Grayson - British politics: a beginners guide

British Politics

A Beginners Guide

British Politics

A Beginners Guide

Richard S. Grayson

A Oneworld Book

First published in North America, Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2010

This revised ebook edition published 2016

Copyright Richard S. Grayson 2010, 2016

The moral right of Richard S. Grayson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781780748788

eBook ISBN 9781780749686

Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India

Oneworld Publications

10 Bloomsbury Street

London, WC1B 3SR

England

Contents

I would like to thank all the students I have taught since the mid-1990s. Their challenges to me have made a major contribution to my thinking on the broad subject of British politics and I am grateful to them all.

A note on terminology

The United Kingdom covers Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Northern Ireland. As is commonly the case, this book uses Britain and British politics as a shorthand for matters relating to the entire UK.

Two election results in 2015 illustrated that British politics is an unpredictable business with the public and parties capable of confounding the experts. In the 2015 general election, the vast bulk of political pundits had expected there to be no overall majority, with most predicting Labour as the largest party. David Camerons return to power as leader of a Conservative majority prompted much questioning of the accuracy of opinion polls, just as John Majors surprise victory in 1992 had done. Four months later, there was a bigger shock in the Labour Party. Ed Miliband had resigned as party leader immediately after the general election and a contest to replace him took place. At the start of the partys leadership election, Jeremy Corbyn had odds of 100-1 and they would rise to 200-1. Yet he swept to victory in a manner which is causing many to re-examine what they thought they knew about British politics and its likely direction in the years to come. There is now a serious discussion about left-wing politics in Britain, which has not been held since the 1980s, and much of that is because of Corbyns leadership of the Labour Party.

These 2015 shocks came at the end of what The Times had called on 13 May 2010 a very British revolution: the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats established following the general election held a week before. Before the 2010 election, no Liberal had sat in the Cabinet since 1945, when the wartime coalition ended. The UKs electoral system is stacked very much in favour of one party having an overall majority, and the hung parliament which led to a coalition has only occurred once in recent decades 1974, when a coalition was not the result. Most remarkable of all was that the Liberal Democrats sat in coalition with the Conservatives. Such a deal stuck in the throats of many members of both parties due to their long-standing ideological hostility to each other. Many pundits predicted that the coalition would not last a full five-year term. Yet it did so, with not a single Cabinet-level spat resulting in resignations. What did happen at its end, though, as many predicted, was the virtual annihilation of the Liberal Democrats, in parliamentary terms, in the 2015 election. They went down from 6.8 million votes and 57 MPs to 2.4 million votes and just 8 MPs. Meanwhile, a new force had emerged: the Scottish National Party, led by Nicola Sturgeon. It had hoped to win independence for Scotland in the 2014 referendum. It failed to do so, but the energy that ballot created saw it claim 56 of Scotlands 59 seats, mostly at Labours expense, and emerge as the third largest party in the House of Commons. Simultaneously, although Nigel Farages United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won only one seat, in gaining 3.8 million votes it could claim to be the UKs third party in terms of vote share.

The changes which took place over the 201015 period, since the first edition of this book, pose big questions in British politics. Can an overtly left-wing political agenda ever achieve political success in Britain? Is there a future for the Liberal Democrats? How will Scotlands place in the world develop? Has UKIP peaked? Is UK politics the victim of cyclical political hegemony, where one party repeatedly dominates Westminster elections? This book places these questions in the context of some deeper and long-running issues in British politics in the hope that it will help readers make sense of the often confusing rituals of Parliament, and tackle the growing belief that many people have of politics being pointless.

It is written partly from the perspective of someone who has been strongly involved in politics since the 1980s for the Liberal Democrats for 25 years, before joining the Labour Party in 2013. But as a university lecturer in British politics, I also had the chance to stand back from the day-to-day process and to reflect on why, for so many people, British politics is so mystifying, frustrating and often just downright annoying.

In the final analysis, it is society that produces its politicians. That partly means that if a society is obsessed with celebrities, then politicians will put themselves forward as personalities. The most mundane aspects of their daily lives become public property because that is what the public is interested in. The media tells us so much about the wives of party leaders because the public is genuinely interested in them, just as much as or more so than it has an interest in party policy. We saw much of that during the 2010 campaign, and for all that Nick Clegg very effectively argued for his partys policies, the Cleggmania which followed the leaders debates on TV can partly be understood in the context of a celebrity-obsessed culture. More recently, this may explain the appeal of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and in a curious way, the avowedly anti-personality politician Jeremy Corbyn.

Societys influence on politics is not seen only in the froth of election coverage. It is also seen in the limits on politicians actions. For example, there are regularly local public campaigns against politicians apparently callously wanting to close local schools. But more often than not, these decisions are not driven by what politicians want or do not want to do. Rather, they are driven by population factors such as birth rates. In the 1980s, schools which had flourished as the baby boomers went through school in the 1950s and 1960s became unsustainable due to there being fewer children. The Conservatives took much flak for school closures, but they were largely beyond the control of government. The vast range of social changes which have taken place in Britain in recent decades are well beyond the scope of this book. But they need to be stated at the outset as huge constraints on what politicians can achieve.

One central question runs through this book: why should we care about British politics? That is a question increasingly on the minds of a public that tends to assume some or all of the following: