problem. It means overturning several beliefs that the British public policy establishment holds dear. These include that higher volumes of consumption of things are essential to economic health (and may even be a measure of it), and that large, centrally controlled systems and organisations are the most efficient.  It amounts to a policy revolution. And revolutions make people uncomfortable.

It is essential for future political success for the Lib Dems to have one foot in the political mainstream – so that they are regarded as being basically a sensible party. If they aren’t they will be condemned to the margins of politics like the Greens. It is the same dilemma faced by Labour supporters as they challenge capitalist ways. You do not secure lasting political progress in a democracy from the extremes.

The Lib Dems should therefore present a radical policy agenda in an un-radical way. It must be evolutionary, not revolutionary. The party needs to specify small steps forward, each of which is able to achieve demonstrable improvements, that will over time change the conventional wisdom.

This is why I particularly like the idea of Green Growth. it contains a highly constructive ambiguity. On the one hand it suggests that the party favours economic growth in the conventional sense, which the public has come to associate with better employment conditions and higher pay. But it does not quite say what is actually meant by growth – it could mean general wellbeing and quality of life rather than volume of consumption. Meanwhile the phrase unambiguously points to environmental sustainability. I strongly suggest that the Lib Dems make the phrase central to their proposition, or come up with something that does the job even better.

That’s my first piece of advice. My next advice is that they need to tread very carefully around two hot political topics: free trade and macro-economic management (aka “austerity”). These may well be excluded from the policy group’s formal scope, but the party’s wider narrative cannot avoid tackling them.

Free trade is a totemic issue for the Liberal Democrats. It was the one of the key organising themes of its predecessor: the Liberal Party. That was in a different time and context, of course. The Liberals then saw free trade as a way of breaking the hold of the landowning classes, who sought to protect their business interests (especially agricultural) at the expense of high prices for the masses. But even now, it is clear that freedom of trade, and competition, is a good way of keeping consumer prices down and freedom of choice up. By and large the general framework of world trade is something that Lib Dems will be quite happy with.

But something has changed in the power balance. Free trade helps keeps prices down, but it also seems to be doing the same with wages, until you reach a globally mobile elite of senior managers and other professionals. And worse, the instruments of free trade can allow globally powerful businesses to legally challenge public policy. There are some particularly odious examples from the tobacco industry as they have successfully slowed down, though not defeated, the introduction of plain packaging of cigarettes. Intellectual property is another issue that needs to be examined with a sceptical attitude. It is promoted by many businesses as being akin to any other form of property right and fundamental to civilised existence, but it is often used to stifle freedom and innovation, rather than encourage it. It is a favourite means for the manipulation of profits to low tax regimes by multinationals.

And trade agreements make this a hot topic. Brexit adds to the relevance. There were already cogent arguments that the EU was using its free trade rules to block general public policy (such as restricting state subsidies to the steel industry – though liberals should see two sides to that argument). Brexit does let Britain off the hook for the proposed EU-US trade pact – TTIP – which is causing a lot liberal angst. But the country must decide what sort of trading relationships it wants, and how far to go – including whether to join multilateral pacts such as the nascent one in the Pacific, TPP, which the country could join if it left the EU (or so I read). I have to say that I am agnostic on this question. My faith in free trade pacts has been shaken, but not destroyed. But the issue is becoming a political touchstone, and the Lib Dems would do well to apply some serious thought to this area, rather than recycling old slogans.

The Lib Dems will also find a minefield confronting them on macroeconomic management. The left have decided to make opposition to “austerity” one of its organising principles. I suspect that is because they draw so much strength from public sector employees and people from places such as universities and charities that depend heavily on public largesse in some shape or form. But anti-austerity does not resonate amongst the general public, who generally get the impression (justified or not) that public spending benefits other people. Since the Greens and Labour have drawn away the more trenchant political voices on the left, the Lib Dems have the opportunity to strike a more nuanced tone. Austerity is an elastic idea, so it is quite possible to say that you are against it, but the party should not apply “homeopathic policy” – mouthing anti austerity rhetoric while diluting the substance – as this did not work well for the previous Labour leadership.

