A cynic might say talks between the government and Labour were doomed to fail. They certainly didn't look promising. On the one hand you had a Brexit deal most Labour MPs and, were they not whipped against it, a good chunk of Tory MPs could have lived with. That is the position offered by Labour: a customs union with the EU as a basis for negotiating a trade deal and retaining some sort of influence over customs rules. And on the other you had May's withdrawal agreement, which had already been rejected by the Commons on three occasions, the last time on what was to be Brexit day itself. Entering negotiations, knowing there was nothing salvageable from your position, the onus is on you - i.e. Theresa May - to make the move. What happened during talks between government and opposition are already the subject of conflicting reports, and no doubt different perspectives will get added in the coming years as participants pen their memoirs. May blames Labour for a lack of a "common position", whereas Jeremy Corbyn - rightly - notes there is no stability on the government side, and once May has sailed off into the sunset the next Tory leader won't be under any obligation to stick to her compromise. Given the the politics of the coming contest, this observation is entirely right. But is there any substance to May's charge? Well there is, but only if you treat politics as an exercise in empiricism of the most stupid and cynical kind. Anyone can look at the Labour benches and see there are differences. There are a tiny number of MPs who'll vote for any kind of Brexit, those who resolutely stick by the whip, those who blow hot and cold on Labour's position depending on what time of day it is, and those who'll press for a second referendum under all circumstances. The Prime Minister expects us to take note and accept this is why the talks came to nothing. It is, naturally, pure nonsense. In fact,we have a very good idea about what happened in the negotiations from the Tories themselves. They attack the intransigence of Keir Starmer for insisting of a confirmatory vote. Well yes, but why was he? Labour's Brexit position is to get a deal on its terms and prevent May's Brexit. Failing that, a general election. And failing that, a second referendum. Not a position designed for the polarity of the EU elections, but one perfectly adequate to the ins and outs of parliamentary horse trading. Because, obviously, May has rejected the customs option, Keir is following through the logic of conference policy and advocating a referendum in response. The digging in of heels is all on May's side, not Corbyn's. And so, no more talks. Which ever way you look at it, whether as a good faith attempt to see what kind of Brexit could be done, or a bad faith attempt at getting Labour to jointly carry the can, we're now in a new, unstable but simultaneously entirely predictable phase. May has suggested we can now look forward to another series of indicative votes over the coming week or so to determine the will of the Commons. If she doesn't whip this time, the results might prove interesting. Then again, they might just replicate the last series of indicative votes. i.e. We find MPs are against no deal, but are for nothing. In one last, desperate throw May brings back the deal as is, it gets rejected, off she goes and the Tory leadership election is triggered. Then the entire summer sees the Tories talk among themselves, a new leader chosen on the basis of hard/no-deal Brexit and come the autumn more crisis as the new PM tries getting their unhinged position approved. Or, more gravely, they ignore parliament and allow Britain to pass out of the EU by default. Fun times. If you think the first four months of this year were rough, politically speaking, then hold on to your hats. The worst is yet to come.
It took two years, but it's looking like June will be the end of May after all. Better late than never! As we look forward them to subsequent leadership election, can we hazard a bet or two? We cannot be sure who all the runners and riders are yet or who's going to come out top, but Boris Johnson is already the favourite and if his name goes forward to the membership, he'll probably win. Yet there are hurdles aplenty before he gets there. To his mind and those of his fans, he's still the bumbling, jovial character who unseated Ken Livingstone from the London mayoralty. For others, he's deceitful, lazy, and utterly opportunistic. Or, if you like, a void with floppy hair empty of everything save self-glorification and social advance. And that's just what a significant chunk of the parliamentary Conservative Party think of him. If he doesn't get to the last two who are put to the party membership, then it's anyone's guess who'll come out on top. Nevertheless, we can suppose a couple of things. Given May's disastrous handling of Brexit, MPs and members alike will want someone who offers "clarity". In Tory land, that means hard Brexit and/or no deal. So any liberal hopes that Justine Greening, Amber Rudd or, be still your beating FBPE heart, Ken Clarke stand a chance, well, snuff that nonsense out right now. Second, the Tories want someone who can piece together their disintegrating coalition, and thirdly someone who can take the fight to Jeremy Corbyn. In this regard, Esther McVey recently burnished working class