Breaking the deadlock

Britain at the polls, 2019

John Bartle, Nicholas J. Allen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526152350
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2019 General Election was historic. In one fell swoop it resolved the longstanding stalemate surrounding Brexit and redrew the electoral map of Britain, breaking the deadlock in Parliament and bringing about the fall of Labour's so-called 'Red Wall'. Since 2016, Members of Parliament had struggled to reconcile a contested exercise in direct democracy with the established institutions of representative government. The 2017 election was meant to bring closure to Brexit. It did not: its indecisive outcome merely exacerbated the challenges. Parliament, the courts and ultimately the Monarch herself became embroiled in the chaos of Brexit. The scale of the Conservatives' definitive victory in December 2020 was therefore a significant departure and a return to the status quo. This latest edition of a prestigious and venerable series surveys the build up to the tumultuous election and its aftermath, offering reasoned conjecture about the future of British party politics and democracy.

1

Deadlock: minority government and Brexit

Nicholas Allen

The period between the June 2017 and December 2019 general elections was one of the most turbulent in recent British political history. Hundreds of thousands of citizens took part in protests, dozens of MPs broke with their parties and one prime minister, Theresa May, was forced from office. On the central issue of the day – the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU – there was complete deadlock. The combination of a hung parliament and some MPs’ deeply held convictions frustrated Conservative ministers’ repeated attempts to secure parliamentary approval for a withdrawal agreement with the EU. Theresa May had sought a snap election in 2017 in part to increase her slender parliamentary majority and avoid this scenario. Her gamble backfired spectacularly. A surge in support for Labour cost the Tories seats and forced May to form a minority government propped up by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Unable to maintain discipline among her ministers and MPs, she failed to take Britain out of the EU and honour her pledge to deliver on the result of the 2016 referendum. Her failure cost her the premiership and catapulted Boris Johnson into Number 10 Downing Street.

This chapter provides an account of the Conservatives in government between 2017 and 2019 and the deadlock that mired Britain’s political system. It begins with the formation of May’s minority government before turning to the challenge of delivering Brexit. It describes both the government’s attempts to negotiate a withdrawal agreement and how internal Tory divisions contributed to the subsequent domestic impasse. It then considers how stalemate at Westminster impacted upon and distorted ‘normal’ politics. Finally, the chapter examines how Boris Johnson forced an early general election and framed it in terms of ‘the people versus parliament’.

The formation of a minority government

The 2017 general election was Britain’s first since the introduction of universal suffrage in which a governing party lost its parliamentary majority but remained in office. The Conservatives, led by Theresa May, secured 42.4 per cent of the popular vote, a 5.5-point increase on their 2015 vote share, but their lacklustre campaign, combined with wider economic and political disillusionment, helped Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, to increase its vote share by nearly 10 points. Labour’s surge, coupled with the voting system’s sensitivity to local dynamics, resulted in the Tories losing seats. They emerged from the election as the largest party, with 317 MPs, but nine seats short of a majority.1

Single-party majority rule is the norm in British politics. The first-past-the-post voting system, in which MPs are elected by simple pluralities in their constituencies, tends to manufacture legislative majorities for those parties that win plurality vote shares. This tendency usually results in decisive elections. It also concentrates power in the government of the day, underpinning the ‘Westminster Model’ and the related idea that governments enjoy a ‘mandate’ – that is, the right and obligation, as well as the parliamentary numbers, to implement their manifesto promises.2 While the voting system’s critics bemoan its disproportionality, its supporters emphasise its promotion of effective government and, above all, accountability. When there is single-party government, voters know who to blame.

Other than 2017, only two elections since 1945 have resulted in hung parliaments and no party winning a majority in the House of Commons. One was the February 1974 election, which led to Harold Wilson forming a minority Labour government before calling another election seven months later.3 The other was the 2010 election that ushered in a five-year period of coalition government under David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.4 Two post-war governments initially elected with majorities ended up as minority administrations as a result of deaths, by-election defeats and defections. Labour lost its overall majority in 1976 within hours of James Callaghan succeeding Wilson as prime minister. John Major’s Conservative government existed as a minority from late 1996 until its crushing defeat in the 1997 general election. Both governments enjoyed a tenuous hold on power. Both struggled to pursue their agenda.

