Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit 3031214633, 9783031214639

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Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit

Edited by Matt Beech · Simon Lee

Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit

Matt Beech · Simon Lee Editors

Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit

Editors Matt Beech University of Hull Hull, UK

Simon Lee University of Hull Hull, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-21463-9 ISBN 978-3-031-21464-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jeff Gilbert/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Judi Atkins, scholar, teacher and friend to the Centre for British Politics.

Also edited by Matt Beech and Simon Lee

THE CONSERVATIVE-LIBERAL COALITION: EXAMINING THE CAMERON-CLEGG GOVERNMENT THE CAMERON-CLEGG GOVERNMENT: COALITION POLITICS IN AN AGE OF AUSTERITY THE BROWN GOVERNMENT: A POLICY EVALUATION THE CONSERVATIVES UNDER DAVID CAMERON: BUILT TO LAST? TEN YEARS OF NEW LABOUR

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Acknowledgements

In the course of planning, writing and editing this volume, a number of debts have been incurred. Matt would like to thank his wife, Claire, for her love and support and for her assistance with the manuscript, especially the index. And their children, Joseph and Anna, for their constant joy and affection. Matt would also like to thank his friend and colleague, Simon Lee, for his wisdom and encouragement in what has been a challenging time for many in Higher Education. Simon would especially like to thank his wife, Liz, for all her love and support, and Charlotte, Charlie, Rosie and Sam for all their contributions to family life at Hornsea. Simon would also like to thank Matt for being prepared to take the lead on this project during the disruption arising from the Coronavirus, and for navigating the Centre for British Politics through a prolonged period of austerity and restructuring at the University of Hull. Despite our profoundly different political perspectives upon Brexit, our friendship and working relationship have endured. Simon would also like to thank Claire for her work on the manuscript, not least the index. The editors would like to acknowledge the contributors for participating in the Centre for British Politics online workshop in June 2021 and for producing an excellent set of essays. Furthermore, they would like to thank Ambra Finotello, Commissioning Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, and her team, in particular, Naveen Das, for their collegiality and assistance in bringing this volume to publication.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Whilst this project has been worthwhile and enjoyable, it will always be tinged with the sadness that our friend and colleague, Judi Atkins, was unable to share her thoughts and words as she had planned. To her memory, this volume is dedicated.

The Centre for British Politics

The Centre for British Politics (CBP) was founded in 2007. Its approach is pluralistic and draws upon the tradition at Hull of considering history, institutions and ideas in the study of British politics. Matt Beech and Simon Lee have edited six books on UK governments and oppositions from 1997, and the CBP has guest edited or co-edited five special issues of peer-reviewed academic journals. The CBP has run workshops in the UK and the USA—in person and online—and collaborated with the Political Studies Association Conservative Studies Specialist Group, the American Political Science Association British Politics Group, the Australian-New Zealand School of Government Institute for Governance and the UC Berkeley Center for British Studies, with whom it has an established partnership. The CBP has given evidence to parliamentary committees, undertaken public policy consultancy in the private sector, provided talks and presentations to schools and charities, explained political questions and problems through the national and international media, and facilitated local engagement by holding public lectures with leading academics and parliamentarians. The CBP community includes doctoral students, post-docs, visiting scholars and 14 Senior Fellows, each of whom have delivered the Annual Norton Lecture. Follow us on Twitter @CBPhull and view our recorded content at: https://www.gotostage. com/channel/923cb85986064f9bb7f9be592abf994d.

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Contents

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Introduction Matt Beech and Simon Lee

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Part I Ideas, Leadership and Elections 2

Conservative Party Ideology in the Age of Brexit Matt Beech

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Prime Ministerial Leadership in the Age of Brexit Roderick Crawford

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The General Elections: 2015, 2017, 2019 Christopher Fear

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The EU Referendum and British Politics Jasper Miles

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Parliament and the Constitution Philip Norton

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Part II Continuity and Change in Public Policy 7

Two Steps Backwards: UK Economic Policy in the Ages of Austerity and Brexit, 2015–2020 Simon Lee

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CONTENTS

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Conservative Governments and Education Policy in the Age of Brexit, 2015 to 2020 Joseph Tiplady

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The Submerged Welfare State: Health and Social Care Policy in England from 2015 to 2020 Holly Jarman

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Conservative Welfare Policies: Ideational Oscillation in the Age of Brexit Daniel Pitt

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Consistently Inconsistent? Assessing UK Climate Action in the Age of Brexit Jeremy F. G. Moulton

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British Defence Policy and Brexit: Finding Stability During a Period of Uncertainty Philip Mayne

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Foreign Policy and International Development from Cameron to Johnson James R. Pritchett

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Part III Four Nation Politics 14

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A Much Misgoverned Nation: England in the Age of Brexit Simon Lee

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Scotland, Conservatism and the British Union, 2015–2020 Margaret Arnott

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Wales and the Conservative Government, 2015–20 Roger Awan-Scully

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Alienation and Destabilization: Northern Ireland in the Age of Brexit Cillian McGrattan

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Margaret Arnott is Professor of Public Policy at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main research interests are in constitutional and territorial politics. She also has research expertise in legislative politics and social policy. Roger Awan-Scully is Chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom and Professor of Political Science at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research has focused on political representation in the EU and UK, and he is the author of several major studies of these topics, including The End of British Party Politics (Biteback, 2018). Formerly Head of Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University, he was Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded 2011 and 2016 Welsh Election Studies and the 2011 Welsh Referendum Study. He was the 2017 winner of the Political Studies Association’s Communicator of the Year Award. He is also a trustee of the Hansard Society. Matt Beech is Reader in Politics and Director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull. He is the author or editor of ten books on the Conservative and Labour parties. He is Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for European Studies, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Associate Member of the Centre de Recherches en Civilisation Britannique at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has held visiting appointments at Oxford, Berkeley and Flinders.

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Roderick Crawford was founder of Parliamentary Brief and its editor 1992-2012. He has since worked in conflict resolution using a mutual security concept ‘If you are safe I am safe’ in Iraq, South Sudan and Yemen. He has worked on the Northern Ireland Protocol from 2018 and is widely published including by Policy Exchange, The Northern Ireland Protocol: The Origins of the Current Crisis (2021), The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph. Christopher Fear is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hull. He specialises in political theory and the history of political thought, with special interests in British Idealism, New Liberalism and conservatism. His work has been published in journals including The Review of Politics, The Journal of Political Ideologies and History of European Ideas. Holly Jarman is Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan. As a political scientist, she researches the impact of market regulations and trade agreements on health and social policies in the UK, the European Union and the United States. Her work on UK health policy appears in journals including The Lancet, Public Policy and Administration, and Health Economics, Politics and Law. Simon Lee is Senior Lecturer at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Hull. He is the author of two books on the political economy of Gordon Brown: Best for Britain? and Boom and Bust, the coauthor of The Political Economy of Modern Britain, the co-editor of seven books and has contributed to more than thirty other books, encyclopaedia and dictionaries. Philip Mayne is a Teaching Associate in politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield. He previously taught at the University of Hull on both international security and defence policy. He has recently been awarded his Ph.D., titled ‘Ethics or efficacy? Examining Strategic Ethics and Counterinsurgency’, from the University of Hull. Cillian McGrattan lectures in politics at Ulster University. His last book, The Politics of Trauma and Peacebuilding: Lessons from Northern Ireland, was published by Routledge in 2017. He is currently writing a book on Protestant memory on the border during the Northern Irish conflict. Jasper Miles completed his Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool on the Labour Party’s approaches to electoral reform. He lectures in politics at

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the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge; Queen Mary, University of London; and the University of Lincoln. He specialises in British Politics and has written on the Labour Party’s political thought. Jeremy F. G. Moulton is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York. His primary areas of teaching and research interest are the European Union, climate and environmental politics, and political myth. Philip Norton the Lord Norton of Louth is Professor of Government and Director of the Centre for Legislative Studies at the University of Hull. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Legislative Studies, President of the Study of Parliament Group, Chair of the History of Parliament Trust and Chair of the Higher Education Committee. He is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He is the author or editor of 35 books. Daniel Pitt is an external Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Politics and Government at the University of Public Service. He is also a Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull. His latest paper, Future Conservative Electoral Prospects: Time for Tory Socialism? is published in Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique. James R. Pritchett is Lecturer in War Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for War Studies at the University of Hull. His research mainly focuses on strategic theory and its history, and he is also interested in the relationship between conservative political philosophy, strategy and foreign policy. His first monograph, Time in Strategy, will be published by Routledge in 2023. Joseph Tiplady is completing his Ph.D. on New Labour’s secondary education reforms in the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull, where he was awarded the Alan Johnson Scholarship. He has published an essay on Labour’s education policy under Neil Kinnock, 1983-1992, in an edited collection published by Routledge, and is working on a paper examining Keir Starmer and statecraft.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Matt Beech and Simon Lee

Since the end of the Second World War, United Kingdom (UK) politics has been shaped by important continuities and changes in party ideology, policy and interests. One of the most important continuities has been how successive general elections have been fought upon the basis of rival party manifesto programmes for national economic, political and social renewal, defined in terms of an overt or default British nationalism, and to be conducted in the interests of the British nation (Edgerton, 2018). This pattern began at the 5 July 1945 UK General Election, when the Labour Party’s Let Us Face The Future manifesto promises of effective political leadership to create a ‘New Britain’ of rising living standards and ‘security for all’, in which the British nation would experience ‘a tremendous overhaul, a great programme of modernization and re-equipment of its homes, its factories and machinery, its schools, its social services’ (Labour

M. Beech · S. Lee (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Beech e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_1

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Party, 1945), led to a landslide 393 seats, and parliamentary majority of 147 and initiated a tradition of One Nation socialism (Lee, 2022). From the early 1960s, an integral component of these British nationalist renewal programmes, at least from a One Nation Conservative perspective, was their advocacy of UK participation in European integration, initially via membership of the European Economic Community and latterly as prime movers during the mid-1980s of the completion of the Single European market by 1992. At first, under Conservative leaders from Harold Macmillan to Edward Heath, this ambition was a central part of a Conservative blueprint for implementing a ‘developmental state’ technocratic industrial modernization programme (Lee, 2018). Subsequently, under Margaret Thatcher, the creation of a Single European Market was a central component of a Conservative ‘developmental market’, enterprise and entrepreneur-led programme of deregulation, liberalization and privatization (Lee, 2017, 2018; Thatcher, 1988). In our series of edited collections, we have previously overseen analyses of the respective programmes for British national political, economic and social renewal advanced by the Blair, Brown and Cameron-Clegg coalition governments between May 1997 and May 2015 (Beech & Lee, 2008, 2010, 2015; Lee & Beech, 2009, 2011). More recently, at the 12 December 2019 UK General Election, the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson secured a winning total of 365 seats and a parliamentary majority of 81 upon the back of a manifesto equally committed to British national economic, political and social renewal by unleashing Britain’s potential (Conservative Party, 2019). However, what made the 2019 Conservative manifesto and Johnson’s general election campaign unique, and unlike any predecessors advanced by major British political parties at the previous twenty-one UK general elections since 1945, was the focus upon an agenda for British national renewal around a single policy objective and political narrative: ‘Get Brexit Done’ (Conservative Party, 2019). Instead of the previous identification of engagement with European integration as a prerequisite for remedying relative decline, the key to British national renewal was now seen to lie with completion of the protracted negotiations to withdraw the UK from the EU. Longitudinal analysis of public opinion by leading pollsters has demonstrated how, while the most important single issue identified by voters in the UK has frequently changed, from, for example, a concern with inflation during the mid-1970s to a focus upon unemployment during the early 1980s, the top three leading issues identified by voters have tended

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to be drawn from those concerned with the economy (taxation, inflation), public services (e.g. education, health or housing) or society (crime and immigration). But there have been relatively few occasions in the UK’s post-war political history when a single issue has been consistently identified by voters as the most important issue confronting the British nation, let alone an issue which has simultaneously concerned British national economic, political and social renewal. And yet from the 23 June 2016 European Union (EU) referendum until the 31 January 2020, when the UK formally withdrew from the EU, a period which covered two UK General Elections and which saw David Cameron succeeded as Prime Minister by Theresa May (from the 13 July 2016) and Boris Johnson (from the 24 July 2019), it was this British withdrawal (‘Brexit’) from the EU which remained the most important issue identified by opinion polls. On 23 June 2016, the question on the ballot paper for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum had asked: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ Seldom has one intractable question been the chief intellectual and electoral dilemma in the public political consciousness, the binary nature of which required a judgement to be made for one side of the argument or the other. The fact that the careers of two consecutive Conservative prime ministers ended because of the same question, and within a period of only three years, is remarkable, in and of itself. Indeed, if, from the spring of 2009, the Brown Government and the following Cameron-Clegg Government had chosen to confront an ‘Age of Austerity’ (Cameron, 2009; Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2010), then it is surely correct to suggest that the Cameron Government, the May Government and the Johnson Government were (and continue to be) confronted with the ideological and policy choices arising from an ‘Age of Brexit’. These choices were to be made while still determining whether to dilute or finally bring to an end the previous ‘Age of Austerity’. It is to the further understanding and analysis of the policy choices made during this ‘Age of Brexit’, and their impact upon and implications for politics in the UK, that this edited collection is devoted. In the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, and for the following three years, the principal political fallout from the landmark Brexit referendum outcome was parliamentary gridlock and legislative inertia, periodically punctuated by constitutional crisis. Brexit decentred

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the British state (Beech, 2022).1 All of this activity occurred primarily at the elite level of British politics, not least within the major UK political parties. But at the street level too, the disruptive character of Brexit continued unabated through bitter disagreements within families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, religious establishments and across civil society. A central reason for such sharp divisions comes from the fact that the United Kingdom has become increasing morally and politically diverse. The generational divide is significant, but so too is class, the division between property renters and rentier landlords, and the wider divide over socio-cultural values. Whilst lines of demarcation are never neat, and outliers necessarily exist, it is accurate to describe the Leave/Remain dichotomy as a struggle for the moral vision of what the United Kingdom, in general, its constituent nations, and, England in particular, should be. One can illustrate these opposing intellectual traditions, pushed further and deeper apart by Brexit, by understanding them as small ‘c’ conservatism versus cosmopolitanism (Beech, 2022).2 These traditions gained greater prominence and explanatory power within British politics in the aftermath of the December 2019 general election. This volume examines the particular phenomenon of Brexit and its impact upon political ideology, institutions, policies and interests. It does this through an analysis of the three Conservative administrations in the period from the 7 May 2015 general election to the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act which received Royal assent on 23 January 2020. As is the way with edited collections, there is no single thesis advocated. The volume is divided into three parts: Part I: Ideas, Leadership and Elections, Part II: Continuity and Change in Public Policy and Part III: Four Nation Politics. Colleagues employ a plurality of methodological tools including (but not limited to) ideational examination (Beech), semi-structured elite interviews (Crawford), quantitative analysis (Fear), historical analysis (Miles) and institutional analysis (Norton). Essays in Part II (Lee, Tiplady, Jarman, Pitt, Moulton, Mayne and Pritchett) employ comparative methods to map and measure the extent of public policy continuity and discontinuity across the three Conservative administrations. Essays in Part III (Arnott, Awan-Scully and McGrattan) speak 1 See, M. Beech (2022) Brexit and the Decentred State, Public Policy and Administration, Vol. 37 (1), 67–83. 2 See, M. Beech (2021) Brexit and the Labour Party: Europe, Cosmopolitanism and the Narrowing of Traditions, British Politics, Vol. 16 (2), 152–169.

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to the specific territorial politics within the framework of UK devolved governance, except England, to which Lee provides an analysis of public policy made in Westminster. The period chosen for study commences with the 7 May 2015 general election. This is far from the beginning of the long, origin story of Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party, but David Cameron fought the election on a platform which included a pledge to hold an in or out referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union (Conservative Party, 2015). The Conservatives under Cameron won an absolute majority (12 seats) for the first time since John Major’s 21 seat majority in April 1992. The period of the volume concludes with the passing of the Johnson Government’s European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act on 23 January 2020. This did not in any sense constitute the end of the ‘Age of Brexit’, but it did mark a significant political, legislative and constitutional landmark, especially for the those who had voted for the victorious Leave campaign in June 2016 and the Conservative Party in December 2019. Whilst that election had been dominated by a personal political and leadership battle between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn to be primus inter pares, in terms of policies for British national renewal, it was chiefly about whether electors wanted to ‘get Brexit done’—or not. The second reason for concluding with the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act is that less than two months later the United Kingdom, and much of the world, was confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon affected every aspect of British national life, politics and economics. Our seventh volume3 will pick up where we have left off in this book, and duly assess the Johnson Government’s programme for British national renewal, and in particular its response to the coronavirus pandemic, its levelling-up agenda, its legislation for amending the Northern Ireland Protocol and the UK governmental response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is the sixth book produced by the editors under the auspices of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull. It is the fifth published by Palgrave Macmillan. Like previous volumes, our approach is to write with our students in mind and to that end accessibility is of primary importance to the Centre for British Politics. And yet, this does not require colleagues to reduce the rigour of their argumentation

3 S. Lee and M. Beech, (eds.) The Johnson Government, forthcoming.

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nor diminish engagement with scholarly literatures. It is most gratifying that these volumes are both well cited by political scientists and widely deployed on undergraduate reading lists. Our organizational practice continues to be one which brings together early career researchers and established experts. And crucially, for the present era within the academy, which resists heterodoxy, it is the commitment of the Centre for British Politics to value pluralism and academic liberty which underpins our work. Within this volume, there are voices of conservatives, liberals, social democrats and an English civic nationalist, and more crucially, within this volume, there are scholars who voted Leave and scholars who voted Remain. The editors themselves hold differing perspectives on Brexit (as they do on New Labour, Britishness and the United Kingdom). When thinking and writing about Brexit—above nearly all questions in British politics—this clearly matters. Avoiding polemical writing requires a commitment not to some artificial conception of neutrality, but to an even-handed rigorous approach towards data and the analysis of one’s subject. There will, no doubt, be gaps in coverage. The pressure to conform to word limits necessarily means that judgements have to be made, including more policy areas in less detail or having fewer policy areas but writing in greater depth. This is the ever-present dilemma for editors. Nonetheless, we believe we have—more or less—struck the right balance but, of course, it is for the readers to decide.

References Beech, M., & Lee, S. (Eds.). (2008). Ten Years of New Labour. Palgrave Macmillan. Beech, M., & Lee, S. (Eds.). (2010). The Brown Government: A Policy Evaluation. Routledge. Beech, M., & Lee, S. (Eds.). (2015). The Conservative-Liberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government. Palgrave Macmillan. Beech, M. (2021). Brexit and the Labour Party: Europe, Cosmopolitanism and the Narrowing of Traditions. British Politics, 16(2), 152–169. Beech, M. (2022). Brexit and the Decentred State. Public Policy and Administration, 37 (1), 67–83. Party, C. (2015). The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015. The Conservative and Unionist Party. Party, C. (2019). Get Brexit Done: Unleash Britain’s Potential: The 2019 Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto. Conservative and Unionist Party.

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Cameron, D. (2009, April 26) ‘The Age of Austerity’, Speech to The Conservative Spring Forum, Cheltenham. Edgerton, D. (2018). The Rise and Fall of The British Nation: A Twentieth Century History. Allen Lane. Her Majesty’s Treasury. (2010). Budget 2010: Securing the Recovery, HC.451. The Stationery Office. Party, L. (1945). Let Us Face The Future: A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation. The Labour Party. Lee, S. (2017). Law, Legislation and Rent-Seeking; The Role of the Treasury-Led Developmental State in the Competitive Advantage of the Southern Powerhouse. In C. Berry & A. Giovannini (Eds.), Developing England’s North: The Political Economy of The Northern Powerhouse (pp. 59–82). Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, S. (2018). From Technocratic Pragmatism to the Developmental Market: Conceptualising the Politics of Brexit in Terms of the Rivalry of Two Different Political Economies. Marmara Journal of European Studies, 26(1), 51–74. Lee, S. (2022). One Nation Socialism: Neil Kinnock and The Quest for A British Developmental State. In K. Hickson (Ed.), Neil Kinnock: Saving the Labour Party? (pp. 42–52). Routledge. Lee, S., & Beech, M. (Eds.). (2009). The Conservatives under David Cameron. Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, S., & Beech, M. (Eds.). (2011). The Cameron-Clegg Government. Palgrave Macmillan. Thatcher, M. (1988, September 20) Speech to The College of Europe, Bruges.

PART I

Ideas, Leadership and Elections

CHAPTER 2

Conservative Party Ideology in the Age of Brexit Matt Beech

Introduction In the period from the Conservative Party’s general election victory on 7 May 2015 until the passing of the Johnson Government’s European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act which received Royal Assent on 23 January 2020, British politics was preoccupied initially (until 23 June

Versions of this essay were given as presentations at the Anglo-American Politics in Transition: After Brexit and Trump online workshop organised by the American Political Science Association British Politics Group on 8 December 2021 and at The Post-Liberal Turn and the Future of British Conservatism workshop organised by the University of Public Service, Ludovika and the Danube Institute in Budapest on 19 March 2022. I am grateful to colleagues at both meetings for their questions and comments. Any errors are, of course, my own. M. Beech (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_2

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2016) by the question of whether the United Kingdom (UK) should remain or leave the European Union (EU), and then latterly by the questions of the precise terms upon which it should withdraw, and the exact nature of its future relationship with the EU27. The Conservative Party was sharply affected, disrupted and once again riven by the subject of Europe. Brexit was, and is, a decentring phenomenon for the British state, for the Government in office, for the Conservative Party and for its executives (Beech, 2022). This chapter argues that in spite of a series of debilitating crises which led to unprecedented constitutional tumult—including prime ministerial resignations, minority governments, Cabinet splits, parliamentary gridlock and the emergence of new parties— the Conservative Party demonstrated its ideational breadth. Unlike its great rival—the Labour Party—which embarked upon the narrowing of traditions (Beech, 2021), the Conservative Party, under immense pressure from internal struggle and disputation, proved to be sufficiently pliable. Or, to put it another way, the Conservatives remained a broad church. The subject of Europe, and more specifically of the United Kingdom’s place within the post-war project of European integration, has been the most problematic question for the Conservative Party. It is perhaps analogous to the Labour Party’s dilemmas over the defence of the realm and foreign affairs, inasmuch as the quantity and quality of perspectives within the party make it a multi-layered problem. The vigour with which beliefs are held, and the mutual exclusivity of traditions of thought about the European project, results in internecine struggle and reputational harm for the Conservative Party (Dorey, 2017). Hindsight is a most useful tool and yet when retracing earlier footsteps, it can play tricks with the mind and with analysis. By this, I mean that the competing visions of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union were not co-equal when David Cameron emerged as the victor in the 2015 general election. In fact, the various perspectives which can be explained and understood as Eurosceptic were a minority view in the Parliamentary Conservative Party. The position of Cameron, and the mainstay of his supporters in Parliament, did not desire to sever the British state from the federal polity and the cosmopolitan project of the European Union. On the other hand, Eurosceptic, small ‘c’ conservatives motivated by love of nation, including its history, institutions, traditions and culture, were eminently recognisable across the country, especially in the shire counties of England. In the minds of millions of Conservative voters and a significant swathe of socially conservative Labour-inclined voters, a Eurosceptic mood had

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risen to the surface of British politics (Ford & Goodwin, 2014). This mood was driven by the negative externalities of cosmopolitan policy including mass low-skill and no skill immigration, the diminution of the sovereignty of Parliament, the influence of a superintending foreign court, exorbitant subscription fees with little corresponding value for money, and the steady erosion of national identity. Whilst it is common knowledge that Leave voters are more socially conservative than Remain voters, one of the most penetrating observations from the data on socio-cultural values and viewpoints of voters is that erstwhile Labour supporters who voted Conservative in 2019 are more socially conservative than any other bloc of voters (Bale et al., 2020: 12–13). This is evidence that small ‘c’ conservatives, in significant numbers until recently, supported both great parties of state. Lord Ashcroft’s research found that Leave voters came from a variety of party affiliations and comprised 37% of electors who had voted Labour, 58% electors who had voted Conservative, 96% of electors who voted for the staunch Eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party of Nigel Farage and, somewhat counterintuitively, 30% who had supported the Euro-enthusiast Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg in the 2015 general election the year before (Ashcroft, 2016). This chapter asserts that the Age of Brexit was one of sharp ideological conflict in the Conservative Party and yet, despite such tumult, the Conservative Party demonstrated its ideological breadth by surviving schism and thriving electorally, by winning a third successive UK general election in 2019 with an increased majority. I argue that the Conservative Party is a broad church, containing a plurality of intellectual traditions and that its success is largely due to a particular approach to statecraft (Bulpitt, 1986) also understood as an overarching commitment to political realism. The post-war Conservative Party’s plurality of traditions, which has enabled it to evolve as a broad church and to thrive electorally, is contrasted with the relative narrowness of those of the second great party of state, the Labour Party. However, the chapter concludes that, whilst the Conservative Party has survived the tumult of the Age of Brexit , the political, economic and social aftershocks, so to speak, have not abated.

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Conservative Intellectual Traditions in the Age of Brexit In the period this volume is studying, the Conservative Party continued to be a political home for a plurality of intellectual traditions. This aspect of the character of the Conservative Party is well documented in studies of its thought and practice in the post-war era (Gamble, 1974; Garnett & Hickson, 2009; Gilmour, 1978; Hickson, 2005; Letwin, 1992; Norton & Aughey, 1981). The purpose here is not to present a typology, nor to refer to every ginger group, faction, dining club or internal publication, for that is clearly beyond the scope of an essay. What can be said is that in different seasons in the post-war history of the Conservative Party, up to and including the period we are discussing, there have been identifiable conservative, libertarian, liberal and progressive/One Nation traditions of thought. This loose ideological quadrumvirate has been seen in the Conservative Party in Parliament on attitudes to economic, European, constitutional, social and foreign policy questions. These traditions are diverse and, from time to time, sharply conflict and collide on matters of party policy. Examples would include, but are not limited to, Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury team’s resignation from the Macmillan Government over what they believed to be unsustainable public expenditure commitments in 1958 (Cooper, 2011); the 23 Conservatives who voted against the Major Government’s Maastricht Bill in 1993 (Cowley & Norton, 1999); the rebellion of 91 Conservative MPs over the Conservative-Liberal Coalition’s plans to reform the House of Lords in 2012 (Cole, 2012); the 134 Conservative MPs who voted against the Cameron-led government’s gay marriage legislation the year after (Gilbert, 2014); and the 25 Conservative MPs who rebelled against the Johnson Government’s policy to reduce the proportion of international aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income in 2021 (Parkinson, 2021). Nonetheless, the adhesive which binds such competing intellectual traditions is a common philosophical adversary, namely socialism, and most often utilised in the parliamentary crucible through the ideas, beliefs and aspirations of Labour Party politicians. Cameron and the Cameronites appeared secure as the results of the 2015 general election were announced (see Fear in this volume). After governing for five years in concert with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party secured its first majority in the House of Commons, albeit a modest 12 seats. This was the Conservative Party’s

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first majority government since John Major led them to a fourth consecutive general election victory with a majority of 21 seats in 1992. As Leader of the Opposition from 2005 and chiefly as Prime Minister from 2010, in a political marriage of shared ideological purpose with Clegg’s wing of the Liberal Democrats—the Orange Book liberals (Marshall & Laws, 2004)— Cameron’s intellectual tradition is best understood as liberal (Beech, 2011). By 2015, this liberal intellectual tradition within the Conservative Party in Parliament was the most influential. As Cameron had undertaken social liberal reform and austerity measures, there was sufficient evidence of a form of politics that was more liberal than conservative (Beech, 2015). With regard to the other ideological traditions with the Conservative Party in 2015, a meaningfully conservative intellectual tradition within Parliament was represented by the Cornerstone Group of MPs under the leadership of Sir Edward Leigh and Sir John Hayes. The progressive or One Nation intellectual tradition was most clearly seen in the thought and speeches of Damian Green and Sir Alan Duncan, whilst the libertarian intellectual tradition was embodied in the ideas, arguments and voting behaviour of Steve Baker. The fact that the 2015 Parliament comprised a Conservative Party in which a plurality of intellectual traditions was apparent, despite the dominance of the Cameronite liberal wing, bears witness to the argument that the Conservative Party was a broad church at the beginning of the Age of Brexit , with Eurosceptics and Euro-enthusiasts, the pagans and the pious, the statists and Hayekians, and the many dispositions in between. Cameron’s government legislated for the in–out referendum in the European Union Referendum Act (2015) and confidence continued from the commencement of the campaign on 15 April 2016 until polling day, on 23 June. What followed rocked the surety of the Conservative leadership and party elites (see Crawford in this volume). On the morning of 24 June, the nation awoke to the shock result that a majority of citizens, 52% to 48%, had voted to leave the European Union (see Miles in this volume). Cameron dutifully resigned and the Age of Brexit claimed its first prime ministerial career. On 11 July, Theresa May won the Conservative Leadership election and the party replaced one Remainer with another. May described herself, as do many, as a One Nation Conservative, but this can’t fully be evinced from her record. She drew upon a plurality of traditions during periods of her ministerial career, moving more towards the liberal intellectual tradition as her tenure progressed.

