Politics UK

Bill Jones, Philip Norton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134856893
• Edition: 9
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This revised and updated ninth edition of the bestselling textbook Politics UK is an indispensable introduction to British politics. It provides a thorough and accessible overview of the institutions and processes of British government, a good grounding in British political history and an incisive introduction to the issues and challenges facing Britain today, including the European referendum and Brexit.

The ninth edition welcomes brand new material from seven new contributors to complement the rigorously updated and highly respected chapters retained from the previous edition. It delivers excellent coverage of contemporary events including a new chapter on Euro-scepticism and the European referendum, an assessment of the performance of Labour's leadership, the trials and tribulations of the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, and the evolving devolution debate in Scotland, led by the Scottish Nationalist Party.

Features of the new edition include:

• Britain in context boxes offering contrasting international perspectives on key themes in British politics
• A comprehensive 'who's who' of politics in the form of Profile boxes featuring key political figures
• And another thing... pieces containing short articles written by distinguished commentators including Mark Garnett, Sir David Omand, Richard Wilkinson and Sir Simon Jenkins
• An epilogue analyzing the turbulent state of UK politics following the European referendum

With chapters written by highly respected scholars in the field and contemporary articles on real-world politics from well-known political commentators, this textbook is an essential guide for all students of British politics.

PART 1

CONTEXT

CHAPTER 1

The changing context of UK politics and key concepts in the study of politics

Bill Jones

“There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions; and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government”

Voltaire, Politique et legislation

Learning objectives

■ To explain how the context of British politics has undergone drastic change over the past decade: world economic crisis, growth of extreme ideas and parties, the EU Referendum.

■ To establish some understanding of the discipline of political science to enable understanding of the rest of the book.

■ To discuss the nature of politicians and the reasons why they choose their profession.

■ To explain and illustrate the concept of politics and how political ideas often rest on assumptions about human nature.

■ To explain the importance of certain further core concepts which enable us to understand political activity.

■ To provide a brief overview of topics covered in the book.

A political scene transformed

Impact of world economic crisis 2007–9 and Brexit vote, June 2016

The purpose of this opening chapter is to introduce the subject of politics and explain some of its central concepts. But first of all it seeks to explain the extreme volatility and rapidly changing nature of recent UK politics.

Since the turn of the last century, and especially since the 2007–8 world economic calamity, the crisis in economics has evolved into something approaching a crisis for democratic government itself. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute (July 2016) revealed that 65–70% of people in advanced economies suffered an earnings freeze 2005–14: in the US the figure was 81%, in UK 70%. ‘In the UK the real wages of the typical (median) worker fell by about 10% between 2008 and 2014’ (The Times, 15th November 2016). Furthermore the number of workers facing ‘precarious’ employment rose in 2016 to 7.1 million, up from 5.3 million in 2006 (The Guardian, 16th November 2016). The frustrations of this economically threatened group, exacerbated by the continuing soaring enrichment of the top percentiles, expressed themselves in symptoms which included: an increasing volatility in political opinion, a collapse of trust in democratic institutions, a growth of political apathy and abstention, a collapse in support for traditional centre ground parties and a tendency to support the idea of a strong decisive leader who ignores the balance and cautious consultation of democratic processes.

One of the UK’s leading journalists, Jonathan Freedland, has analysed these developments with some acuity in his essay ‘Welcome to the World of Trump’ (The Guardian, 19th May 2016).

He focuses on the USA but argues the malaise is now present throughout western Europe.

If two decades of globalisation have had their winners and losers, it is, brutally, the losers who are rallying to the populist flag – though that flag comes in stripes and colours that vary from country to country…. While the richest 10% of US society became 75% richer 1998–2013, working class Americans saw their net worth decline in that period by a staggering 53%.

