Fasten Seatbelts. An election now appears inevitable. When it will happen is rather less certain
Who needs to buy expensive tickets for productions in the West End when Westminster provides so much high drama for free? The House of Commons has only been back in business for two sitting days and yet in that time it has seized control of the Order Paper from the executive, enacted a law which effectively emasculates the political strategy of the Government on the principal public policy issue of the day, and set the scene for an early general election.
There has not been anything akin to it since the struggle over Irish Home Rule in the 1880s. Even Ken Clarke, the Father of the House of Commons, is not old enough to remember that one. It is yet further proof that the vexed question of the UK’s relationship with the European Union is in a tiny category of controversies in which all the normal rules of British politics and the standard character of UK party loyalties simply do not apply.
Is an election inevitable?
Predictability is a scarce quality in the United Kingdom at the moment but there is a compelling logic to an election. Boris Johnson needs the support of two-thirds of all MPs (not just two-thirds of those present and voting), or 434 votes, in order to hold an early election under the strictures of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act 2011 (one of the most badly drafted pieces of UK legislation ever, incidentally). He could be confident of around 300 votes from his Conservative/DUP side (what the 21 MPs who have had the Conservative Whip withdrawn do is up to them). He thus needs backing from the other side. That was never going to happen last night (as he knew) in a vote that was basically theatre.
There are many Labour MPs who think that it is a desperately bad idea to rush to the hustings. They would much prefer to let an administration which is now well short of a majority in the House of Commons stagger on ineffectively, wait until an hour when it is manifestly unpopular and then move to throw it out and hit the campaign trail. Jeremy Corbyn is not in that lobby. He has, after all, been calling for an election several times a day (or so it seems) ever since, well the last election. It is the one aspect of his role and responsibilities as Labour Party leader that he truly, actively enjoys.
So, Labour’s ‘conditions’ for endorsing an election are not (bar a sudden reversal) very demanding. Mr Corbyn has said that the ‘Benn Bill’, which makes 31 January 2020 the new default date for the exit from the EU if an Agreement is not in place by 19 October, must be on the statute book before an election is acceptable. Yet it is the very fact that the Benn Bill is moving to the House of Lords and to Royal Assent at the parliamentary equivalent of warp speed which is why we are where we are.
He has also declared that ministers should pledge to obey the law – which should not be too taxing for them. His contingent further insists that the Prime Minister must stick to the election date that has now been named and not move it beyond 31 October so that the UK ‘crashes out’ of the EU by default before the electorate has spoken. This stance is close to surreal in that the notion of any Prime Minister swirling around election day dates in the midst of the contest and not suffering any political consequence or cost for it is nuts, and besides which the legal position of the date on which the UK quits the EU is about to be changed so as to render (for the time being) the 31 October deadline redundant. The PM could only engineer circumstances in which the country ‘crashed out’ of the EU without public consent if he could keep deferring the poll until February.
If Labour sticks to the conditions outlined above, then the election motion could be run again and won on Monday. This means that 15 October is credible as an election date (now that 14 October has belatedly been recognised as a day of Jewish religious observation). It has the novelty of being a Tuesday (all UK elections since 1935 have been held on Thursdays; the convention is believed to have occurred because it allowed what were then only three political parties of note to book the local town hall for the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before polling day for their final rallies). The only event that could complicate matters would be the death of the Monarch beforehand.
There are many senior Labour figures, nonetheless, who would like to delay the competition. They have been contending that not only should the Benn Bill be passed but implemented. This implies that the extension to Article 50 should actually have been sought and secured (which will not occur until 19 October) before Labour assents to an election. If this becomes the official line (which is very unclear), then polling day would not be 15 October but something closer to 29 November.
Their preference is partly motivated by the belief that, as in 2017, a longer campaign would be worse for the Conservatives but also, as will be set out below, because of their desired policy on Brexit. This is a battle that will be fought out within the Shadow Cabinet over the coming days. It is seminal.
What will the various parties say about Brexit?