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May’s tenure experienced the full decentring effects of Brexit, from a legal challenge over the government’s right to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to the loss of her parliamentary majority at the 2017 general election (see Fear in this volume) which necessitated the confidence and supply deal with the Eurosceptic, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) (see McGrattan in this volume) parliamentary gridlock, constitutional crises and the Speaker of the House emerging as an intentional political actor (see Norton in this volume). At root, the problem was that Parliament had a Remain majority split between those for whom a second referendum was essential and others who desired some form of customs union, and/or continued membership of the single market, and/or connection with the formal legal structures of the European Union. For Leavers, May’s tenure promised much—‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’—but did not deliver. This verdict was held by staunch Eurosceptic Conservative members of the European Research Group (ERG) who interpreted May’s actions as nothing short of duplicitous. The ERG consistently voted against her negotiated deal with the European Union and challenged her leadership in a vote of no confidence in 2018. Eventually, after multiple failures to garner sufficient support in Parliament, even trying to work with Her Majesty’s Opposition and offering a second referendum, May announced her resignation on 24 May 2019. The Age of Brexit claimed its second prime ministerial career. In the ensuing Conservative Party leadership election, the Brexiteer, Boris Johnson defeated the Remainer, Jeremy Hunt, on 23 July 2019. After withdrawing the whip from 21 pro-EU rebel MPs who supported the Benn Act, but then restoring it to 10 of them, and suffering defections to the Liberal Democrats, Johnson lost the technical majority that the confidence and supply deal with the DUP had provided. Soon after the controversial proroguing of Parliament further heightened the internecine conflict within the Conservative Party along the Leave/Remain axis. Johnson’s goal was to make the case to Parliament that constitutional gridlock could only be resolved with a mandate from the electorate at a general election. Once the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was satisfied that a no-deal Brexit had been removed, the Labour Party agreed to a December 2019 general election (see Fear in this volume).

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A Plurality of Traditions Within a Broad Church British political parties have, when exposed to extreme tumult and ideological conflict, risked schism. In the nineteenth century, the Conservative Party experienced an historic schism in 1846 when the Peelites split to work with the Whigs and Radicals (eventually forming the Liberal Party in 1859) over the issue of the repeal of the Corn Laws. During the interwar period, one recalls the schism the Liberal Party had in 1931 when the Simonites split to form the National Liberals over the question of supporting the minority Labour Government. And most recently the schism the Labour Party had in 1981when the Gang of Four split to form the Social Democratic Party over the socialist policy platform of Michael Foot and the influence of Tony Benn’s New Left. All major parties have experienced some of their Members of Parliament crossing the floor of the House to join their opponents. Labour MPs have joined the Conservative Party (e.g. Woodrow Wyatt) and Conservatives have joined the Labour Party (e.g. John Bercow). Change UK, also known as the Independent Group for Change, was an example of a short-lived, minor party, formed by a handful of European Union-enthusiast parliamentarians who resigned the whip, from both great parties of state, in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union and the ensuing parliamentary gridlock. Other members of political parties—not in Parliament—have resigned and joined emergent political parties and, by so doing, have shaped British politics. A strong example of this is Nigel Farage resigning his membership of the Conservative Party and joining the fledgling United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Without UKIP under Farage, there would have been no Brexit. Considering the tumult of the Age of Brexit , in large measure authored and reauthored by Conservative politicians, an apprehending question to pose is, why does the Conservative Party retain its effectiveness? Effectiveness here is used simply as an expression of consistent vote-winning. In the three general elections of 2015, 2017 and 2019, the Conservative Party triumphed, and in the election before our period of study in 2010, it was the largest party in Parliament and the lead partner in the first post-war coalition government. So why do sufficient numbers of electors, across diverse socio-cultural communities, continue to lend their support to the party responsible for much of the polarisation and constitutional commotion of recent years? One interpretation builds upon the work of political scientist Jim Bulpitt around the idea of statecraft. In

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the conclusion of his famous article on Thatcher’s first term statecraft, Bulpitt argued the following: The art of statecraft is to understand and work with the limitations placed on elite activity by the many changing structural constraints arising from within and without the polity. A distinguishing feature of the Conservative Party since the late 19th century is that, for most of the time, it has taken greater cognizance of these constraints than its opponents (Bulpitt, 1986: 39).

Following Bulpitt, the Conservative Party appears to possess a general facility or a disposition, which pertains to ‘the art of statecraft’. Crucially, this disposition towards statecraft directly relates to its primary opponent, the Labour Party. The historical record of the post-war era bears the following data: between 1945 and 2019 the Labour Party won nine out of twenty-one general elections. At first glance, this may convey the sense of a reasonably even series of electoral contests but, on closer scrutiny, the nine victories were achieved by three Labour leaders and yielded a total of 30 years in office: 1945 and 1950 (Clement Attlee), 1964, 1970, February 1974, October 1974 (Harold Wilson), and 1997, 2001 and 2005 (Tony Blair). At times, the Labour Party has proved to be a formidable opponent of the Conservative Party. When it has successfully constructed a social coalition, or put another way, when it has held together a plurality of intellectual traditions (e.g. social democratic, democratic socialist and small ‘c’ conservative), it has prevailed, but more often than not, it has come second to the Conservative Party. Statecraft properly understood poses a dilemma for a party of idealism and reform such as the Labour Party. The dilemma can be noted throughout the postwar period between its left-wing or socialist traditions, both Old Left and New Left and its right-wing or progressive traditions, both Old Right and New Labour (Beech et al., 2018). There is explanatory value in Bulpitt’s theory of Conservative Party statecraft, and in the post-war era, one could maintain that this statecraft approach was the special quality that the party acquired. It can also be understood as a type of political realism. This realism is concerned to keep the necessity of policy pragmatism connected to the changing interests of the electorate, especially those electors dubbed ‘floating voters’ residing in marginal constituencies. This political realism has as its overarching objective the defeat of the Labour Party at each election and, by so

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doing, prevent an agenda of socialism being implemented. Such an ideological agenda, whether in a full-blooded form as proffered by Corbyn’s platform in 2019 or in a moderated fashion as typified by Ed Miliband’s platform in 2015, acts as an essential political coagulant for the plurality of intellectual traditions housed within the Conservative Party. Within this type of political realism, there is agency and structural considerations. The political and social environment is fluid and, as such, the Conservative Party’s electoral tactics in any given electoral contest are dynamic. What remains concrete is the strategy of political realism, namely to stymying the appeal of the second great party of state. What is contended here is that the post-war Conservative Party survives and thrives because it has evolved into a broad church. Broad, not in the nineteenth-century Anglican sense which denotes a latitudinarianism. But broad, rather in an institutional sense, such as a church with a variety of traditions and dispositions which practises toleration between factions. This breadth is a strength and is as much as result of the attitude of individual political actors as it is a product of the electoral system. I emphasise the ideological breadth of the Conservative Party to underscore the explanatory argument of its statecraft or political realism which has, over many decades, led to numerous electoral successes and, therefore, its predominance in forming administrations ahead of its chief rival and opponent. The Labour Party’s experience of the Age of Brexit led to what I have called ‘the narrowing of traditions’ (Beech, 2021). By this, I refer specifically to the narrowing of acceptable intellectual traditions regarding the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. During the 2016 referendum, and in the years of tumult and constitutional crises that followed, and especially during the 2019 general election campaign, the Labour Party marginalised and barracked its own members who held a contrary view to its cosmopolitan Euro-enthusiasm. Whether the target was Labour parliamentarians, local councillors or local party members in constituencies across the country, in person or online, the intellectual tradition of Labour Euro-enthusiasm demonstrated its intolerance of the Labour Leave campaign headed by John Mills and, in particular, of Labour politicians such as Gisela Stuart, the Chair of the Vote Leave campaign. This narrowing of acceptable intellectual traditions is peculiar for a number of reasons. First, Labour was the original Eurosceptic party (Hickson & Miles, 2018). Second, in the Age of Brexit , Labour was led by Corbyn, a long-standing critic of the European Union and the

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United Kingdom’s membership. Third, 37% of electors, who voted for the Labour Party in the 2015 general election, voted Leave in the 2016 referendum (Ashcroft, 2016). And yet, in the post-referendum period, the hostility to centre-left Euroscepticism increased. The consequence of the Labour Party’s intellectual homogeneity on the question of the United Kingdom’s place in European Union was most clearly revealed by losing dozens of Red Wall seats to the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election. These communities possessed solid Leave voting majorities and when faced with a Labour manifesto commitment to hold a second referendum, and the prospect of a radical socialist as Prime Minister, the cross-pressures involved led thousands of erstwhile Labour voters to choose the party led by Johnson, on the promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’. It should be noted that it is not merely on the question of the United Kingdom’s place in European Union that the Labour Party demonstrates its sectarian character, but also on a wider set of questions pertaining to socio-culture. From gay marriage to abortion, to transgenderism and the Black Lives Matter movement, the Labour Party has eschewed its former broad church disposition. Questions of political economy and foreign and defence policy continue to separate the Labour Left from the Labour Right—as they have done throughout the post-war era— but not matters of socio-culture (Beech, 2018). On this, there is unity, or put differently, uniformity. Intellectual traditions of small ‘c’ conservatism, which helped to birth the Labour movement, emanated from historic, working-class communities embedded within the religious and moral fabric of Protestant non-conformity and Roman Catholicism, have been largely erased from the party’s institutional memory. Even Christians on the Left is indistinguishable. Barely anything discernibly Christian remains.1 To parse the famous dictum of the British Labour movement, the contemporary Labour Party owes more to Marx, or more accurately to the cultural turn in Western Marxism, than it does to Methodism.2

1 For a history of the role of Christian intellectual traditions on socialist thought and the formation of the Labour Party, up to the end of the Second World War see, A.A.J. Williams (2022) Christian Socialism as Political Ideology: The Formation of the British Christian Left, 1877–1945 (London, Bloomsbury Academic). 2 For more on Cultural Marxism see, D. Dworkin (1997) Cultural Marxism in PostWar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

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The Labour Party has evolved into a cosmopolitan, social justice, Euroenthusiast organisation. It is inclusive and welcoming to all who can make such a religious confession and excludes those with a heterodox perspective. As a Unionist organisation, it has little to say in response to the Scottish National Party—the dominant progressive force in Scotland—whose added weapons of nationalism, anti-Englishness and threats of independence referendums continue to strengthen its arm North of the border. The result is that the Labour Party is authoring and re-authoring its intellectual traditions on deeper, yet narrower, moral and intellectual territory.

Conclusion The Conservatives managed to win the 2019 general election despite the tribulations over Brexit and the disputatiousness within the Parliamentary Party in the 2015–2017 and the 2017–2019 parliaments. A third consecutive election victory was delivered, and one headed by its third chief executive in three years. This momentous period in British political life could have witnessed the complete unravelling of the Conservative Party, so riven was it by barbed conflict over exiting the European Union. In 2017, Corbyn’s Labour Party posed a robust electoral challenge, but by 2019, with a change in Conservative leadership, and a genuine desire to extricate the United Kingdom from the federal polity of the European Union, Corbyn and the Labour Party’s offering was much diminished. In this chaotic period for the Conservatives, one could identify a plurality of intellectual traditions long-held within the party and recall them aired, time and again, in the course of ideological exchange and argumentation. Questions were raised and debated about nationalism and cosmopolitanism, free trade and protectionism, controlled immigration from the Continent and free movement of people, the nature and authority of regulatory frameworks, the dilemma over the Northern Irish border and, last but not least, the financial cost of quitting the club. Although the Conservative Party as a broad church, comprised of a plurality of intellectual traditions, has succeeded in weathering the violent storms of the Age of Brexit , the aftershocks have not abated. It does not follow that the Conservative Party will maintain its position or retain its statecraft and approach of political realism. Politics, like traditions of thought, evolve.

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It is important to note that the act of recovering the British nationstate, after over four decades of ever-closer political integration, required a fundamental divestment of resources, law and practices. In this sense, the Leave campaigns were radical projects rather than conservative projects and, to some extent, rubbed against the traditions of conservatism. The counterpoint to this interpretation is that recovering the British nationstate—in a meaningful sense–required the return to what Noel O’Sullivan terms a limited style of politics: By a limited style of politics is meant one which has as its primary aim the preservation of the distinction between private and the public life (or between the state and society) which emerged in Europe at the end of the medieval period. It is this distinction that moderate conservatives have believed to be increasingly threatened by the ideal of radical change – an ideal which has meant in practice the constant extension of state power into every sphere of life, in the name of equality, social justice and welfare (O’Sullivan, 1976: 12).

In other words, the radical change was the 1972 European Communities Act. This piece of legislation set the United Kingdom on a path to European integration and that which evolved was a set of supranational institutions that subordinated the sovereignty, and therefore, much of the law and policy of the United Kingdom, as a meaningfully independent nation-state. The project of recovering the United Kingdom is not finished. Whilst recovery for conservatives can never be a mere desire to reverse, it does include the impulse to re-found politics on the essential institutions that have been the nation-state’s inheritance. It is because the task of each generation is to find the wisdom to manage change that Russell Kirk’s statement resounds: Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body’s perpetual renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces (Kirk, 1953: 8).

This generation has been granted the Providential opportunity to refound politics on British intellectual territory with a mandate that points both to the land of home and to the sea. By home, one means British institutions, practices and English common law, and by sea, one means trade, markets and new partnerships. This project of re-founding or

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recovery has no easy parallel. It does not do to speak of events in British history such as the post-war recovery (too great) or post-recession recoveries (too meagre). The re-founding of politics in the Age of Brexit has no analogy. And yet, by its very nature, it is a recovery of the centuries-old traditions of liberty, sovereignty and legitimacy of the British nation-state and, by popular demand, a re-founding of the will of the majority of the British people.

References Ashcroft, M. (2016). How the United Kingdom voted on Thursday … and Why. https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kin gdom-voted-and-why/. Accessed 22 April 2022. Bale, T. Cheung, A. Cowley, P. Menon, A., & Wager, A. (2020). Mind the Values Gap: The Social and Economic Values of MPs, Party Members and Voters. UK in a Changing Europe. https://fdocuments.in/document/thesocial-and-economic-values-of-mps-party-members-and-voters-2020-06-26the.html?page=3. Accessed 8 September 2022. Beech, M. (2011). A Tale of Two Liberalisms. In S. Lee and M. Beech (eds.) The Cameron-Clegg Government: Coalition Politics in an Age of Austerity (pp. 267–279). Palgrave. Beech, M. (2015). The Ideology of the Coalition: More Liberal than Conservative. In M. Beech & S. Lee (Eds.), The Conservative-Liberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government (pp. 1–15). Palgrave. Beech, M., Hickson, K., & Plant, R. (Eds.). (2018). The Struggle for Labour’s Soul: Understanding Labour’s Political Thought Since 1945 (2nd ed.). Routledge. Beech, M. (2018). The Progressives. In M. Beech, K. Hickson, & R. Plant (Eds.), The Struggle for Labour’s Soul: Understanding Labour’s Political Thought Since 1945 (2nd ed.). Routledge. Beech, M. (2021). Brexit and the Labour Party: Europe, Cosmopolitanism and the Narrowing of Traditions. British Politics., 16(2), 152–169. Beech, M. (2022). Brexit and the Decentred State. Public Policy and Administration., 37 (1), 67–83. Bulpitt, J. (1986). The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft. Political Studies., 34(1), 19–39. Cole, M. (2012). Little Boy Clegg Spots a Gap in the Coalition Emperor’s New Clothes. British Politics and Policy at LSE, 8th August, https://blogs.lse. ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/clegg-lords-reform-coalition-cole/. Accessed 22 June 2022.

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Cooper, C. (2011). Little Local Difficulties Revisited: Peter Thorneycroft, the 1958 Treasury Resignations and the Origins of Thatcherism. Contemporary British History, 25(2), 227–250. Cowley, P., & Norton, P. (1999). Rebels and Rebellions: Conservative MPs in the 1992 Parliament. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1(1), 84–105. Dorey, P. (2017). Towards Exit from the EU: The Conservative Party’s Increasing Euroscepticism Since the 1980s. Politics and Governance., 5(2), 27–40. Ford, R., & Goodwin, M. (2014). Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain. Routledge. Gamble, A. (1974). The Conservative Nation. Routledge. Garnett, M., & Hickson, K. (2009). Conservative Thinkers: The Key Contributors to the Political Thought of the Modern Conservative Party. Manchester University Press. Gilbert, A. (2014). From ‘Pretended Family Relationship’ to ‘Ultimate Affirmation’: British Conservatism and the Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships. Child and Family Law Quarterly, 26(4), 463–488. Gilmour, I. (1978). Inside Right: Conservatism, Policies and the People. Quartet Books. Hickson, K. (Ed.). (2005). The Political Thought of the Conservative Party since 1945. Palgrave. Hickson, K., & Miles, J. (2018). Social Democratic Euroscepticism: Labour’s Neglected Tradition. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 20(4), 864–879. Kirk, R. (1953). The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana. H. Regnery Co. Letwin, S. (1992). The Anatomy of Thatcherism. Routledge. Marshall, P., & Laws, D. (Eds.). (2004). The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism. Profile Books. Norton, P., & Aughey, A. (1981). Conservatives and Conservatism. Temple Smith. O’Sullivan, N. (1976). Conservatism. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Parkinson, J. (2021). Government Wins Vote to Lock in Cuts to Overseas Aid, BBC News, 13th July, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-57826111. Accessed 22 June 2022.

CHAPTER 3

Prime Ministerial Leadership in the Age of Brexit Roderick Crawford

How are the big decisions made? They are usually rooted in convictions and beliefs. They tend to be contemplated for a long time, but are often expedited by circumstances. They are frequently influenced by other people’s views, and events that have taken place over many years. (Cameron, 2019: 398)

Following the general election of 7 May 2015, David Cameron found, contrary to expectations, that he had won 330 seats—the first Conservative majority for 23 years. He had a manifesto commitment to legislate in the first session of the next Parliament for an in–out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU to be held before the end of 2017 and to negotiate a new settlement for Britain in the EU. ‘Then we will ask the British people whether they want to stay in on this basis, or leave’ (Conservative Party, 2015: 73).

R. Crawford (B) Policy Exchange, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_3

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The majority of the manifesto section on Britain’s place in Europe was focused on reforming the EU and the UK’s place in it. In spelling out the government’s plans, just 59 words cover the referendum: 560 are on reform of the EU, pro-free trade policy and securing special terms for Britain’s place in the EU. If successful, it would meet the UK’s strategic aims of securing its trading status with full access to the single market while being protected from decisions being made by and for Eurozone members. It would secure public support for continued membership of the EU based on this enhanced special status. This strategy stemmed from Cameron’s experience protecting UK interests during the Eurozone crisis, as well as his assessment of public opinion. A key point was the December 2011 Council where he sought to ‘veto’ a new treaty only to find it introduced outside of the EU Treaties but implemented through its institutions. Eight weeks before this Cameron had suffered the largest post-war Conservative rebellion on Europe: 81 Conservative MPs defied a three-line whip and voted for an in–out referendum on EU membership while 15 abstained (Watt, 2011). Cameron began to mull over the idea of a referendum and cites a number of reasons in his memoirs relating to the development of the EU and the lack of opportunity to give consent to them, as well as the attitudes of his own MPs. The core elements of his renegotiation were decided in 2012 and ‘centred on whether Britain’s berth in the EU but outside the Eurozone could be made permanently sustainable, and was always about British exceptionalism more than EU reform’ (Rogers, 2017). His decision to renegotiate and put an in–out referendum to the country was not discussed by Cabinet—indeed, Ken Clarke records his surprise on hearing the news that an in–out referendum was to be held and records that other members of the Cabinet were similarly surprised (Clarke, 2016). The referendum was a Cameron initiative—strongly opposed by Osborne (Shipman, 2016) and also by Gove (at the time). However, if the decision was his, it was taken within a context in which each major party had offered a referendum: Labour on the 2005 EU Constitution (Labour Party, 2005: 84), the Liberal Democrats an in– out referendum in the event of a new EU Treaty (Liberal Democrats, 2010: 67) and the Conservatives a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and subsequently a pledge for a ‘referendum lock’ that was included in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition agreement of 2010 (HM Government, 2010: 19).

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His strategy was finally announced in ‘The Speech’—at Bloomberg’s London offices on 23 January 2013 (Henley, 2013). It had two aims: to protect UK interests in the EU and to gain the concessions needed to win the support of his backbenchers and to win a referendum: polling showed there was only a majority for remaining in the EU if long-standing problems were addressed (Cameron, 2019). The right reform package would lead to the right referendum result. His fear, recorded in his taped reflections before the negotiations, was that ‘what is negotiable is not sellable and what is sellable is not negotiable’ (Cameron, 2019). His hope that he could achieve a sufficiently meaningful renegotiation was based on ‘achievements’ during the Coalition that, while significant, were of an entirely different order to those he now sought. His team were well prepared for the negotiations: three and a half years of thinking, discussing and planning from January 2012 to the summer of 2015 allowed the core of the strategy to be rigorously worked out before negotiations began. However, some key issues were rushed, and there was an over optimistic view of what was possible given EU legal and political realities, and too little consideration of the limits of member state sympathies and their own self-interest and attention span. When he returned to No.10 in May 2015, Cameron was ready to implement his strategy. The European Referendum Bill was presented to the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond; on its second reading on 9 June 2015, it was approved by 544–53, with only the Scottish National Party opposing, and passed its third reading by 316– 53 on its third reading in the Commons on 7 September 2015, with 277 abstaining. Cameron’s plan was to work to achieve reforms in four ‘baskets’, as he termed them and to get some proposals agreed in each of them. The first basket was economic governance. This was the core of the work done since the December 2011 summit based on the experience of the conflict between the interests of the Eurozone and the nine nonEurozone members, particularly the UK. Cameron and Osborne were seeking ‘legally-binding principles that safeguard the operation of the Union for all 28 Member States—and a safeguard mechanism to ensure these principles are respected and enforced’ (Cameron, 2015a, 2015b). This would have been a necessary negotiation with or without the broader ‘renegotiate and referendum’ strategy.

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The second basket was competitiveness. A lot had already been achieved in this area during the Coalition years: the flow of EU regulations had fallen considerably under pressure from an alliance of member states including the UK and with a willing partner in the European Commission under Jose Manuel Barroso. Cameron was knocking on an open door. The UK was pushing for a faster completion of the single market for the financial and services sectors that dominate the UK economy—and in which the UK enjoyed a trade surplus with the rest of the EU. The third basket was sovereignty. The 1957 Treaty of Rome laid ‘the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’; opting out of this would demonstrate ‘we were serious about different destinations, not just speeds’ (Cameron, 2019). Cameron also wanted groups of national parliaments, acting together, to be able to stop unwanted legislative proposals (Ibid); there was already a process in place in the Treaties for national parliaments working together to block legislation: between 2010 and 2015, this system had blocked only two proposals (House of Lords European Union Committee, 2016: 43). He also wanted to ensure that the principle of subsidiarity was applied in practice: ‘Europe where necessary, national where possible’. Jean-Claude Juncker, in his July 2014 statement to the European Parliament (when Candidate for President), had said: ‘My agenda will focus on ten policy areas… Beyond that, I will leave other policy areas to the Member States where they are more legitimate and better equipped to give effective policy responses… in line with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality’ (Juncker, 2014). The fourth basket was titled ‘immigration’. This was not included in the Bloomberg speech of January 2013, which summed up the experiences, reflections, discussions and plans of 2011 and 2012. Net EU immigration had increased between 2004 (84,000) and 2007 (127,000); with the financial crash of 2008, it had fallen back (63,000) before rising once more in 2011 (115,000); falling a little in 2012 (108,000), it rose in 2013 (155,000) and again in 2014 (209,000) (Migration Observatory, 2022). In 2013, immigration became front-page news, driven by the forthcoming freedom of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to enter the UK from January 2014 and helped drive UKIP up in the polls and onto election victory in the 2014 European elections. By 2015, immigration from the EU was the primary political issue that encapsulated ‘the problem with Europe’, yet it was where the options for a deal that was acceptable to the EU and sellable to the UK electorate were most clearly

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at odds. Cameron was forced to look at ways of reducing the pull of the UK to mostly Eastern European workers by reducing access to benefits. Cameron’s negotiation was formally launched on 10 November 2015 with a letter to Donald Tusk and a speech at Chatham House in which he insisted that nothing had ‘undermined or rendered obsolete the central argument I set out in my speech at Bloomberg. If anything, it has reinforced it’ (Cameron, 2015a). In the speech, Cameron emphasises some of his key political leadership principles: ‘taking the difficult decisions, and sometimes making the arguments that people don’t much want to hear’. The diplomacy that followed concluded at the February 2016 European Council. Cameron and his team achieved worthwhile results outside of the immigration ‘basket’. However, given the expectations and the needs of the occasion, it was a failure. The two-pronged strategy was falling apart even as the Prime Minister headed home from Brussels. The press coverage was severe. ‘David Cameron returned home from Brussels last night to mixed reviews. The likes of Nigel Farage were always going to pan his “renegotiation” of Britain’s EU membership (and did not disappoint). Less predictable was the gloomy verdict from typically friendlier sources. “Thin Gruel” ran the leader headline in The Times , while The Spectator deemed the EU to have “called the prime minister’s bluff”’ (Bagehot, 2016). The Daily Mail ’s headline was ‘Call that a deal, Dave?’ and followed it with a commentary whose opening line was ‘All that lost sleep for what?’ For the Daily Express, it was ‘a proposed deal that was so paltry and so pointless that it ought barely to merit mention, let alone give rise to the notion that it somehow recasts our membership of the EU’ (Pollard, 2016). The Daily Telegraph front-page headline was ‘Gove Out as EU agrees deal’, followed by the case for Leave penned by Gove himself. Cameron’s deal had failed to win his party in the media, enough of his colleagues, his party or the country. Four months later, he resigned on the steps of No.10. There is no sign that it made the impression on the public that justified the strategy. The Leave campaign’s own polling conducted by ICM showed that strong support for leaving the EU rose slightly after the renegotiation from 33 to 36%, strong support for remaining fell one point from 31 to 30%, those who would like to leave but were worried about implications for living standards and jobs fell from 18 to 17% and ‘don’t knows’ stayed constant on 17% (Cummings, 2017).