My advice is for the Lib Dems is to stay clear as they can from the word “austerity”, and to strongly advocate higher levels of public investment in education (not just schools, incidentally) and green growth. Public services, though, must deliver value for money, and will need continued reform – though not the brainless outsourcing and “payment by results” favoured by the Conservative government.

So there are some hard questions and tricky politics. But as I said last week, the left has to develop a new economic narrative. Given the staleness of the economic discourse on the far left, the Lib Dems have real opportunity to take up thought leadership. There is a real prize to be taken here.

The rise of Labour’s hard left reflects the weakness of the soft left

I am no fan the British Labour Party. I have spent years enduring its arrogance and tribalism; I would not mind terribly if the party did not survive its current crisis. There is a temptation to gloat over its predicament – though this would be a distraction from the important political questions of our time. But it is more important to reflect on wider lessons for the political left.

Labour’s immediate problem is that their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has no idea how to lead a political party, even if he were inclined to lead it in a sensible direction. To understand the depth of his failure I would point to two articles by former supporters. First from the Guardian journalist Owen Jones is getting a lot of attention right now; but what really shocked me was this from Richard Murphy, who developed Mr Corbyn’s economic manifesto last year, when he was running for the Labour leadership. And yet Mr Corbyn remains very popular in the party’s mass membership, much of which has only recently joined, who seem convinced that he represents a new kind of politics, and that criticism arises from malign forces. And that is enough to keep Mr Corbyn secure in his role.

As a convenient shorthand I will call Mr Corbyn and his supporters the “hard left”, though it is in fact a more complex fusion of old and new leftist trends than this name suggests. The word “hard” suggests its uncompromising attitude towards the political and business establishment, and its rejection of the conventional methods of politics. It compares with two other loose groupings. First are centrists, who held sway in the late 1990s and 2000s under former leader Tony Blair. These combined an embrace of global capitalism with a broad role for government intervention, albeit using quasi-market structures much of the time, and with a contempt for intermediate levels of democratic intervention below national government. The centrists made a successful pitch for formerly Conservative voters, giving the party power from 1997 to 2010. And yet the left of the party felt betrayed by its compromises, and especially by the Mr Blair’s support for the Iraq war in 2003.

In between the centrists (otherwise referred to as Blairites) and the hard left stands what outsiders call the “soft left”. I’m not sure if they would be happy to use that term themselves, they might prefer “liberal left”, but it seems to me highly appropriate. The soft left want to have the best of both worlds: drawing on the anger felt by the public sector workers that are the core of the hard left, while still wanting to achieve and wield political power through conventional political processes. The soft left became the dominant Labour faction under the leadership of Ed Miliband, after Labour lost power in 2010 until last year’s general election. It still forms most of Labour’s parliamentary party, and it is trying to oust Mr Corbyn as leader.

The success of the hard left reflects the weakness of the centrists and the soft left. The centrists are now a busted flush. The financial crash of 2008 exposed the hollowness of their achievement; the economy was not robust enough to support the level of public expenditure they favoured. Meanwhile their economic policies seemed to favour an affluent minority. While they might use government agencies to redistribute much of the wealth, what was required was decent jobs in poorer parts of the country. The Conservatives took over much of their governing ethos.

The soft left are no better, and that goes to the heart of Labour’s problems. They have no more idea about what to do than anybody else; the hard left doesn’t have much idea either, but is able to focus its energies on being against things instead. They nevertheless focus hard on what they have to do and say in order to win back political power. Under Mr Miliband this took the form of endless re-launches as they tested out one half-baked idea after another.  By 2015 they ended up with an election manifesto that was generally centrist. Its core fiscal policy is in the process of being adopted by Theresa May’s new Conservative government, along with many other policies and priorities. But in order to coopt the anger of the hard left they had to dress it up as something more radical. This is what, in another context, the Economist calls “homeopathic politics”: the adoption of radical policies in minute quantities in the hope that it will create a positive aura by association. The Economist framed this idea to describe the way the American right tries to tap into the anger of the working classes at globalisation. Its warning was that it always backfires, as it will never satisfy the people that it Is trying to appeal too. In due course it led to the capture of the Republican nomination by Donald Trump. Something similar has happened to the soft left.

