The post you are reporting:
Matthew Parris writing in the Times.
Chuka Umunna is not a stupid man. So I hope that at first light yesterday, as the news of Thursday’s local government elections came in on his bedside radio, he pulled the duvet a little more snugly over his ears to muffle what he must surely now hear as a rebuke. He badly underestimated the Lib Dems. They are not going to go away. Because if there are two things these results scream, it’s that a clear majority against leaving the European Union is emerging but that unless Remain-leaning political parties can swallow their pride and work together to turn that majority into actual election results, we shall be divided, ruled and pushed aside. Mr Umunna and the new party of which he’s a leading member has been a significant block to this coming-together. Already it’s nearly too late.
To Umunna in a moment but first to someone we know was out of bed early, because Brandon Lewis, Conservative Party chairman, was giving dawn interviews, “explaining” the Tories’ election failure. I surely don’t flatter his intelligence by speculating that, even as he told the BBC that “voters had given his party a very clear message they were ‘fed up’ with the Brexit deadlock and just ‘want us to get it done’”, he realised he was talking nonsense.
Take us through this, Brandon, in a little more detail. Let’s start with some background. You’ll surely agree that it’s one of the better-known facts of British politics that the Liberal Democrats want Britain to remain in the European Union? They’ve talked of little else for the past three years. It’s virtually the only Lib Dem policy most of us can call to mind. You’ll concede too, I hope, that few of our fellow citizens would think of the Greens as a pro-Brexit party. And you’ll perhaps have heard the political analyst Professor Sir John Curtice summing up on BBC radio yesterday: “In seats where the Liberal Democrats were second to the Conservatives, double-digit swings from the Tories to Lib Dems are commonplace.” And these voters were telling you they just wanted to get Brexit done?
In Remain-voting Bath, where the Tories lost 24 council seats and the Lib Dems soared, were voters telling you they just wanted to get Brexit done? And in Barnsley (Leave-voting in 2016) where the Tory vote was down substantially, Labour down massively, and the Lib Dem vote up hugely, were voters trying to tell Labour and the Tories that they just wanted to get Brexit done?
And when the Tory vote in Remain-inclined Winchester went down by 5 per cent, and the Lib Dem vote went up by 5 per cent, was it because the good folk there just wanted to get Brexit done?
Almost the only conclusion to draw from these results is that the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, have lost (a lot) to the Liberal Democrats and (a bit) to the Green Party in both formerly Leave-voting and formerly Remain-voting parts of the country. Bolsover, for God’s sake! Derby, Oldham, Sunderland, Chelmsford . . . all over Britain (whether they voted Leave or Remain in 2016) non-political people despair that neither the Tories nor Labour can secure a Brexit that benefits us. Some of these will undoubtedly gravitate towards Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. It didn’t stand in the local elections but will hoover up most of these hardline Brexit votes in the coming European elections. The Tories, stuck with a half-in-half-out compromise deal that nobody wants, will lose their hardline voters to the Brexit Party. Millions of Tory Remainers like me will have nowhere to go. Millions of Labour Remainers, languishing in a party whose leader they have sniffed out as a Brexiteer, are in the same fix.
Just as the hardline Leave cause begins to consolidate around a single party that will have our apology for a Conservative government by the balls, so the Remain cause stays splintered between Tory and Labour loyalists looking for somewhere to go: Change UK, the Lib Dems, the Green Party, and (in Scotland and Wales) the SNP and Plaid Cymru. If this isn’t a clear majority of mainland British voters, I’m a Dutchman. The risk is growing that Britain may be wrenched from the EU against the wishes of a clear majority. Surely this cries out for a temporary alliance of Remain-leaning political movements, and a temporary coming-together of Remain-leaning voters? It’s too late for this in the European elections due on May 23. Change UK appears to have blocked co-operation. The Lib Dems are open to it. The Greens just might. But a leaked alleged strategy document from the Tiggers makes ugly reading. “Strategy: Win over LD activists and members . . . attract support and resources from LD backers . . . draw attention to any ex-LD [parliamentary candidates] joining TIG . . .”. Change UK’s response when this was published was hardly a denial. And an article by Umunna, defending his party’s disinclination to get into bed with anyone else, was shot through with an overconfident, even conceited, expectation of a moment that never came.
“They can join us if they want to,” was the gist. And, secondly, “We’re a lot more than an anti-Brexit party”. Well, sure. But if, as Change UK’s members surely believe, we face a national emergency in a no-deal Brexit, then any longer-term ambitions to absorb, or merge with, or replace or fight the Lib Dems should surely take second place to firefighting this threat. To the Lib Dems’ immense credit they’ve stuck to their guns; and (dare I say it?) these local government results do suggest that, rather than the Lib Dems being taken over by Change UK, it’s looking like the other way round. Candidates’ lists are set in stone for the European parliament elections and it’s too late for the strongest contenders from the Remain group of parties in each regional contest to be given clear runs by other Remain parties. But tactical voting by us, the electorate, is still possible. We’ll need to know, however, which Remainer party stands the best chance in each region. At arms’ length from the competing parties, an authoritative website might give guidance. It would need an accompanying campaign. Then, later this year, comes a likely pre-Brexit general election. Unless Remainer parties forestall a self-destructive competition between themselves for our votes, then we shall all hang together — and it will serve us right.