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On 24 June 2016, just four months later, David Cameron resigned on the steps of No.10. His strategy, to renegotiate and then hold a referendum, had failed. Events—EU-migration—had conspired against him. The chaos that ensued after his sudden and unexpected exit after 11 years of party leadership led to some of the most bizarre scenes of modern party leadership elections, with the backstabbing of Boris Johnson and fall of Gove. Theresa May, Home Secretary for six years, became Prime Minister. She had played it quiet during the referendum; even her closest allies thought she had voted for Brexit—but she voted Remain. Now, she would have to lead the UK as it left the EU. Theresa May became Prime Minister on 13 July 2016. She set out her Brexit policy in her leadership speech: ‘Brexit means Brexit’ (May, 2016a). It was one of the most memorable statements of the Brexit era: there would be no attempt to improve on Cameron’s renegotiation and no second referendum. She set out her first red line: ‘there is clearly no mandate for a deal that involves accepting the free movement of people as it has worked hitherto’; Article 50 would not be invoked before the end of the year. She appointed the Brexiteer David Davis to a new department, DExEU, to conduct the negotiations and coordinate Whitehall. Olly Robbins, a civil servant May had worked with at the Home Office, was made his permanent secretary and her official EU adviser (‘Sherpa’). In September, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker gave his State of the Union address (Juncker, 2016) ‘Our European Union is, at least in part, in an existential crisis… never before have I seen such little common ground between our Member States… Never before have I seen national governments so weakened by the forces of populism and paralysed by the risk of defeat in the next elections’. Brexit added to this existential threat and was the most obvious and significant representation of the ‘forces of populism’ threatening ‘Europe’. It also provided the cause on which Juncker could and had to unite the European institutions and the member states. The future of Europe was at stake, not merely the terms of the UK’s departure. May’s common sense and mutual benefit approach to the negotiations entirely ignored this dimension. For the EU, ‘mutual benefit’ meant securing its core achievements—the Single Market, its legal order and the autonomy of its decision-making. At the 2016 Conservative Conference, May set out a vision for a Global Britain with close ties to Europe but with global trade deals (May, 2016b). She confirmed Article 50 would be invoked by the end of March

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2019. She has been widely criticised for this, but there were substantial limits to what could be achieved outside of negotiations. May set out another red line: ‘The authority of EU law would end in Britain’. Brexit meant leaving the EU completely and becoming a fully-sovereign nation state, ‘So it is not going to be a ‘Norway model ’. It’s not going to be a ‘Switzerland model ’. May fleshed out her negotiating position in a speech at Lancaster House on 17 January 2017 (May, 2017a). She wanted maximum freedom of trade between the UK and the EU, but this ‘cannot mean membership of the single market’ because membership required free movement, the acceptance of rules and regulations without having a vote on them, and continued jurisdiction of the CJEU. Staying in the single market ‘would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the EU at all’. ‘Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement’. As trade deals with other global partners would mean not being bound by either the Common Commercial Policy or the Common External Tariff, she wanted a unique customs agreement with the EU. The UK aims were set out in a white paper two weeks later (Department for Exiting the European Union, 2017). She gave three reasons why she thought this partnership on these terms was attainable: first, the EU wanted a close relationship with the UK; second ‘it was the economically rational thing’ for both sides to aim for; third, that the UK, along with France, contributed uniquely to the EU’s security. She was proved wrong, but it would take her over 20 months to realise it. May triggered Article 50 on 29 March 2017. The European Council published its negotiating guidelines on 29 April 2017 (European Council, 2017a). They required agreement on arrangements for an orderly withdrawal in phase 1—citizens’ rights, legal arrangements to cover contracts post-Brexit, the financial settlement, Ireland and Northern Ireland, and other separation issues. The European Council would determine when sufficient progress had been achieved to allow negotiations to proceed to the framework of the future EU-UK relationship in phase 2. Eleven days before the first round of negotiations began, May, expecting to gain seats and strengthen her hand through the election, lost 13 seats and thus her majority. Her two most trusted advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, resigned, creating a hole in her inner counsel never really filled again. She was forced to rely on a confidence and supply arrangement with the DUP to keep the Conservatives in power. Her

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gamble had completely failed. The threat of ‘no deal’ would never have real credibility again. Sequencing formed the only issue Donald Tusk outlined in his invitation letter to the first European Council of 27 (Tusk, 2017): no discussion of future relations with the UK until sufficient progress on the main issues of the UK’s withdrawal had been achieved. The UK believed they went together, but No. 10 conceded to the EU’s position before the first round of talks began (Newell & Seldon, 2019). The first rounds of talks in June and July set out the structure of negotiations and the opening positions, with clarity sought in the August round. To that end, on 15 August 2017, the UK published its Future customs arrangements . This set out two different customs proposals: (i) ‘Maximum facilitation’ based on the continuation of some existing arrangements with new facilitations and technology-based solutions was favoured by Brexiteers; (ii) a ‘new customs partnership’ that mirrored EU requirements for imports from the rest of the world where their final destination was the EU, which was favoured by May and those supporting the closest future alignment with the EU. Both these proposals were immediately dismissed by Brussels as ‘magical thinking’. The following day, the UK put forward its position paper on Northern Ireland/Ireland (HM Government, 2017)—a robust and detailed presentation of the UK’s view of the centrality of the Belfast Agreement to any arrangements for the island of Ireland and the centrality of the balance within it of North–South and East–West cooperation. It stated the answer to avoiding a hard land border ‘cannot be to impose a customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain’. The EU response was in the form of a short paper putting forward ‘guiding principles’ on addressing Ireland/Northern Ireland, key to which was a definition of upholding the Good Friday Agreement as the continued operation of the institutions that agreement established—a much narrower definition than that of the UK (European Commission, 2017a). By the beginning of September 2017, the talks were in difficulty. In response, May prepared another speech. The original draft suggested a Norwegian-style relationship with the EU, but it caused a major row (Shipman, 2017), with Johnson forcefully restating the Lancaster House commitments (Johnson, 2017); May pulled back. Speaking in Florence on 22 September 2017 (Hansard HC Deb, 9 October 2017), she committed to meeting the UK’s 2014–20 budget obligations and said ‘we will not accept any physical infrastructure at the border’. The

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European Parliament concluded that Northern Ireland would have to remain, in some form, in the Single Market and customs union (European Parliament, 2017). There was still insufficient progress to enter phase 2 negotiations. Under intense domestic pressure, May committed to achieve ‘sufficient progress’ at the December Council (Barwell, 2021). On 9 November 2017, the EU presented a six-point negotiating paper (European Council, 2017b) that argued, based on the incomplete ‘mapping exercise’, that North–South cooperation provided for in the Belfast Agreement required Northern Ireland to remain aligned to rules of the single market and customs union such that a hard border was avoided.1 The argument was accepted without question and led directly to paragraph 49 of the 8 December 2017 Joint Report. This provided three options for avoiding a hard border in Northern Ireland: through a future relationship, through specific solutions, or ‘In the absence of agreed solutions, the United Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North–South cooperation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement’ (European Commission, 2017b). This was the key turning point in the negotiations. Given her public statements at the time, it seems likely that she did not realise what she had agreed to (May, 2017b, 2017c). Geoffrey Cox, later her Attorney General, believed that the Joint Report and her subsequent letter confirming her commitment to it, had entered the UK into commitments neither May nor her Cabinet could have fully comprehended. He concluded that either they had not had the implications explained to them or they didn’t fully understand them (Newell & Seldon, 2019). She would spend the rest of her negotiations trying to find a way out of this. The December 2017 Council authorised the opening of phase 2 negotiations and the drafting of its own guidelines for the future relationship and called for more clarity from the UK on what it sought (European Council, 2017c). This was explored in a series of meetings of the Cabinet’s Brexit Committee (Barwell, 2021) where there was a division over customs options (‘maximum facilitation’ and a ‘customs partnership’, both already rejected by the EU), and over the question of regulatory alignment or divergence—and the implications of these for avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland.

1 For a detailed explanation see Crawford, 2021.

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The EU published its draft Withdrawal Agreement on 28 February 2018 placing Northern Ireland in the EU’s customs territory and single market for goods (European Commission, 2018: 100). May’s response was that this ‘would, if implemented, undermine the UK common market and threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK by creating a customs and regulatory border down the Irish sea, and no UK Prime Minister could ever agree to it… We are committed to ensuring that we see no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, but the December text also made it clear that there should continue to be trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, as there is today’ (Hansard HC Deb, 28 February 2018). A UK alternative to the EU’s Irish backstop was published on 7 June 2018 (Cabinet Office, 2018): it was a time-limited ‘customs backstop’ that would keep the UK in the EU customs union and VAT regime until an alternative solution to the Irish border issue could be found. The EU rejected the time limit and considered the UK-wide backstop unacceptable. Later in the month, May removed responsibility for the white paper from David Davis and appointed Olly Robbins’ team to nail down her bespoke deal. A few days later, May went to The Hague and then to Berlin to test these proposals: feedback was encouraging (Ibid: 283). On 6 July 2018, the 29 senior members of the government met at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence. May knew she had a majority, but possible resignations. A presentation on the parliamentary arithmetic was followed by Cabinet discussion, with support for frictionless trade but concerns over the ‘common rulebook’. The Cabinet approved May’s proposal for the future partnership with the EU; only seven ministers spoke against it (Malnick, 2018). The proposal included an ambitious free trade agreement with a facilitated customs arrangement—the ‘new customs partnership’ with some features of the maximum facilitation proposal—and ‘a common rulebook’ for all goods to ensure frictionless trade and no border checks. The rationale for the Chequers approach was that: ‘such a relationship would see the UK and the EU meet their commitments to Northern Ireland and Ireland through the overall future relationship: preserving the constitutional and economic integrity of the UK; honouring the letter and the spirit of the Belfast Agreement; and ensuring that ‘backstop’ solution would not need to be brought into effect (HM Government, 2018). Chequers was May’s answer to paragraph 49 of the Joint Report.

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Cabinet collective responsibility, suspended by Cameron in 2016, was restored for policy on Brexit. David Davis resigned on Sunday, 8 July 2018: ‘proposed policies will… make the supposed control by Parliament illusory rather than real… the ‘common rulebook’ policy hands control of large swathes of our economy to the EU’ (Davis, 2018). Steve Baker followed his boss at DExEU. The following day, Boris Johnson resigned to pursue outside Cabinet an argument already lost within it. Analysis of public reaction following Chequers (Curtice, 2018) found the Chequers agreement was relatively unpopular among Leave voters: 58% of whom did not think it represented what the country had voted for. Three polls tracking the government’s handling of Brexit showed an average rise in dissatisfaction of 17.5%. Net disapproval among Remain supporters increased slightly from −28 to −30, but for Leave voters it increased from +1 to −31. Boris Johnson’s resignation speech in the House of Commons returned to the Lancaster House speech and May’s plan for a free trade agreement with the EU with the UK out of the customs union and single market, able to do its own free trade deals: ‘I thought that was the right vision then; I think so today’, he said. In important ways, this was BRINO, ‘Brexit in name only’, he said (Hansard HC Deb, 18 July 2018). The EU looked on, unsure if May would survive, sure that she was their preferred negotiating partner, certain her plan would not work, but determined to say nothing for now to upset a very unsteady prime minister who had at last put her cards on the table and hoping that in time they could be reshuffled to be in line with those of the EU(Adler, 2018). On 20 July 2018, just a week after the white paper, Barnier, while sounding positive about some of Chequers, rejected its core elements. May, encouraged by the positives, wouldn’t see the writing on the wall (May, 2018a) which led directly to the ‘humiliation’ of Salzburg, where, on 18 September 2018, her plan was formally rejected (European Council, 2018). Her team was ‘dumbstruck’ at the rejection (Barwell, 2021), but they had not been listening.2 May still defended her policy, threatened no deal but said she would set out an alternative that preserves the integrity of the UK and is in line with the December 2017 Joint Report (May, 2018b). On 9 October

2 For more details on May’s (2018a, 2018b) Chequers plan, see Crawford (2021).

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2018, May’s Chief Negotiator Olly Robbins reported back that, while there was no progress on goods and customs, Brussels was prepared to entertain the concept of a UK-wide customs union as a backstop to the NI-only backstop and a fortnight later agreed it could be included in the Withdrawal Agreement. By 13 November 2018, Olly Robbins reported that his negotiations had got as far as possible. The next day Cabinet agreed the draft Withdrawal Agreement and outline Political Declaration. Speaking outside No.10 said ‘the choice before us is clear: this deal which delivers on the vote of the referendum… or leave with no deal or no Brexit at all’. Not everyone agreed: Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and then Esther McVey resigned from Cabinet. Gove took 24 hours to think it over and decided to support it. Following a final negotiation with Juncker on 21 November, it was endorsed at a special meeting of the European Council on 25 November 2018. It now had to be ratified by Parliament. In 2016, May had promised Parliament a vote on any agreement, and it had subsequently been put into law that the Commons would have a ‘meaningful vote’ on the agreement before it could be ratified.3 On 23 November 2018, her chief whip warned there were 91 Conservatives likely to vote against and he had concerns over 40 more. The view was that the vote would be lost badly; after a few days of parliamentary debate, the meaningful vote was pulled. On 15 January 2019, after May asked Tusk and Juncker for clarifications (May, 2019 and European Council, 2019), the first meaningful vote was lost 432–202—an unprecedented government defeat in modern times; the government won a subsequent confidence vote 325–306. On 29 January 2019, government put forward a motion on finding a way forward. The Brady amendment requiring that the Northern Ireland backstop be replaced by an alternative arrangement to avoid a hard border passed by 16 votes. This indicated that there was a majority for Theresa May’s deal, but not the backstop. However, the ‘backstop’ was part of the Withdrawal Agreement and that was not open for renegotiation. There was no clear way out. After further engagement with Brussels to resolve concerns that the UK could be trapped in the backstop, a second meaningful vote was lost 391–242 on 12 March 2019. Indicative votes followed: on 27 March, the House voted down all options put to it; the next day, the Withdrawal Agreement alone was voted on and failed to pass

3 See Section 13 of the European Withdrawal Act 2018.

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by 344–286; a second round of indicative votes was held on 1 April 2019, with none passing, though a customs union came close. Parliament had tried and failed to find a way forward. Negotiations between the government and Labour followed; there were moments of hope, but the tide was turning and on 17 May, 2019, Jeremy Corbyn called the talks off. This spelled the end of May’s premiership. May made the announcement on 24 May, 2019 that she would step down as leader of the Conservative Party on 7 June and as Prime Minister when her replacement as leader had been elected by the Party. Conservative MPs whittled the ten candidates down to two—Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt—to put before the membership. Following an intense campaign between 22 June and 17 July 2019, Johnson was elected as leader of the Conservative Party with two-thirds of the votes and on the following day, 24 July 2019, he formed his government. He had campaigned to ‘get Brexit done’ by 31 October 2019 and renew the United Kingdom through competitive free markets supporting highquality public services and investment in tech and infrastructure to level up the whole country. His first move was to end the divided Cabinet of the May years: he fired 11 Cabinet members in what The Times called ‘the most brutal Cabinet purge in modern political history’ (Elliott, 2019). It wasn’t his Cabinet he was purging, but May’s. Johnson brought in Sir Eddie Lister as his Chief of Staff, Dominic Cummings, director of Vote Leave, as his Chief Special Adviser, and made David Frost his Chief Negotiator with the EU. Speaking in the House of Commons the next day (Hansard HC Deb, 25 July 2019), he promised that the UK would come out of the EU on 31 October 2019 when the temporary extension of Article 50 expired, with or without a deal. He believed a deal was possible, and preferable, but that: ‘The withdrawal agreement negotiated by my predecessor has been three times rejected by this House. Its terms are unacceptable to this Parliament and to this country… If an agreement is to be reached, it must be clearly understood that the way to the deal goes by way of the abolition of the backstop’. To achieve this, he was proposing a mix of customs arrangements and technology fully compatible with the Belfast Agreement to which ‘we are of course steadfastly committed’. Key to getting concessions from Brussels was the willingness and ability to leave without a deal: ‘We have to be ready to come out and we have to prepare now’ (Balls & Forsyth, 2019).

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Michael Gove, perhaps his most effective minister, was tasked with these preparations. The reaction to Johnson’s demands on the Irish ‘backstop’ was firm and immediate. Michel Barnier pronounced it ‘unacceptable and not within the mandate of the European Council’ (Deutsche, 2019): President Juncker reiterated that ‘the withdrawal agreement is the best and only agreement possible—in line with the European Council guidelines’ (Peston, 2019). However, there was no ‘future relationship’ that could avoid a backstop that allowed the UK regulatory and trade policy freedom in line with the UK’s red lines under May: even Chequers had failed to square that circle; specific solutions, paragraph 49’s other alternative, had so far been dismissed. Johnson’s team identified its priorities as: ‘leaving in a way which imposed minimal constraints on the future—which did not leave us irrevocably subject to EU laws, which did not pre-commit us to a particular form of Brexit’ (Frost, 2022). This would have to take account of the balance of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement; though Northern Ireland couldn’t be treated just like any other part of the UK and border checks were never contemplated, unionist concerns had to be recognised and the unity of the UK’s internal market and customs territory respected. ‘That meant—for political and legal reasons—our priority had to be renegotiating the “backstop”, taking the country out of the EU customs union, and redoing the Political Declaration which committed us to a “soft” Brexit’ (Ibid). On the 19 August 2019, Johnson wrote to Donald Tusk setting out his position on the backstop. ‘First, it is anti-democratic and inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK as a state… Second, it is inconsistent with the UK’s desired final destination for a sustainable long-term relationship with the EU… Third, it has become increasingly clear that the backstop risks weakening the delicate balance embodied in the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement’ (Johnson, 2019a). Johnson wanted the backstop replaced by a commitment to put in place an alternative that was more consistent with the Belfast Agreement. It was agreed in late August to start twice-weekly negotiations in September 2019 after Juncker agreed that the EU would look constructively at UK proposals if they were compatible with the withdrawal agreement. As talks progressed, domestic UK politics reached new levels of discord. Parliament was prorogued from the second week of September until the state opening of Parliament on 14 October. On 3 September

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2019, MPs took control of the order paper to introduce a bill4 to place a statutory obligation on the government to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October 2019 by asking for an extension to Article 50: the bill passed 327–299 on 4 September 2019 (The Benn-Burt Act became law on 9 September 2019). Johnson said that this Bill ‘scuppered’ negotiations (BBC Online, 2019); he proposed an early election for 15 October 2019 which under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 needed the support of two-thirds of MPs (434). He was defeated 298–56, with 288 MPs abstaining. Corbyn refused an election until the risk of the UK ‘crashing out’ of the EU was removed (Ibid). Johnson tried again on 10 September 2019, the Benn Act by then in place, but failed. Though the prorogation of Parliament was subsequently ruled unlawful and overturned in the Supreme Court on 24 September 2019, Johnson proved to Brexiteers and the EU that he was determined to deliver Brexit in a way May was not. Talks and non-papers led to a formal UK proposal on 3 October 2019 (Johnson, 2019b). The ‘backstop’ was a bridge to a relationship based on close integration with the EU. ‘The Government intends that the future relationship should be based on a Free Trade Agreement in which the UK takes control of its own regulatory affairs and trade policy. In these circumstances the proposed “backstop” is a bridge to nowhere, and a new way forward must be found (Ibid)’. It therefore proposed a new protocol based on compatibility with the Belfast Agreement, an all-island regulatory zone for goods, the consent of the Northern Ireland executive and assembly to enter that regulatory zone, and Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK customs territory. For David Frost, ‘the crucial new element was consent. We believed the only way it could be acceptable to subject part of the UK to dayto-day legislation without a say was with the periodic consent of the NI people through their institutions. Crucially, this had to involve a vote to go in to the arrangements in the first place’ (Frost, 2022). However, the proposal was rejected by Barnier as inconsistent with the requirement to secure the internal market and to provide a legally operational solution, and, as with the Irish, he rejected the requirement to provide consent to enter the arrangement (European Commission, 2019).

4 The European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill. It received Royal Assent on 9 September 2019.

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If a deal was to be ready for the UK to leave on 31 October 2019, then it had to be ready before the October Council and the Irish were key to a backstop solution. Johnson met Varadkar in the Wirral on 10 October 2019; the meeting was far more positive than expected and both leaders said they saw a pathway towards an agreement. Key to this was Johnson accepting the EU’s off-the-shelf offer of a FTA with the Northern Ireland only solution put on a permanent basis but coupled to consent and freedom from tariffs for goods going into Northern Ireland from Great Britain. Northern Ireland would now remain in the UK customs territory but would apply the Union Customs Code and align with single market regulations for goods. The final Withdrawal Agreement was agreed at the European Council on 17 October 2019 (HMG, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c). It was one thing to end the backstop, another to get it through Parliament. The opposition parties were all opposed to Johnson’s deal. The Conservative Party had lost six MPs since the 2017 general election— one in a by-election after a recall and five had resigned the whip. On 3 September 2019, the Conservatives lost their ability to command a majority on paper with their DUP allies. Later that day, 21 Conservative MPs had the whip withdrawn, leaving Johnson nominally 43 short of a majority. Keeping the DUP onside was crucial, but the terms of the deal made this impossible. On 19 October 2019, the first Saturday sitting of the House of Commons for 37 years, the Johnson government held its meaningful vote with the aim of passing the deal before the deadline set by the Benn Act would force a request to extend Article 50. However, an amendment was passed 322–306 that denied ratification until the implementing legislation had been passed, thus forcing a request for the extension; the Speaker refused a second meaningful vote on 21 October. The government introduced the implementing legislation—the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill and it passed its second reading on 22 October 2019, by 329–299. However, the fast-track timetabling of the Bill to get it through before 31 October was rejected 322–308, placing the Bill in ‘limbo’. The EU agreed an extension to 31 January 2020 on 28 October 2019 which Johnson accepted as required by the Benn Act. That day he made another attempt to vote for a general election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, but with large numbers of opposition

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MPs not voting it failed. Of polls taken in October 2019, the Conservatives were on average on 35.65%5 compared to 42.3% in the 2017 election. Polling at 24.75% on average in October compared to its 2017 vote of 40% curbed its enthusiasm for a general election. The Liberal Democrats on the other hand were polling at 17.8%, in some polls level with or just ahead of Labour, compared to 7.4% in 2017. The SNP were polling at 40% against their 36.5% vote in 2017; they both hoped to capitalise on Labour’s weakness. Based on a Liberal Democrat and SNP proposal, the government introduced the Early Parliamentary General Election Bill, authorising a general election on 12 December 2019; it passed on Third Reading 438 to 20 and became law on 31 October. Parliament dissolved on 6 November 2019 and the official campaign started. Johnson went into the campaign with a strong team quietly led by Isaac Levido; its plan and a message were built around Johnson and the question facing the country: ‘Get Brexit done’. Johnson had proved himself in the referendum campaign, during May’s government he was consistent in his vision of Brexit in words and action in and out of office. He had won the leadership on this basis, focused on it in office, proved his determination to do anything he could to get Brexit done, ensured that Conservative MPs and candidates had to be committed to getting Brexit done and got a clean-break deal agreed with the EU. Johnson’s refusal to compromise on Brexit and enforce his line on the Party won the support of Nigel Farage, who announced on 11 November 2019 that he would not run Brexit Party candidates in 317 Conservative seats so as not to split the Brexit vote; other candidates also defected to the Tories. The Brexit Party was polling consistently at 10% at that time: it won only 2% of the vote, contributing significantly to the Conservative election victory. Farage’s decision to unite the Brexit vote behind Johnson’s Conservatives may have doubled Johnson’s majority, in contrast to the failure of the Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens to share the spoils (Norris, 2019). If that is so, then his leadership played an even more significant role in the campaign than is usually understood. With 365 MPs and an 80-seat majority, Johnson’s deal was set to pass Parliament. The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill, allowing the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement without a meaningful vote,

5 Based on the 20 previous polls; for the SNP, the last three-Scottish polls.

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passed its second reading on 10 December 2019 by 358–234 and its third on 9 January 2020 by 330–231. It became law on 23 January 2020. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020. Johnson had succeeded in getting Brexit done. It came at a price—a Northern Ireland only solution to avoid a hard border. In retrospect, it is hard to see how a Brexit on the terms set out by Theresa May from June 2016 to early 2018 could have been accomplished without checks given the legal commitments she gave in the Joint Report, commitments that she and others clearly didn’t fully comprehend at the time. May had sought to escape from these through Chequers, a proposal the EU couldn’t agree, and then into a UK-wide backstop, an agreement that Parliament couldn’t ratify. Just as the Joint Report increased the limitations on May, so the November 2018 Withdrawal Agreement, the parliamentary arithmetic and the Benn Act limited Johnson’s options. David Frost, Johnson’s Chief Negotiator, summed up their perspective: ‘We faced a choice—take this deal and try to get it through Parliament, and sort out the detail in 2020 while we were negotiating the trade agreement… or walk away, fail to deliver Brexit on 31 October, and almost certainly see the Government collapse. At that point we would have seen, at best, a second referendum, and quite possibly Brexit reversed tout court. We decided the lesser risk was to push the deal through and sort out the detail later’ (Frost, 2022). Of the three Prime Ministers of the Brexit era, Cameron failed to find a berth in Europe for UK interests and its exceptionalism, May failed to take the UK out of the EU, but Johnson did manage to fulfil his vision of Brexit. His personal leadership had played a substantial part in making that happen.

References Adler, K. (2018, July 13) Why Brussels is Keeping Quiet on May’s White Paper. BBC News. Bagehot. (2016, February 20). And They’re Off! The Brexit Referendum on June 23rd will be All About David Cameron. The Economist. Balls, K., & Forsyth, J. (2019, July 6). A Whole New Boris, Interview with Boris Johnson, The Spectator. Barwell, G. (2021). Chief of Staff . Atlantic Books. BBC Online. (2019, September 4). Boris Johnson’s Call for General Election Rejected by MPs. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-495 84907; accessed on 15 September 2022.

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Cabinet Office. (2018, June 7). Technical Note on Temporary Customs Arrangement. Cameron, D. (2015a, November 10). Prime Minister’s Speech on Europe. Chatham House. Cameron, D. (2015b, November 10). A New Settlement for the United Kingdom in a Reformed European Union, letter to Donald Tusk, President of the European Council. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ons/eu-reform-pms-letter-to-president-of-the-european-council-donald-tusk; accessed 13 September 2022 Cameron, D. (2019). For the Record. William Collins. Clarke, K. (2016). Kind of Blue: A Political Memoir. Macmillan. Conservative Party. (2015). Real Change in Our Relationship with the European Union. Conservative Party. Crawford, R. (2021). The Northern Ireland Protocol: The Origins of the Current Crisis. London. Cummings, D. (2017, January 9). How the Brexit referendum was won. The Spectator. Curtice, J. (2018, July 17). Why Chequers has Gone Wrong for Theresa May. Available at https://whatukthinks.org/eu/why-chequers-has-gone-wrong-for-the resa-may/; accessed 15 September 2022 Davis, D. (2018, July 8). Letter of Resignation. Department for Exiting the European Union. (2017). The United Kingdom’s Exit From and New Partnership with the European Union (CM 9417). The Stationary Office. Deutsche Welle. (2019, July 25). EU Negotiator Michel Barnier calls Boris Johnson’s Brexit Stance ‘Unacceptable’. Elliott, F. (2019, July 25). Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Carnage. The Times. European Commission. (2017a, September 21). Guiding Principles for the Dialogue on Ireland/Northern Ireland. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/ info/sites/default/files/dialogue_ie-ni.pdf; accessed 16 September 2022. European Commission. (2017b, December 8). Joint Report from the Negotiators of the European Union and the United Kingdom Government on the Progress During Phase 1 of Negotiations Under Article 50 TEU on the United Kingdom’s Orderly Withdrawal from the European Union. Available at https://ec. europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/joint_report.pdf; accessed 16 September 2022 European Commission. (2018, February 28). Draft Withdrawal Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community. Available at https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/draft_withdrawal_agre ement.pdf; accessed 16 September 2022.

