The bankruptcy of the centre right: Brexit edition

If you want to see how the centre-right can lose out big time you just need to look at the US. Last week a Republican senator who had been critical of Trump lost to a Trump loyalist in a primary. Partisan voters prize loyalty, you may say, but this is loyalty to someone who lies all the time, and prefers the US’s traditional arch enemy Russia to its traditional allies. The US is just a few threads away from becoming yet another elected dictatorship. One of those threads is the Mueller investigation, and we will see if any Republican ‘rebels’ who want to impeach Trump are made of sterner stuff than the Brexit rebel Conservative MPs.

The story of neoliberal overreach is in part about how centre-right politicians set in place or promoted causes or institutions that would allow for the ascendency of the hard-right and then eventually their own demise. In the US this stretches from repealing the fairness doctrine, which led to hard-right talk radio and then Fox News, to increasing the role of money in elections and finally allowing Trump to win the presidency. In the UK it involved promoting austerity and an immigration target that was bound to fail, both of which directly led to Brexit.

Once these conditions have been set in place to win votes or shrink the state, there seem to be two stages in the process through which the centre-right concede power to the hard-right. The first stage is a belief that the centre-right are still in control when clearly they are not, or a blind optimism that the hard-right can be easily bought off. In the UK that is the stage where Cameron gave in to UKIP and newspaper pressure and agreed to a referendum on EU membrship. The centre-right make concessions to the hard-right to preserve party unity.

The second stage is where the hard-right have control, and play on this centre-right belief in party unity to prevent the centre-right from rocking the boat. [1] We saw this in the US under Obama when the Republicans scorned all the President’s overtures for bipartisanship. In the UK we are seeing it right now in how easily most Remain voting Conservative MPs are happy to go along with the current farce, and how easily the small band of rebels can be persuaded to cave.

The latter is due in part to our equivalent of Fox News conducting a hate campaign against these rebels. There is nothing subtle about this: try to vote against the government to prevent a national disaster and those big four right wing newspapers will headline on saying you are going against the will of the people and even imply you are a traitor. Whipping up this kind of hatred is no joke when followers of the ultra-right have already murdered one MP and tried to murder another. Yet before you start feeling some sympathy for the rebels subject to these newspapers attacks, remember these same centre-right Conservative MPs were quite happy to indulge the same papers by voting down Leveson 2.

It is also a result of the BBC increasingly shying away from anything that could be construed as critical of the government, and dumbing down political discussion. The rabid right wing press pretend that any form of dissent from the government’s chosen path of implementing Brexit is betraying the will of the people, confusing the government with the people just as authoritarian governments have always done, yet the BBC panders to the idea that these rebels are really trying to stop Brexit by constantly labelling the rebel MPs as Remainers.

As a result, Conservative MPs duly voted through substantial increases in executive power at the expense of parliament. There is now a grave danger that they will get played by the Brexiters. The Brexiters should by now know that any deal that can be done will be some form of soft Brexit, remaining in the Customs Union and Single Market for goods for sure. That is not the kind of divorce they wanted. They keep saying that the possibility of No Deal must be kept in play to increase our negotiating power, having conceded all our negotiating power by invoking Article 50 with no discussion and little plan. Perhaps the real reason is that they would not be at all unhappy that through their belligerence time for a deal disappears, and we get No Deal by default. Chris Grey calculates there are only 62 working days left to do a deal, and May is not even near the range of possible deals yet. If the Brexiters plan is to talk out a deal so we exit without one, it seems to be going very well.

For months I have been saying that No Deal would not happen because parliament would not let it happen. I still think it is unlikely, but as a result of the votes last week and the UK side in the Brexit negotiations going backwards since December I am much less confident than I was. The slide from a pluralist democracy to an elected dictatorship or a right wing plutocracy [2] is full of moments when sensible people say this could not possibly happen here.

