04 Jan 2017

Known Unknowns: Five factors worth considering about UK politics in 2017

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The political stock of Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, may have hit junk bond status after the US found itself in deep difficulties in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq but his contribution to the English language should never be forgotten. In particular, there is his epic and extremely instructive quote that: “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know that we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know”. Exactly.

Much of politics is the interaction between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns as David Cameron could ruefully testify more than anybody. Identifying important known unknowns is, alas, far from an exact science. Those that might seem obvious often turn out to be inconsequential. Others which appear at first to be more mundane end up being the ones with seminal implications.

What then might be the known unknowns that have the most impact on UK politics in 2017? There is a potentially very long list of them but here are five factors worth considering during this new year.

The Davis-Hammond dynamic

There will be endless speculation as to what the opening position of the Government will be when it triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and thus formally signifies an intention to leave the European Union and seek a different form of relationship with it. The Prime Minister obviously intends to keep her cards super glued to her chest for as long as possible but at some point she will need to show at least part of her hand. Her priorities will be reaching a position which can preserve the unity of the Cabinet and the wider Conservative Party and which will be seen as consistent with the Brexit vote.

Whether that can be achieved and precisely what that formula will be now depends crucially on the personal and political dynamics between David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There were strong signs towards the end of 2016 that the two men were seeking to reach an agreed position on Brexit between them.

The most public signal of this was Mr Davis’s statement that he “would not rule out” the notion of the UK paying to be part of the single market in some fashion for a temporary or longer period. The reaction within the parliamentary Conservative Party to this possibility was not as hostile as some in Whitehall had feared, in large part because Mr Davis has a lot of credit in the bank with anti-EU MPs. If he is prepared to endorse a course of action that might seem slightly heretical from a pure Brexit viewpoint, then almost all of his colleagues would be willing to allow him the benefit of the doubt in a manner that would not be true for Boris Johnson (whose stand on Brexit was widely deemed to be opportunistic even by those who backed the cause that he embraced) or even Dr Liam Fox (who is considered something of a temperamental loose cannon even by those who largely agree with him).

The Davis-Hammond axis is thus fundamental to the opening stages of the Brexit discussions. If the two of them are aligned on the core principles, then the Government will start from a reasonably coherent place and events from there on will largely turn on the attitudes of those on the other side of the bargaining procedure.

If the two of them are split, the Government will be split and stay split. The further consequence of this fact is that the other institutional players which might otherwise be considered as meaningful contributors to the Brexit dialogue within the Government – such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – are being marginalised much to their immense indignation.

The Unite leadership election

Unite is the largest trade union in the United Kingdom with 1.42 million members and it is the most substantial financial contributor to the Labour Party. The backing of Len McCluskey, the General Secretary since 2010, for Jeremy Corbyn last year doomed the attempt to remove him from the leadership. Mr McCluskey has recently called an early election in an attempt to secure a third and final term in office which would take him well beyond the 2020 general election. He would hence be a central figure not only in ensuring that Mr Corbyn remains in place until those hustings but could be pivotal in determining the identity of any successor.

He is, however, being challenged in the April ballot by Gerard Coyne, a moderate from the West Midlands, who is a close ally of Tom Watson, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, from whom Mr Corbyn is openly estranged. The outcome of this contest will determine whether there is any realistic chance of Labour moving to the centre by 2020.

The Scottish local elections in May

There are some interesting local elections in England and Wales on 4 May this year including the novelty of direct elections for regional mega-Mayors in places such as Greater Manchester, the Liverpool region, Sheffield, Tees Valley and the West Midlands (the last one being particularly intriguing as the Conservatives have a strong local candidate who might upset the Labour Party).

In terms of macro-politics, nonetheless, it is Scotland which could be the most significant. There are local elections everywhere north of the border with all 1,223 seats in 32 councils up for the taking. This fact plus the timing of these contests - little more than two months after Article 50 will have been invoked and with the stance of the Government on withdrawal having become more apparent - means the SNP may turn this election into a de facto referendum on another independence referendum. If Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to bet the farm on pressing for such a vote, then Mrs May is in trouble.

The Queen’s Speech

A few weeks after these local elections will see the Queen’s Speech delivered to Parliament. This will be the first opportunity for Mrs May to set out a legislative programme which is very much one of her own rather than the policy initiatives that she inherited from Mr Cameron and his manifesto. To what extent which she put personal and political capital behind the revival of grammar schools and risk confrontation with some of her MPs and the House of Lords? How much will she depart from past orthodoxy on questions such as corporate governance and industrial strategy? How much weight will she put on the ‘Great Repeal Bill’ to pave the way for leaving the EU? We will discover.

By-elections

In normal circumstances, when a Government has a majority of only 10 in the House of Commons, the number and the outcome of by-elections would matter because it would be a test of survival. That might not be the case in 2017. It could be instead that by-elections are viewed as a test of the comparative fortunes of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP and their leaders.

Just before Christmas, Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland in Cumbria, announced that he would stand down from Parliament to assume the role of Head of Development and Community Relations for Sellafield (the largest employer in his constituency). For a 43-year old former high-flyer linked to the Blairite section of his party, this decision to in effect quit politics is striking. Others may head for the exit too. Every contest that results from such resignations will be subject to intense media scrutiny. Mr Corbyn may be about to learn, in the words of another Rumsfeld quote, issued in what seemed an almost casual manner as looting broke out in museums in Baghdad in 2013, that “stuff happens”.

Tim Hames


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