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European Commission. (2019, October 9). Statement by Michel Barnier at the European Parliament Plenary Session. European Council. (2017a, April 29). European Council (Art. 50) guidelines for Brexit negotiations. European Council. European Council. (2017b, November 8). Dialogue on Ireland/Northern Ireland Issued by General Secretariat European Council to Ad hoc working party on Article 50. European Council. (2017c, December 15). European Council Meeting Guidelines. European Council (2018, September 20). Remarks by President Donald Tusk After the Salzburg Informal Summit. Available at https://www.consilium.eur opa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2018/09/20/remarks-by-president-donaldtusk-after-the-salzburg-informal-summit/; accessed 16 September 2022. European Council. (2019, January 14). Joint Letter of President Tusk and President Juncker to Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. European Parliament. (2017). Resolution on the State of Play of Negotiations with the United Kingdom, 3 October. European Parliament. European Union Act. (2011). The Stationery Office. European Withdrawal Act. (2018). The Stationary Office. Frost, D. (2022, April 27). The Northern Ireland Protocol: How We Got Here, and What Should Happen Now?. Policy Exchange. Hansard HC Deb. Vol. 629 cols 43, 9 October 2017. [Online]. [Accessed 16 September 2022]. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2017-10-09/ debates/B119A163-5708-4B76-847A-0F8AFE4CD5F9/UKPlansForLeavi ngTheEU Hansard HC Deb. Vol. 636 cols 823, 28 February 2018. [Online]. [Accessed 16 September 2022]. Available from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Com mons/2018-02-28/debates/1F0CE924-51C5-4698-B16B-0CD495082 B12/Engagements Hansard HC Deb. Vol. 645 cols 448–450, 18 July 2018. [Online]. [Accessed 16 September 2022]. Available from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Com mons/2018-07-18/debates/C599EEE1-D863-4AC9-87B3-35DA3A3EA FEE/PersonalStatement Hansard HC Deb. Vol. 663 cols 1458, 25 July 2019. [Online]. [Accessed 16 September 2022]. Available from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Com mons/2019-07-25/debates/D0290128-96D8-4AF9-ACFD-21D5D9CF3 28E/PrioritiesForGovernment Henley, P. (2013, January 28). Is it “The Bloomberg Speech”? HM Government. (2010). The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. Cabinet Office.

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HM Government. (2017, August 16). Northern Ireland and Ireland Position Paper. Available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl oads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/638135/6.3703_DEXEU_N orthern_Ireland_and_Ireland_INTERACTIVE.pdf; accessed 16 September 2022. HM Government. (2018, July 6). Statement from Chequers. HM Government. (2019a). Agreement on the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community, 19 October. The Stationary Office. HM Government. (2019b). Political Declaration setting out the framework for the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom, 19 October. The Stationary Office. HM Government. (2019c). Declaration by Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland Concerning the Operation of the ‘Democratic Consent in Northern Ireland’ Provision of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, 19 October. The Stationary Office. House of Lords European Union Committee. (2016). The EU referendum and EU reform, 9th Report of Session 2015–16. The Stationary Office. Johnson, B. (2017, September 15). Boris Johnson: My Vision for a Bold Thriving Britain Enabled by Brexit. Daily Telegraph. Johnson, B. (2019a, August 19). United Kingdom’s Exit from the European Union: letter to Tusk. Johnson, B. (2019b, October 2). A Fair and Reasonable Compromise: UK Proposals for a NEW PROTOCOL on Ireland/Northern Ireland: letter to Juncker. Juncker, J. (2014, July 15). A New Start for Europe: My Agenda for Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change: Political Guidelines for the Next European Commission. Strasbourg. Juncker, J. (2016, September 14). State of the Union Address: Towards a Better Europe—A Europe that Protects, Empowers and Defends. Strasbourg. Labour Party. (2005). Britain: Forward Not Back. Labour Party. Liberal Democrats. (2010). Manifesto. Liberal Democrats. Malnick, E. (2018, July 14). If We Wreck Brexit the Tories Will Split—and We Will get the Corbyn cataclysm. Steve Baker interview. Daily Telegraph. May, T. (2016a). Speech Launching Conservative Party Leadership Campaign, 30 June. May, T. (2016b, October 2). Britain after Brexit. A Vision of a Global Britain. Birmingham. May, T. (2017a, January 17). The Government’s Negotiating Objectives for Exiting the EU . Lancaster House. May, T. (2017b). Press Conference Speech, 8 December.

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May, T. (2017c, December 11). PM Statement on EU Negotiations. House of Commons. May, T. (2018a, September 1). There Will be No Second Referendum on Brexit—It Would be a Gross Betrayal of Our Democracy. Daily Telegraph. May, T. (2018b, September 21). PM Brexit Negotiations Statement. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-brexit-negotiations-statement21-september-2018b#:~:text=As%20I%20told%20EU%20leaders,threatens% 20the%20integrity%20of%20theirs; accessed 15 September 2022. May, T. (2019, January 14). Letter to Presidents Tusk and Juncker. Newell, R., & Seldon, A. (2019). May at 10: The Verdict. Biteback Publishing. Norris, P. (2019, December 16). Was Farage the Midwife Delivering Johnson’s Victory? The Brexit Party and the Size of the Conservative Majority. Available at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ge2019-brexit-partyimpact/; accessed 15 September 2022. Peston, R. (2019, July 25). Can Boris Johnson overcome Jean-Claude Juncker? The Spectator. Pollard, S. (2016, February 19). What a Farce These Negotiations Have Been: They Really Must Think We Are All Fools. Daily Express. Rogers, I. (2017, November 25). The Inside Story of How David Cameron Drove Britain to Brexit. Prospect. Shipman, T. (2016). All Out War. William Collins. Shipman, T. (2017). Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. William Collins. The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. (2022). Net migration to the UK. Available at: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resour ces/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/; accessed on 3 March 2022. Tusk, D. (2017, April 28). Invitation Letter by President Donald Tusk to the Members of the European Council (Art. 50). Watt, N. (2011, October 24). David Cameron Rocked by Record Rebellion as Europe Splits Tories Again. The Guardian.

CHAPTER 4

The General Elections: 2015, 2017, 2019 Christopher Fear

Introduction At first glance, the Conservative Party’s performances and results in the general elections of 2015, 2017, and 2019 could hardly have been more different from each other. Three different party leaders, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson, achieved respectively (1) a surprise majority when a hung parliament was widely expected, (2) a hung parliament when a majority was expected, and (3) a majority when a majority was expected. The first election brought about the Brexit referendum, the second caused stalemate in implementing its result, and the third cut the knot, ended the parliamentary crisis, closed the Brexit debate for any but academic purposes, and left the Conservatives with an 80-seat majority until (nominally) 2024. It is my intention here to narrate the performance of the Conservatives through these three elections, but with special attention to voting patterns and statistics. The branch of political science that we call electoral studies is today professional and sophisticated, which makes it impossible

C. Fear (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_4

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to find anything new to reveal about voting behaviour in elections that happened more than sixth months ago. I have therefore sought primarily to present only a three-part summary of what the reader can inspect in greater detail elsewhere, should he wish. For almost all students of politics, the volumes of the British General Election series contain everything that could be wanted, including on the other parties, so for the reader’s convenience I have referred to the three relevant volumes in that series wherever possible. However, I will also target some of the received wisdom about these elections, in order to overturn a number of common myths about them— myths which have usually been birthed by election night pundits trying to interpret results as they’re coming in, which they often explain by positing a single cause. Such explanations always oversimplify voter behaviour, yet they also tend to enjoy a long afterlife in political commentary. The first of these ‘myths’ is that the Conservatives’ surprise majority in 2015 owed to David Cameron’s ‘disingenuous’ offer of an in/out referendum on membership of the EU (see Cameron, 2019: 398–417). The second is that the 2017 election showed that voters did not, after all, support Theresa May’s vision of a ‘hard Brexit’. And the third is that the 2019 result reflected the greater popularity of Johnson compared to May and the superiority of his campaign, especially in Labour’s former ‘Red Wall’ in the Midlands and North of England and Wales. Each of these myths is false, and psephological evidence shows us which factors have been overlooked. First, Cameron’s referendum policy did not win any significant number of new Conservative voters in 2015. Second, in 2017, though the party’s slender majority was lost, the election was in fact very successful for the party outside of the House of Commons and achieved most of what was needed for its 2019 landslide. And finally, the party leader and his Brexit policy were hardly more decisive issues for Conservative voters in 2019 than they had been in 2017. It was really the collapse of support for Labour outside of the big cities in 2019 that dramatically redrew the electoral map.

The 2015 General Election Of the three elections discussed here, only 2015 was held as envisaged by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and was planned well in advance. Its date had been public knowledge since it was baked into the agreement that founded the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition in 2010. In

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the intervening years, the government’s project of reducing the budget deficit in the wake of the 2007–08 global financial crisis may have been broadly recognized as necessary, but each part of the ‘austerity’ method for achieving it—cuts to government spending, public sector pay freezes, reforms to benefits, quantitative easing—had provoked criticism (see Cowley & Kavanagh, 2016: 1–40; and Lee, 2011). These measures also seemed to have had side effects, including rising unemployment, riots in several English cities in 2011, a ‘double-dip’ recession in 2012 (which on later analysis turned out not to have happened), and a downgrading of the UK’s credit rating. The government had also performed a number of ‘U-turns’, including on proposed cuts to schools and coastguards and on the ‘pasty tax’. For its critics, such episodes suggested that the ‘Con–Dem’ Coalition was ideologically callous and practically incompetent. There had also developed a general public distrust of Westminster and the press, and neither the expenses scandal in 2009, nor the phone-hacking scandal in 2011 had left the Conservatives untouched—though neither seemed to have helped other parties either. Also during these years, the three issues of Islamist terror, immigration, and membership of the EU would become more closely connected in public opinion—while they continued to be treated as separable by mainstream politicians, with significant consequences for voter behaviour in general, local, and especially European elections. In the earlier years of the Coalition, there seemed to be only a very tenuous connection between the ‘home-grown’ Islamic fundamentalism of Abu Hamza alMasri, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, and those conflicts in the Islamic world which terrorists used to justify their crimes. But in the light of the European migrant crisis, which had begun in 2014, such factors became increasing more politically salient as parts of a single issue: sovereign control of Britain’s borders. By this time, Cameron was under pressure from many of his own MPs to see off the electoral threat from UKIP. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, UKIP—then the only party committed to withdrawal from the EU—had won just 2.5 million votes. Four years later, it topped the national poll with nearly 4.4 million votes, winning in every English region from Cornwall to Yorkshire, with the sole exception of London. UKIP was now unambiguously the natural recipient of Eurosceptic votes. But its leader, the straight-talking Nigel Farage, had also repositioned himself as Britain’s leading critic of the Westminster consensus on immigration. He thereby won for UKIP the sympathy of

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those also concerned about other aspects of the ‘progressive’ Westminster consensus on social and cultural issues: negligent leniency towards criminals, terrorists, and the illegal drugs trade; the growth of dependency culture and the impotent sentimentalism of ‘hug a hoodie’; the legal innovation of same-sex marriage; and the transformation of London into a city of two sides: part impoverished Babel and part millionaires’ playground. In 2014, UKIP had pushed the Conservatives into third place, behind Labour—by popular vote, vote share, and seats. The Conservatives’ coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, had lost ten of the eleven seats they were defending. If this pattern of voting, or anything like it, had been repeated in the general election a year later, the Conservatives would find themselves back in Opposition. In January 2014, the Conservatives had hired Lynton Crosby to lead their election campaign. Since I cannot improve on Cowley and Kavanagh’s sketch of the Australian campaign strategist, I will provide it: Known as the “Wizard of Oz” because of his role in guiding John Howard in four successive Australian elections, he [Crosby] had also managed Boris Johnson’s successful mayoral campaigns in 2008 and 2012 in largely Labour-voting London. He had a reputation in Australia as a right-winger because of his hard line on immigration … Crosby’s reputation rested on his success in identifying the issues and language which would appeal to key voters and enforcing message discipline. (Cowley & Kavanagh, 2016: 61)

The party’s own research on voters’ perceptions and values, combined with Crosby’s commitment to ‘message discipline’, produced two primary campaign themes: (1) the economy: i.e. the Conservative Party’s ‘longterm economic plan’, and (2) leadership: i.e. competence versus chaos (see Cowley & Kavanagh, 2016: 61–65). The themes interlocked neatly: ‘economic competence with the Conservatives, or chaos with Ed Miliband propped up by the SNP’. No attack on the Liberal Democrats was deemed necessary, since their polling was consistently poor, and they might anyway still be needed following another hung parliament. It may surprise some readers that Crosby did not make key messages out of immigration or the in/out referendum on the EU that Cameron had already promised in January 2013—surprising, that is, given Crosby’s popular reputation and given that the referendum is now generally seen

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as the most significant outcome of the Conservatives’ victory in 2015. But in 2014 and 2015, the ‘borders’ issue did not reflect the priorities of the Conservatives’ target voters. It may be that Cameron had misjudged those priorities in 2012 when he had decided upon the renegotiate–referendum policy. But it seems that Cameron anyway genuinely believed that it was the right policy. Certainly, he has strongly challenged the view that he intended to bargain the policy away in a new round of post-election coalition negotiations (Cameron, 2019: 398–417)—an interpretation that has survived among staunch Remainers. Though as we will see (below), the policy does not seem to have shaped voter behaviour directly, it probably aided party discipline during the 2015 campaign. First, it parked the issue of Europe within the party and therefore neutralized potentially offmessage Eurosceptic backbenchers. And second, it neutralized otherwise difficult questions about Europe so that Conservative campaigners could refocus discussion upon the ‘long-term economic plan’, and the prospect of Labour and the SNP ‘wrecking’ the hard-won recovery. Meanwhile, Labour had replaced its leader Gordon Brown with Ed Miliband. But by the seventh of May 2015, the party and Miliband personally were not polling well enough to win a majority (YouGov, 1/5/2015; Cowley & Kavanagh, 2016: 57). The Conservatives’ chief concern now was not that Labour would win a majority, but that it could recover enough to lock the Conservatives out of government with the help of other parties, even if the Conservatives emerged as the largest party. It was widely expected that the next government would be another coalition, in the shape either of another term for the governing parties— which were, however, expected to suffer some losses—or of a Labour Prime Minister with some kind of support from other parties, probably including Alex Salmond’s SNP. At 10 o’clock in the evening, on 7 May 2015, the BBC’s exit poll revealed that the Conservatives would be the largest party in the Commons. In itself, this was no great surprise. Labour’s advances in England were poor, and in Scotland, Labour saw its worst result since 1918. The Liberal Democrats, as predicted, lost support almost everywhere, but unevenly, and more dramatically than many in the party had expected—their worst result since 1970. Lib Dem voters had split four ways, and those sticking with them were not the largest group. The Lib Dems had been overtaken on popular vote by UKIP. Indeed, more of UKIP’s new voters had voted Lib Dem in 2010 than had voted for UKIP that year.

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But it wasn’t until later in the night that it became clear that a Conservative majority was actually still in play. The projected swing to Labour was smaller than expected in their target seats; indeed, in many, the swing was against Labour (Curtice et al., 2016). Overall, the Conservatives gained 24 seats, giving them a majority in the Commons of twelve, their first majority win since 1992. So what exactly had happened? First, the Conservatives’ surprise majority in the Commons disguised electoral stagnation and even decline in some areas. They had gained 24 seats (net) with the addition of just 630,472 more votes than they won in 2010, a vote share increase of just 0.8 pp. Labour had collapsed in Scotland, but the Conservatives had not advanced there at all. Of Scotland’s 59 MPs, all but three went to the Scottish National Party. This may not seem surprising, given the dramatic rise in turnout in Scotland on the back of the independence referendum the previous year. But those Conservatives who had expected some sort of corresponding advance as ‘No’ voters swung behind the Conservatives would be disappointed. Turnout in England had barely increased on 2010, and in the large cities of the North, and in Lancashire and Yorkshire more generally, the Conservatives had actually lost support. Other parties were also advancing across the UK in areas with higher unemployment, and those with higher numbers of ethnic minority voters. Further, although the Conservatives had benefitted from the collapse of the Liberal Democrats (more on which in a moment), in many former Lib Dem strongholds Labour were the chief beneficiaries—perhaps as some disaffected Lib Dems in these areas switched to Labour tactically or in protest. Indeed, more of 2010’s Lib Dem voters voted for Labour in 2015 than voted Lib Dem again. However, importantly, the Conservatives had held most of the seats they’d taken from Labour in 2010. This ‘incumbency effect’ would also feature in 2017 and 2019. It was especially pronounced where the Conservative candidate was defending the seat for the first time and where the leading opponent was a new candidate. Here, there was an average swing to the Conservatives. But even in such seats where there was a swing away from them, they usually still held the seat (Curtice et al., 2016: 397–399). It was the gains, however, that won the election, and the Conservatives made 35 of them. Just eight of these seats were taken from Labour: Bolton West, Derby North, Gower, Morley and Outwood, Plymouth Moor View, Southampton Itchen, Telford, and Vale of Clwyd—a diverse

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group of constituencies evincing few general patterns and many local factors. The remaining 27 seats gained by the Conservatives were taken from the Liberal Democrats. These were mostly economically buoyant Southern towns in London suburbs, such as Kingston and Surbiton, Sutton and Cheam, and Twickenham; and those more rural constituencies in the West Country where the Liberal Democrats normally gather the anti-Conservative vote. Constituencies fitting this profile included Bath, Cheltenham, Chippenham, Taunton, Yeovil, Wells, and several in Devon and Cornwall. In such areas, household income was higher than average, and there were fewer public sector employees. It seems, then, that in 2015 the Conservatives probably benefitted from the combination of two main factors. First, voters who had experienced economic recovery in their towns and in their private sector work rewarded the Conservatives for it. And second, in areas where Labour was traditionally weak, the Lib Dems had lost control of the antiConservative vote, which was now split between other parties, allowing the Conservatives to win seats without necessarily increasing their vote share. Voting patterns also seriously problematize the view that Cameron’s referendum policy had made much of an impact in this election. First, as we have seen, the Conservatives’ key gains were made in affluent former Lib Dem strongholds in the South of England. In the EU referendum the next year, these same areas would lean towards Remain, or at least less heavily towards Leave. Meanwhile, those ‘more Brexity’ areas in the Midlands and North of England and Wales, where average levels of wealth and education were lower, saw no Conservative advance in 2015. Second, it had been supposed before the election that UKIP would be a headache for the Conservatives, and taken as a whole, this turned out to be true, despite the referendum policy. UKIP advanced significantly in 2015: they won 12.6% of the popular vote, their best ever performance in a general election. Very few of 2010’s UKIP voters switched to the Conservatives in 2015; far more stuck with UKIP, while the Conservatives lost more voters to UKIP than they won from any other single party. However, because support for UKIP grew less where the Conservatives were defending marginal seats, the party in Parliament was insulated from the popularity of UKIP nationally. Elsewhere UKIP also took voters from Labour. This affected, above all, those areas which had rejected Labour most heavily in 2010: areas with relatively few university graduates and

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more public sector employees, those most affected by the economic crash of 2008, and those with higher numbers of white working-class voters. Though it has very commonly been supposed that immigration was the leading issue for these voters—an issue on which approval of Labour in these areas was now dangerously low—in fact UKIP did much better in areas relatively unaffected by immigration. It might be supposed that UKIP’s success was therefore due to the fear of immigration, rather than to first-hand experience of it. This is the story told by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, for example (2020). However, immigration is just one point in a complex of cultural questions on which Labour was diverging from the white working class. More than any other indicator, including class and ethnicity, the strongest predictor of Conservative and Labour support in 2015 was newspaper readership. Voting for Labour was now correlated less strongly with being working class and more strongly with reading The Guardian or The Independent —papers that take a consistently ‘progressive’ (or even anti-British) position on cultural questions. Thus, while Labour was holding and gaining support among what David Goodhart would later called ‘Anywhere’ voters, whose work and cultural attachments are geographically transferable, it was already losing them in working-class constituencies. The cultural realignment of the Labour vote that would later be exacerbated by the party’s position on Brexit was already affecting its electoral performance in 2015, while at the same time the Conservatives were advancing not so much in the areas that Labour would later so dramatically lose—poorer, culturally conservative towns—as in richer, more culturally ‘progressive’ towns.

The 2017 General Election Jasper Miles, in this volume, has already explained the campaign, results, and fallout of the 2016 Brexit referendum, so there is no need to repeat that story here. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, had contributed almost nothing to the Remain campaign; her experience with the European Court of Human Rights had probably hardened her attitude to the Continent’s institutions, and she was suspected by many Conservative colleagues of planning for a leadership challenge after the referendum (Cowley & Kavanagh, 2018: 43). By the summer of 2017, and within a year of May’s acceding as party leader, the debate over Brexit within the Conservative Party had moved away from ‘Leave or Remain?’ and onto what kind of Brexit would be preferable. As usual, despite a complex

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number of options being viable, popular political debate reduced the options to two, in this case labelled ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. In political practice, these unhelpfully vague terms could be ignored. But if it came to an election, there would be little political capital to be gained in openly advocating a ‘soft’ Brexit. May therefore ‘hardened’ her stated aims. Announcing in Downing Street that there would be a general election on 8 June, she said, ‘Britain is leaving the European Union, and there can be no turning back … That means we will regain control of our own money, our own laws, and our own borders, and we will be free to strike trade deals with old friends and new partners all around the world’. May’s stated aim in calling the election was to defeat the obstructions and ‘gameplaying’ at Westminster, to replace them with ‘strong and stable leadership in the national interest’, and to strengthen her hand in negotiations with the EU. Those negotiations would first centre upon the terms of withdrawal and then on the future relationship. But, May argued, the British Government’s position would be weaker in the run-up to the next scheduled election in 2020. As many Conservative MPs were opposed to Brexit, May could expect sizeable rebellion in the Commons, which could block the process completely, with economic consequences for the UK and political consequences for the party. The Conservatives were widely expected to enlarge their majority in June 2017, and this probable complacency among voters was identified early on as a real problem for the campaign. Voters might think that, since Conservative victory was inevitable, that they could safely vote for non-Conservative local candidates whom they liked more, or register a ‘protest’ vote, or that they could use their votes to promote whichever exciting Labour policies had particularly attracted their eye. Growing Conservative support seemed to mean making Corbynite Labour a genuine challenge and danger, while positioning May as a national leader who needed a powerful mandate to strengthen the UK in the context of a complex international process. May’s campaign team needed to paint her as a unifying figurehead who could be supported by reasonable people who, regardless of past party allegiances, accepted the referendum result, even if they didn’t vote for it, and who wanted terms of withdrawal that served the national interest. The Conservatives could not allow May to be assessed as merely a domestic party leader whose policies offered little in reply to Labour’s generous spending programme. For this reason, the

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campaign strategy emphasized May herself, her ‘team’ (somewhat debranded of Conservative identity), and the great timely need for ‘strong and stable government in the national interest’. It is not unusual for MPs to be secretly critical of their leader’s election strategy, especially in the light of a bad result. But Theresa May had the added disadvantage of an extremely short planning period and a reputation among her colleagues for making decisions with the help of a very small group of close advisors. Commentating for ITV’s election night coverage, George Osborne, by now the editor of the London Evening Standard, claimed that the Conservative manifesto had been ‘drafted by her [May] and about two other people, was a total disaster, and must go down now as one of the worst manifestos in history’. In fact, it was not the ‘two’ that Osborne probably had in mind, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who had most shaped the Conservatives’ campaign: it was, again, Lynton Crosby. May had also appeared over-protected during the campaign. In contrast to Cameron, who in 2010 and 2015 had taken part in live television debates and appeared, sleeves rolled up, among public audiences, May seemed somewhat too obviously to be avoiding any situation in which she might struggle to respond to challenge, or which might take her off message. Three days before polling, May told an ITV interviewer that the naughtiest thing she had ever done was, as a youngster, to ‘run through fields of wheat’. It quickly became clear from the exit poll, released at 10 pm on 8 June 2017, that May’s gamble had failed. Though still the largest party in the Commons, the Conservatives were projected to win just 314 seats, twelve short of a majority. At worst, they could be out of office, and Labour able to reach an agreement with other parties to make Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister. By 10:05 pm, dozens of commentators in national media had questioned May’s ability to stay on as party leader. The Conservatives had taken one of the few surviving Liberal Democrat seats, but overall their gains had been very few. They had taken only six seats from Labour— far fewer than they’d hoped—and those lost to Labour numbered 28, and included Brexit-supporting areas. Four of Cameron’s gains from the Liberal Democrats had been lost again in areas where support for Brexit was more mixed. In the end, the Conservatives would win three crucial seats more than projected and were able to continue in office thanks to a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. But still May’s authority at home, within the party, and also on the Continent, appeared damaged. Far from increasing the

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Conservatives’ 2015 majority, May had thrown it away, and Parliament was again hung. The 2017 election looks, on the surface, like a reversal of 2015 and a reversion to 2010—only this time it was the more culturally conservative DUP that would prop up a Conservative Prime Minister, rather than the ‘progressive’ and uniformly Europhile Liberal Democrats. In 2010, there was agreement between the coalition parties on the big issue of the time, which was the economy. But now, on Brexit, the DUP would effectively have a veto on whatever withdrawal agreement the Conservatives would be able to negotiate, which could become a problem if any compromise seemed to have been made over Northern Ireland’s constitutional status within the UK. What had gone wrong for ‘Theresa May’s team’? As usual, commentators looked to the ‘turning points’ of the campaign for an explanation: the empty manifesto, Crosby’s excessively narrow message (‘strong and stable in the national interest’), the leader’s lack of charisma. May would later express regret that she had not made more of her own positive Conservative case for opportunity and social mobility, and had allowed herself to be guided by Crosby’s strategy. After all, it appeared that the Conservatives’ offer of strong leadership through the Brexit process had been rejected, and that the strategy of uniting Leave voters had failed. Clacton had been taken from UKIP, as expected. But everywhere that UKIP support had collapsed, Labour also seemed to have benefitted. Perhaps Crosby had been wrong? Perhaps voters had changed their minds on Brexit, or preferred a weaker government forced to build consensus with other parties? Analysis of voting patterns tells a different story and seems more to vindicate Crosby’s strategy—certainly in the long run. The Conservatives’ losses in the Commons disguised the significant advances that were made across the country, especially in Scotland, and among working-class voters in the English towns that would be known in 2019 as Labour’s ‘Red Wall’—towns such as Workington, Wakefield, and Bishop Auckland. The retained support went well beyond the ‘incumbency effect’. Somewhat under the radar, May had won more votes than the Conservatives had won at any election since 1992, and more even than Tony Blair had won for Labour in 1997. The party had not enjoyed such a large share of the vote (42.4%) since 1983. Most historically, as Curtice et al. have noted, the vote share increase on 2015 was ‘the largest increase in support

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enjoyed by any incumbent government that had won the previous election since the 1832 Reform Act’ (Curtice et al., 2018: 452). However, this performance was unusually uneven (see below). Most commentators, because they were focusing on May’s disaster in the Commons, the consequences for the Brexit process, and Corbyn’s surprise success, did not give much attention to the Conservatives’ significant advances in Scotland, where it won a higher share of the vote (28.6%) than at any election since 1979. The growth in support for the Scottish Conservatives was strongest in areas where support for Leave had been strongest. However, because the primary issue in Scottish politics was now Scottish independence, the party also benefitted from tactical voting among Unionists, especially where the Liberal Democrats now seemed unlikely to unseat Scottish National Party MPs (Curtice et al., 2018: 468– 469). Of course, this also meant that in other areas significant numbers of former Conservative voters had tactically voted for Labour. These successes, however, were poor consolation for Conservatives the morning after the election. Their problem was that Labour had gained thirty seats overall. While still behind the Conservatives on seats, vote share, and popular vote, Labour had increased its vote share by a dramatic 9.8 pp—more than in any election since 1945. Labour had won more votes than in any election since 1997 and had nearly matched its 2001 vote share of 40%. At no election since 1970 had the two main parties claimed such a large proportion of the vote. In England, the two-party system seemed to have been restored. For some time, it was believed that Labour’s performance was due to a ‘youthquake’: a mass mobilization on election day of young voters enthused for Jeremy Corbyn. It now seems, however, that the relationship between voter age and turnout changed very little from 2015; indeed, 2017 may have seen lower turnout than 2015, but both possibilities are well within the margin for error (Prosser et al. 2015). Another overlooked factor was a statistical development in the Conservatives’ support base in England and Wales—a development which it is now customary to call ‘realignment’. In a dramatic reversal of the historic trend that had still been evident in Cameron’s 2015 election win, the Conservatives were now losing support in strong Remain areas, which tended to be more affluent, and gaining in less economically buoyant areas where the Leave vote was strongest, and where levels of formal education were lower. Most commentators missed this realignment because it had not yet translated into seats in the House of Commons

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(Curtice et al., 2018: 453). But the differences it implied between the Conservative voters of 2015 and 2017 are significant. Many new Conservative voters were less cosmopolitan, less educated, poorer, and employed in more routine manual work (Curtice et al., 2018: 461). For Labour, the statistical significance of Leave/Remain support was weaker in 2017. Perhaps Labour had identified that many voters still cared more about domestic spending priorities than they did about Europe, or perhaps Labour’s Brexit strategy of ‘constructive ambiguity’ had worked to accommodate different views. In retrospect, however, we can say that the Conservatives had taken an early lead in what would become a race to realign party support along Leave/Remain lines. The Conservatives were claiming Leave voters, including in the Midlands and North of England; Labour would need, then, to claim more Remain voters, including in the South of England. The prize for winning the realignment race would be, as it turned out, a large majority in the general election of 2019.