creds, Liz Truss has positioned herself as the optimistic Tory who's down with the kids because she's heard you can do funky things with computers like send email, and Jeremy Hunt is going hard on the military promising it all the money. To be honest, thanks to the mugging of Gavin Williamson, I'm surprised someone hadn't run with this ball sooner. We don't know who's going to win, but we can guess at the contest's politics. Each contender will look at the polls, purse their lips and tot up the Tory percentages, the dismal UKIP percentages, and the numbers the Brexit Party are attracting. This offers the path of least resistance, suggesting hard Brexit/no deal is the vote winner that will see Labour off. Indeed, some senior Tories have publicly floated a coalition/pact with Farage to win an election and get Brexit done and dusted. As argued previously, the Tories have three possible futures. There is the disintegration and splitting of the Tories, which is what we're seeing right now. The MPs are staying put but Conservative Home has spent the last month reporting on the voting intentions of Tory members, and a lot of them are ticking the Brexit Party box. Donors and activists are defecting and deserting, people the party can ill-afford to lose, and the whole shebang is shaking itself apart. If May's statement about the leadership election is reneged on - and who knows with her? - then it's more dissipation, more decomposition. Alternatively, the Tories could have a thorough clean. Steaming through and getting rid of the horrible old reactionaries and Thatcherites, and relaunching themselves as a moderate, socially liberal centre right party is the direction they need to move in if conservative politics is to be viable over the long-term, but the chances of that happening without assistance from existing centrist outfits is most, most unlikely. The final option, the one I thought would be their most likely strategy, is to try and build a right-populist coalition by being as Brexity as possible. A recipe for instasuccess, surely? Well, no. One cannot simply walk into Mordor, and one shouldn't automatically count Brexit Party votes into your pile. A lot of them, certainly, but not all. You'd have thought the collapse of UKIP's support in 2017 would have driven this lesson home. Second, May built her general election coalition off the back of the Tories being the party who would deliver Brexit. It was the ideological glue that held the show together. Then, in the swivelled eyes of the leave ultras, she betrayed Brexit with her delays and more delays. Would they trust a Tory again to deliver, even if the new leader is ERG-aligned and/or a (comparative) fresh face? Some would go along with it, but some wouldn't. Third, there are the effects of polarisation. Going all-out on hard Brexit runs the risk of firming up Labour's vote as per 2017, but this time with an added complication. Part of May's original appeal and success was her rhetorical difference from her predecessor. The one nation Tory stuff turned out to be nothing more than flowery words, but it did turn heads at the time. While definitely not a liberal Tory, even a superficial one like Dave, her emollient words about healing the nation and poverty was enough to keep centre-leaning, remain-ish Tory voters on board. A populist strategy dumps all that. They're not going to go Labour any time soon, but enough of them could go LibDem - as per the local elections - to give them serious headaches. And lastly, they could offer Farage something but he's not guaranteed to bite. He is the perfect figure for Brexit grumbles because he is outside the system. He knows full well that once he enters it in some form of governing or deal-making capacity, the lustre wears off. He also knows hanging around with "insiders" reduces his stock too, especially Tory insiders. It all depends what he wants - a nice seat or a berth in the Lords, or continuing his career as an outsider politician with no responsibility beyond meeting his media schedule. Abandoning the latter leaves the road open to someone else, however. Regardless of Farage's intentions, a Tory populist strategy would only go so far in reassembling its vote. They might think it would be enough for a thumping majority, but as things presently stand its a plan for a voter bloc less substantial than the one put together by May. However, given the alternatives - split and extinction vs detoxification, splits, and partial disintegration, it is my happy responsibility to report they have no easy way out, let alone a convincing strategy for winning a general election.