[1] Contrast Conservatives voting on block to sweep aside the Lord’s amendments to the Labour rebellion over the EEA. Often the fact that Labour MPs have views for which they are quite prepared to vote against their leadership is seen as a political weakness, but what we are seeing right now is the Conservative desire for party unity as a colossal political weakness.

[2] Before anyone objects, of course this only applies to the UK on the single decision of Brexit, for now. But Brexit is perhaps the most important change in UK politics since the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the way this change has come about does show structural similarities to the transformation of the US Republican party that led to the election of Donald Trump.

The persuasive power of the UK right wing press

“It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio” - Joseph Goebbels

The first line of defence for the UK’s partisan right wing press (Mail, Sun, Telegraph) is that they do not matter. The opinions they express and the news stories they follow just reflect the views and interests of their readers. We now have clear evidence that this is simply not true for Fox News in the United States. As I describe here, the output of Fox News, which bears very little relationship to the truth, is designed to maximise its persuasive power. I think Obama summed it up quite clearly when he said even he would not vote for himself if he watched Fox News.

The presumption must be that the same is true in the UK in terms of the potential power of the right wing press. Most voters are not interested in politics, and so depend on limited sources of information to form their views about politicians and political parties. But I thought we had no comparable econometric or statistical studies to show this for the UK. I had noted that Scottish newspapers were much less pro-Brexit than their English counterparts, but maybe that just reflected different attitudes to Brexit north of the border. I did wonder whether Liverpool and the Sun (more specifically its absence because of Hillsborough) might be what economists call a natural experiment. The Leave vote in Liverpool’s districts does seem exceptionally low (my thanks to Ian Gordon here), but of course there are always other stories you can tell.

But then someone (alas I cannot remember who) pointed me to a paper by Jonathan Ladd and Gabriel Lenz in the American Journal of Political Science in 2009. They looked at another natural experiment: the endorsement of Labour by certain newspapers before 1997. To quote

“By comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical approach, the point estimates vary from about 10% to as high as 25% of readers. These findings provide rare evidence that the news media exert a powerful influence on mass political behavior.”

So we do have evidence, comparable to that for Fox news, of how powerful an influence these papers can have. I suspect the endorsement per se is not doing the work here, but the more favourable editorial line and coverage that went with it. Blair never got the Kinnock or Miliband treatment. 

It is ironic how much we are currently obsessing about the influence of the new social media, when the problems with old media are likely to be quantitatively larger. Once you acknowledge this, explaining important political developments like public attitudes to austerity becomes much easier (see this paper by Timothy Hicks and Lucy Barnes for example). For so many things that political scientists and others spend a great deal of time analysing, like Brexit, the right wing print media is the elephant in the room.

It is in this context that we should view the latest attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn in the print media, and the shameful attempts by Tory ministers to jump on the bandwagon. (I will leave it to Andrew Neil to explain what nonsense the smear is and who those ministers are, but watch Steve Baker use all the usual tricks (e.g. “questions to answer”) to try and make something out of nothing.) The 2017 election showed us the influence of the Tory press is not total, but May still won: its influence on older voters in particular is still strong. Despite its falling readership, this press still also has considerable influence over the broadcast media's agenda.

So when certain journalists call Corbyn’s response to these smears creepy and disturbing, this is the context in which to view such comments. To say it suggests an attack on our free press is nonsense, because the predominantly right wing press in the UK is not in any meaningful sense free. That these papers are owned by extremely wealthy people who can dictate these paper's political agenda seriously distorts democracy. It also means this press has considerable power over the government. The UK press will not be reformed under a Tory government: Leveson 2 has been shelved.

Those who want to go back to a world without Brexit and Trump have to ask why Brexit and Trump happened. There is no point treating the symptoms and not the disease. A key part of the reason we have Trump and today's Republican party in the US is Fox News, and a key reason we have Brexit in the UK and ministers calling the leader of the opposition a traitor is the right wing press.