The 2019 General Election In view of the Conservatives’ now obvious need to attract the full range of Eurosceptic voters—from those who had always denounced the European project to those who had voted Remain but now supported leaving on good terms—it is perhaps surprising that, as late as June 2019, there were still Conservative leadership candidates who were recognizable Remainers. One, Rory Stewart, even argued that a ‘no-deal’ withdrawal should be taken ‘off the table’—though in legislative terms it was not clear what this meant. Sajid Javid told the first leadership hustings that ‘You don’t beat the Brexit Party by becoming the Brexit Party’. But Sam Gyimah was perhaps the most vocal Remainer to enter the leadership contest: he advocated a referendum on the withdrawal agreement, with the option of remaining in the EU on the ballot paper. Those who elected Boris Johnson, at whatever stage of the party leadership election process they participated, can hardly be expected to ignore polling data which were by now common knowledge: that although Boris Johnson was the less popular choice for Prime Minister than Jeremy Hunt among Remainers and supporters of other parties, he was far more popular among Conservatives and Leavers (YouGov, 21/6/2019). Johnson’s campaign slogan, ‘Get Brexit done’, was simpler than May’s had been two years earlier, and it had the advantage of reflecting the impatience and exasperation with the wrangling at Westminster that many

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voters now felt (see Ford et al., 2021: 195–6). The message also lent itself to blunt visual metaphors for the campaign: Johnson was photographed boxing in blue ‘Get Brexit done’ gloves; driving a ‘Get Brexit done’ JCB through a wall labelled ‘Gridlock’; and preparing to feed his ‘oven-ready’ withdrawal agreement into the mouth of a baker’s oven. The release of 2019’s exit poll, which predicted a Conservative majority of 86, was the final whistle for those who had spent more than three years trying to delay, dilute, or prevent Brexit, and for those who had sought to make a Prime Minister out of Jeremy Corbyn. (Johnson’s final majority was 80.) Although polling had consistently shown a Conservative lead throughout the campaign, and especially a personal lead for Johnson ahead of Corbyn, most politicians and commentators were surprised by the scale of the Conservative victory. Johnson had won 43.6% of the popular vote, the highest share for any party since Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Conservatives had lost some seats, but most of these were to the SNP in Scotland, which had also taken six seats from Labour. The much bigger story was the 54 seats that the Conservatives had won from Labour. These cut deep into the ‘Red Wall’ of formerly safe Labour seats in the North of England and Wales, many of which had not elected Conservative MPs since the 1950s or earlier (see Ford et al., 2021: 243–75). Labour’s 202 seat total comprised a worse result for them even than 1983; it was in fact the worst since 1935. The political map had been dramatically redrawn in the North of England, and with it the arithmetic of the House of Commons. Johnson’s majority gave him the numbers he would need to get his ‘oven-ready’ withdrawal agreement through the Commons and the UK out of the EU within two months. It also gave him the stronger position that May had sought for the next stage of EU negotiations, and it gave him another five years of Conservative government with a strong mandate and high number of Conservative MPs elected under his leadership. Labour meanwhile had won 32.1% of the vote. That is more than it won under Ed Milliband in 2015 (30.4%). However, this gave the party just 202 seats, because new supporters were only being made in places that Labour was already winning: Labour’s support was increasingly concentrated in the big cities. If this suggests to Labour politicians that Britain’s electoral system now works against them, it is perhaps worth remembering that Johnson’s majority in the Commons was also smaller than historical precedent might have made him feel he deserved. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won 397 seats from just 42.4% of the vote.

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If anything, Johnson had this in common with May: for both leaders, results in the Commons seemed to underrepresent the popularity of the party in the country. Still, at 4:13am on election night, BBC journalist Andrew Neil asked Theresa May the obvious question, if a very awkward one: When you called an election two years ago, you lost your majority. Boris Johnson has called an election and achieved a quite substantial majority. What has he done right that you did wrong?

Johnson had won more votes for the Conservatives than Theresa May, but not many more—though Neil’s interviewee would not have known this at the time. Johnson had added just 329,770 to the Conservatives’ popular vote; Theresa May had added 2.3 million. What had made the difference in 2019 was that, although Johnson had lost some of 2017’s Conservative voters to other parties and to abstention, he had more than compensated for these losses by attracting new voters from Labour. YouGov’s survey, taken 13–16 December (YouGov, 17/12/2019), suggests that roughly a third of those 2017 Labour voters who had also voted Leave in 2016 were now backing Johnson. In percentage terms, this is not the largest group of Conservative switchers: that position is taken by the 46% of Leave-voting 2017 Liberal Democrats—a larger percentage of a much smaller number of voters—though only in North Norfolk does this Lib Dem–Leave group seem to have caused a seat to change hands, and even there local factors were probably more significant. Meanwhile, Labour had also lost around 12% of its Remainers to the Liberal Democrats, 3% of them to the Conservatives, and another 6% of its Leavers to the Brexit Party. All in all (net), between 2017 and 2019, Labour under Corbyn lost 2.6 million voters. The combined effect was extremely damaging: 54 seats were lost to the Conservatives (only one, Putney, went the other way), and six were lost to the SNP. The Corbynite explanation for this was simple: this was overwhelmingly down to Brexit (Ford et al., 2021: 259– 60). In fact, though the party’s complicated Brexit positioning may well have confused or frustrated many voters, Corbyn had also been polling very poorly with working-class voters. In October, 68% of C2DE respondents said they viewed Corbyn ‘unfavourably’; for Johnson, the figure was 48% (YouGov, 24/10/2019: 2).

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For Labour, then, the collapse of support in the ‘Red Wall’ seemed sudden and shocking compared to 2017. But on the Conservative side of the election, 2019 was a story of remarkable consistency with 2017. The switchers I’ve just described only comprised 15% of 2019’s Conservative voters. The great majority (85%) of them had also been 2017 voters, and many of these were ‘Red Wall’ voters who had made the Labour-to-Conservative switch back then, and not only in 2019. In many seats (Bolsover is a good example), the Conservatives had increased their support by more in 2017 than they did in 2019, even though it was only in the latter election that the seat was actually won. Johnson had, then, very effectively retained the backing of 2017 Conservatives. Labour’s retention was weaker, at just 72%. Indeed, of those who had voted Leave (2016) and Conservative (2017), 92% had stuck with the Conservatives in 2019—which we would expect. But the defection of 2017’s Conservative Remainers was also smaller than we’d expect: 65% of this group still voted Conservative in 2019, and of the rest, only 8% switched to Labour. Far more Conservative Remainers (22%) switched to the Liberal Democrats—which, ironically, may well have allowed the Conservatives to hold or gain crucial Con–Lab marginals, and increase the majority they needed for ‘getting Brexit done’. There was also nothing very new in 2019 about Conservative voting patterns, demographic trends, or what I have called the ‘realignment’. As is 2017, the 2019 election saw a stronger swing from Labour to the Conservatives where there were more working-class voters, and where the proportion of Leave voters was higher. Social class really has now ceased to be a significant indicator of Conservative support—certainly relative to age-group and newspaper readership. It is also noteworthy that the Conservatives had the lowest proportion of voters of any party who reported voting tactically: just 17% of their voters did so; the other 82% (the figures are rounded) wanted them to win. For Labour, those figures were a considerable 31% and just 67%, respectively (Ashcroft, 2019). The realignment of Leave voters towards the Conservatives that had already begun in 2017 thus continued in 2019. With 74% of 2016’s Leavers voting for them in 2019, the Conservatives were now unequivocally the preferred party of government for most Leavers. Conversely, Labour had not become the preferred party of government for Remainers. Only 49% of Remainers voted for Labour in 2019; 19% of the rest voted for the Conservatives.

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Since the trigger of that realignment, Brexit, has now been resolved, it seems unlikely that the realignment has any more mileage. For the Conservatives, retaining these new voters without losing the old ones is the next electoral challenge. ‘Patriotism’ may be the natural successor theme to ‘getting Brexit done’, but without concrete political disputes to divide voters into ‘patriotic’ and ‘unpatriotic’ classes, it is unlikely to be a powerful device. This has left the Conservatives with the social composition of a more ‘One Nation’ party than was the case in 2015: they now draw support more evenly from every social class, and their MPs represent more people in the Midlands and North of England and Wales than many can remember. Their voters also now have a set of priorities distinct from other parties. Where other parties typically attract those whose priorities are (1) politicians’ good motives and (2) domestic spending promises, the Conservatives have attracted those who between 2016 and 2019 prioritized (1) the Brexit outcome and (2) economic competence (Ashcroft, 2019). It seems probable that 2019’s Remain– Conservatives, who still form a significant portion of their vote base, had either accepted the necessity of executing the referendum result or prioritized a competently-managed economy. As we have seen, Labour’s realignment has been going on for longer, but its character is also cultural. While retaining much of its traditional white working-class supporters in poorer areas, Labour has also lost a significant number of them to the Conservatives, especially over Brexit and Corbynism. Meanwhile, Labour has piled up support in areas that are above-averagely culturally ‘progressive’, affluent, and Muslim (Curtice et al., 2018: 458). This may prove a difficult coalition to maintain while questions of nationality and culture are high on the political agenda, especially as it is primarily middle-class people in the UK’s larger cities that are joining the Labour Party and steering its policies. Labour’s best hope is that the political wind blows questions of tax and spending back to the top of that agenda, where the Conservatives’ 2019 electoral coalition is more fragile. The economic destruction of COVID-19 has raised exactly such questions.

References Cameron, D. (2019). For the Record. William Collins. Cowley, P., & Kavanagh, D. (Eds.). (2016). The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Cowley, P., & Kavanagh, D. (Eds.). (2018). The British General Election of 2017 . Palgrave Macmillan. Curtice, J., Fisher, S. D., & Ford, R. (2016). Appendix 1: The Results Analysed. In P. Cowley & D. Kavanagh (Eds.), (2016) The British General Election of 2015 (pp. 387–431). Palgrave Macmillan. Curtice, J., Fisher, S., Ford, R., English, P. (2018). Appendix 1: The Results Analysed. In Cowley, P., & Kavanagh, D. (Eds.), The British General Election of 2017 (pp. 449–495). Palgrave Macmillan. Dorling, D., & Tomlinson, S. (2020). Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire. Biteback. Ford, R., Bale, T., Jennings, W., & Surridge, P. (Eds.). (2021). The British General Election of 2019. Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, S. (2011). No Plan B: The Coalition Agenda for Cutting the Deficit and Rebalancing the Economy. In S. Lee & M. Beech (Eds.), The Cameron–Clegg Government: Coalition Politics in an Age of Austerity (pp. 59–74). Palgrave Macmillan. Lord Ashcroft Polls. How Britain voted and why: My 2019 general election post-vote poll. Prosser, C., Fieldhouse, E. A., Green, J., Mellon, J., Evans, G. (2018, January 28). Tremors But No Youthquake: Measuring Changes in the Age and Turnout Gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3111839 or https://doi.org/10. 2139/ssrn.3111839 YouGov (undated). Does Jeremy Corbyn looks like a Prime Minister in waiting? (Tracker). Accessed 21 Feb 2022, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/tra ckers/does-jeremy-corbyn-looks-like-a-prime-minister-in-waiting YouGov (1/5/2015). David Cameron is the Most Liked Party Leader. Accessed 21 Feb 2022, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2015/ 05/01/cameron-most-liked YouGov. (24/10/2019). Favourability Trackers 191024. Accessed 21 Feb 2022, https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/yhz z7n5sdk/YouGov%20-%20Favourability%20trackers%20191024.pdf YouGov. (17/12/2019). How Britain Voted in the 2019 General Election. Accessed 21 Feb 2022, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-rep orts/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election YouGov. (21/6/2019). If You Had to Choose Between Them, Who Would You Prefer as Prime Minister? Accessed 21 Feb 2022, https://yougov.co.uk/top ics/politics/survey-results/daily/2019/06/21/bced3/1

CHAPTER 5

The EU Referendum and British Politics Jasper Miles

It is popular to think that British politics has been turned upside down since David Cameron’s surprise victory in 2015. This was the first time since 1955 that an incumbent government increased both its share of votes and seats. Somewhat impressively, this was set against a backdrop of austerity and weak economic growth, yet Cameron overcame the expectations of the markets, bookmakers, polls and commentators to deliver a small Conservative majority. From there, British politics has been characterised as going through further profound shocks. Firstly, the 2016 referendum on continuing British membership of the European Union, which notably was the first time in Britain that the result of a national referendum went against the recommendation of the government and against the status quo. Secondly, the turbulent Theresa May premiership in which despite increasing the Conservative vote share and making inroads into the ‘Red Wall’, she lost her majority in 2017. This severely impacted her leadership, her ability to deliver her Brexit deal, and her wider policy agenda. Conversely, Jeremy Corbyn exceeded expectations,

J. Miles (B) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_5

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although this would prove to be the high-water mark of his leadership. Thirdly, replacing May with Boris Johnson allowed the Conservatives to reset their Brexit policy around a clearer message of ‘Get Brexit Done’, rally leave voters and overcome the impasse by winning a clear parliamentary majority in 2019. Therefore, it appears that much has changed between 2015 and 2020. For instance, depending on which side of the divide you fall, Britain turned its back on its European neighbours in an act of great political and economic national self-harm, which will be felt for years to come. Alternatively, Britain corrected a forty-year constitutional and foreign policy error, restoring the supremacy of Westminster, and allowing Britain to pursue its global, not just regional, priorities and interests. Elsewhere, the result shocked the political establishment, who had favoured remain yet discovered an electorate with different priorities and values. This has encouraged political parties to reorientate their policies; for the Conservatives around a ‘shared society’ and latterly, ‘levelling up’, and for Labour, a greater emphasis on class. Thirdly, while not the cause, the referendum was a catalyst for electoral and party change as internal party factions and ideological positions competed for advantage, party leaders were replaced and voters realigned around leave and remain positions. Consequently, Britain’s departure from the European Union is a defining event in British politics. Therefore, the journalist Charles Moore’s suggestion that all aspiring political leaders should be asked ‘Who understands that everything has changed, changed utterly?’ (2016) has some merit. However, with the benefit of the passage of time, it is worth thinking about what exactly has changed. We would do well to remember Michael Oakeshott’s advice to be sceptical of ‘the false emphasis which springs from being over-impressed by the moment of unmistakable emergence’ (1962: 13). As such, this chapter will have four main sections. The first will outline the context of the referendum, appreciating both the longer historical view of Britain’s relationship with Europe and the critical events building up to the referendum. A section considering the referendum campaign will follow this and while there is some debate as to whether election campaigns really matter, a broader view of the campaign revealed some telling aspects of modern British Politics. The third section will investigate the referendum result and offer some explanations drawn from the existing literature as to why Britain voted leave, laying the groundwork

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in thinking about the political significance and implications of the referendum. Consequently, the final section will outline five areas—identity, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, territorial integrity and culture. The conclusion will stress that while there has been significant change and turbulence, the two main parties and the wider political system have contained the challenge of Brexit. First, let us chart the course of Britain’s relationship with Europe.

Context In one way or another, Britain’s political, economic and social relationship with the European continent goes back centuries: in its ‘culture, its language, its institutions, its religion and its politics, the national identity first of England, and then of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, has generally been formed in opposition to “Europe”’ (Gamble, 2004: 108). Yet, for our purposes, the story begins in the middle of the twentieth century through to 2020. In the intervening period, the relationship between Britain and Europe has been characterised as an ‘awkward partner’ (George, 1998), a ‘stranger in Europe’ (Wall, 2008) and ‘the permanent minority member’ (Bulpitt, 1992: 269). Despite emerging from two world wars as a victorious power, Britain was eclipsed by both the USA and the USSR as its power and capabilities were significantly reduced. The post-World War II order fashioned by the USA, of which European integration was to be a key component, challenged thinking on both the left and right of British Politics. For the British left, the Attlee governments displayed a lukewarm attitude towards calls for closer political and economic integration. They were concerned about its impact on the British constitution and democracy, Britain’s world role and its domestic policy agenda. For the British right, they too were sceptical. However, after the Suez crisis in 1956 and the comparatively weak growth of the UK versus other European states, Harold Macmillan pondered whether Britain faced a ‘grim choice’, caught between ‘a hostile… America, and a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne”—now under French but later bound to come under German control’ (Kaiser, 1996 quoted in Thompson, 2017a: 8). After two unsuccessful attempts to join the European Community— firstly under Macmillan in 1961 and secondly under Harold Wilson in 1967—the United Kingdom joined at the third attempt in 1973 under Edward Heath. Helen Thompson writes that Heath—who is

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often considered along with Blair to be the most pro-European Prime Minister—was willing to sacrifice much to get the UK into the Community. Yet, prior to accession, he took Britain out of the Community’s first common exchange rate policy, the Snake. This approach to economics and monetary policy was evident throughout Britain’s time as a member, not wanting to Europeanise monetary and exchange rate matters, leaving Britain in a singular position within each formation of the EU (Thompson, 2017a, 2017b: 436). James Callaghan also exhibited the same scepticism towards monetary union, concerned about its implications for sterling, the domestic economy and the advantage it would give to the highly competitive West German economy. In 1992, Britain crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, confirming Callaghan’s earlier concerns (Miles, 2020: 217–233). Jim Bulpitt wrote in relation to most of the behaviour of Conservative governments between 1961–1991 that they exhibited not defeatism but ‘hyper-optimism in presenting the benefits of Community membership as regards both the British economy and Britain’s international power pretensions’ (1992: 260). Regardless of whether it was a Conservative or Labour government in office, there was a continuity of thought that Britain could magnify its influence in both Europe and the wider world through the political structures of what would eventually become the European Union. Membership also provided economic benefits. As the Commonwealth declined in both political and economic importance, the economy and trade shifted towards Europe. British membership, it was claimed, provided businesses the opportunity to access European markets, and vice versa, resulting in benefits for the British economy, job market and workers. Proponents of membership across the political spectrum argued that withdrawal would damage Britain’s global influence and the domestic economy. Despite a more hostile tone taken by Margaret Thatcher towards the end of her Premiership, the same line of reasoning was present in subsequent Conservative and Labour governments. John Major endured considerable difficulties over Europe as Prime Minister even though he negotiated opt-outs from the single currency and the social chapter. The growing divisions within the Conservative Party from the late 1980s into the 1990s opened up political opportunities for the Labour Party, which through ‘modernisation’ had gradually moved away from Euroscepticism and become increasingly sympathetic to European integration (see Hickson & Miles, 2018). For New Labour, the nation-state had a reduced

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capacity to act in a globalised world, and Britain could achieve more by working together with likeminded European partners. Consequently, they promised to put Britain at ‘the heart of Europe’, compared to the isolationism of the Conservative Party. The extent to which New Labour put Britain at ‘the heart of Europe’ is debatable. After the 9/11 terror attacks, New Labour looked across the Atlantic, taking an active role in the war on terror, much to the consternation of European leaders. Moreover, while Blair promised a referendum on the Euro currency, it did not materialise, and Britain retained the pound. However, New Labour’s importance can be seen in their modernisation programme, reforming the British state and wider constitutional reform, social liberalism, multiculturalism and orientation towards European integration. Given that these ran counter to Conservative instincts, it led some to consider whether there was a crisis in conservatism (Gamble, 1995; Hayton, 2012). At least in part, David Cameron’s leadership can be seen as an attempt to reconstruct conservatism, packaging his brand as modernised liberal conservatism. Shortly after winning the leadership in 2005, Cameron did not want his party to ‘keep on banging on about Europe’ (d’Ancona, 2013: 241 quoted in Smith, 2018: 1). For Tim Bale, this period of Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party marked a ‘critical juncture’, opening space for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) to fill the Eurosceptic void. While the Conservatives then tried to regain the initiative, they struggled to do so as the economic and migrant crises hit Europe, and domestically, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was unable to control immigration (2018). Julie Smith writes that Cameron’s ‘leadership and legacy would both come to be defined by the question of the UK’s membership of the European Union’ (Smith, 2018: 1), although this does somewhat overlook the centrality of austerity to Cameron’s time as Prime Minister. Regardless, he committed to holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in opposition, but he dropped the commitment when the Brown government ratified the treaty. While the leadership promised to negotiate the ‘repatriation’ of certain powers (such as social and employment legislation) from Brussels, reject the ‘ratchet clauses’ of the Lisbon Treaty and to legislate for the ‘referendum lock’ guaranteeing a vote on the transfer of powers and competencies to the EU, coalition with the pro-European Liberal Democrats further emboldened the Eurosceptics in the Party. They were confident that once Cameron was in office, they could push him further on Europe (Farrell & Goldsmith, 2017: 226), and their number had

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increased after the election. Moreover, even those Conservative MPs who were ambivalent or opposed to leaving, came under pressure from their constituency associations and were concerned about the pressure from UKIP (Bale, 2018: 271). As such, the division over Europe within the Conservative Party was considered at this stage to be a conflict between soft and hard Eurosceptics. The soft Eurosceptics favoured continued membership, albeit on a qualified basis, whereas the hard Eurosceptics favoured withdrawal (Heppell, 2013; Lynch & Whitaker, 2013). In addition, the intra-party battles over Europe had almost exclusively become a problem for the Conservatives, whereas the matter did not prompt the same intensity in the other major parties (Copsey & Haughton, 2014). As a result of a petition signed by over 100,000 people, in October 2011, the Commons divided on a motion calling for an in/out referendum on British membership of the EU. A Conservative backbencher introduced the motion. 81 Conservative MPs, 49 of whom had entered the Commons in 2010, voted for the motion. It was, at the time, one of the two biggest rebellions against a Conservative Prime Minister. In April 2012 the People’s Pledge campaign held a mini-referendum in Thurrock, in which 90% voted in favour of leaving the EU. Combined with the ‘omnishambles’ budget of that year, 100 Conservative MPs demanded that there be a referendum in the next parliament. Such an open demand represented nearly a third of his parliamentary party, perhaps leaving Cameron wondering how many more of his MPs favoured a referendum but did not sign the letter. In addition, on 31st October 2012 Cameron was defeated over an EU budget bill a month before a Brussels summit, seeing 53 Conservative backbenchers join with Labour to defeat the government 307 votes to 294. By early 2013, and under internal and external pressure, Cameron in his Bloomberg speech settled on a policy of ‘reform, renegotiation and referendum’ should the Conservatives hold power alone after the 2015 general election. In this speech, Cameron set out his vision for a reformed EU and the UK’s place within it. He acknowledged the gap between the EU and its citizens and the need to address this lack of democratic accountability and consent; he gave an assurance that developments in the eurozone would not prejudice those outside the single currency; he proposed a limit to welfare incentives encouraging EU citizens to seek work in Britain; and emphasised the need to maintain competitiveness, jobs, growth, innovation and success (Cameron, 2013 quoted in Cini & Pérez-Solórzano Borragán, 2019: 408). Moreover, the referendum was

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to be held before the end of 2017, and the process was contingent on the negotiation of a ‘new settlement’ for the UK in the EU. He saw the pledge as an opportunity to unite ‘most shades of opinion within his party’ until the next election (Byrne et al., 2017: 217). Cameron deemed that the electorate would not vote for such a radical change, especially as most business Conservatives, soft Eurosceptics, the wider mainstream political class and the propensity in referendums to vote for the status quo. Interestingly, it appears that Cameron had decided in June 2012 that the 2015 Conservative manifesto would have to contain a commitment to an in/out referendum. A combination of principle, pressure from local Conservative associations, the fear that UKIP might harm Conservative electoral prospects in 2015 and the insufficient policies introduced by the coalition all led Cameron, influenced by the then Foreign Secretary William Hague, to commit to an in/out referendum (see Bale, 2018: 270–275). The commitment helped, bar the defection of two MPs, Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell, and the donor Aaron Banks, to hold the Conservative Party together. However, the extent to which Cameron believed he would have to deliver on the commitment is contested. With the opinion polls pointing towards another hung parliament, the prospect of another coalition with the Liberal Democrats or the formation of a Labour government would have given Cameron the cover to drop the commitment (Smith, 2018: 4–5). The small Conservative majority following the 2015 general election meant that Cameron had to fulfil his promise, and he set about implementing his three ‘Rs’ policy. Set against a backdrop of terrorist attacks in Paris and the failure of the EU to resolve the refugee crisis, Cameron focused on four areas—‘economic governance’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘immigration’—the latter having risen in salience since his Bloomberg speech. This was too limited for many Eurosceptics who claimed that it was narrower than what had been outlined in the Conservative manifesto. On the other hand, it was too far-reaching for the other EU 27 (Smith, 2018: 6). Also, he had to persuade the EU 27 that there was a real prospect that he would walk away from the negotiations and recommend a leave vote. Given Cameron’s personal view on European integration, this was near impossible to envisage, and it rendered it difficult for him to play tough. Moreover, he had to encourage his MPs not to declare while the negotiations were ongoing for fear of weakening his hand. Most abided by Cameron’s wish, some out of loyalty, others out of an openness to see what he could achieve (Smith,

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2018: 6–7). While the negotiations revealed the complexity, difficulty and arguably British weakness inside the EU, Cameron achieved agreement on non-discrimination for non-eurozone countries, and the symbolically important matter that Britain would no longer be committed to ‘ever closer union’. He claimed that the agreement offered ‘the best of both worlds’, but again, critics suggested that it fell short of promises made before the general election.