Populist politics is back in a big way. Nigel Farage's Brexit Party is upsetting the polls based on a very simple premise: Leave won the 2016 EU referendum, and the parliamentary elites are taking your Brexit away from you. Crude, not strictly speaking true, but effective. How do you beat Farage, then? How can the populist surge be pushed back and the Brexit Party made as irrelevant as, say, Change UK? Unfortunately, there's no quick fix - an effective counter to far right populism doesn't begin in the period immediately prior to a set of elections. This we know, or at least should know. We are, after all, talking about the collective wisdom - a term I'm using advisedly - of mainstream politics. How to get to grips with populism? On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau sounds like a good place for, well, precisely the reasons why his most famous work, co-written with Chantal Mouffe, got the brickbats. In their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy they provoked a great deal of controversy by arguing there was no necessary correspondence between class and politics, that socialism and the working class had a historic relationship but one that was contingent. i.e. You could not read off the politics of revolution and communism from the positioning of proletarians as a class who sold their labour power for a living. This was roundly criticised, but they were right in one crucial aspect. Class, class identities, and class politics are not something that should be assumed: it is something to be established and built in the first place. In so far as class politics exists in Laclau and Mouffe's terms, it is an accomplishment. Class struggle isn't just there, it exists only in as far as it is pursued. Hence one reason why the far left tend not to get anywhere is because rather than trying to create a politicised class subject, they assume it already exists and will attract such workers through exemplary activism and ultra correct politics. Class therefore is after the fact, not a priori. This methodological note is useful for populism because we know the kinds of formations contemporary populisms have thrown up did not exist before the fact. They are not "natural" outgrowths of certain demographics, but are contingent phenomena requiring an explanation. This is the task Laclau sets himself. What then is specific to populism? Anti-elitism? Vagueness? Irrationalism? Charismatic leaders? Catastrophism? The sovereignty of the people? Laclau observes you find these characteristics in all kinds of political movements to greater or lesser degrees. For instance, Tony Blair is the standard bearer of "normal", "sensible" politics with his centre grounds, technocracy, and (alleged) commitment to "what works". Yet at one time or another, he employed all the populist devices. If those stratagems are what constitutes populism, then clearly it's a label without any utility. Yet there are obvious differences between the Tories and the Brexit Party, between En Marche and the Front National, between the Merkel's Christian Democrats and Alternative für Deutschland. Nigel Farage's politics aren't any different to a great many Tory backbenchers (and why the Brexit Party should not be separated from recomposing the Tory vote), but there's a certain something that makes his enterprise qualitatively different to the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, David Davis, etc. How do we separate out the specific qualities of populism? Laclau proposes taking what is often assumed exceptional about populism - the stress on vagueness and rhetoric - and turning this supposition on its head. Far from being unique, vagueness, or indeterminacy, and rhetoric are inscribed in the social and are therefore properties of "normal" politics. To tease sense out of this observation, he proposes three basic concepts. First is discourse, which Laclau treats as the overall complex of social relations - what Marxists call totality. Here, actions are what they are and acquire meaning by virtue of their difference with other actions. Second is an interplay between empty signifiers and hegemony. Like relations, identities (individual and group) are differential and therefore have meaning through difference with others. The character of these differences and the sedimenting of identities into partial wholes takes place within a totality, which determines what is and isn't outside. For instance, in liberal democratic politics parties identify each other by their differences, but all are equivalent vs what the system excludes: terrorism, foreign enemies, extremist politics. However, this complex totality is never complete, it can never fully totalise and close off against the outside. Therefore limits require policing, and so one difference within this complex assumes the representation of its incompleteness. Effectively, a particularity assumes the responsibility of universal signification. This is an outcome of struggle, and is therefore a hegemonic operation and results in an empty signifier - a difference among differences that works as a first among equals, and represents the rest. For instance, the Tory stress on the deficit to the exclusion of all else strung together a series of policies and positions while excluding its opposite, which was Miliband social democracy-lite. One policy objective, reducing public spending, overwrote and signified everything else, including the government's political economy. Likewise with the SNP, their one main policy - Scottish independence - simultaneously signifies the rest of their policy agenda and excludes its opponents, the resolutely unionist Westminster parties. Laclau's third concept is rhetoric. Words matter, in that they have material force. They also distort and slip their meanings. For instance, Cicero noted there are only so many words to name all the things in the world, so they will acquire new meanings and cast off others. For example, an organ is a term for your innards, an institution, and a musical instrument. This matters for Laclau because