Credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images
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Why did the Tories bother with a manifesto? The real electioneering was over before the election was even called — in the Parliamentary psychodrama leading up to Britain’s failure to leave the EU on 31 October.
Johnson’s opponents were handily played. They failed to grasp that the most salient issue for ordinary British voters today is not any one specific policy, but the simple question of whether voting ever changes anything. In the unedifying spectacle of their efforts to block Brexit, culminating in the Benn Act, Parliament’s Remain Alliance set about demonstrating to an appalled public that if it were left to them? No: voting would change nothing, ever.
This election was at root about a technocratic style of politics which has been the status quo for decades: an ever-growing range of issues is ring-fenced through mechanisms not easily subject to change via the democratic process. The worldview it enshrines can be summarised as ‘double liberalism’.
If Thatcher drove a greater degree of ‘openness’ in the economy, liberalising the financial sector and privatising monopoly utilities, Blair drove something equivalent in society. The new ‘openness’, first of the economy and then of society was entrenched via unaccountable quangos and EU treaties against which, in the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, “There can be no democratic choice”. The electoral fightback against this is the long narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s path to victory.
When, in 2015, David Cameron scored a surprise majority, his government concluded that this represented a mandate for double-liberal policies. He believed it possible to drive ‘openness’ on both social and economic fronts, and that rising freedom and prosperity would somehow magic away any costs and externalities.
He was wrong. In fact it was Cameron’s offer of an in/out referendum on the EU that handed him a majority. What the electorate wanted, more than austerity or gay marriage, was a chance to vote democratically on Britain’s continued participation in the central elite mechanism for avoiding confrontations with democracy. His majority was not a victory for double liberalism but the first move in an electoral rebellion against it.
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Subscribeplease delete – too late! – but thx to Ms Herrington for an excellent piece
The main problem with the headline is that it is in the future tense…