The Campaign The Prime Minister decided to hold the referendum in June 2016 with the official start of the referendum campaign on 15th April 2016. However, in the preceding months both camps sought to attract supporters from across politics, business and celebrity, while seeking to organise themselves into coherent campaigns. Cini and Pérez-Solórzano Borragán note that the challenge for the referendum campaigns was twofold: firstly, translating the referendum question into meaningful issues that would interest and mobilise voters; and secondly, devise a cohesive message shared by a majority of those supporting each side, given the heterogeneous make-up of the supporters for the respective campaigns and the cross-party nature of the campaign divide (2019: 409). The Leave campaign started as the underdogs, portraying themselves as the outsiders, fighting against the ‘liberal establishment’ and the ‘elite’, all of which would serve them well. The ‘take back control’ message was effective, relating to issues around borders, immigration, money and sovereignty. In addition, Leave stressed that economic opportunities were available to the UK outside of the EU, reviving relationships with the Commonwealth and looking across to America. The Remain campaign also focused on the economy, but the economic stability offered by membership and the economic costs and dangers of withdrawal. Remain called on the expertise of the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Bank of England and the American President, all stressing that instability and an economic downturn would follow a vote to leave. The then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, ramped up ‘project fear’ when he promised an emergency budget in the event of a leave vote, along with claims that every British citizen would be substantially worse-off. The Remain campaign also struggled to address the thorny matter of immigration and border control, a serious problem that came to a head

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when promises from this side were made to reduce migration within the EU’s free movement of people. Others in the Remain campaign suggested that leaving would threaten peace in Europe and that only Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, would benefit. Moreover, telling those who had been most affected by austerity, economic change, unemployment, globalisation, mass immigration and rapid social change that they should vote to stay in an institution that encouraged and promoted many of those things was going to be a hard sell. On the other hand, the Leave campaign rejected the ‘doom-and-gloom’ narrative as both elitist and ‘out of touch’ and successfully married many social problems to EU membership. Notably, the Leave campaign also proved very effective in mobilising political disaffection, with strong Leave victories among voters who felt British democracy was not working, or that politicians did not care about ‘people like me’. By 2019, the Conservatives successfully positioned themselves among the politically disaffected (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020: 300). While the Cabinet accepted Cameron’s recommendation that the negotiation had been a success, and the government would recommend a remain vote, this did not sit easily with Cameron’s decision to allow MPs and ministers a free vote. Moreover, some high-profile Conservatives such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson took an active role in the referendum, with Gove becoming co-chairman of Vote Leave. Other high-profile leave supporting Conservative MPs included Theresa Villiers, David Davis and Chris Grayling. Most Conservative MPs—187—declared for Remain in June 2016, totalling 57% of the parliamentary party. The main Conservative remain group was ‘Conservative In’, which enjoyed the support of the Prime Minister, Chancellor and other Cabinet Ministers, including Patrick McLoughlin, Liz Truss and Nicky Morgan. The Labour Party was formally committed to continued British membership and, therefore, it was of little surprise that most of the Labour movement campaigned for Remain in the referendum. For the pro-Europeans within the Party, continuing British membership was an ‘article of faith’, a sign that Labour were modern social democrats, expressing their internationalism. ‘Labour In for Britain’ professed the economic benefits of the Single Market, the free movement of goods, capital and labour, workers’ rights and the ability of Britain to exert influence by tackling global issues on a European level. However, the EU elicited varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the referendum superseded the position taken by those who thought the EU required reform—soft

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Eurosceptics (Taggart, 1988; Szczerbiak & Taggart, 2018)—as they had to choose whether they were in or out. Consequently, supporting Britain remaining in the EU was a pragmatic decision for some. While the EU was imperfect, after over forty years of British membership, it would be too hard to disentangle the United Kingdom from the institutions of the EU. In contrast, the Eurosceptics within the Party were much smaller in number. On the left of the Party were figures such as Denis Skinner and Kelvin Hopkins who likely would have been joined by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell had they been outside of the Shadow Cabinet. On the right of the Party, which has an enduring Eurosceptic tradition (Hickson & Miles, 2018), figures included Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Roger Godsiff, Frank Field, John Mann and former MPs such as Austin Mitchell, Tom Harris and Nigel Griffiths. Bruce Grocott, Alan Howarth and Maurice Glasmann made the social democratic Eurosceptic case from the House of Lords. Labour Leave, Chaired by John Mills, articulated Labour’s Eurosceptic tradition. Stuart was Chair of the official Vote Leave campaign. Most of the Trade Union movement supported remain, although some dissented such as RMT, ASLEF, BFAWU and FBU.

The Vote On 23rd June 2016, the UK electorate voted to leave the EU. 17,410,742 people voted to leave and 16,141,241 voted to remain, amounting to 51.9% for Leave and 48.1% for Remain, based on a turnout of 72.16%. The closeness of the vote is itself significant, as had 600,000 people voted otherwise, then a different outcome was possible. Indeed, Dominic Cummings developed this point, suggesting that several factors could have altered it either way (2017). Yet ‘Leave’ did win the referendum and in this section, we will consider some of the predictors and explanations of why people voted as they did, and ultimately why leave won. Steve Richards, in his book, The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way, argues that by the 2010s, and under the constraints of a globalised economy, politicians had ‘failed calamitously to find ways of telling the truth about what they can do, want to do and what they believe, with conviction, they should do’ (2017: 2–3). This opened space for outsiders to offer messages and policies that voters wanted to hear.

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Others have focused on democracy and the trajectory of British history, seeing Britain as a country with a singular European history in relation to the continent (Adler-Nissen et al., 2017: 6–7). Moreover, reconciling Britain’s constitutional traditions with other European countries and the EU proved difficult, compounded by recent changes to the governance of England and asymmetric devolution (Henderson et al., 2016). The structure of the referendum compared to a general election—total votes across the United Kingdom rather than winning a majority of parliamentary constituencies—freed voters from influences of party loyalties, local political cultures and the incentives of the first-past-the-post electoral system (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020: 234). The traditional divide over economics and ideology that generally shapes voter patterns in general elections receded, and had little impact on the choice between Remain and Leave. Instead, argue Sobolewska and Ford, the new identity divides over immigration, national identity and equal opportunities, which were a secondary factor in the choice between Labour and Conservative in 2015, were the strongest predictor of choices between Leave and Remain in 2016. In the EU Referendum, the latent identity divides in the electorate became fully mobilised as the primary factors (2020: 233–234). Young people were much more likely to vote Remain than the elderly. For example, three quarters of 18–24-year-olds voted for Remain, 60% of over 65s voted to Leave (Ashcroft, 2016). Ford and Goodwin (2017) see in the division between the young generally voting Remain and the elderly voting Leave, education level, social attitudes and tolerance. On the matter of education level, McGill, (2016), although primarily writing on American politics, noted that there was a strong negative correlation between the percentage of educated people in a local authority and its propensity to vote Leave in the EU Referendum. 71% of those with a degree voted to remain; only 34% of those with only a secondary education did so. However, the relationship between formal education status and voting is contested. One view is that it provides a ‘factor endowment’, allowing those with higher educational attainments to better withstand and compete in a globalised economy. The other is to view education as a method of counteracting nationalism, isolationism and intolerance (Mansfield & Mutz, 2009 referenced in Wilson, 2017: 548). As for social attitudes, Sanders et al. identified an emerging Authoritarian Mindset, comprising ‘a virulent opposition to human rights, negative views towards immigration, preferences for lower taxes and a smaller state, beliefs about the strong role Britain should play in the world

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and deep cynicism about EU institutions’. While they were writing before the referendum, and the extent to which those who lean more towards the authoritarian favour lower taxes and a smaller state is questionable, they claimed that this emerging mindset ‘is a hugely important driver of the UK electorate’s preferences with regard to Britain’s leaving or staying the EU’ (Sanders et al., 2016: 1, 10 quoted in Wilson, 2017: 548). Immigration underpinned much support for Brexit and was cited as the second most important reason for voting for Leave (Ashcroft, 2016). Having little or no choice over the expansion of the EU’s membership of powers was third. The vote to leave has also been seen as a revolt of those left behind by economic change and globalisation, people who had seen incomes stagnate, and jobs and opportunities disappear. Andrew Marr wrote ‘I think we voted to leave because so many people had been left behind economically and culturally for so long and were furious about it’ (quoted in Jones, 2018: 666). The Lagatum Institute (2016) study found that lowerincome groups voted for Brexit. Whereas 65% of households earning more than £60,000 voted to Remain, only 38% of those from households earning less than £20,000 did so (quoted in Wilson, 2017: 547). Yet, the pattern across England, and more widely Great Britain varied. For instance, less well-off areas such as Stoke-on-Trent voted in large majorities for Leave, whereas other less well-off areas such as Knowsley, albeit by a slim majority, voted to Remain. As Katwala et al. (2016: 19 quoted in Wilson, 2017: 547) show, ‘some 69.4 per cent of voters in Stoke-on-Trent opted for Leave while in Knowsley, which shares many local characteristics, just 51 per cent did so’. Consequently, while the Leave vote was strongest in the poorer parts of Britain, these groups were marginalised in other respects: ‘The public vote for Brexit was anchored predominantly, albeit not exclusively, in areas of the country that are filled with pensioners, low-skilled and less well-educated blue-collar workers and citizens who have been pushed to the margins not only by the economic transformation the country over recent decades but also by the values that have come to dominate a more socially liberal media and political class. In this respect the vote for Brexit was delivered by the ‘left behind’—social groups that are united by a general sense of insecurity, pessimism and marginalisation, who do not feel as though elites, whether in Brussels or Westminster, share their values, represent their interests and genuinely empathise with their intense angst about rapid social, economic and cultural change’ (Goodwin & Heath, 2016).

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David Goodhart’s contribution to our understanding of the centrality of identity and culture to modern British politics and society remains relevant. In his book, The Road to Somewhere, Goodhart introduces the idea that there is a spectrum of opinion ranging from ‘Somewheres’ to ‘Anywheres’. The Somewheres tend to be more socially conservative, valuing the local and sceptical over radical social change such as mass immigration. While they are not opposed to recent social developments—female equality, minority rights, individual choice—‘they want them more slowly and in moderation’ than the Anywheres (Goodhart, 2017: 6). On the other hand, the Anywheres are ‘cheerleaders for restless change’, characterised by education and mobility, in favour of immigration, EU integration, equality and human rights. While fewer in number than Somewheres, the Anywheres than Anywheres, the Somewhere have come to dominate the national conversation, setting the standards across society. Tellingly, particularly in light of the condemnation leave voters have received since 2016, Goodhart writes that ‘It is time that Anywheres stopped looking down on Somewheres, white or non-white, and learnt to accept the legitimacy of their “change is loss” worldview and even accommodate some of their sentiments and intuitions’ (2017: 12). Thompson writes that structural factors led to Britain’s ‘inevitable’ withdrawal from the European Union. While Britain was able to pursue its interests in the EU and achieve some victories, especially around the Single European Market (see Menon & Salter, 2016: 1300), the structural problems remained. This was combined with the commitments made by the Conservatives in their 2010 manifesto, the ConservativeLiberal Democrat coalition and then majority Conservative government such as the immigration target, the referendum lock and the wish to use a new treaty to return some powers to Westminster. Moreover, non-Conservative governments would have faced the same structural problems. For Thompson, Cameron ‘made the Leave campaign’s case that there was little control to be had inside the EU-for it’ (2017: 447). It is worth quoting Thompson reasoning at length: ‘… the 2008 financial crash and the eurozone crisis put a time-bomb under the sustainability of Britain’s membership of the EU. They generated conflict over London’s position as the offshore financial centre of the euro, escalated the differences between the macro-economic options open to Britain and the euro-zone states, produced a significant rise in immigration

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from the euro-zone periphery into Britain, strengthened German influence within the EU, and weakened Britain’s position in the SEM with regard to financial services and banking matters… Any attempt to address the practical policy problems they generated—whether the risk of discrimination within or the particular consequences of freedom of movement for Britain in relation to a monetary union of which it was not a member—could only risk demonstrating the fundamental political weakness of Britain’s position inside the EU and erode domestic democratic consent to it’ (2017: 446).

Political Significance Within hours of the referendum result being declared, Cameron had resigned as leader of the Conservative Party. Within days, two-thirds of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet had resigned and by 28th June, he had lost a vote of no confidence by the Parliamentary Labour Party 172–40. Consequently, both parties faced summer leadership contests as they sought to deal with the ‘leave’ victory and how best to respond. Remarkably, Theresa May who had remained largely silent during the referendum campaign, only making one notable speech in favour of remaining, emerged victorious as the other leadership contenders squabbled, backstabbed and made ill-judged comments. In the Labour leadership contest, Corbyn defeated Owen Smith, with much of his support coming from outside of the PLP. Yet, the significance of the referendum result transcends party leaders. First, we turn our attention to the ‘new identities’. Sobolewska and Ford claim that the ‘new identities’ were crystallised by the referendum and Brexit, becoming central to how people saw themselves. The ‘identity liberals’ were forged in defeat, but could unify around opposition to Brexit, instead favouring European integration and open borders. On the other hand, the ‘identity conservatives’ had long been concerned about immigration and rapid social change but were now ‘the holders of a powerful democratic mandate’. Moreover, voters developed a clear sense of ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ as social groups; they developed clear group-based judgements, seeing their own group positively, and their rivals negatively; and these group identities and group judgements began to influence their political preferences and choices (2020: 217–218; 223–234; 238). They continue, identifying three case studies to illustrate the impact and interaction of identity politics and electoral geography. Firstly, the collapse of the ‘red wall’ 2019, seats across the midlands, north of

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England and parts of Wales which had as recently 2015, significant Labour majorities and long histories of voting Labour, but through May’s reorientation of the Conservative Party in 2017 and then under Johnson’s leadership, swung heavily towards the Conservatives. Secondly, the ‘blue wall’, seats across London and the south east of England, predominantly consist of identity liberals, and while still held by the Conservatives, are steadily trending away. Thirdly, Labour’s retreat into the ethnically diverse and graduate heavy cities. As such, they are absent from many of the ‘blue wall’ contests between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020: 300–304). Consequently, the challenge presented by the EU Referendum result is evident within both major political parties and moving forward, will pose considerable electoral and political problems. It is an especially acute problem for the Labour Party, as it piles up support among its cosmopolitan supporters in the big cities and seemingly moves further apart from its erstwhile small-c conservative voters in its former industrial heartlands. Manwaring and Beech (2018: 28 quoted in Hayton, 2021b: 8) argue that ‘Brexit revealed a divided UK, with especially deep fissures in the English left over the type of country Labour-inclined voters want to see’ and characterise this division as ‘progressive left versus conservative Labour’. The Labour Party represented some of the seats with the highest ‘Leave’ votes in the country but also represented seats with the largest ‘Remain’ majorities in England and Wales. Many MPs representing ‘leave’ voting seats understood that the result had to be honoured, aligning although for different reasons, with the Corbyn leadership who had their roots in the Bennite Eurosceptic tradition. Yet, they were faced by a wider Shadow Cabinet, PLP and membership that represented and lived in Remain voting areas, convinced that Brexit was the biggest error in living memory, and broadly accepted a worldview based on cosmopolitan liberalism. Here, the tension shaped Labour’s Brexit policy, initially accepting the referendum result and committing to leave the European Union, moving to ambiguity and then flipping to a second referendum in which Labour would campaign for remain. Tellingly, one committed pro-European Shadow Cabinet member decided to drape themselves in the blue and gold of the EU flag when campaigning for a second referendum, having a few years earlier been shocked at the sight of someone flying the flag of St. George from their window.

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Thus far, attempts by Labour politicians to reconnect with more conservative-minded voters have fallen flat, whether on immigration or patriotism. In the eyes of many, Labour is responsible for presiding over large-scale immigration when last in office. Moreover, their attempts to talk tough on immigration are seen as insincere; the messenger may wish to curb immigration, but much of the Party is at ease with open borders and profess that any attempt to limit immigration is rooted in racism. As for patriotism, the Party had become increasingly detached from its patriotic centre since the 1990s. By the time Corbyn assumed the leadership, both the left and ‘progressives’ were united in their rejection of patriotism, the former inspired by Marxism, the latter by hyper-liberalism. Consequently, today’s Labour Party, at least in terms of patriotism, has little in common with leading historical figures such as Attlee, Gaitskell, Callaghan and Shore. The EU Referendum result caused significant problems for the Conservative Party as it sought to balance a range of conflicting demands, governing competency, national interest, electoral pressures and party unity. Following the European Parliament elections, 2019 in which the Conservatives dropped to fifth and won less than 9% of the vote, it was feared that the electorate would wreak revenge on the Party at the subsequent general election. However, Johnson’s ability to substantially change the Conservative Party by silencing and in some cases removing opponents of Brexit, reorganising the Party around a harder Brexit and marshalling leave voters into the Party’s electorate base, played a key role in the Party winning a clear majority in 2019. In short, the consequence of two electoral cycles was the Conservative Party effectively building support around a new national issue. Therefore, ‘the vote for Brexit provided the opportunity to reshape radically the future of British politics and once again return the Conservative Party to a position of political dominance’, another effort in a long line of attempts to deal with the crisis of conservativism created by Thatcherism (Hayton, 2021a, 2021b: 414–415). Yet, there is no guarantee that this political dominance will last. Firstly, governments become unpopular, the main opposition positions itself more effectively and the electorate instils a new government; this is the general pattern of electoral politics. Secondly, the Conservative Party faces a ‘uniquely challenging set of constraints—both national and international’ and ‘its capacity to manage the politics of support is vulnerable to

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the conflicting priorities of its voters and of factions within the parliamentary party which are increasingly self-confident and well organised’ (Peele, 2021: 410). Thirdly, the long-term demographic shifts that are trending away from the Conservative Party. As more ‘identity liberals’ enter the electoral marketplace and the number of ‘identity conservatives’ reduces, the Party’s strong embrace of the latter may involve long-term costs as it struggles to engage with ‘identity liberals’. However, ‘demography is not destiny’, and the success of the Conservative Party throughout its history has been its ability to construct new electoral coalitions. Sobolewska and Ford outline three scenarios for the future of British politics, as identity continues to shape and shift voter preferences, behaviour and political competition: fragmentation, restoration and replacement. In the fragmentation scenario, the two-party system cannot contain the new identity divides, prompting the rise of existing but smaller parties, or the formation of new parties. In this scenario, British politics will revolve around four or more parties, like the party systems found in many European countries. In the second setting, politics reverts to its traditional fight over economic issues and, therefore, identity divides fall away. Alternatively, traditional political competition could be restored by the persistence of identity divides in which the post-Brexit parties look very different to their pre-Brexit iterations. For instance, the Conservative Party becomes a party of the ‘red wall’ advancing a more prominent role for the state, whereas Labour further embraces suburban middleclass liberals and university graduates, duly shedding what is left of its working-class heritage. Lastly, replacement would entail one, or both, of the major parties disappearing, unable or unwilling to respond to the new divides, with voters moving away in droves. While there is some historical (the early twentieth century when Labour replaced the Liberals as the main opposition to the Conservatives), contemporary (the collapse of Scottish Labour and the rise of the Scottish National Party) and comparative evidence (the quick demise of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada) that this is a possibility, it is also rare (2020: 311–322). Thus far, the evidence suggests that both major parties have been able to withstand, although not without considerable difficulty, the shock caused by Brexit. The referendum result saw England and Wales vote to leave, but Scotland and Northern Ireland vote to remain. This raises further questions about the territorial integrity of the British state. While the result in these

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parts of the United Kingdom was perhaps, unsurprising, and these territorial questions long precede the referendum, it does suggest further divergence between England and other parts of the United Kingdom. Indeed, it emboldened the nationalists who argued that it enhanced the case for Scottish Independence and Irish Unification. However, both the May and certainly Johnson governments have taken a firmer line with the Scottish Nationalists, rejecting calls for a second independence referendum, promoting a pro-British, pro-Union line and reasserting the United Kingdom’s independence because of Brexit. In addition, the workings of the Johnson Government’s Internal Market Act and ‘Shared Prosperity Fund’ are controversial but designed to promote the UK’s domestic economy. As for Northern Ireland, its distinctive politics, political settlement and the fact that it shares a land border with an EU member mean that it requires careful management. However, these territorial and constitutional questions now take place in a context of limited freedom of manoeuvre at Westminster, due to devolution, the increased independence and assertiveness of the judiciary, and the operation of the Human Rights Act, all subjecting the executive to greater challenge and control (Peele, 2021: 410). Debates over culture and British history have spilt over into all parts of social life. Over the last few years, every institution from HSBC to the Church of England has re-evaluated its history, priorities and practices. Consequently, cultural matters entered politics, although its electoral saliency remains limited. Regardless, this can be linked to the EU Referendum, as it became popular in some quarters to conceive of leave voters as ‘imperialists’, wanting to bring back the Empire. More broadly, history is continuously being revised. However, the flurry of literature in recent years reducing the complexity of history generally, and British history specifically, to little more than racism and white supremacy—as if they had discovered the real and underlying motivator of history—resulted in cultural debates coming to the fore. Some see the ‘culture wars’ as part of the Conservative Party’s electoral strategy, binding identity conservatives further into the electoral fold. Yet, the extent to which the Conservatives have engaged in the ‘culture war’ is debateable. On the one hand, the government has toyed with free speech on university campuses, threatened the BBC licence fee and made some critical comments directed towards those tearing down statues of individuals who are now deemed beyond the pale. On the other hand, the Conservative Party has disappointed the numerous critics

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of ‘woke politics’ found across the political spectrum, ranging from the Marxist-inspired Claire Fox, the liberal comedian Andrew Doyle, to the conservative and traditional New Culture Forum. Here, the critics of ‘woke politics’ appear on firmer ground when they claim that far from the debate being conducted on ‘right-wing terms’ to dominate ideological discourse, the Conservative Party (and what few remaining conservative institutions still exist in Britain) have been unable, or more likely, unwilling, to engage in the debate properly.

Conclusion The surprise result in the EU Referendum has caused much upheaval in British politics. For instance, changes in party leadership and policies, voter behaviour, electoral geography and the emergence of new identities and divides, particularly around culture. These fault lines had been brewing for decades underneath the surface as Britain experienced considerable economic, social and cultural change. The referendum gave these fault lines full expression and are likely to shape British politics for years to come. Thus far, the fallout from the EU Referendum has been contained. The Conservative and Labour parties have, with varying degrees of success, navigated the post-Brexit terrain of British politics ensuring that at least at Westminster they remain the two dominant parties. For the time being, the Conservative Party has taken advantage of the electoral and political opportunities presented by Brexit. While challenges around territorial integrity, culture, Britain’s world role, policy implementation and economic productivity lay ahead, Brexit has presented the Conservative Party under Johnson with a golden opportunity to recast the political and economic agenda for years to come.

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CHAPTER 6

Parliament and the Constitution Philip Norton

The premierships of David Cameron and Theresa May created conditions that led to constitutional crises that ended their tenure in Downing Street. David Cameron was the first Prime Minister to lose a UK-wide referendum. His fate was determined by those who voted in the referendum. Theresa May’s fate was determined by a confluence of the outcome of the referendum and that of the 2017 general election. She inherited the former, but was primarily responsible for the latter. Whereas Cameron got the legislation he wanted through Parliament, May was thwarted in getting hers through the House of Commons by a transient majority of MPs arrayed against her. During the 2017–2019 Parliament, the glue holding the Westminster model of government in place started to come unstuck.