hegemony operates in more or less the same way. Differences and equivalences proliferate within its boundaries, their dynamism and slippages inscribing and informing hegemony, but never so that their co-option is total. Their excess overflows hegemony's capacity for neat capture, meaning inclusion always goes hand-in-hand with exclusion. What has this got to do with populism? In this abstract rendering of the political/social, populism produces a particular kind of challenge to it. Beginning with a political demand, some times they are fulfilled (absorbed) by the powers that be, sometimes not. Again, in line with Laclau's approach to discourse each demand differs. If it is granted, it is accepted in a 'differential', or isolated way. However, if it is refused it can combine with other different demands as something that has been knocked back. In this sense, more funding for young people's mental health, calls to scrap fracking, and demanding a fairer voting system, for example, are equivalences by virtue if their rejection. These can combine into a chain of equivalences with each articulator finding common cause with others. Therefore we have an internal barrier - a repeat refusal, leading to antagonism - and an articulation, the linking up of variegated demands. This begets a third moment: the formation and consolidation of equivalential chains in a popular identity, a political subjectivity that is something more than these chains. However, because totalisation is impossible the line between differential, or democratic demands and equivalential (antagonised) demands are unstable, sharp incorporation/non-incorporation slipping into and out of populist chains and turning up in other, non-populist chains. For instance, how UKIP's demand for an EU membership referendum was adopted by the Conservatives. It follows then that rather than being a movement, in the sense of a species of social movement, populism is a type of political logic, and goes some way to explaining how populism can carry different kinds of politics. Populism is no more right wing than it is left wing. Second, its imprecision and fuzziness is thanks to its chains of equivalences - what's in, what's out (and by extension, who's in, who's out), and lastly a logic constantly subject to the conflict between democratic and equivalential demands. There is much more to Laclau's argument, including the construction of 'the people' of populism and the naming of equivalential chains in the person of a charismatic leader. But by thinking about populism as a logic, it is possible to start thinking about strategies for disrupting the populism of opponents and, if it's your political bag, constructing a populism conducive to your politics. Let's have a quick think about this in relation to Farage and the Brexit Party. Brexit is the empty signifier. It is an equivalential demand par excellence symbolising the antagonism between the people and the elite because a) the people voted for it and b) the parliamentary machinations since are elite attempts to water it down, frustrate it, and reverse it. As such, every other grievance, unmet demand, and general sense of powerlessness can be thrown into this perfect container, everything that is outside to Westminster can fuel this catch-all grievance engine. The same logic extends to Farage and the people he's selected to run with him. Farage is an outsider in Westminster terms, and while he has not allowed anyone else to challenge his authority, his running mates are outsiders too. The ex-RCP and their Warrington Bomb/porn for paedos peccadilloes, and the sundry Islamophobes find their status cemented every time the media pulls something up from their past to discredit them. This form of populism may well have the effect of mobilising people against them to try and swamp them in the course of an election, but it doesn't disrupt the support they have. Does Laclau offer any insights? Widening the possibility for the co-option of demands is one. Indeed, what we're likely to see before the next general election is the wholesale adoption of hard Brexit by the Tories, at least for the cameras and papers anyway. But ultimately, getting down and dirty in the guts of populism is what's necessary. We know the logic, but the logic isn't free-floating. It is fed. Elaborating the programme for older voters, who tend to power right populism more than any other demographic, looking at the myriad of unsaid demands and grievances the Brexit chain of equivalence scoops up, challenges us to think about ways of co-opting them and neutralising them. It's a task easier said than done, and one much harder than Laclau's book, but done it must be if we are to detoxify politics and banish the hard right from political efficacy permanently.
