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And so, Andy Burnham’s flame was snuffed: the Labour NEC sided with Starmer 8-1. It is a clear signal that the government is willing to lose Gorton and Denton – Farage has suggested that had Burnham been allowed to stand, Labour would have kept it. The election will take place on 26th February. Reform have put up the political scientist and GB News presenter Matt Goodwin as their candidate; the Greens have chosen a plumber and local councillor Hannah Spencer; Labour have chosen a local councillor Angeliki Stogia. The Conservatives are yet to announce theirs. Jacob Rees-Mogg has called on his party to not challenge the contest.
On Monday, Suella Braverman defected to Reform. As Home Secretary she had been to the right of Rishi Sunak and so had been on ‘defection watch’. Though she has less of the social media presence than Jenrick, there is a sense in which Braverman’s is a more substantial defection as her conservatism has been consistently hard-edged. The hollowing out of the Brexiteer section of the party is being eagerly filled by prominent Remainers who have formed a pressure group called Prosper UK, populated by the spiritual adherents of Theresa May (i.e. Barwell, Gauke, Ken Clarke, Ellwood etc etc).
Since Trump has withdrawn his support for the sale of the Chagos Islands, the government’s deal has seemed to be running into the sand. Why? Some say it’s because Kemi Badenoch persuaded Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson; others say Farage convinced the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent of the absurdity of the deal. While apparently ridiculous, the deal has a logic – or, rather, is the product of the ‘thought-world’ inhabited by a three-headed monster (Lord Hermer, Philippe Sands and Jerome Powell) picked apart in an article by Michael Gove this week.
Lastly, Keir Starmer has been in China this week. The diplomatic prelude to this visit was his government’s approval of China’s ‘super-embassy’ which has been roundly criticised. The attempt to sell the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is also part of a pro-China foreign policy, the architect of which is Powell. From China, Starmer has returned with 30-day-visa-free travel, lower tariffs on whiskey and £2.2bn of export deals for Britain. While Starmer has been served well by adopting a ‘Ming vase strategy’ in domestic politics, his embrace of China masks a darker side to his visit. It begs the question: is Starmer being played for a fool?
Media
Sabrina Miller in The Telegraph: How Starmer’s ‘weak and meek’ state visit performance emboldened China
Fred Sculthorp for UnHerd: Tunbridge Wells is still disgusted: Its paranoid politics is fragmenting
Blog
The guilty men: the ideologues who undermine Britain by Michael Gove
Britain is shrinking by choice. The Chagos surrender shows a foreign policy that trades sovereignty, security and wealth for abstract legal ideals, indulging adversaries while weakening allies in an increasingly dangerous world. Hermer has been the ally of Sands and Powell in pushing the Chagos surrender on their close friend Starmer. For all three, the rulings, even tentative and advisory, of international courts supersede any hardheaded assessment of the importance of protecting national sovereignty and national defence.
Key Points
Dividing lines on the Right
Right/Left, Far-Right/Left, Centrist, Centre-Right/Left etc: this is the vocabulary of modern British politics, used to make sense of where politicians and parties stand in relation to one another. Such geometric precision is all well and good in theory and is well-established in the public’s mind. But it has arguably blinkered the British commentariat’s understanding of politics.
The main divisions in British politics are often best understood in terms of attitudes towards ‘issues’, connoted historically by such dates as 1649, 1688, 1714, 1832, 1846, 1867, 1884 and so on. The latest date is 2016.
Fundamentally, what is determining the direction of the British right can be pinpointed to Brexit. All the defectors from the Conservatives were Brexiteers (…though Robert Jenrick took longer to see sense). And the elements in Prosper UK – a cast of politicians who are living in c. 2018– are all Remainers. And, moreover, what is Reform if not the sum total of Brexit, both as an issue in itself and as a lightning rod for all that needs to be ‘reformed’ in the nation? The great challenge for the leadership of the Conservative party is to shut out the Remainer faction, who are closer to Labour and the Liberals than to Reform.
The significance of the Gorton and Denton by-election
Now that Burnham is out of the picture, the two insurgent parties, Reform and the Greens, can viably win the seat. There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said about the implications for the government if it loses. It might, however, be worth dwelling a moment on the significance of by-elections generally.
Because it is before 1945, the historical comparison with Reform to the rise of Labour and the fall of the Liberals after WW1 has been seldom made, except in passing. (Though note this exception by one of Farage’s chief advisors.) The classic study of this period is a great old book called The Impact of Labour 1920-1924 (1971) by Maurice Cowling. His focus was ‘high politics’ which ‘was primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre. The predominating preoccupation of politicians at the top was the moral and mental vacuum they believed had been established by the destruction of the pre-war landmarks, by the arrival of the Labour party and by the newness and ignorance of the new electorate [who had been enfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act].’
Cowling deliberately chose to start his narrative in 1920: in January of that year Labour had defeated the Liberals in a by-election in Spen Valley. ‘From Spen Valley onwards,’ Cowling argues, ‘the Labour party was the major problem.’
Could the Gorton and Denton by-election be Reform’s ‘Spen Valley moment’? The significance of Labour’s victory in 1920 was that it galvanised all that had been suspected about the popularity of socialism and the disaffection with both Lloyd George’s coalition government and the Asquithian elements of the Liberal party (with whom Prosper UK bears some resemblance). For Cowling it registered the ‘beginning of modern politics’.
Thus we should bear Gorton and Denton in mind: it may contain an end and a beginning in British political life.
