Brexit is likely to dominate the leadership contest. Candidates will have to compete to show their stance is tough enough to impress the leave-leaning Conservative membership and see off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Brexit party...[no deal]...certainly looks a lot more likely than it did at the start of the week...There has not been a majority for that approach in parliament, but the hard Brexiters believe a strong showing by Farage’s party will shift the balance. Certainly, backbenchers who masterminded the last parliamentary manoeuvres to block no deal, including Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper, doubt whether they would be able to do so again.
Then -- the unicorn is sighted:
some observers believe Johnson might soften on Brexit somewhat once the leadership election is out of the way....A general election could return a Labour, or Labour-led government, but if Jeremy Corbyn’s party entered a coalition with the anti-Brexit Scottish National party or Liberal Democrats, it would come under intense pressure to call another Brexit referendum....With parliamentary and public debate becoming ever more polarised, there is also a growing chorus of calls for article 50 simply to be revoked. That looks impossible in the current parliament, but some ministers believe MPs would prefer it to no deal and a general election could change the complexion of the Commons dramatically – or, of course, leave it all but unchanged.
Elsewhere, it's all a patriarchal plot:
But May is not the first woman, and probably won’t be the last, to be invited to take on a leadership role in perilous circumstances. This is the classic “glass cliff” scenario [a term cited in a recent zeitgeisty book] . A glass ceiling may have been (temporarily) removed; but in a situation where the odds against success are high, there are suddenly fewer men available to take on ultimate responsibility. Time to let a plucky woman inch her way to the cliff edge....May’s decline and fall will only confirm in certain men’s eyes the thought that women just can’t cut it at the top...This image of the apparently broken, tearful female prime minister seemed to be demanded by the macho Westminster village, and now it has been granted.
In this view, May's failure is actually a Shakespearian triumph for woman-ness:
A moment of humanity makes a refreshing change. We could learn something from this. At Ophelia’s graveside, her brother Laertes apologises for shedding what he sees as shameful, embarrassing tears. “When these [tears] are gone, the woman will be out,” he says...Well, she’s out now.
By comparison, J Harris rebukes Farage for being too energetic:
His crude messages need to be fought with urgency and passion – precisely what the remain parties lack
Harris attends a Brexit rally and begins to suspect dark artery of the old kind:
The atmosphere was roughly as I had expected: highly charged, defiant, often strangely celebratory. But what was most striking was the slickness of the presentation: brisk, elegantly structured speeches and warm-up videos, and the clear sense that everyone had been told to lay off subjects that usually buzz around Farage – immigration, chiefly.
There is always abuse to rally the Remainers:
a candidate with the face, haircut and stiff demeanour of a freshly bought Action Man... Farage appeared, grinning from ear to ear and bellowing out his super-charged version of the same messages. The chant that greeted him suggested that if some English people have embraced the politics of wild claims and demagoguery, it at least comes with a certain bathos: “Nigel! Nigel! Nigel!”
These people are just not sensitive enough! Good Lord, they offer 'a discourse full of crude binaries' (below)!:
There is something very sobering indeed about watching a handful of chancers lay in to the fragile mesh of institutions and ideas that underpin our democracy, and a head-spinning quality in the fact that they do so in the name of democracy itself. It has echoes not just of the current darkness that defines the US and much of mainland Europe, but things that go much further back.
The link refers to a piece with M Kettle linking current Britain to Weimar Germany -- one Graun journalist citing another in evidence as usual. How could I have missed the Kettle piece? It's brilliant:
The Berlin exhibition is not just about how democracy unravelled in the decade that followed the first Weimar elections in 1919. It is also about whether something like that may again be happening across Europe in 2019. It consists, indeed, of two umbilically linked shows. One is about the stormy Weimar period itself; the other is in the form of a participatory laboratory on how democracies can cope with similar challenges today. It is not a comfortable experience....The Europe of 1919 and the Europe of 2019 are massively different from each other....Yet the more you proceed around the Berlin exhibition, the more you are compelled to ask yourself difficult 21st-century questions...The Weimar parliamentary system, for instance, required political parties to cooperate to deliver publicly supported compromise....Weimar was overwhelmed by a potent narrative of national betrayal and the allure of a strong autocratic and illiberal alternative form of government rooted in racism and fear of others.... also, there is a surging narrative on the right about national betrayal, which seems likely to score heavily in the European polls next week.Here, more than half the public, according to a recent Hansard Society survey, says it supports “a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Here, racism of various kinds is on the increase. And here too we have experienced political assassination (also from the far right), public threats of violence against politicians, and official warnings that MPs are no longer safe....Contempt for parliament has become the public’s default setting. Representative democracy is on the back foot.
He's missed one parallel -- Weimar ended with the creation of a new European superstate. Inevitably,Kettle is also signalling he has read a book:
at the launch of a new book of essays called Rethinking Democracy, of which he is co-editor with Andrew Gamble, the former Labour MP Tony Wright went to the unstable nub of the matter. “We lost the referendum,” he said. “But we lost the democratic argument too. The argument for democracy was won by the leavers.” What is needed is a change of culture, says Wright.[echoes of Nazism there too?]
Back to Harris now:
Farage’s greatest asset is a discourse full of crude binaries, established by the original referendum and then deepened by the hardcore postures struck by Theresa May in its aftermath (the main reason, incidentally, why she deserves her fate). Via her moronic insistence that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, leave v remain has led inexorably on to the idea that the only meaningful choice is between total capitulation and leaving without a deal, ...
Hedging his bets in case the Remain factions do better in the elections after all, and searching for unicorns:
Clearly, however much noise it creates, support for the Brexit party and its agenda remains a minority taste. As I wrote last week, the results of the recent local elections highlighted the fact that large swathes of England are unstoppably moving in the opposite direction. Contrary to some of the overheated stuff one hears from the media, both here and abroad, most of the country is not in a state of wound-up fury, nor baying for the economy to be pushed off the proverbial cliff. [But paranoia is more fun and there may be chances {sic} ahead]...But that does not mean Britain is not in the midst of a deeply dangerous moment.
Harris also attended a ChangeUKrally, despite being in danger of offering a crude binary opposition:
attended by no more than 60 people, and addressed by just about all the party’s leading figures, including Chuka Umunna and Anna Soubry. On Brexit, they had arguments that sounded both passionate and convincing. They also had a video presentation that didn’t work, so some of the speakers were given the backdrop of either a PC desktop or the Google homepage.
And, as he paces the mean streets:
Four miles down the road in the bustling neighbourhood of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, just about everyone I met had voted remain, but responded to questions about Brexit with a sighing fatalism. “I’ve stopped following it,” said one woman; “I try not to pay too much attention,” offered another...whereas Farage’s messages have flowed, molten hot, out of social media and big events into the national conversation, here there was a sense of the righteous paroxysms of so-called ultra-remainers as something from another world.
Harris nearly stumbles across the problem with petit bourgeois oppositional distancing cultural politics:
As he tries to terrify the ruling party into doing his bidding, Farage has discipline, media nous and the clearest of messages. By contrast, even as they tremble at the prospect of no deal and cling to a vision of an open, modern country, what have his opponents got? Milkshakes?
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