Blimey. We have a poll from ComRes putting the Brexit Party on a two-point lead over Labour (27% to 25%), with the Tories coming in fourth at 13%, behind the Liberal Democrats. Another achievement for Theresa May then - first time they have polled in the fourth position in any poll. If that wasn't bad enough, the same polling company put the Tories in third on Westminster voting intention - a position they haven't suffered since the early 1980s when the Social Democratic Party was shiny and new. And then we have Opinium's findings, putting Farage's party on 34%(!), with the Labour and Tory vote combined registering just 32%. Amazing. You look at these extraordinary figures, including those recently given by the gold standard, and the only obvious conclusion to be entertained is that two-party politics are done. Is this really the case? Some necessary context. As we saw in last week's local elections, the vote share of the main parties were depressed, in large part, because they are second order elections. I.e. The kind of exercise most voters don't see as mattering so much as parliamentary elections, which is why electoral turn out tends to be depressed and votes are more likely to move away from the two-party duopoly. But also because the prospect of the European elections and the rise of the Brexit Party is dominating politics and, effectively, overwrote the concerns and issues that normally come to the fore during local elections. For example, had Farage stood council candidates it is very likely the Tory meltdown would have been even worse. What does this mean for polling? The same observation applies. European election voting intentions are overwriting Westminster voting intentions because Brexit is the burning issue of the moment. Polls are always, always snapshots of politics in motion, not forecasts. So when the general election comes round different issues will be in play, and the result is not going to be the same. Those caveats in mind, that still doesn't explain what is going on and what they might mean for a general election further down the road. Well, here's a stab. The first thing they demonstrate is the fragility of the Tory vote and their exposure to Brexit as an issue. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election, it was apparent that Brexit was the ideological glue sticking together the millions of people who voted Conservative. It helped along the UKIP collapse, scooped up the bulk of the Scottish unionist vote, and won over other voters for whom securing Brexit was the main issue. The travails the Tories are suffering now are largely thanks to May's posing of Brexit in the hardest terms, not least the infamous 'no deal is better than a bad deal', which has acquired material force and is one of the handy weapons in the Faragist/ERG arsenal. It was also obvious that if May was seen to backtrack on Brexit her coalition of voters would be put into jeopardy and crumble. And what do you know, that is exactly what has happened. The question is can these voters be reassembled behind a renewed Tory party behind a new leader? Of course, that depends on who the leader is. Apart from Boris Johnson, who is as polarising a figure as Farage, most would-be leaders aren't known to the general public. It might be possible for someone to emerge who half-inches Farage's populist pitch and makes the Tories the party of Brexit again, but this comes with added difficulties. Any effort aiming to reassemble May's coalition would only build in the same structural defects that got the Conservatives into their present difficulties. That is a coalition in long-term decline thanks to it a) ageing, b) not replacing itself thanks to the breakdown in the conservatising effects of age, and c) held together on pretty flimsy grounds. Furthermore, going down this route by no means guarantees Brexit Party voters are automatically bound to transfer over. To reiterate, there are plenty of people who would vote for Farage without ever countenancing a vote for the Tories. Likewise, any involvement by Farage in a regrouping of establishment right wing politics would put off a bloc of centre-leaning Tory voters. Therefore, regardless of what vote the Brexit Party gets in a couple of weeks' time, electorally speaking the Tories and the eventual successor to May are still in a hole. And it seems none of them know what to do, as Esther McVey helpfully reminds us. Where does this leave Labour? Whereas the Tory vote is tending toward decomposition, Labour's support is travelling in the direction of recomposition. The fact the Tories repeatedly, egregiously and, crucially, visibly act against the interests of working people mean, unsurprisingly, the younger you are the less likely you're going to vote Conservative. And that age threshold of votes switching to the Tories gets higher and higher with every passing month. When the Tories lock people out of the political system, they're locking themselves out of the voting intentions of growing numbers of voters. Political science isn't rocket science after all, though plenty of politicians are ignorant of its basics. And so, Labour made a splash in 2017 because it opened itself out and struck an inclusive tone by talking about matters establishment politics regard as taboo: class, property, ownership, wealth. Nevertheless, while 40% of the popular vote is good it is a soft vote. The mistake of sundry remain campaigns is the assumption Brexit, or rather staying in the EU, plays the same constitutive/bonding role in its electoral coalition as it does the Tories. That is obviously not the case, seeing as Labour's 2017 coalition came together on the basis of an appeal to interests, and fast forward to today it's holding on to more of its vote than the Tories are managing. In fact, you could go so far to say Labour voters are more sophisticated than those who've chucked their lot in with joke remain