P. Norton (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_6

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The Changing Relationships In looking at the relationship between the executive and Parliament, there is no single relationship, but rather, as Anthony King argued in his seminal article on the subject, at least five modes of relationship: the opposition mode, the intra-party mode, the inter-party mode, the cross-party mode and the non-party mode (King, 1976: 11–34). Of these, the opposition mode has been at the heart of British politics, indeed is core to the Westminster model of government. Two major parties fight general elections for the spoils of election victory, one achieving a parliamentary majority and forming the government and the other forming the Opposition. The aim of each, as King noted, is not accommodation, but domination. The chamber of the House of Commons is an arena for the two sides to engage in adversarial combat. They proceed within accepted rules—there is an equilibrium of legitimacy, under which the government is recognized as being entitled to get its business considered, but the opposition is entitled to be heard (Norton, 2001: 13–33). The government has control of most of the parliamentary timetable, confirmed by reforms at the start of the twentieth century. Its parliamentary majority ensures usually that it gets its way. This mode is at the heart of the accountability that characterizes the Westminster model: one party is elected to office on a particular platform, mobilizes its majority to deliver its programme of public policy and stands before the electorate at the next election to be rewarded or punished for its actions. The doctrine of collective ministerial responsibility ensures that there is one coherent entity answerable in between elections to the House of Commons and to the electorate in the general election. The coherence of this system was thrown into disarray during the period of Conservative government from 2015 to 2019. It was challenged in the preceding Parliament when the period of coalition government ensured that the inter-party mode became more prominent. David Cameron was limited by having to negotiate with the other party in government. Unlike previous peacetime Conservative Prime Ministers, he was denied the opportunity to exercise exclusively what Andrew Gamble characterized as the politics of power (Gamble, 1974). Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg exercised a veto power. Tensions within the Conservative Party over the issue of European integration also meant that the intra-party mode was significant. Cameron thus had to balance pressure

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from a section of his own parliamentary party and countervailing pressure from his coalition partner (Norton, 2015: 467–491). In the relationship with the Liberal Democrats, the tensions were particularly sharp on constitutional issues, where the parties embraced diametrically opposed positions. The Conservatives supported the Westminster model of government, viewing the existing system as fundamentally sound, whereas the Liberal Democrats adhered to the liberal approach, seeing the system as dysfunctional (see Norton, 2021: 357). Cameron essentially conceded the case to the Liberal Democrats, the Coalition agreement declaring ‘The Government believes that our political system is broken’ (HM Government, 2010: 26). The agreement committed the government to a referendum on whether the alternative vote (AV) electoral system should be employed for parliamentary elections, the introduction of a Bill to provide for a largely or wholly elected second chamber, and a Bill to provide for fixed-term Parliaments. Inter-party conflict became marked after the Conservatives campaigned against AV in the 2011 referendum, Cameron being pushed by his backbenchers to take a more prominent role in opposing it, and after opposition by Conservative MPs led to the government having to abandon the House of Lords Reform Bill in 2012. Following the outcome of the 2011 referendum, voters rejecting AV by a two-to-one-majority, ‘the new phrase doing the rounds was that the Coalition had to move on to a more “transactional” footing—joint business venture rather than marriage’ (Paun, 2011: 15). In retaliation for losing the Bill to reform the Lords, Nick Clegg instructed his party to vote against orders reforming constituency boundaries, a provision strongly supported by the Conservatives. The junior partner to the coalition also blocked any move to implement English Votes for English Laws (EVEL), votes on legislation affecting only England being voted on solely by MPs sitting for English constituencies. Cameron had come out in support of EVEL the morning after Scotland had voted in a referendum (by 54 to 46%) to remain in the UK, but Clegg made clear he was not speaking for the coalition (Seldon & Snowdon, 2016: 420–421). Nor, as we shall see, were the Liberal Democrats prepared to support Cameron when he decided to throw his support behind a referendum on continued membership of the European Union. The policies pursued by the coalition led to unprecedented dissent in the division lobbies (Cowley, 2015: 146–154) as well as increasing

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tensions at the top of government. Nick Clegg described Tory opponents of electoral reform and the House of Lords Reform Bill as ‘dinosaurs’ (Norton, 2012: 192) and the relationship between Clegg and David Cameron was portrayed as more a civil partnership than a marriage, one in which they stayed together for the sake of the coalition (Norton, 2012: 193). The tensions made the work of government whips increasingly difficult. Having started with a traditional approach to handling business, the position changed as the strains became greater: ‘the approach became more ad hoc. At times, one could be forgiven for thinking they were just making it up, vote by vote’ (Cowley, 2015: 154). Despite the tensions, the coalition held together for the lifetime of the Parliament. After single-party majority governments, minimum winning coalitions are the most durable (Laver & Schofield, 1998: 150–155) and capable of absorbing tensions between parties (Andeweg & Timmermans 2008: 269–300). The inter-party tensions in the 2010 Parliament arose from a position unique in British politics—the creation of a formal coalition resulting from the electoral outcome of a general election—but not unusual in comparative perspective (Norton, 2011: 166). Although the inter-party mode was clearly crucial during the period of coalition, it was the intra-party mode that was to prove more critical to what was to befall the May government. For Cameron, intra-party dissent was significant for focusing primarily on constitutional issues and initially on what he was not prepared to do as much as for what he was. As Philip Cowley has recorded, Conservative MPs in the coalition period dissented most frequently on constitutional issues. For the whips, the dissent, though frequent, was usually manageable. Many backbenchers were unhappy with what had been negotiated as part of the coalition agreement, not least the referendum on electoral reform, but acquiesced in the passage of both the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill and the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill. However, the dissent that was to have the biggest impact on government policy was that on House of Lords reform. The government’s House of Lords Reform Bill attracted extensive opposition from backbenchers, the most committed opponents forming a group—self-styled ‘the sensibles’—to organize against it (Norton, 2015: 481). They held regular meetings and undertook a systematic canvass of Tory MPs—they were able to draw on the support of some former whips—as well as produce briefing notes. They dominated in the debate on the Second Reading of the Bill. In the event, 91 Tories voted against the Bill and a further 19 abstained. It

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was the largest rebellion by government MPs on the Second Reading of the Bill in post-war history (Norton, 2017: 29). When the Opposition indicated that it would oppose the programme motion for the Bill, it was clear that, combined with the votes of Tory opponents, the motion would be lost. This would open up the potential for endless debate on the Bill, occupying time in the chamber that was needed for other government business. The government abandoned the Bill. The government also went down to defeat on a major issue of constitutional significance, but not one derived from the coalition agreement or tensions between the two parties to it. As a result of precedents set under the Blair government, it was expected that before British forces were committed to combat abroad, the House of Commons had to debate and approve such action (Norton, 2020: 39). The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria led Cameron to favour the use of British forces against the regime. Parliament was recalled on 29 August 2013. The Opposition, which the government had understood would support action, decided to oppose it. With 30 Conservative and nine Liberal Democrat MPs also voting against, the government was defeated by 285 votes to 272. Cameron immediately accepted the defeat. It was the most important defeat of a government on an issue of military engagement in modern political history and also served to confirm the view of those commentators that requiring parliamentary approval for forces to be deployed in action abroad did now have the status of a constitutional convention (Norton, 2019a: 166; Strong, 2015: 604–22). However, the most significant effect of backbench Tory pressure was less on government policy than on party policy for a future Conservative administration. There was pressure from some Tory backbenchers for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Cameron initially opposed a referendum. When a Tory MP, David Nuttall, achieved a backbench debate on holding a referendum, a three-line whip was issued to vote against it. In the event, 81 Tory MPs defied their leadership and voted for it. This appears to have been the pivotal debate that prompted Cameron to shift his stance and advocate renegotiating the terms of the UK’s membership and putting the renegotiated terms to a referendum (see Norton, 2015: 483–484; Seldon & Snowdon, 2016: 169). Despite such a major shift in policy, he still came under pressure to commit to legislation to provide for a referendum in the next Parliament. In 2013, two Tory MPs took the unusual step of moving an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, regretting the absence from it of a commitment to

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a referendum bill. The number of Tory MPs voting for it—114—was greater than that voting for the earlier Nuttall amendment. In response, No. 10 drafted a Bill to provide that a referendum must be held before 31 December 2017. Given that opposition from the Liberal Democrats meant that the Bill could not be a government Bill, it was introduced as a Private Member’s Bill by Tory MP James Wharton and supported by the party leadership. Cameron lobbied for it and held meetings and receptions at No. 10 to rally support. The Bill cleared the Commons, with neither the Liberal Democrats nor the Opposition voting against, but failed to make it through the House of Lords, when Opposition and Liberal Democrat peers voted to adjourn debate on the last day available for its committee stage. The issue thus stalled failing a return of a Conservative government. The commitment to a referendum was included in the party’s, 2015 election manifesto (Conservative Party, 2015: 73). Returned to office with an overall majority, Cameron was able to deliver on the commitment. He achieved passage of an EU Referendum Bill. As in 1975, the use of a referendum was primarily a political expedient, designed to hold the governing party together, and not derived from any clear constitutional principle. If anything, Cameron saw it as a rerun of the 1975 referendum (see Butler & Kitzinger, 1976; King, 1977), with voters supporting continued membership on the basis of hastily renegotiated terms. In the event, history did not repeat itself. The outcome of the 2016 referendum on membership of the EU created a major constitutional challenge. There was no precedent for a member state leaving the EU, provision for such an event only being made possible by the Lisbon Treaty. Cameron had permitted no planning by government for such an eventuality, fearing that doing so would concede that the Leave campaign may win. That approach also explains why the government did not include provision in the EU Referendum Act for the outcome to be binding. Leaving the outcome as formally advisory—though with a manifesto commitment to implement the result, whatever it was—left opponents of withdrawal calling for Parliament to ignore the result. The effect was to ensure that the debate was not closed by the result of the referendum. The vote to leave the EU led to Cameron resigning and being replaced as Conservative leader, and Prime Minister, by Home Secretary Theresa May. She had supported Remain in the referendum, but had not been passionate in her stance and was seen as ‘the most pro-Brexit of all those

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in the Cabinet who came out for Remain’ (Seldon, 2020: 44). She now had the task of delivering something for which the government was not prepared and for which there was no agreement on what form the UK’s exit from the EU should take. When asked to define Brexit, she fell back on the mantra ‘Brexit means Brexit’, but the term meant different things to different people. Seeking to deliver on Brexit put May in a complex political position. She had to negotiate with the EU on the terms for withdrawal, while also keeping on board her own supporters. Some of her own party remained opposed to leaving the EU and were prepared to press for an exit that kept many of the key attributes of EU membership in place. Others were determined to achieve a clean break, favouring if necessary a no deal exit over what they deemed a bad deal. Although the government had an overall majority in the Commons, the majority was not guaranteed on the issue of Brexit. Having previously set her face against seeking an early general election, May reversed her position—telling only a few close advisers before informing the Cabinet and making a public announcement. She achieved the two-thirds majority required under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act for an early general election, but a massive lead in the opinion polls evaporated between the opening of the campaign and the close of polls. The Conservatives remained the largest party, but lacked an overall majority. A deal was negotiated with the Democratic Unionist Party on a confidence and supply basis, keeping the Conservatives in government, but, in the event, not necessarily in power. In the new 2017 Parliament, May headed a government that faced several constitutional dilemmas. Brexit was the pre-eminent challenge, but there was also that of maintaining the Union, with tensions in Northern Ireland and the absence from January 2017 of a functioning executive, and pressure from the Scottish National Party (SNP) especially for more powers to be devolved to Scotland. Internationally, there was US pressure for the UK to participate in military action in Syria. The constitutional issue was whether it would be necessary to seek parliamentary approval. Like Cameron, May adopted a reactive stance in the face of demands from the SNP for more powers to be devolved, a stance that helped feed rather than quell the demands. Legislation had to be enacted to keep services running in Northern Ireland. Brexit exacerbated the situation in respect of both Scotland, where a majority had voted for remaining within the EU, and Northern Ireland, where avoiding a hard border with the Republic post-Brexit was a key sticking point in negotiations.

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On the issue of Syria, May authorized air strikes without first seeking parliamentary approval. She justified her action on the grounds that revealing her plans in advance would have endangered the security of the other allies (the US and France) engaged in the operation (House of Commons Debates, 17 April 2018, col. 207). Her decision highlighted the division between military action that could be debated publicly prior to engagement and that which could not (See Norton, 2020: 39–40). However, the issue that dominated the Parliament was that of achieving Brexit. May achieved passage of a Bill in 2018 providing for the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972 on ‘exit day’, but with EU law being retained as part of UK law until it was decided what to do with it (repeal, retain or amend); it formed a new body of law ‘retained EU law’. The Act was significant in constitutional terms, but less fraught politically than attempts to negotiate and achieve parliamentary approval to a withdrawal agreement. The key difficulty for May was not that she faced a divided House, but that she faced a House where those who considered she was not going far enough in negotiating a clean break and those who wanted a ‘soft’ Brexit (and ideally no Brexit at all) were prepared to come together to prevent her getting anything that fell short of their aims. The lack of a majority led ministers to accept an amendment moved by Tory MP Dominic Grieve providing that, before a withdrawal agreement could be ratified, it had to be agreed by a motion of the House and a Bill passed containing provisions ‘for the implementation of the withdrawal agreement’. It also stipulated what the government must do in the event of the motion not being carried. When the government did negotiate an agreement and laid it before Parliament, Grieve achieved passage of a business motion providing that, if a deal was rejected and the government came up with an alternative, the motion providing for that would be amendable. The withdrawal agreement attracted opposition from a large number of Tory MPs, especially Brexiteers for whom the ‘Northern Ireland backstop’, under which the UK would in effect remain in the EU until the issue of the border was resolved, was unacceptable. When the agreement was debated in the House on 15 January 2019, it was defeated by 432 votes to 202, the largest government defeat in recorded history. The no lobby included 118 Conservatives. The agreement was put to the House again on two further occasions and defeated by majorities of 149 and 58, respectively. Amendments tabled to motions the government was obliged to put under the 2018 Act were variously defeated. The deadlock resulted

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in the government seeking an extension to the withdrawal deadline. The House in March 2019 agreed an amendment moved by Tory MP Sir Oliver Letwin for a series of indicative votes. There were eight options voted on, including a referendum on the withdrawal agreement and on a no deal exit. All were voted on simultaneously by written ballot—and every one was defeated. Four more indicative votes held the next month were also defeated. There was then a move by MPs to take control of the order paper and pass a Bill, the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, that would provide for the House to determine the date of the extension sought. Letwin moved a motion that suspended standing orders so that the Bill would have precedence over government business and provided that all stages of the Bill could be taken in one day. The motion was carried by one vote. The Bill, introduced by Letwin and Labour MP Yvette Cooper, was then considered, achieved a majority of five on Second Reading and taken through both Houses. The deadlock and pressure from Tory MPs led to Theresa May announcing that she would give up the party leadership and hence the premiership. She was succeeded by former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who engendered controversy by seeking a five-week prorogation of Parliament—his advice to the Queen being determined by the Supreme Court to be unlawful—but prior to prorogation faced passage of a business motion for the House to take control of the timetable and passage of a Bill requiring the Prime Minister to seek an extension of the deadline for withdrawal beyond 31 October, unless the House had agreed a withdrawal agreement or voted for the UK to leave without a deal. The Bill was passed and given Royal Assent, becoming the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act, shortly before prorogation. In the event, Johnson achieved revisions to the withdrawal agreement. The revised version proved acceptable to a majority of MPs and the Bill to give effect to it was agreed on Second Reading on 22 October 2019 by 329 votes to 299. However, a timetable motion that would enable the Bill to complete its remaining stages by 31 October, enabling the UK to leave the EU by that date, was defeated by 322 votes to 308. The Prime Minister as required by the EU (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act then wrote, albeit reluctantly, requesting an extension of the deadline for withdrawal. After three times seeking unsuccessfully to achieve the requisite majority for an early general election under Sect. 2 of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, he achieved passage of a Bill providing that there would be a general

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election on 12 December. The election saw the return of a Conservative government with an overall majority of 80, sufficient to ensure passage of the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill and for the UK to cease to be a member of the EU on 31 January 2020.

Challenges to the Westminster Model The events of the 2017–2019 Parliament were clearly politically tumultuous. They also created a situation that was constitutionally exceptional. They posed a seemingly existentialist threat to the Westminster model of government. There are four essential components that were threatened— the government enjoying a majority to deliver its business, control of the timetable, the initiative in bringing the demands of the Crown before Parliament (that is, control of the policy agenda) and the government facing Parliament as a cohesive entity. Lost Control of a Majority It is unusual, but not exceptional, for a government not to have an overall parliamentary majority. There have been occasional periods of minority government. Some Tory MPs favoured governing as a minority administration in 2010. The May government lacked a Tory majority, but had negotiated the support of the DUP to sustain it in office. Again, such an arrangement was not unprecedented. Other than the formal coalition under Cameron, James Callaghan’s minority government had in 1977 negotiated a pact with the Liberal parliamentary party (the Lib-Lab Pact), sufficient to stave off defeat in a confidence vote (Michie & Hoggart, 1978). What was different on this occasion was the nature of the majority arrayed against the government. It was not a case of staving off defeat by the Opposition or opposition parties. The government had a majority when Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn moved a vote of no confidence in January 2019. Instead, what is faced was a transient majority drawn from different parties, including its own, and some who now sat as independents or members of a breakaway group. From September 2019, there were also 21 Tory MPs who were whipless, having had the whip withdrawn for voting against the government. The fluid nature of the majority that opposed the government’s Brexit policy raised, as we shall see, fundamental issues of accountability.

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The other exceptional aspect of the majority ranged against the government was not simply that it opposed what the government was seeking to do, but rather that it was prepared to wrest control of the parliamentary timetable from government and substitute policy of its own for that of the government. Lost Control of the Timetable Under Standing Order 14, government business has precedence at every sitting, other than on thirteen Fridays allocated for Private Members’ legislation and on days designated as Opposition Days, debate days allocated by the Backbench Business Committee and three Estimates Days. As Erskine May records, ‘This, coupled with the provisions in Standing Order No. 27 allowing the Government to arrange its business in any order it thinks fit, gives the Government substantial control over the time of the House’ (Natzler & Hutton, 2019: 379). Government control of the timetable expanded in the nineteenth century with the growth of party government and was confirmed by reforms introduced by the Leader of the House (and Prime Minister), Arthur Balfour, in 1902. As Josef Redlich observed, when it came to developments in the procedures of the House over the previous quarter-century, three tendencies stood out: the strengthening of the disciplinary powers and administrative powers of the Speaker, the continuous extension of the rights of the Government over the direction of all parliamentary action in the House, and, lastly, the complete suppression of the private member, both as to his legislative initiative and as to the scope of action allowed him by the rules. Not one of the three is the consequence of any intentional effort; they have all arisen out of the hard necessity of political requirements. (Redlich, 1908: 206)

The political requirements derived primarily from the growth of party government and facilitated key features of the Westminster model, not least the imperative of government getting its business. Party government was the driver of public policy. It enjoyed primacy in the chamber in terms of business. Its business was normally then carried by its party majority. In the 2017–19 Parliament, its direction over parliamentary business was challenged. MPs took control of the timetable. This enabled

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private members to take the legislative initiative. In this, they were facilitated by the first of the three features adumbrated by Redlich: the powers of the Speaker. The three developments had previously cohered with one another. For the first time, they were in tension with one another. The Speaker, John Bercow, used the powers of the chair to interpret standing orders in a way that at times departed from precedent, and the advice of the clerks, to enable private Members to vote on motions to give them control of business. He allowed amendments to be moved to business motions, previously deemed unamendable, and debate to take place where standing orders required the question to be put ‘forthwith’ (Whale, 2020: 295–301). He sought to justify his actions on the grounds that he was facilitating the wishes of the House. His actions were a necessary but not sufficient condition to enable MPs to wrest the initiative from government. Although taking control of the timetable may not be seen as historically unprecedented, given that the government achieved its current pre-eminence at the start of the twentieth century, the ends for which control of the timetable was achieved in 2019 were unprecedented in the era of modern British politics. Lost Control of Policy ‘Speaker Bercow and leading Remainer MPs’, wrote Robert Tombs, ‘led new attempts to seize control of government policy in a way not seen since the English Civil War’ (Tombs 2021: 116). Parliament since it emerged in the thirteenth century has responded to the demands of the Crown. It has looked to the Crown, and now the Crown through its ministers, to come forward with demands for supply and law. Even at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Parliament still wanted a king that would come forward with proposals—a ‘real, working, governing King, a King with a policy’ in Maitland’s terms (Keir, 1943: 271–272). What Parliament was asserting was that the king could not bypass it in making law. Its assent was necessary. Prerogative powers still rested with the monarch. That has remained especially so in negotiating treaties. In the words of the House of Lords Constitution Committee, ‘Treaty-making is a core function of the UK Government’ (Constitution Committee, 2019: 5). Parliament’s role is responsive, enacting legislation where necessary to give effect in domestic law to the provisions of the treaty. In 1972, the chair ruled that the European Communities Bill was not a measure to ratify the treaty of accession, but a Bill providing the ‘legal nuts and bolts’

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necessary for membership (Norton, 1978: 75). Under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, the House of Commons achieved the power to prevent ratification of a treaty, but it is a power that has never been utilized and one that still puts the House in response mode. The actions of the House of Commons in 2019 thus marked a major constitutional departure. MPs sought to tie the hands of government and essentially direct it in negotiations, in some cases seeking to restrict it in a way that would weaken its bargaining position. As Vernon Bogdanor observed, ‘Parliament is in no position to renegotiate a treaty. It has never in modern times sought to do so’ (Bogdanor, in The Guardian, 29 August 2019). The House of Commons was moving into new territory. Lost Control of Ministerial Responsibility The doctrine of collective ministerial responsibility ‘implies that all Cabinet Ministers assume responsibility for Cabinet decisions and actions taken to implement those decisions’ (de Smith, 1971: 176). It has its origins in the late eighteenth century, but was confirmed in the nineteenth century with the development of party government: it provided some cohesion to government and provided a body that was deemed responsible for public policy (Norton, 1982: 61). During the nineteenth century, the doctrine was extended to encompass junior ministers. Under it, ministers vote loyally with the government and once Cabinet has agreed a policy, they support it (or do not oppose it) in public. The first of these two components has been more strictly adhered to than the second. Ministers have, especially in recent decades, found ways of signalling their disagreement with Cabinet colleagues (Norton, 2020: 160–163). Leaking details of Cabinet meetings has become more pronounced and some ministers regularly brief journalists as to their side of an argument. Under Theresa May, leaking took place on an extensive scale, with the Prime Minister lacking the authority to rein it in (Norton, 2020: 163). According to Theresa May’s chief of staff, ‘leaking became endemic in the May government. As the Brexit debate became more polarized, ministers and their advisers stopped thinking of themselves as a team and instead started trying to win the argument by waging it in the media rather than around the cabinet table’ (Barwell, 2021: 182). Whereas leaking was not unprecedented, ministers abstaining or voting against their own government in some numbers (as opposed to the

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occasional discreet abstention, see Norton, 2020: 161–162) was a fundamental challenge to the doctrine. Theresa May faced extensive ministerial resignations—between April 2018 and the end of September 2019, 38 ministers (including 11 Cabinet ministers) resigned, most (22) over Brexit policy—but what provided the greatest challenge was provided by ministers staying in office and voting against, or failing to support, the government in the division lobbies. In March 2019, 13 ministers, including four Cabinet ministers, were permitted by No. 10 to abstain on a motion ruling out a no deal Brexit in all circumstances. According to one minister, ‘In an outburst of uncontrolled frenzy, discipline collapses. The government tries but fails to whip against the motion, and collective responsibility goes down the plughole… It is total, utter meltdown’ (Duncan 2021: 432). What was even more remarkable was when, the following day, eight Cabinet ministers voted against the government motion supporting an extension under Article 50. They included the Brexit Secretary, who had wound up the debate on behalf of the government. The Prime Minister’s position was too weak to act against them and No. 10 retrospectively claimed that it had been a free vote. The leaking and the dissenting votes demonstrated the political turmoil surrounding Brexit, but the key constitutional point was that the activity undermined the very purpose for which the doctrine of collective responsibility exists. There was no cohesive body that stood before the House of Commons, and the electorate, to be held accountable for public policy.

Constitutional Consequences The period of Conservative, or Conservative dominated, government from 2010 and 2019 challenged the accountability at the heart of the Westminster model. The first challenge occurred as a consequence of the coalition government formed in 2010. It was the consequence of postelection bargaining. The coalition agreement had not been placed before the electors and the parties to the coalition fought the 2015 election as separate entities, as indeed they had fought by-elections during the Parliament. There was no one body standing before voters as responsible for the policies enacted during the Parliament. Indeed, as we have seen, it did not always stand as one united entity before Parliament. The second challenge arose from the confluence of the 2016 referendum and the 2017 general election. In the referendum, a majority of electors voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The following

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year, electors returned a House of Commons where MPs were divided on the means for giving effect to the referendum outcome. The government of Theresa May and the House of Commons, as represented by a majority of members, were on the issue of Brexit separate rather than united entities. The Prime Minister faced a transient majority that was prepared to defeat her withdrawal agreement and to seek to direct the government’s negotiating position. There was no one body in control. ‘Senior civil servants talked of paralysis across Whitehall and a complete breakdown of collective cabinet responsibility’ (Stephens, 2021: 406). The government could not be held accountable for the decisions taken by a temporary and shifting majority of MPs, nor was the government itself a united whole. There was a double lock in terms of unaccountable decisions taken on the issue of Brexit (Norton, 2020: 80–81). Electors cannot hold themselves to account for the outcome of a referendum. Neither can they hold to account a transient majority of MPs. The 2017–19 Parliament was exceptional. When this writer gave the 2019 Bingham Lecture in Constitutional Studies at the University of Oxford, the title selected was ‘Is the House of Commons too powerful?’ (Norton, 2019a, 2019b: 996–1013). From the perspective of the Westminster model, the answer was yes. The period, as with that of coalition government, proved temporary. The outcome of the 2019 general election restored the norms of the Westminster model. The House of Commons reverted to responding to the demands of the Crown, with one body in power and answerable for its actions. The opposition mode was again the dominant and visible mode of executive-legislative relations. The coronavirus crisis of 2020 created new challenges, not least from a constitutional perspective, in ensuring that the two Houses of Parliament could meet to fulfil their functions. Novel solutions were found to enable both to meet in hybrid form (see Study of Parliament Group, 2021), but the relationship between the executive and legislature exhibited no novel features. Debate occurred over whether Parliament was as effective as it could be in holding government to account. That in essence constituted business as usual.

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Norton, P. (2019a). Parliament: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times? In J. Jowell & C. O’Cinneide (Eds.), The Changing Constitution (9th ed.). Oxford University Press. Norton, P. (2019b). Is the House of Commons Too Powerful? The 2019 Bingham Lecture in Constitutional Studies, University of Oxford. Parliamentary Affairs, 72(4), 996–1013. Norton, P. (2020). Governing Britain: Parliament. Manchester University Press. Norton, P. (2021). The Changing Constitution. In B. Jones, P. Norton, & I. Hertner (Eds.), Politics UK (10th ed.). Routledge. Paun, A. (2011). Governing in Coalition. In One Year On: The First Year of Coalition Government. Institute for Government. Redlich, J. (1908). The Procedure of the House of Commons (Vol. 1). Archibald Constable. Seldon, A. (2020), May at No. 10. Biteback. Seldon, A., & Snowdon, P. (2016). Cameron at 10: The Verdict. William Collins. Stephens, P. (2021). Britain Alone. Faber & Faber. Strong, J. (2015). Why parliament now decides on war: Tracing the growth of the parliamentary prerogative through Syria, Libya and Iraq. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17 (4), 604–22. Study of Parliament Group. (2021). Parliament and the Pandemic. Study of Parliament Group. Tombs, R. (2021). This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. Allen Lane. Whale, S. (2020). John Bercow: Call to Order. Biteback.

PART II

Continuity and Change in Public Policy

CHAPTER 7

Two Steps Backwards: UK Economic Policy in the Ages of Austerity and Brexit, 2015–2020 Simon Lee

Introduction On the whole, governors of central banks tend to be a fairly conservative bunch, choosing not to utter anything too radical for fear of creating unnecessary political uncertainty, financial instability, a currency crisis and wider loss of confidence among investors. However, on 5th December 2015, in delivering the Roscoe Lecture at John Moores University, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, painted a bleak picture of the United Kingdom (UK)’s economic performance and broader political economy. Carney told his audience, ‘We meet today during the first lost decade since the 1860s’ (Carney, 2016). The decade had been lost because, since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, average real incomes in the United Kingdom had ‘grown at the

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slowest rate since the mid-19th Century’ (Carney, 2016). Indeed, overall economic activity in the United Kingdom was still 16 per cent below its pre-financial crisis trend rate. To this picture of low income growth, Carney added entrenched wealth and income inequality in the UK, both in intergenerational terms, because ‘Since 2007, those over 60 have seen their incomes rise at five times the rate of the population as a whole’, and, between the rest of the population and the top 1 per cent of income earners, whose incomes had ‘tripled from 5% in the early 1980s to 15% by 2009’ (Carney, 2016). Consequently, for Carney, this evidence suggested ‘equality of opportunity in the UK remains disturbingly low, potentially reinforcing cultural and economic divides’ (Carney, 2016). This chapter explores UK economic policy and performance during the latter half of Carney’s ‘lost decade’, and in particular the period from 7 May 2015 UK General Election to the UK’s departure from the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020, in the immediate aftermath of 12 December 2019 UK General Election. It argues that both the central UK economic policy choices during this period, namely expansionary fiscal consolidation (commonly referred to as ‘austerity’) and Brexit itself constituted major steps backwards for UK economic performance. This was because neither policy addressed the principal cause of the UK’s longer-term relative economic decline, and its experience of stagnating productivity, real wages and living standards in the 12 years following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, namely a failure of both public sector and private business investment to match the levels sustained by their Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) advanced industrial competitors. To explore and understand the policy continuities and discontinuities, the chapter demonstrates how, during the tenure of three different Prime Ministers (David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson) and three different Chancellors of the Exchequer (George Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid) in fewer than five years, UK economic policy was characterised by three distinctive phases. First, for the duration of the campaign for the 2015 United Kingdom General Election, and the year which followed until 23 June 2016 European Union ‘In-Out’ referendum, UK economic policy under David Cameron and George Osborne continued to be dominated by the primacy given to perpetuating their Age of Austerity, and their ‘long-term economic plan’s’ commitment to eliminating the current budget deficit. Second, from July 2016 until July 2019, during the premiership of Theresa May, UK economic policy

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was shaped by May and Hammond’s failure to reset policy to bring an end to Cameron’s Age of Austerity, because of May’s inability to complete an exit agreement with the EU27 member states. Third, from July 2019 until the UK’s withdrawal from the EU on 31 January 2020, UK economic policy would be dominated by the Johnson Government’s very different political narrative, namely how to ‘build back better’ and ‘level up’ the political economy of the United Kingdom during the Age of Brexit. The United Kingdom (UK)’s economic performance during this period was characterised by average annual growth below the 2.25–2.5% annual growth trend rate experienced since May 1945. Furthermore, despite major cuts in taxation of corporate profits and capital investment, private business investment would remain stubbornly low, especially in comparison to major OECD competitor economies. In depicting it as a ‘lost decade’, Mark Carney had suggested three priorities for economic policy: first, acknowledgement of the challenges faced; second, growing the economy by ‘rebalancing the mix of monetary policy, fiscal policy and structural reforms’; and, third, a movement towards ‘more inclusive growth where everyone has a stake in globalisation’ (Carney, 2016). However, rather than addressing Carney’s priorities, during the respective premierships of Cameron, May and Johnson, the political narratives shaping UK economic policy would instead remain focused upon rolling back the role of public institutions, initially internally, through austerity cuts in the UK state’s public spending, investment and borrowing, and latterly externally, by withdrawing the UK from the EU. What both the Age of Austerity and the Age of Brexit would neglect to challenge would be the longstanding sources of competitive disadvantage and national decline arising from the private sector business practices sustained by the British model of political economy. Throughout this lost decade, these would continue to place greater emphasis upon the short-term extraction of profit from rents and dividends (a veritable ‘renterprise culture’), rather than sustained longer-term investment in development of new products and services, and the building of globally competitive industries in an authentic entrepreneur- and risk-driven enterprise culture.