The soft left have compounded their problems by changing the leadership election rules so that not only is the mass membership in control, but they are boosted by temporary members (though they are trying to backtrack on this now). Two muddled ideas seem to be behind this. The first was that broadening the franchise for the leadership battle would make the selectorate more representative of the country at large; a quick glance at US primary elections should have shaken them out of that. Second was that the soft left could ride the tide of left wing anger at “austerity” and “neoliberalism”, the abstract ideas that the hard left choose to obsess about. But they have been outgunned by the hard left.

Meanwhile soft left MPs have shown little backbone. Their chosen challenger to Mr Corbyn, Owen Smith, was almost unheard of outside Labour circles, and even he required another MP, Angela Eagle, to break cover and make the initial challenge. The best qualified MPs to be leader are keeping a low profile.

The political misjudgements and the lack of backbone are signs of a wider weakness – a failure to develop distinctive political ideas of their own with which to excite the country at large. Owen Jones’s article, linked to above, takes the form of a series of questions to which he feels Mr Corbyn’s supporters have no convincing answer. But the soft left would struggle with exactly these questions.

This vacuum of ideas on the left is not unique to Britain. It is why populists of left and right are doing so well in so many developed countries. It is why the left is in full retreat in Latin America too. Beyond the populists it is leaving the political space dominated by the centre-right, such as Britain’s Conservatives and Germany’s Christian Democrats. Developing new, liberal ideas on economics and democracy is now of the utmost urgency on the left. I wish more people were engaged in that exercise.

And it is the best hope for my party: the Liberal Democrats. It has flirted with both centrism and the soft left; neither will work now. But it is as close as anybody to the new ideas that will be needed to take our society forward. It should make development of these ideas its top priority.

But what are these new ideas? A topic for another day!

The Liberal Democrats: a rebirth not a fightback

Britain’s political system is in turmoil, and each political party faces distinct problems. For now the Conservatives seem to be weathering the crisis best; the referendum result was the right one for them, in party management terms at least. Labour’s crisis is looking terminal, “the reek of death” as this excellent article by Nick Cohen has it, describing the particular lunacy of the political far left. But what of the party that has already suffered death: the Liberal Democrats?

Death might sound a bit strong. It continues to bob along at 8% or so in the opinion polls, win the odd local election, and its membership is resurgent. But the party has regained little of the political traction it lost during its coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015. And so much of the human capital and community connections it built up in its growth years in the 1990s and early 2000s has gone. Locally I can’t get over the fact that the Lambeth party has lost all its councillors – I remember so well the process by which the party took de facto control of the council in 2002, a process that will now have to restart almost from scratch. The party is now almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. In David Cameron’s valedictory Prime Minster’s Questions last week the Speaker saw fit not to call any of the party’s MPs, in spite of the important role the party played in his premiership. Only Lib Dem activists noticed.

And yet new life is stirring. Last year, after the calamitous General Election, party membership surged, and the Autumn conference was one its best attended, though ignored by lobbyists and media. But that is as nothing compared to what has happened in the last month – after the referendum. Membership has surged again (my local party has grown by about 60% – this may be the strongest it has ever been), but it is very different from last year. In 2015 the members were sorry for the party; they were interested in it, but few were up for a fight. In 2016 they are boiling. Membership events are better attended than ever; new and recent members want to get involved. The party is benefiting from a general increase in political engagement, which is benefiting most other parties too.