The American Dream, whereby hard work earned according to the rules, no longer seems to equal success and comfort. ‘Squeezed economically, the world around them increasingly unrecognisable, these are the voters who believe both [US] parties and therefore the system have failed. And so it makes sense to turn to someone entirely outside it – someone who promises to smash it to pieces’. He notes the appeal of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator who (astonishingly) succeeded in making ‘socialism’, for a few months of 2016 at least, part of the mainstream American political conversation. He notes social research showing 44% of Americans respond to psychological surveys as ‘authoritarian’, a tendency activated when under stress caused by the threat of change. The economic crisis and liberalising changes to the culture like gay marriage, not to mention the threat of ISIS, may all be feeding into simplistic desires for a ‘strongman’ to cut through the toils of bureaucratic government and ‘solve’ such problems. A measure of the potency of these influences is the fact that Trump, of course, went on to win the presidency in November 2016.

Over in Europe, similar tendencies are observed: support for the left – Syriza in Greece, Podemus in Spain; support for the right – Marine le Pen in France, Victor Urban in Hungary, the Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, the Swiss People’s Party and strongman Recep Erdoğan in Turkey. In the UK, of course, we had the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by beer-drinking, fag-smoking populist Nigel Farage, supported by angry mostly poorly educated white working-class voters, similar to Trump’s US supporters. UK’s manifestation of this anger – some called it a ‘working-class revolt’ – was the extraordinary Leave decision in the EU Referendum, 23rd June 2016. Despite the emphasis of the Remain campaign on economic arguments, Leave won with an effective – though some claim shameful – emphasis on immigration. It seems as if a new element has been added to UK political thinking: a ‘closed’ and ‘open’ spectrum relating to other countries which cuts across the more widely used left–right one (see Box 1.2 on ‘post-democracy’ and Chapter 7 for a full analysis of Brexit).

Anger is directed at several possible ‘villains’: the political elite of both main parties; the corporate world which continues to enrich itself during recessions and refuses to pay a fair share of taxation. Freedland concludes:

Whether it is tax avoidance, globalisation – in the form of free trade, outsourcing and mass migration – the even greater challenge of climate change, or the ever widening gap between the [richest] 1% and the rest, democracy has come to look impotent, unable to protect people from the mightiest forces confronting them. In Europe, Farage and Le Pen play on similar rage at migration, Farage making the case that British democracy has vanished – with power over the nation’s borders shifting not to the corporate boardroom, but to Brussels.

Fall-out from Referendum campaign and result

Freedland was writing before the 23rd June UK vote on membership of the European Union, which most commentators assumed would result in a majority for Remain, the campaign for which was led by David Cameron, George Osborne and most of the business world plus a majority of all MPs. After a bitter and turbulent campaign (see Chapter 7 for a full analysis), the result was a narrow 51.9% for Leave and 48.1% for Remain: ‘Brexit’.

In the wake of this, British politics seemed to suffer a temporary nervous breakdown. The most prominent leader of the successful Leave campaign was expected to take over in Downing St once Cameron resigned in the wake of his defeat. Instead his fellow campaigner, Michael Gove appeared to engineer the collapse of Boris Johnson’s campaign, of which amazingly he was the manager, through a rather transparent plot whereby he made his own bid for the top job. Gove’s comeuppance occurred when his bid was not supported by his fellow MPs, and he dropped out after two rounds of voting. The winner was the uncharismatic Theresa May, the long-serving Home Secretary who, while ostensibly supporting Remain was suspected of Leave sympathies and was perceived as being a ‘safe pair of hands’ by MPs and activists alike. When her opponent, the Leave advocate Andrea Leadsom, dropped out of the race, May became Prime Minister on Wednesday, 13th July 2016. Many expected May, in the wake of such a narrow decision, to seek a deal with the EU, which leaned as close as possible to the existing relationship (‘Soft Brexit’). However, she did the opposite, refusing to explain her thinking and appearing to favour a complete break from Brussels (‘Hard Brexit’).