parties precisely because they can see beyond Brexit and EU membership and know where their interests lie. But like I said, the vote is soft, so some movement away from Labour - repeating the pattern of all EU elections since 1999 - is inevitable. That said, the conditions that gave Labour its 2017 election result haven't gone away. The four craps - crap wages, crap jobs, crap housing, and crap prospects are very much with us. The Tories are uninterested and unable to address these issues, and neither is Farage. A billionaire's Brexit is what his game is about. Does that mean we should put our feet up and wait for the sociology to grind out the desired result for us? Absolutely not. There are no iron laws to politics, only tendencies, and tendencies can be thwarted, stymied, and redirected. It means we pay heed to these polls and use them to think about strategy for firming up our vote and winning over new people, regardless of the way they voted in the referendum. What we shouldn't do, and is singly unhelpful, it to look at these polls, get over excited and lose our heads. They sign post the task to be done, not the inevitable result.
British politics needs comedic relief, and Change UK are delivering it in spades. From their foundation, CHUKa's short history has been a caper of unforced faults and unintentional laughs. We've had the racism. We've had the racism again. We've got transphobes and Tommy Robinson apologists among its European candidates. We saw the Electoral Commission reject their ballot box logo, which they then muddied by giving themselves two names, neither of which say anything. And more hilarity was served up over a "rebrand" of their Twitter account which saw their accidentally abandoned handle immediately annexed by Brexit Ultras. This wouldn't matter if it didn't have a blue tick and was at the top of Google rankings for 'The Independent Group'. And Thursday night, CHUKa blamed Labour for their failure to stand a unity remain candidate in conjunction with the Greens and LibDems in the upcoming Peterborough by-election. Who'd have Adam and Eve'd it, Farage's outfit looks slick at professional compared to these amateurs. As Solomon Hughes notes, these missteps can be put down to CHUKa's status as a memberless party (ordinary punters still can't join, only supporter status is available). But I want to ask an entirely different question tangentially related to their incompetence. While the public are largely indifferent to the doings of Chuka, "Iron" Mike Gapes, and pals, why do an ungodly number of leftists find them fascinating? Is it because they're the butt of the best memes, or something else? I think we can put this down to three reasons. 1. Political experimentation. Most people active in politics now weren't around when the SDP split with Labour nor, for that matter, when Militant struck out on its own in the early 90s, and Arthur Scargill left the party to form his mini-Stalinoid personality cult. What happens then when someone splits from Labour to form their own party is destined to be a matter of interest, especially considering how previous departures have never amounted to anything. Is there a chance CHUKa could defy historical precedent and help recast British politics? After all, we have been told ad nauseam that elections are won from the hallowed centre ground and the centre is where most of the people are - is CHUKa about to prove whether this is the case? 2. The end of centrism. Yes, liberalism and centrism in the UK is in sharp decline. Over-represented in the media and in the Parliamentary Labour Party, as a movement of elites, they're marginalised in the Conservative Party, they spectacularly lost the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats remain in the doldrums, despite what appear to be spectacular local election gains. What happens when a declining movement, in a fit of pique, tries something new? Might they hit upon something and jump start their brand of politics by forcing centrism to confront matters they usually do not talk about, like crap wages and crap jobs, the environmental crisis, the breakdown of property ownership, and so on. Or perhaps the fun lies in watching them scampering to avoid discussing these important issues. 3. Schadenfreude. It's not just that CHUKa is a collective of some of the most useless politicians to have sat for Labour in recent times, nor that their politics are woefully out of touch and don't fit the demands of the moment. No, what really grates is their entitlement and arrogance. You have Chris Leslie, who was gifted a very nice career by the Labour Party at the tender age of 24. Gapes hasn't held a job outside of the party since the 1970s. Chuka worked for five minutes as a solicitor before getting on the Compass bus and then going full Blairite once comfortably ensconced. Luciana Berger got the Wavertree seat after a distinctly irregular selection process, Ann Coffey couldn't be bothered to turn up to her CLP meetings for four years, Angela Smith used her job to represent the interests of water companies as opposed to constituents, and Joan Ryan cheerleading land theft and murder in Palestine. On and on it goes. These place seekers and non-entities, corporate satraps and warmongers, they epitomise all that is and continues to be objectionable about the Labour Party. The main reason loads of lefties follow them, take pleasure in their stupid mistakes, and cheer loudly come election night when each CHUKa MP loses their seat is because we hunger for a comeuppance that's been a long time in the making. Not just for them, as appalling as these people are, but for the whole rotten edifice of so-called centrist politics. We want to see their noses rubbed in their irrelevance, and we will glory in it.