What is happening? Last year the party celebrated the membership surge under the hashtag #libdemfightback. This made me cringe. The old party is dead. A new party is being born. Not enough of the party’s remaining old hands recognise the difference between a fightback and a rebirth. With the latter you are dealing with a new party.

I want to say something about what I suspect about the reborn party. This is unashamedly based on my local experience in this part of cosmopolitan London, plus reading the odd blog and social media comment. I may be proved wrong – this year’s party conference in Brighton will be an important test. But here goes anyway.

First the new party is cosmopolitan, well educated, and, as a generality, distinctly younger than the old one.  Many in the old party, including me, find the new members to be kindred spirits. But much of the old party was built through local campaigning, and drew in a distinctly less cosmopolitan crowd. Many female activists reported casual sexism that would be anathema to the new membership. The new party may find it harder to rebuild in its old rural strongholds than many suppose, but it should be less dominated by white male representatives.

Second, the new party is not very tribal by British political standards. The need for political alliances to achieve wider political ends is often mentioned. The wider political scene, and especially the promotion of cosmopolitan values, is more important than the party’s own fortunes. Old hands need to be conscious of this, though the party leader, Tim Farron, has clearly picked this up.

Third, the new party is distinctly more centrist than the old one. After the coalition with the Conservatives ended in 2015, many old hands thought they could put those years behind them, and recover the party’s old standing as part of the “radical” left, which peaked in 2005. The new members will give them a shock. They may cringe at the tuition fees debacle, but they do not regard the coalition government, and its austerity policies, as a betrayal. They are largely private sector in employment and outlook. The more left-wing types have joined Labour. Members of the old party who think the former leader Nick Clegg should be erased from the party’s history will not find a receptive audience.

So, those are the main elements of the new party that is taking shape. What about its political opportunity? So far there is little evidence of traction with the public at large; but with the Conservatives embracing Brexit and Labour showing suicidal tendencies, that could easily change. At this point I just want to posit one negative and two positives.

The negative is shared with the emerging Labour Party, which is undergoing its own rebirth, except that in their case the old party hasn’t died yet. The social base of its membership is narrow. It will be a huge challenge to broaden the party’s appeal to less cosmopolitan groups – and yet that is what the party must do to succeed. At least the Lib Dems, unlike Labour, who are victims an overblown sense of political entitlement, can have few illusions about the scale of the challenge.

The first positive is that the referendum has proved to a cataclysmic political event, that has helped erase memories of what went before it, or at least changed their perspective. This gives the Lib Dems the chance to move on from its recent traumas more speedily that otherwise.

The second positive is that the referendum result has changed the political dynamic in the party’s favour, just as the country embarks on a course that it thinks is profoundly wrong. Previously being against the EU was a central organising theme of anti-establishment politics.  All sorts of ills could be blamed on EU membership, and it was very hard to refute these claims. Now that dynamic is reversing. The country’s ills can plausibly be blamed on Brexit, and life in the EU can slowly be built into a sort of promised land. Being pro-EU and pro-immigration will become anti-establishment. That is a much easier dynamic for an up and coming political party to play with, whatever the justice of it.

The media will continue to treat the Lib Dems as if their party was dead. The survival of the reborn party is certainly not assured. But something interesting is happening.

Remain supporters won’t get over Brexit but we must move on

“I feel that part of my identity has been taken away,” said one of our members in a local Liberal Democrat meeting last week. The local party, in a cosmopolitan part of London that voted 75% Remain, has grown its membership by 50% since the referendum result. I have never known members to be more motivated. Shock is turning to anger, though not yet to coherent action.

It turns out that party members are not alone, at least here in London. Psychotherapist Susie Orbach describes in the Guardian how her patients (mostly Remainers) will talk of little other than Brexit. Many had not been politically engaged, and hadn’t thought they were particularly worked up about the issue, but now find themselves in profound psychological shock. Interestingly this does not present itself as anger at the majority of Brexit voters, understood as being as those left behind by globalisation. I found that at our members’ meeting too.

