I was very impressed with Heidi Allen’s first speech when she left the Conservative Party to join the Independent group, now known as the Change Party in the UK. How could the Conservative high command ignore such an outstanding talent? But I’m afraid I wasn’t very impressed with her performance at the beer and Brexit debate on May 14 hosted by King’s College London. Ms. Allen is now the acting leader of Change UK. But even as her position grew, she seemed to shrink as a politician. Gently interrogated by Anand Menon, the reigning Brexit guru at King’s, she gave a series of mild and vague answers that suggested she was incapable of either strict thinking or vigorous organization.
Ms Allen spouted a torrent of good government platitudes about how Britain should make much better use of the experience. Politics should be run more like a business. Parties must take stock of the skills and talents of each new set of deputies. Parliament operates like an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club, and so on and so forth. This makes some sense, especially with regard to the list of skills. But isn’t the call for politics to be run more like a business a bit old hat for a party that positions itself as an agent of change? Donald Trump ran for a promise to use his businessman skills to shake up Washington D.C. in 2016, and Silvio Berlusconi said the same about Rome in the 1990s. And isn’t the Change UK boss a pretty bad place to call for a more businesslike approach to politics? The party rushed from one disaster to another: failed to create a brand; fiddling with his name; public disagreement with the policy; the production of ridiculously sloppy propaganda literature; and, in every possible sense, allowing itself to be inefficient, disorganized and ill-conceived by what is considered the party of out-of-world fanatics, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
The UK looks set to receive the Palme d’Or for the most risky projects in recent political history. For a moment, it looked like Tom Watson and the Social Democratic wing of the Labor Party might go on a mass strike and join the Tigers (as Change UK members were called when their nascent party was the Independent Group). But Mr. Watson chose to stay and fight, and the Tigers had to rely on the strength of their personalities rather than numbers. The trouble is that this is far from enough: the founders of the Social Democratic Party back in 1983 were big weather-making beasts. Change UK is a collection of little animals that are likely to be blown away by a storm.
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In EDINBURGH – this is a wonderful exploration of stone as poetry – to discuss the future of capitalism with Stuart Wood, a Labor colleague courtesy of Reform Scotland, a think tank. To be honest, we struggled to find important things to disagree about. Across the political spectrum, there is broad agreement on the biggest challenges facing the UK: the over-centralization of economic and political power in London; a long tail of low-skilled workers stuck in low-paying jobs; the cult of the short term; financial design; lack of respect for the manufacturing sector. And yet the British political class is instead focusing on policies that are as divisive as possible: on the right, exit from the European Union, and on the left, massive state intervention in the “commanding heights” of the economy, such as the renationalization of housing and communal services and taking 10% of the country’s largest public companies. As long as we quarrel over what is controversial, we cannot decide what we agree on.
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SCOTLAND and England are perhaps politically further apart than at any time in the history of the Union, and not just because the Scots voted to stay in the EU and the British voted to leave. The Labor Party once specialized in pushing Scottish politicians to the heights of power in Westminster – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smith, Ramsay Macdonald, Keir Hardy. The Liberal Party and its various offshoots had deep roots in Scotland as well as in the English provinces (think of Joe Grimond and Charles Kennedy). The aristocratic wing of the Tory party also boasted deep Scottish connections: Alec Douglas-Home had an estate there, and even David Cameron boasted a Scottish name and Scottish shooting buddies.
British politics are now as English as they ever were. The only Scot at the forefront of politics is Michael Gove, the adopted son of a Scottish fishmonger and a man who could switch from Oxbridge English to Aberdeen Scots if necessary. People in high government positions (prime minister, chancellor, minister of foreign affairs) seem to be competing to be the most southerly. The Scottish Labor Party has all but died of complacency and mediocrity, and the National Party has been taken over by a cabal of London MPs: Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry sit next door in Islington, while Diane Abbott and John McDonnell represent London. places. The Scottish dominion that once ruled over its southern neighbor has been blown to the wind: Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are back in Scotland, and Tony Blair is flying in a private jet somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.
Political life in Scotland is dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP), which has no real importance in the south (although it has 35 MPs and their leader, Ian Blackford, courageously delivers the same Prime Minister’s Questions speech every week on the state of Britain ). take Scotland out of the EU against her will). The hottest issue in the north right now is the upcoming trial of Alex Salmond on charges including sexual harassment and attempted rape. (He says he is innocent of any crimes.) This separates the SNP and Scottish politics in general into fans of Nicola Sturgeon, who began her political life as a protégé of Mr Salmond but has since turned her back on him, and Salmond’s supporters who feel he is being unfairly accused. The row could loosen the SNP’s (increasingly deadly) grip on Scottish politics and set the stage for significant gains for either the Tories or the Labor Party, with major implications for the next general election in the south.
Another big issue is Ruth Davidson’s return to the stage after a few months on maternity leave. If things had gone well with Brexit, Ms Davidson would have reappeared at a time when the Tory party would have put Brexit behind us and addressed the question of where Britain needs to go now that it is leaving the EU (Ms Davidson is the remaining who resigned herself to fulfilling the will of the people). But the Brexit problem is even more serious today than when she went on vacation, and the Tory brand is far more toxic. Ms. Davidson has resisted enormous pressure from within her party to weaken her ties to the Conservative Party south of the border. As Brexit swings from disaster to disaster, and as the Tory party becomes more associated with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, she may regret her decision.