They might have made a powerful team, George Galloway standing for the Brexit Party in Peterborough, but it is not happening. In a tearful tweet transmitted into the ether, the Gorgeous One announced the withdrawal of his prospective candidacy as Nigel Farage the Brexit Party have instead selected Mike Greene, a local Tory businessman who once appeared on Channel 4's egregiously awful The Secret Millionaire. Galloway writes "I tried to persuade @Nigel_Farage to support my candidacy in #Peterborough to emphasise the broad democratic alliance the campaign must be and balance the candidatures of Ms Widdecombe and Ms Rees-Mogg." Silly George. Farage isn't interested in an alliance, he's interested in another ego vehicle. Actually, no, that doesn't quite capture it. There is some mileage in the himself personally now argument, but not enough to go the full distance. Yes, sure, when the Brexit Party is organised entirely around Farage's person and he is leader, executive committee, and party secretary rolled into one there is no room for a potential rival. As he was occasionally wont to lament, Farage grew to despise the fact he didn't and couldn't run UKIP as a personal fiefdom. Too many fruitcakes and loons, to paraphrase a former Prime Minister, got in the way. Had Farage consented to Galloway's candidacy, there was always a chance his numero uno position would be usurped. A lesson learned from the defection and subsequent career of Douglas Carswell. While he did not seek the limelight in the same way Farage did and does, the fact he was a parliamentarian and the only one UKIP returned in 2015 as Farage crashed and burned for the seventh time sat uneasy. If Galloway, a man not averse to the media spotlight himself, got the Brexit Party ticket and was successful, it would prove too much for Farage and undermine the one-man sovereignty of his project. Need we mention the politics? Yes, we must. Farage and Galloway might be populists, and they are both anti-EU, but the basis of their opposition is fundamentally different. Farage's politics, as per his sound-a-likes on the Tory benches, is steeped in imperial nostalgia, the faux affectation of plucky Little Englandism, and a heavy dose of libertarian capitalist politics, his project is a class project of turning the clock back and letting the market rip through what's left of the public sector, above all the NHS, and refounding the UK as a global haven for tax dodgers. Sounds idyllic, no? Galloway's opposition however is consistent with old school Bennism and sees the state as the primary vehicle for enacting socialist policies and suppressing the market, in as much as it needs suppressing. The pooled sovereignty of the EU with its neoliberal policies, unelected bankers dictating to elected politicians what they can and can't do, and its rules on state aid aren't just undemocratic, they are fundamental threats to this prospectus. Here then are two perspectives that don't exactly sit easy with one another. But what about the presence of leftwingers on the Brexit Party's regional lists? You have Claire Fox and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, James Heartfield and Stuart Waiton, all former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and associates of its successor organisations, Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas. Well, they might have caused a bit of bother for all of five minutes for past support of the IRA, though for some reason their Bosnian genocide denialism is yet to trouble the press, but Farage can handle it. Their leftism has long since drained out, filled now by the void of professional contrarianism and their alibiing of every two-bit racist and demagogic gobshite. This is performative radicalism, and I use that term advisedly, of providing 'saying-the-unsayble' filler for impeccably establishment publications like The Spectator as well as their own unreadable and best-avoided websites. Oh yes, and they are funded by well-known friends of revolutionary socialism, the Koch Brothers. As unprincipled chancers and opportunists, they can turn out the old phraseology when it suits. Naturally, they're Farage's kind of leftist. He thinks it will hook into the lexity-leave voters and provide left cover for his project, allowing him to present his bunch as a broad coalition when, of course, any difference between the Brexit Party's European candidates are incidental and inessential. And in the mean time they will shut up. Now, say what you like about Galloway, he's no one's lapdog. Having Galloway use the Brexit Party to articulate his Lexit vision would not sit easy with Farage's business backers, or for that matter the voters Farage wants to court - former kippers, 'patriotic' Labour leavers, the disintegrating Tory vote - who might remember Galloway as the fellow who saluted Saddam Hussein, was scathing of British military adventures overseas, and minced