Whenever an election results in a hung parliament, the incumbent prime minister and government are expected to stay put until it becomes clear that they cannot command the confidence of MPs but an alternative administration might be able to.5 With 317 MPs, the Conservatives were almost guaranteed to remain in power. Because the seven Sinn Féin MPs would not take their seats (they refused to recognise Parliament’s sovereignty over Northern Ireland), and because the speaker and three deputy speakers would abstain from votes, the support of 320 MPs would be enough to guarantee the confidence of the House of Commons. Labour, by contrast, had won 262 seats. Even if it had formed an unlikely ‘progressive alliance’ with the other centre-left parties – the Liberal Democrats (twelve MPs), the Scottish Nationalists (thirty-five MPs), Plaid Cymru (four MPs) and the Greens (one MP) – the Conservatives would have outnumbered the resulting coalition by three. In any event, the Liberal Democrats had ruled out joining any kind of coalition.

Crucially, there was one other centre-right party whose support could guarantee for the Tories the confidence of the Commons: Northern Ireland’s DUP. This party had won ten seats in the election. Although the party was more socially conservative than the Tories, it shared the larger party’s commitment to unionism. It was also pro-Brexit. The Conservatives moved quickly to secure the DUP’s support. The goal was to establish a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement, where the DUP would support ministers in key parliamentary votes without entering into government. A full-blown coalition would have been resisted by Tory MPs. It would also have undermined the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the government’s obligation to exercise its powers in Northern Ireland ‘with rigorous impartiality’.

After two weeks of negotiations, the DUP agreed to support the government in any confidence motions. Its MPs would also back ministers in any legislative-programme and budget votes, as well as legislation relating to finance, national security or Brexit. In return, the government abandoned some of its manifesto commitments and promised to spend an additional £1.5 billion on infrastructure projects in Northern Ireland. This largesse confounded comments made by May and others during the campaign that there was no ‘magic money tree’ to fund increases in public spending.

May herself was left gravely weakened.6 Going to the country had been her initiative. The next general election should have taken place in 2020 under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. May had sought the early election – which required the backing of two thirds of all MPs – less than three weeks after formally notifying the EU of Britain’s intention to leave the bloc. She had previously argued against an early poll but suddenly backtracked, ostensibly on the grounds that the other political parties, as well as the House of Lords, were threatening her plans for Brexit and ‘the mandate’ created by the referendum.7 Few people had accepted her words at face value. The Tories had enjoyed a commanding poll lead over Labour, and almost everyone thought May’s primary motive was to increase her parliamentary majority.

Early expectations of a landslide win now exacerbated her party’s anger. Many Tories blamed the prime minister for both her decision to seek an election and her shortcomings as a campaigner. The ill-judged Conservative campaign had focused on May’s personality and ability to provide ‘strong and stable leadership’, but the prime minister was ‘robotic’ and lacked spontaneity in interviews. She flunked out of participating in a televised leaders’ debate and, worse, was forced into an embarrassing U-turn on an unpopular manifesto pledge to tackle the growing cost of care for the elderly. Conservatives generally campaign on lower taxes, yet the pledge to raise the wealth threshold for free domiciliary social care would have cost millions of voters, especially many traditional Tory voters, thousands of pounds. The whole episode cast doubt on May’s political acumen.

On the weekend after the election, a vengeful George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer whom May had sacked the year before, told a television interviewer: ‘She is a dead woman walking.’8 The prime minister appeared even more vulnerable the following week as a result of her response to the Grenfell Tower fire that erupted in a block of flats in West London. Some seventy-two residents were killed, and more were injured. May visited the scene and met with members of the emergency services but did not meet with any of the survivors. It was a public-relations disaster.

For a while it looked like May might be ousted. Senior ministers jockeyed for position, made soundings and hatched plans to replace her. There was speculation that Boris Johnson, the ambitious foreign secretary, leading pro-Brexit campaigner and one-time favourite to replace David Cameron, might make a move. In the event, the plots fizzled out when it became clear that May had no intention of stepping down any time soon. It was a similar story three months later when an excruciating party-conference speech led to renewed speculation about May’s future. Her address was first interrupted by a comedian who handed her a mock P45 form indicating that she was about to be di...