Meanwhile the Labour Party was apparently imploding. After the 2015 election Ed Miliband had resigned, and in the ensuing leadership contest, the candidate who caught the imagination of the membership was veteran ‘hard left’ rebel, Jeremy Corbyn. As leader he initially struggled to make much impression despite some good by-election results. A long-time opponent of the EU, he supported Remain, but most of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) thought his performance lacked conviction and they passed an overwhelming vote of no confidence in him on 28th June. Corbyn went on to win the challenge mounted by Owen Smith and remained in power to lead his party against Theresa May in the surprise snap election she called in April 2017.

Election of 8th June 2017

This development was not linked directly to the Brexit vote, despite May’s claim that it was necessary to prevent opposition parties frustrating her plans to fulfil voters’ Brexit instruction; she therefore needed an increased ‘mandate’ and majority to carry out her and the nations’ objectives. In reality her plans had sailed through virtually unopposed. A more credible explanation for her calling an election was that the opinion polls showed a massive 20 plus point Tory lead over Labour plus a soaring personal poll lead for May herself over Corbyn. Moreover, close colleagues were urging her not to miss this open goal to virtually eliminate Labour for a generation. In the wake of her announcement, the Conservative-supporting Daily Mail led with the headline, ‘Crush the Saboteurs’. The aim was to rally the country behind Brexit but, as with the 2016 Referendum, voters can answer a different question. Remain voters – 48% of the electorate after all, were not inclined to support May, and remarkable things happened during the campaign. May’s advisers, convinced by polls that their boss was a ‘winner’, designed a presidential campaign, focusing on the PM and downplaying her party. Unfortunately for them her performance was anything but presidential: she insisted on mouthing political platitudes ad nauseam and refused to debate her opponents face to face on television. By contrast Jeremy Corbyn now came into his own. A lifelong campaigner, who relished meeting people, he addressed huge ecstatic crowds of mostly young people and generated huge momentum not captured by the pollsters – which persisted in showing large Tory leads – until the sensational exit poll, obtained for the media by ace psephologist John Curtice from Strathclyde University. This indicated that, far from increasing her majority, she had actually lost seats, and Corbyn increased his by some measure. George Osborne, summarily sacked by May when she became PM, declared, with obvious pleasure, that his nemesis was a ‘dead man walking’, but she was not done yet. Hugely weakened, she eventually struck an agreement with the 10 strong Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland to support her on key votes. In exchange the DUP won £1 billion extra funding for their region, to the fury of other UK regions and UK taxpayers in general. At the time of writing this is where the political situation remains: a fragile coalition surviving under the leadership of a gravely, possibly fatally, weakened leader. As Mao Tse-tung observed, ‘We live in interesting times’.

BOX 1.1

Populism explained

I don’t blame people for voting for him [Trump], or for Brexit: these are responses to a twisted, distrusted system. Elections captured by money, lobbyists and the media; policy convergence among the major parties, crushing real choice; the hollowing out of parliaments and other political institutions and the transfer of their powers to unaccountable bodies: these are a perfect formula for disenfranchisement and disillusion. The global rise of demagogues and outright liars suggests that a system nominally built on consent and participation is imploding.

Source: George Monbiot, The Guardian, 25th January 2017

BOX 1.2

A ‘post-democracy’ future?

The political scientist and commentator Colin Crouch, formerly at Warwick University, has coined the idea of ‘post-democracy’ (2004) as a destination towards which he thinks our politics is heading:

A post-democratic society is one that continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell. The energy and innovative drive pass away from the democratic arena and into small circles of a politico-economic elite.

(Crouch 2013)

Crouch doesn’t claim we currently live in a post-democracy society but that we are ‘moving towards such a condition’.

1 He does discern however, a ‘post-industrial society’ and the problems a displaced working and ‘underclass’ have in forming a ‘group identity’ and find a political party to represent them.

2 Globalisation has given h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• List of profiles
• List of boxes
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Guided tour
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART 1 CONTEXT
• PART 2 DEFINING THE POLITICAL WORLD
• PART 3 THE REPRESENTATIVE PROCESS
• PART 4 THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS
• PART 5 THE EXECUTIVE PROCESS
• PART 6 THE POLICY PROCESS
• Epilogue: Three Turbulent Years in British Politics
• Glossary
• Index