about the Big Brother set with Pete Burns in a leotard. For his part, if the European elections and after get ugly and we see Farage strike out on wink, wink, nudge nudge racist territory, as he has before, it's not likely Galloway would keep quiet. Could you imagine him saying nothing as Farage moves on to a calculated bout of Islamophobia? Two big personalities, two sets of ultimately incompatible politics. This is not the stuff of which a populist project can be made. Anti-EU right and left populisms oppose themselves and their particular renderings of the people to the antagonistic other of Brussels bureaucrats and their Westminster satraps determined to undo the outcome of the 2016 referendum. This, however, is not enough when this common opposition has very different bases, and appeals to different sets of punters. Farage's snub of Galloway might be an ego move, but it helps ensure his right wing project remains viable beyond the end of this month.
Who would be the next Tory leader? Consider the scene just for a moment. The Brexit Party has taken a bite out of the Conservative Party's electoral coalition which, recently constituted, was in long-term decline anyway. And as last week's local elections established, there are some vulnerabilities where centrist-ish Tory voters are concerned. As if it can't get any worse, most polls are posting good leads for Labour even if, for the moment, the showing for the main parties is depressed by the fragmentary dynamic of imminent EU elections. They're in a pickle then, a very sticky, treacly pickle, and any new leader is going to have their work cut out freeing the party from the morass. Yet there are no shortage of vultures circling the carrion of Theresa May's career willing to try. With one hopeful knocked out of the running, let's focus on someone else who has used her leadership posturing to stake out territory of her own. I am talking about Esther McVey. Formerly of the GMTV sofa, McVey acquired the sort of bastardy reputation only an association with the DWP brief can confer, both as a bag carrier for Iain Duncan Smith while he was there and again last January when she was made social security supremo, until Brexit pricked at her conscience in ways a bogus work capability assessment never could. Nevertheless, as far as her chances with the Tory membership goes these are both positives. Then again, rivals like Boris Johnson, Sajid Javid, and Dominic Raab possess these shoddy qualities in spades. What then is McVey's shtick, her U to the S to the P? At the weekend, 'We Tories are the natural party of the working classes' appeared in the Express. The theme of her piece is abandonment. Tory failures on Brexit have detached the party from its base, she says. But not to worry because Labour's abandonment of "traditional working class" voters presents the Tories an opportunity. Leaving aside the Labour's difficulties with "traditional" voters, she argues the Tories could do a job appealing to workers, even low paid workers, because they work hard and "do the right thing". This, apparently, is something Labour does not understand. Repeating the lazy cliches about a metropolitan elite (has she not seen the people she hangs out with at Westminster), McVey argues that her brand of Toryism, 'Blue Collar Conservatism', really has something to offer. And what might these tasty morsels be? More police on the street to stop criminals thumbing their nose at the law, raiding the overseas aid budget to rectify the issue. She attacks High Speed Rail 2, calling for money to be invested instead in local transport (no objections there), but her main pitch centres on "freedom, responsibility, and choice" - words Labour activists often find cropping up on the doorstep. For McVey, these words are talismans warding off the evils of Corbynist statism with its levelling downwards and removal of incentives for self-improvement. This isn't where most working class voters are, they want social mobility and the Tories are the ones to give it to them! Even by the standards of May's 2017 pitch to workers, this is pretty abysmal. Unlike McVey, May's then policy brain, Nick Timothy, actually came from a working class background and understood the Tories would have to offer something relatively substantial to catch their notice. This didn't get beyond the philosophical and rhetorical, and the election proved you have to do better than nice words. Where really existing working class people were concerned they went for Labour in droves because it spoke their language. The Tory prospectus for working class voters was zilch. McVey makes the common Westminster mistake of assuming retirees are typical of workers in general when, in fact, they're not. Pinching Johnny Foreigner to pay for a handful of beat coppers suggests McVey has read too much UKIP material instead of talking to actual wage earners locked out of the property market, and held back by crap wages and, to be truthful, crap jobs. The daily experience of working class life is a better education in Tory rule than any number of Labour Party leaflets. Rhetoric of this kind then might fly with the diminishing electorate of her threadbare party, but like all other Tory offerings McVey's pitch is not about to excite anyone but the Tory faithful, let alone getting anywhere near winning a general election.