This depth of feeling is surprising. I have been told many times that Britons had not accepted European-ness as part of their identity. Unlike those from other countries, they viewed the EU as a transaction which they weighed up in cold pragmatic terms. This has never been true of me personally, but I supposed that I was in a tiny minority. Us British-Europeans are still in a minority – but not as tiny as previously thought. For me feeling European was something to do with the stultifying claustrophobia of Englishness, and a strong feeling of not being American. For others, perhaps many years of foreign travel, and of European work colleagues and neighbours, have crept up on them without their realising it. Their horizons have just been narrowed. Freedom of movement, at the heart of Leave voters’ concerns, is closely linked to Remain supporters’ sense of who they are.

So there’s a gulf of understanding between us and that part of the political and economic elite that supports Brexit. This was evident from Sunday morning’s Point of View on Radio 4, by philosopher John Gray. He told Remainers to get over it and move on. To him the EU is a failing international project that Britain is well out of, and that Britain would be the first country to exit of many. He differed from many commentators in not seeing the British as exceptional from other Europeans, but he still saw the EU as essentially transactional – a power play by a shadowy group of politicians and bureaucrats. He was quite perceptive in many ways, though I think he made some factual errors. It is not right to call the EU strongly protectionist against countries outside it, except in agricultural products, where it has plenty of company, such as the USA and most emerging markets. The European expansion was not an exercise by the European elite to grow and deepen the EU, but something of a plot by Eurosceptics to make deepening impossible. The imposition of austerity policies on many European countries is not those same elites desperately trying to keep the union together – but a number of better off countries in the Union putting boundaries on its powers to deploy their taxpayers’ funds. These errors reveal a lack of understanding, though they do not directly undermine his conclusion.

But what Mr Gray has missed is how bound up the EU has become in people’s sense of identity. This happens in the same way as identity has become bound up with the nation-state. Why on Earth should the English feel a sense of belonging to the British state after all? We just do, and it grew over a 1,000 years; in 1066 the English state was controlled by alien Normans. On the way Englishness and Britishness have become entangled. Many English Brexit voters, incidentally, seem only loosely tied to the idea of Britishness, never mind European-ness. Identification with the EU varies from country to country, and is genuinely weaker in England (and Wales and Cornwall and Unionist Ulster) than in most other European countries. I sense it is also weak in Austria, for example, but strong in Germany and France. Identification should not be confused with satisfaction. The English are dissatisfied with the British state, but they don’t want to leave it so set their own governments in Yorkshire, Somerset or wherever. The sense of identity of so many of its citizens gives the EU a much better chance of surviving than Mr Gray thinks. He is far from the first of Britain’s intellectual elite to underestimate the EU’s capacity for progress and survival. I remember being assured by most of the Britons I met in the 1990s that European monetary union was utterly impossible. In the mid 1950s British thought the idea on the union laughable.

So, much as the Brexit leaders tell us Remainers to get over it, we won’t; there is a complete gulf of comprehension. Much like opponents of EU membership could not get over the last referendum, in 1975. As a nation we are utterly divided.

But us Europeans will have to move on, even if we cannot accept the result in our souls. The referendum result could be reversed – but only after a prolonged period of disillusionment and failure to get a satisfactory new way of being – and even then it would be hard. Our project to return to the European family could take another 40 years. It will happen as people’s outlook becomes more cosmopolitan; as the current 20-somethings move into their retirement; and as the bedrock of anti-European identity literally dies out. The central demand will be to restore the freedom to move, work and settle.

Meanwhile we must take on other political projects, to help create a less divided Britain and a less divided Europe. That means taking the Brexit slogan of “Take Control” seriously. The Brexit leaders have no intention of implementing this idea beyond the Westminster political establishment, and perhaps in boardrooms. We must look at the communities who voted to leave, and ask ourselves how to make the people living there less powerless. We may regard the Brexit leaders as traitors, but the bulk of people that voted for them are our sisters and brothers.