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Okay, hands up anyone who predicted that Ann Widdecombe and Claire Fox would end up in the same party. I certainly didn’t. Yet last week, the former Conservative shadow Home Secretary (Widdecombe) and erstwhile Revolutionary Communist (Fox) were announced as candidates for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
These are the strange times we live in. It’s hard to look at British politics right now and not see a system in meltdown. Remarkably we have not one but two hard-Brexit parties – the Brexit Party plus UKIP; and not two but three anti-Brexit parties – the Lib Dems, Change UK and the Greens (plus of course the SNP and Plaid Cymru in Scotland and Wales). Then, of course, there’s Labour and the Conservatives straddled painfully across the fence. It’s quite conceivable that all nine of these parties will win seats in the forthcoming Euro-elections (and, with the exception of what’s left of UKIP, in the next general election too).
In fact, we’ve never been closer to a wholesale realignment of the post-war party system. The Conservatives are already in existential crisis territory – and if Labour is finally forced off the Brexit fence, then we could see the existing cracks and splinters in both parties develop into wholesale disintegration. That would mean multi-party politics across the whole of the political spectrum, but under first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. Expect the next general election to be the most unpredictable in British history.
Almost anything could happen except, it would seem, the one thing that needs to happen – which is the emergence of a sane and sensible post-liberal party.
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As I’ve explained before, the polling evidence keeps showing that the most under-served portion of the electorate are culturally conservative voters who lean to the Left on economic matters. As I’ve also explained, post-liberalism shouldn’t be confused with anti-liberalism. Rather, what post-liberals recognise is that while freedom matters, it’s not the only thing that matters – and especially not when it’s hitched to a self-serving ‘open-vs-closed’ agenda designed to benefit those already best-placed to take advantage of globalisation.
Despite the emergence of numerous new parties and movements in Britain and elsewhere, it’s hard to find any that qualify as post-liberal. New centrists such as Change UK or the Macronistes in France offer establishment liberalism in undiluted form. The radical Left, as exemplified by the Corbynised Labour Party, is a toxic cocktail of cranky foreign policy, extreme political correctness and the sort of borrow-and-spend economics that would pawn the country to the money markets. As for ‘national populism’ on the Right, that’s all about exploiting and exacerbating resentments, not offering any positive way forward. Can you think of any populist movement overseas that would provide a model for what we’d want see over here? Trumpism in America? Le Penism in France? Orbanism in Hungary? No. Non. Nem.
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