What they say and what they may find themselves doing are different matters. In no case is it totally straightforward. If the election is on 15 October, Mr Johnson will presumably argue that if elected with a majority he will then attend the EU Council on 17/18 October with a mandate to obtain a superior Withdrawal Agreement from the EU. Once he has done that, he will then call the House of Commons into continuous session to enact it and to revert the date of the UK’s official departure from the European Union back to 31 October. If he cannot obtain such an accord with the EU, then he would legislate for a no-deal Brexit on 31 October instead (a result he sincerely would prefer to avoid but might find himself trapped into accepting).
In the real world, a re-elected Conservative Government, even one with a thumping majority and a caucus of MPs absolutely committed to Brexit, may find itself needing a short extension to Article 50 anyway. If the election is not until late November, he would have to change tack and announce a new date by which he would ‘do or die’ to ensure that the UK had left the EU, with a deal ideally but without one if that is the alternative.
Labour has to make a swift decision on its position. The current formula is that a Labour Government would negotiate a ‘better’ Brexit (it is not remotely clear what this is or how it might be achieved), legislate for a referendum between that better Brexit and Remain, ask for a further extension of EU membership in which to conduct such a referendum, presumably tell the electorate to favour that better Brexit over Remain, and then either implement the better Brexit or accept a Remain victory.
This is utter fantasy. The fear inside most of the Labour Party is that such an incoherent thesis will hand Remain voters over to the Liberal Democrats (and SNP/Plaid and the Greens) in droves. Mr Corbyn will come under huge internal pressure to switch to a posture in which he legislates for a referendum that offers a binary choice between Remain and a no-deal Leave, with Labour fully committed to Remain. But if he does this, he risks offering up Labour-inclined voters who strongly favour Leave to the Conservative Party. His closest supporters will be tempted to continue to seek to straddle the issue somehow but there is the danger that this will just fall apart during the campaign with different Labour figures making different statements and ultimately alienate almost everybody.
This is where the choice of election date (October v November) intersects with the internal Labour debate on Brexit and explains why Mr Corbyn is much more sympathetic to an earlier poll than are his colleagues. If there is an election on 15 October then the Labour Party conference will either be cancelled or curtailed into little more than a rally around the leader’s speech. Control over Brexit policy would rest with the National Executive Committee, which is packed with Mr Corbyn’s most loyal supporters and which would be inclined to do his bidding on Brexit, namely to fall short of a wholehearted commitment to a referendum and remain. If the election is later, conference will happen and it could well bounce him into a far more pro-EU manifesto stance than he would like.
If Mr Corbyn does switch to ‘referendum and remain’, however, that potentially creates a dilemma for Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats as this is essentially their outlook as well. Does she, and do they, accept this and compete with Mr Corbyn and Labour as to who is the most credible advocate of a second referendum as the route to staying in the EU, or might she be tempted to harden her line to that of revoking the Article 50 application and staying in the EU without needing another plebiscite?
There are others with a more subtle conundrum. The Scottish National Party, which is champing at the bit for a ballot because it senses that it will re-capture many of the seats north of the border which it lost to the Conservatives in 2017 (an instinct which an opinion poll published yesterday confirmed), is all in favour of a second referendum on the EU, in large part as a precedent to demand a second, second referendum (on independence). Yet, if a second referendum on the EU were to deliver continued UK membership of the EU, that would rather take the steam out of the case for a second referendum on Scotland’s membership of a United Kingdom that was still within the EU.
Will 2019 be what 2017 should have been?
Logically, there is a strong argument that it should be. Unlike 2017, this may be a proper ‘snap’ election which is short in duration. Brexit should therefore be the overwhelming question. Mr Johnson is a much better campaigner than Theresa May. The Conservative manifesto this time will be a tribute to populism (if not necessarily to intellectual consistency), and will not have a policy suicide bomb like the ‘Dementia Tax’ of two years ago, and the Liberal Democrats are in a much stronger place to take votes off the Labour Party to the benefit not only of themselves but also the Conservatives.
Logic has not, though, been in plentiful supply in British public life of late. Fasten seatbelts. This could be one hell of a bumpy political ride.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA
