Riding the populist wave: the UK Conservatives
and the constitution
Posted on
December 10, 2021 by The Constitution Unit
At a recent
Constitution Unit event (available in video and podcast form), Tim Bale
discussed the challenges posed to mainstream conservatism by the recent rise in
successful populist politicians. Here, he sets out those challenges, how
conservatives have traditionally faced them, and concludes that the UK
Conservative Party is so determined to ‘unite the right’ and supress support
for a challenger party that it risks transmogrifying into a populist radical
right party.
A few weeks
ago I was diagnosed with costochondritis – a minor and surprisingly common
condition involving the cartilage that joins your ribs to your sternum but
which produces chest pains that make some people suffering from it worry
they’re having a heart attack.
The
standard treatment is to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as
ibuprofen. For me this presented a bit of a dilemma. Like many other people, I
don’t tolerate ibuprofen: it irritates my gastrointestinal tract – something
I’m wise to avoid doing because I also suffer from something called Barrett’s
oesophagus, which, if you’re unlucky, can turn cancerous. So, on the assumption
that the costochondritis would eventually resolve itself, and given the fact
that the discomfort involved was irritating but far from overwhelming, I
decided just to put up with it.
I’m sharing
this bit of my recent medical history not because I particularly enjoy talking
about it but because it produces a useful analogy for a question that I want to
ask – namely, are politicians on the mainstream right so concerned about
countering the rise of populist radical right parties that they end up
proposing things that risk doing more harm to society and to the polity than if
they were simply to admit that those parties are now a normal rather than a
pathological feature of contemporary politics?
The
background to this is the book I’ve recently co-edited with Cristóbal Rovira
Kaltwasser, called Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in
Crisis. We look at how mainstream right parties – which aren’t written about
anywhere near as much as their counterparts on the left or, indeed, on the far
right – have handled (or in some cases failed to handle) some of the challenges
that they’ve been facing for the last three or four decades. Over that time,
they’ve suffered significant electoral decline, although, as we show in the
book, the extent of that decline varies not just between countries but between
party families, with Christian democratic parties suffering more than
conservative parties, which, in turn, have suffered more than (market) liberal
parties, which have actually managed to hold pretty steady.
We argue
that the difficulties they’ve faced are partly down to their having to cope
with something of a double whammy.
On the one
hand, they’ve had to deal with what the late Ronald Inglehart called the
‘Silent Revolution’ – the gradual spread of progressive, liberal and
postmaterialist values which are particularly attractive to younger and
well-educated voters but which are inimical to some of the nationalistic and
socially-conservative values held and advocated by mainstream right
politicians.
On the
other hand, they’ve had to deal with the backlash against all that – what Piero
Ignazi has called the ‘Silent Counter-Revolution’ – that has helped fuel the
rise of populist radical right parties which, because they espouse (albeit in
more extreme fashion) some of the values espoused by their more centrist
counterparts, may well tempt some of those who traditionally vote for the
latter to jump ship.
In the
book, which contains country case studies (including one of the British
Conservative Party by Leeds University’s Richard Hayton), as well as a couple
of chapters looking at both the demand side and supply side of European party
politics, we focus on how all this has impacted on the stances adopted by the
mainstream right on welfare policy, on European integration, on moral/social
issues and on immigration. And it’s on the latter two where the impact is most
obvious, with mainstream right parties becoming more socially liberal in many
ways but not when it comes to immigration, where they’ve become noticeably more
restrictive, even hard-line.
But the
book is also a jumping-off point for talking about the broader strategic
responses to the rise of the populist radical right by its mainstream
counterpart. Essentially, these boil down to four approaches.
The first
is to resist it by huddling together with other mainstream parties, to try and
freeze out populist challenger parties by refusing to have anything to do with
them, even if that means (as in Germany, at least at the federal level) going
into or staying in ideologically uncongenial coalitions.
The second
approach – the most popular one across Western Europe, particularly on
migration and multiculturalism – is for mainstream right parties (and some on
the left as well) to adapt to, and even to some extent to adopt, the policies
of the populist radical right. We are seeing this in real-time in France but
we’ve seen it almost everywhere.
The third
approach taken by mainstream right parties is to actually get together in
government with populist radical right parties – either in full-blown coalition
or using them as support parties for minority mainstream administrations. This
has happened in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The fourth
option is for mainstream right parties to, in effect, become a kind of ersatz
populist radical right party, adopting not just its policies, but its rhetoric
and its ‘strongman’ approach to governing – so much so that observers begin to
voice concerns about the erosion of constitutional and political norms we might
(perhaps complacently) have taken for granted. The most extreme contemporary
examples of this kind of ‘democratic backsliding’ on the part of parties
previously considered (rightly or wrongly) to be part of the mainstream right
are the United States and, in Europe, Hungary and Poland.
Arguably
the UK, too, is heading in that direction, governed by a Conservative Party so
determined to ‘unite the right’ and supress support for a challenger party like
UKIP, the Brexit Party, and ReformUK that it risks transmogrifying into a
populist radical right party.
The ‘charge
sheet’ is a long one:
- There was the unlawful prorogation of parliament in order to help get Brexit (and possibly a no deal Brexit) done;
- There were the provisions in the Internal Market Bill that would have allowed the UK to break international law;
- There’s the Elections Bill, which threatens the independent governance of the Electoral Commission, promises to bring in voter ID for no good reason (hence raising accusations of voter suppression) and appears likely to make it more difficult financially for third parties to campaign in ways that might benefit the political parties with which they sympathise;
- There’s the possibility that judicial review is going to be heavily qualified or pared back, as well as Lord Chancellor Dominic Raab’s recent hint about a new legal ‘mechanism’ to allow ministers to overturn court rulings;
- There’s the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which appears to place unprecedented limits on the right to protest;
- There’s what many people see as the attempt to undermine independent regulation and intimidate regulators – (a) by attempting to appoint sympathetic figures into public bodies like Ofcom or (b), as in the case of the Parliamentary Commissioner on Standards, making executive-friendly revisions to the system or (c) simply ignoring their findings, for example on colleagues who have clearly broken the Ministerial Code.
Taken
together, these ideas and measures raise the possibility that the UK may indeed
become another example of democratic backsliding, as suggested in a recent
Constitution Unit blogpost, in which the authors point out the part played in
the process by polarisation and a legislature rendered acquiescent by an
overwhelming government majority – both of which clearly apply in the UK case.
In the
government’s defence, of course, one can argue that not all of these ideas have
come to fruition and that we haven’t had enough time to allow us to come to a
judgement as to whether, in sum, they constitute a ‘pattern of behaviour’.
The problem
with this argument, of course, is that – much like the situation with COVID-19
– if you wait to act until you’re absolutely certain something’s wrong, then
you’re bound to be too late to do much about it. There are (as books by
Levitsky and Ziblatt, and Runciman recount) so many examples from history and
from around the world which remind us that democracy all too often ends not
with a bang but a whimper.
All of
which brings us back to the question raised by the analogy with which I began
and which can be traced right back to Virgil’s Aeneid: if the only way to
effectively stymie the rise of the populist radical right is to ape it, and in
so doing undermine and erode liberal democracy, at what point does the cure
become worse than the disease?
This
blogpost was written in conjunction with our December event, Riding the
populist wave: the UK Conservatives and the constitution, which featured Tim in
conversation with Conservative peer and Times columnist Lord (Daniel)
Finkelstein, and Unit Director Meg Russell. The video and podcast of the event
also feature a lively Q&A with the panellists
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