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Austerity Phase Four: Economic Policy Under David Cameron and George Osborne Like polities, economies and markets are governed by written constitutions, i.e. a power map of laws, legislation, policies and regulations. When fashioning those written constitutions, the choice confronting national governments is not whether to intervene, but how much to intervene, and where to intervene. For David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne, the Conservative Party’s victory in 7 May 2015 UK General Election was a vindication of their decision to base their economic policy interventions on a political narrative which argued for the necessity for the UK to enter the Age of Austerity (Cameron, 2009). The Conservatives had secured a net gain of 24 seats to win a working majority of 12 seats, while their Liberal Democrat coalition partners had been decimated, suffering a net loss of 49 seats, to hold on to only eight seats. From the perspective of the narrow electoral interests of the Conservative Party, the political, ideological and economic policy choice of austerity had been vindicated. However, on every other performance criterion, notably those measured by official government statistics and especially those identified by austerity itself, the implementation of an Age of Austerity during the Cameron (and subsequent May) years would prove to have been a failure. As would prove to be even more the case with the Age of Brexit as a political, ideological and policy choice, the disparity between the shorter-term advantage to the narrow electoral interests of the Conservative Party, and the longer-term disadvantage to the much wider strategic interests of the nations of the UK, would prove to be significant. The economic policy implemented from 8 July 2015 Budget (HM Treasury, 2015a), via 25 November 2015 Autumn Statement and Spending Review (HM Treasury, 2015b) until Cameron and Osborne’s departure from ministerial office in July 2016 delivered the fourth phase of austerity. The first three phases had been implemented during the Cameron-Clegg coalition. The first phase had seen the adoption of Plan A in June 2010, in the form of the coalition’s ‘unavoidable deficit reduction plan’ (HM Government, 2010), while the second phase had seen the dilution of the pace of Plan A’s fiscal consolidation, and an additional £175 billion of money creation through Quantitative Easing (QE) between October 2011 and July 2012, to prevent the stagnating UK economy from falling into recession. The third phase, which had begun in

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September 2013 had been marked by the adoption of Plan B or ‘the longterm economic plan’, Osborne’s open admission that austerity, and the balancing of UK government’s current budget deficit, would last much longer than its originally planned achievement in 2015–2016 (Lee, 2015, 2017). The political narrative which Cameron and Osborne chose to frame the fourth phase of austerity was that of a transition from ‘The Great Recession’ to ‘The Great Revival’ during which their long-term economic plan would ‘finish the job by eliminating the deficit’ (Conservative and Unionist Party, 2015: 7–8). Having achieved a fiscal consolidation of £120 billion during their first term, during their second term there would now be a further £30 billion of fiscal consolidation, comprised of £13 billion savings from annual departmental spending and £12 billion from annual welfare spending (on top of the £21 billion annual saving already delivered during their first term). Furthermore, having achieved a balanced budget in 2017–2018, starting in 2018–2019 austerity would then enter a new phase during which ‘in normal economic times, when the economy is growing, the government will always run a surplus in order to reduce our national debt, with a state neither smaller than we need nor bigger than we can afford’ (Conservative and Unionist Party, 2015: 8–9). In what prove to be his final annual conference speech as Conservative Party leader, Cameron set out his own avowedly British nationalist vision for ‘big battles. Big arguments. A Greater Britain’, but cautioned ‘if anyone thinks the battle on the economy is won, they need to think again. The battle has only just begun’ (Cameron, 2015). Indeed, there was still a ‘need to find savings and produce more…to become more competitive…to make the most of our entire country and build the Northern Powerhouse…’. There would also need to be ‘a national crusade to get homes built’ to achieve a transition from ‘Generation Rent to Generation Buy’ (Cameron, 2015). For his part, in his 8 July 2015 Budget statement, and in 25 November Autumn Statement and Spending Review, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne set out his blueprint of a ‘new settlement’ for delivering the fourth phase of austerity. This would take the form of a transition from ‘a low wage, high tax, high welfare economy to the higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare country we intend to create’ (Osborne, 2015). In the event, the outcome of 23 June 2016 EU referendum brought a swift end to Cameron and Osborne’s plans. When he reflected upon

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his government’s economic policy record in office, Cameron was wholly unapologetic. In his political memoirs, Cameron stated that advocacy of a policy of austerity had constituted ‘the real boldness’ of his administration (Cameron, 2019: 113), and that ‘Ensuring that Britain could live within its means was vital to giving businesses the confidence to invest and consumers the confidence to spend’ (Cameron, 2019: 183). Indeed, Cameron’s own assessment was ‘we probably didn’t cut enough. We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done successfully, to get Britain back in the black and then get the economy moving’ (Cameron, 2019, 193). With the exception of favourable employment data, UK official statistics do not tend to support Cameron’s conclusion that ‘the economy was undoubtedly stronger’ (Cameron, 2019: 697). In June 2010, the newly created Office for Budget Responsibility had forecast that the UK economy (as measured by real GDP) would grow in every year of the Cameron coalition, with an annual average of 2.5%, and consistent with the UK’s historic trend rate growth. Furthermore, UK public sector net borrowing would have fallen to £17.6 billion or 1.1% of GDP by the end of 2015–2016, and that UK public sector net debt would have fallen to 67.4% of GDP or £1316 billion, from a forecast peak of 70.3% of GDP in 2013–2014 (HM Treasury, 2010: 85, 87). In the event, on most key performance criteria, Cameron and Osborne’s austerity had failed to deliver a stronger economy. The UK’s net public sector borrowing had not fallen to the forecast £17.6 billion or 1.1% of GDP in 2015–2016, but had instead declined only to £75.6 billion or 4.1% of GDP. Furthermore, rather than falling to 67.4% of GDP by the end of 2015–2016, the UK’s public sector net debt was £1574.8 billion or 79.8% of GDP (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2016: 18). From the first three months of 2010 (the final quarter of UK economic performance under the Brown Government) to the first three months of 2016 (the final completed quarter of economic performance before the EU referendum), the UK’s GDP had been forecast to grow by a total of 17.2%, but delivered just 12.9%, a shortfall of one quarter (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2016: 18). According to Cameron and Osborne, as austerity shrank the size of the state by a planned 6.3% of GDP (from 47.3 to 41.0%), the previously ‘crowded-out’ private sector had been expected to expand its business investment and exports to fill the void left by the retreating state. In the event from the end of the first three months of 2010 to the end of first three months of 2016, rather than

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expanding by the forecast 67.6%, private business investment had grown by only 25.5%, a shortfall of almost two-thirds. Exports of UK goods and services, which had been forecast to expand by 39.8%, had grown by only 22%, barely half the forecast increase. Wages and salaries, which had been forecast to increase by 28.1%, had grown by only 18.6%, or just twothirds the predicted increase. Productivity per hour, forecast to grow by 12.8% had delivered a paltry 2.5%. Only employment, which had grown by 8.8% rather than the predicted 4.9%, had outperformed its forecast increase (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2016: 18). Austerity was a costly failure, in both economic and social terms. Cameron’s six-year tenure as Prime Minister witnessed the wholesale failure of fiscal austerity to balance the current budget or to reduce UK net public sector debt as a percentage of national income. Indeed, UK net public sector debt increased during this period from £1014.4 billion or 63.2% of GDP in May 2010 to £1595.9 billion or 79.1 billion at the end of June 2016 (Office for National Statistics, 2022: Table PSA4). Under Cameron, the UK’s national debt had increased by £581.5 billion, an annual average of more than £94 billion. By comparison, in dealing with the 2007–2008 financial crisis and its consequences, under the Brown Government, the UK’s national debt had increased by £488.3 billion (Office for National Statistics, 2022: Table PSA4). Austerity had not only failed in its own terms, but it had simultaneously failed to unleash Osborne’s promised ‘march of the makers’. In 2010, Osborne had promised to deliver a new British growth model that would ‘rebalance’ the UK economy away from its over-dependence upon debt-driven consumer spending and the ‘Southern Powerhouse’ financial services of London and the South-East, and towards private business investment, manufacturing, trade and exports, especially in the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and other administrative regions outside the ‘Southern Powerhouse’. This re-balancing never materialised. In response to austerity and the UK’s state’s reluctance to spend or invest, private businesses had not had the confidence to increase their own investment. Private investment had been crowded out by the continuing historical tendency for UK businesses to distribute their profits as share dividends, rather than reinvest them in new products and services and the expansion of output. Consequently, in every year of David Cameron’s tenure as Prime Minister, the UK would record annual deficit on both its trade and total transactions with the rest of the world (current account balance).

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Indeed, during 2015 the final full calendar year of Cameron’s premiership, the UK’s trade deficit would soar to £38.57 billion or 2.1% of GDP, and its current account deficit to a record £100.26 billion, equivalent to 5.4% of GDP (Office for National Statistics, 2016: Table 1.2). These official UK statistics hardly justified Cameron’s own conclusion that, when he had left office, ‘the economy was undoubtedly stronger’ (Cameron, 2019: 697).

A Failure to Reset: Economic Policy Under Theresa May and Philip Hammond The outcome of 23 June 2016 EU referendum put paid to David Cameron and George Osborne’s plans, outlined in the 2015 Budget, Autumn Statement and Spending Review, to deliver their long-term economic plan and a surplus on the UK’s current budget by the end of their second term in office. For UK economic policy, the prospect of Brexit opened up the possibility of a reset under the leadership of the recently installed Prime Minister Theresa May and her new Chancellor Philip Hammond. The clearest clues as to Theresa May’s own political economy and vision for economic policy had been given on 10 March 2013 in a keynote speech delivered at Westminster to a conference organised by the ConservativeHome website. In identifying ‘three pillars of conservatism’, May had included a commitment to ‘a state that is strong, small and strategic’, and one which would embrace industrial strategy, the reform of capitalism, and take power away from the elites and give it to the people (May, 2013). In July 2016, immediately prior to becoming Prime Minister, May had not only promised ‘An economy that works for everyone’, but ‘A better research and development policy that helps firms to make the right investment decisions. More Treasury-backed project bonds for new infrastructure projects. More house building. A proper industrial strategy to get the whole economy firing. And a plan to help not one or even two of our great regional cities but every single one of them’ (May, 2016a). On becoming Prime Minister, in what she described as ‘a time of great national change’ (May, 2016b), and later would depict as ‘a turning point for our country’ (May, 2016c), Theresa May had boldly defined the mission of her government as to ‘make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for everyone of us’ (May, 2016b). Setting out her quintessentially British nationalist prospectus, May claimed this would

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mean ‘fighting against the burning injustices’ confronting the poor, black people, white working-class boys, those attending state schools, women and the young (May, 2016a). Furthermore, beyond ‘these injustices’, for those working-class families who were only ‘just about managing’ to pay their mortgage, working around the clock, and struggling to get their children into a good school, May boldly promised: The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you. (May, 2016b)

Unfortunately, like both her immediate predecessor and successor as Prime Minister, May in office would over-promise and under-deliver. The conduct of economic policy during May’s premiership, as with so many other critical areas of public policy, was to be characterised by a series of major strategic errors and tactical blunders. The first was May’s failure to bring David Cameron’s Age of Austerity to an end. Instead, she chose to maintain fiscal austerity throughout her tenure, denying her government the financial resources to deliver her key repeated promise to deliver an economy that worked for all. Ironically, and perhaps in a hope to save his own job as Chancellor, little more than a week after the EU referendum, George Osborne had diluted his commitment to fiscal austerity via an annual current budget surplus by stating ‘we will continue to be tough on the deficit, but we must be realistic about achieving a surplus by the end of this decade’ (Osborne, 2016). This did not impress May, and Osborne was duly replaced. Indeed, when she was challenged about her own commitment to austerity by Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, at her inaugural Prime Minister’s Questions, rather than resetting Osborne’s plans, May had stated: It is the long-term economic plan that has delivered the record level of employment that we see today. Perhaps I could put the right hon. Gentleman straight. We have not abandoned the intention to move to a surplus. What I have said is that we will not target that at the end of this Parliament. He uses the language of austerity; I call it living within our means…It is not about austerity; it is about ensuring that we have an economy that works for everyone. (May, 2016d)

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Theresa May’s second key strategic error in UK economic policy was her choice of Chancellor. She chose Philip Hammond, a Thatcherite fiscal conservative, whom she had once herself defeated as a rival candidate to become the candidate for the newly created Maidenhead constituency, prior to May 1997 General Election. What May’s government had needed to reset UK economic policy was a more open-minded, pragmatic approach to public spending, investment and borrowing. For this part, in his first major statement to Parliament as Chancellor, Hammond had at least acknowledged the potential for a reset by stating ‘Over the medium term we will have the opportunity with our Autumn Statement, our regular late year fiscal event, to reset fiscal policy if we deem it necessary to do so in the light of the data that will emerge over the coming months’ (BBC News, 2016). In the event, that reset never came. This was despite Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney’s, 5 December 2016 warning that the UK economy was facing ‘the first lost decade since the 1860s’, with average real incomes falling for a decade, the slowest growth rate since the midnineteenth century, and the then current level of UK economic activity being no less than 16% below its pre-financial crisis trend rate (Carney, 2016). Once negotiations began with the EU over the UK’s withdrawal and future relationship with the EU27, Hammond made any reset conditional upon the reaching of a satisfactory agreement with the EU. That agreement was never reached during May’s premiership. Consequently, there was no resetting of economic policy. The pattern of austerity continued, reflected in the fact that no new multiyear Spending Review was initiated between the Cameron government’s 25 November 2015 Review and the Johnson Government’s fiscal reset in the 4 September 2019 Spending Round. Theresa May’s third strategic error in UK economic policy arose from her avowedly British nationalist ‘Plan for Britain’. In setting out her government’s negotiating objectives for exiting the EU to facilitate ‘a truly Global Britain’, May opted for a ‘hard’ Brexit, with the United Kingdom outside the Single Market and the Common Externa Tariff and Common Commercial Policy of the EU’s Customs Union, while failing to identify as a key British negotiating red line, access for the UK’s financial services to the Single Market equivalent to the passporting rights they had enjoyed when the UK was part of the EU (May, 2017a). At no point did May ever offer any actual empirical evidence that the UK’s competitiveness or capacity to trade as ‘Global Britain’ had been constrained by

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its 43 years of EC/EU membership. Nor did she ever explain why, if EU membership was such an impediment to competitive advantage and the capacity to trade globally, other EU member states, not least Germany, were able to trade so successfully as ‘Global Germany’, running up huge trade and current account surpluses year after year. Immediately prior to becoming Prime Minister, in her one major speech during the EU referendum campaign, May had concluded that it was in the UK’s national interest to remain a member, not least because ‘44% of our goods and services exports go to the EU, compared to 5% to India and China’, and ‘9% of the ‘value added’ of UK exports comes from inputs from within the EU, compared to 2.7% from the United States and 1.3% from China’ (May, 2016e). Furthermore, since the UK exported ‘more to Ireland than we do to China, almost twice as much to Belgium as we do to India, and nearly 3 times as much to Sweden as we do to Brazil’, it was simply ‘not realistic to think we could just replace European trade with these new markets’. Indeed, outside the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union, ‘London’s position as the world’s leading financial centre would be in danger’ and, when it came to negotiating replacement international trade agreements, there could be ‘no guarantee that they would be on terms as good as those we enjoy now’ (May, 2016e). Once in office, all these key points would be forgotten. The 2017 Conservative Party UK General Election manifesto had stated that there was a need for ‘a strong economy’ because, without it, ‘we cannot guarantee our security, our personal prosperity our public services, or contented and sustainable communities’ (Conservative and Unionist Party, 2017). In her Foreword to the manifesto, May had promised ‘A Britain in which every area is able to prosper, with a modern industrial strategy to spread opportunity across the whole United Kingdom’ (May, 2017b). But such promises, along with those to make work pay, invest in public services, and to tackle and surmount ‘burning injustices’ would only have been feasible had fiscal austerity been abandoned. It never was. Delivering her final annual speech as Prime Minister to the 2018 Conservative Party conference, Theresa May had stated ‘a decade after the financial crash, people need to know that the austerity it led is over and that their hard work has paid off’ (May, 2018). But under the May government, in the face of a continuing ‘lost decade’ of falling average real living standards, which the May government’s economic policies had done so little to reverse, the British people never did know austerity was

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over. Instead, May’s three years in office witnessed a further £182.00 billion increase in UK net public sector debt to £1766.8 billion or 78.3% of GDP, while the annual deficit in the UK’s day-to-day current budget had still not been eliminated (Office for National Statistics, 2022: Table PSA4). At 2.1% in 2017, and 1.7% during 2018 and 2019, real economic growth rates under May also remained anaemic as UK economic performance continued to pay the price for May’s failure to end the Age of Austerity and to deliver a strong and stable Brexit settlement.

The Reset Delivered: Economic Policy Under Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid When Boris Johnson succeeded Theresa May as UK Prime Minister on 24 July 2019, it was immediately evident that the resetting of UK economic policy which neither the Cameron nor the May governments had delivered would now occur. Continuing with the Age of Austerity would be incompatible with the series of promises Johnson immediately made in his inaugural speech as Prime Minister, namely to ‘level up across Britain with higher wages, and a higher living wage, and higher productivity’, to unleash ‘the productive power not just of London and the South East but of every corner of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’, to ‘fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared’ and to ‘level up per pupil funding in primary and secondary schools’ (Johnson, 2019). To deliver this resetting of UK economic policy, in an immediate Cabinet reshuffle, Johnson replaced Philip Hammond as Chancellor with Sajid Javid. On 4 September 2019, Javid unveiled what was to prove a pre-General Election one year Spending Round which committed to deliver ‘the fast planned real growth in day-to-day departmental spending in 15 years. From 2019-2020 to 2020-2021 day-to-day spending will now grow at 4.1% in real terms’ (HM Treasury, 2019: 1). Thus, the next phase of the Age of Brexit would see the UK’s departure from the EU on 31 January 2020 coincide with a formal ending to a decade of fiscal austerity. In many respects, Johnson’s identification (alongside ‘getting Brexit done’) of ‘levelling-up’ as the central domestic political narrative of his premiership was an open admission that the ‘lost decade’ of the Age of Austerity in UK economic policy and performance under consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers since May 2010 had failed to deliver shared prosperity and rising average real living standards for the British people.

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In fact, it was also a reflection of a much longer strategic failure of the British model of political economy to deliver a level of economic growth capable of reversing the UK’s relative economic decline. Under the One Nation Conservative governments of 1951–1964 and 1970–1974, the UK had achieved average annual real economic growth rates of 2.82% and 2.59%, respectively. Subsequently, the UK had never managed to match this growth performance. Indeed, in every decade since the election of the first Thatcher government, the UK’s annual average real per capita economic growth rate had deteriorated from only 2.09% under Thatcher and John Major from 1979–1987, to an only 1.37% annual average during the New Labour years 1997–2010, and then a paltry 1.32% annual average under the Cameron-Clegg coalition, and 1.13% following May 2015 UK General Election (Albertson & Stepney, 2020: 321). Moreover, as Adam Corlett of the Resolution Foundation had identified, if UK economic performance was measured in terms of the historic growth of real household disposable income under different governments since May 1955, the period of economic policy since May 2010 truly had constituted a lost decade. Whereas the Macmillan/Hume governments of October 1959–October 1964 and the Heath Government of June 1970– February 1974 had delivered annual real household disposable income per capita growth rates of 3.1 and 3.3% respectively, since May 2010 the Cameron-Clegg coalition had managed an annual average of only 1.2%, the Cameron and May governments 0.3% between May 2015 and July 2017 General Elections and the May and Johnson Governments only 1.4% in the period up until December 2019 General Election (Corlett, 2021: 3).

Conclusion: A Lost Decade for UK Economic Policy and Performance One essential continuity in economic policy during the Age of Austerity and the subsequent, but also overlapping Age of Brexit, would be a continual UK economic underperformance, especially when compared to earlier era. For example, ‘Labour productivity grew by just 0.4 per cent a year in the UK in the 12 years following the financial crisis, half the rate of the 25 richest OECD countries (0.9 per cent)’ (Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, 2022: 8). Furthermore, while real wages had grown ‘by an average of 33 per cent a decade from

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1970 to 2007’, this declined but ‘to below zero in the 2010s’, with the consequence that ‘by 2018, typical household incomes were 16 per cent lower in the UK than in Germany and 9 per cent lower than in France, having been higher in 2007’ (Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, 2022: 8). The final year of David Cameron’s tenure as Prime Minister was marked by the same trends in UK economic performance as during the previous five years of coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Cameron’s Age of Austerity did not eliminate the annual current budget deficit, which remained at £43 billion or 2.0% of GDP in 2018–2019. During nine years of austerity under Cameron and May, the UK’s public sector net debt mushroomed from £1014.4 billion or 63.2% of GDP in May 2010 to £1766.8 billion or 78.3% of GDP in July 2019, an average annual increase of more than £82 billion (Office for National Statistics, 2022: Table PSA4). In its own terms, austerity had failed to eliminate the current budget deficit or make the state smaller, and in so doing had confirmed the International Monetary Fund’s repeated warnings that the virtues of fiscal consolidation had been oversold, and the costs could be much larger than the benefits (Ostry et al., 2016). Under Cameron and May, there never was the promised rebalancing of the economy towards private business investment, trade and manufacturing. Rather than crowding-in private investment, the rolling back of public spending and investment under austerity only served to weaken domestic demand and compromise already fragile business confidence. Where George Osborne’s ‘march of the makers’ had aimed for total UK exports to reach £1 trillion by the end of the decade, in practice, by the end of 2019, UK exports totalled only £700.4 billion, falling 30% short of Osborne’s target (Office for National Statistics, 2020: Table B). Moreover, in 2019 the UK would record a current account deficit of £88.8 billion or 4.0% of GDP, not least because of a trade deficit in goods of £129.5 billion or 5.9% of GDP, which was not balanced by a £105.5 billion or 4.8% of GDP trade surplus in services (Office for National Statistics, 2020 Table B). Given that, by then, the UK had recorded a current account deficit in every three-month quarterly period since Quarter 3 (July–September 1998) and every year since 1983, the failure of the Cameron, May and Johnson governments would be one shared with every UK government since the first Thatcher Government. Fundamentally, neither austerity nor Brexit, not indeed the 43 years of the UK’s membership of the EC/EU, had addressed the root sources and

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causes of the UK’s relative economic decline, namely the sustained shortfall in both public sector and private business investment, when measured against the UK’s principal competitors. Indeed, ‘In the 40 years to 2019, total fixed investment in the UK averaged 19 per cent of GDP, the lowest in the G7’ (Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, 2022: 16). Moreover, in the year of the EU referendum, the UK had been in the bottom half of every single public and private investment category. Consequently, in 2016 the UK’s public capital investment rate of 2.6% of GDP (compared to an OECD average of 3.2%) ranked it a lowly 24th out of 32 OECD economies, while its private business investment rate of 14.2% of GDP (compared to the OECD average of 17.7% of GDP) ranked it only 27th out of 30 OECD economies (Tily, 2018). By itself, Brexit would do nothing to reverse this trend, and, according to the UK government’s own official economic analysis, was likely to make it worse. Theresa May’s ‘British Dream’ (May, 2017c) and repeated promise of strong and stable government had turned out to be an Age of Brexit nightmare, characterised by weak and unstable government. Rather than being tackled, injustices and inequality burned ever more brightly. The UK economy did not work for everyone. There was no ‘Great Meritocracy’ (May, 2016f), and a ‘Shared Society’ (May, 2017d) only in the sense that most workers and households shared in the experience of the ‘lost decade’ for average real incomes foretold by Mark Carney in December 2016. Furthermore, while May have argued that ‘Brexit will define us’, her government’s own official economic analysis had warned that, under every single Brexit scenario, the UK would be poorer as a third country outside the Single Market and Customs Union than if it had remained an EU member state (HM Government, 2018: 6). Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party’s 2019 UK General Election manifesto guarantee to ‘get Brexit done in January and unleash the potential of the whole country’ (Johnson, 2019) delivered an 80-seat parliamentary majority at Westminster, the best Conservative general election result since June 1987. However, with the onset of the coronavirus in March 2020, the fact that Boris Johnson was then ready and able to borrow £321 billion in a single fiscal year (2020–2021), and a total of £620.8 billion during his first four years in office, raising the UK’s net public sector debt to £2387.6 billion or 96.1% of GDP (Office for National Statistics, 2022: Table PSA4), served only to highlight how the Age of Austerity, like the Age of Brexit itself, had been a highly questionable political and

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ideological policy choice, rather than an unavoidable necessity. Conservative Party electoral success had been achieved at a not inconsiderable economic and social cost.

References Albertson, K., & Stepney, P. (2020). 1979 and All That: A 40-Year Reassessment of Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy on Her Own Terms. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 44, 319–342. BBC News. (2016, July 22). Chancellor May ‘Reset’ Economic Policy in Autumn Statement. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-368 64099. Accessed 23 March 2022. Cameron, D. (2009, April 26). The Age of Austerity. Speech to the Conservative Party Spring Forum, Cheltenham. Cameron, D. (2015, October 7). Speech to The Conservative Party Conference. Manchester. Cameron, D. (2019). For the Record. William Collins. Carney, M. (2016, December 5). The Spectre of Monetarism. Roscoe Lecture. Liverpool John Moores University. Conservative and Unionist Party. (2015). The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015. The Conservative and Unionist Party. Conservative and Unionist Party. (2017). Forward Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future—The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2017 . The Conservative and Unionist Party. Corlett, A. (2021). Are You Better Off Today? Real Income Growth Under Different Governments Since 1955. The Resolution Foundation. https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/are-you-better-offtoday/. Accessed 22 November 2021. HM Government. (2010). The Coalition: Our Programme for Government. The Cabinet Office. HM Government. (2018, November). EU Exit: Long-term Economic Analysis. Cm.9742. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. HM Treasury. (2010). Budget 2010. HC.61. The Stationery Office. HM Treasury. (2015a). Summer Budget 2015. HC.264. The Stationery Office. HM Treasury. (2015b). Spending Review and Autumn Statement 2015. The Stationery Office. HM Treasury. (2019). Spending Round 2019. CP.170. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Johnson, B. (2019, July 24). First Speech as Prime Minister. Downing Street. Lee, S. (2015). Indebted and Unbalanced: The Political Economy of the Coalition. In M. Beechand & S. Lee (Eds.), The Conservative-Liberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government (pp. 16–35). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Lee, S. (2017). Expansionary Fiscal Consolidation and the ‘Smarter State’: An Evaluation of the Politics of Austerity in the United Kingdom, May 2010 to February 2016. In S. McBride & B. Evans (Eds.), The Austerity State (pp. 123–143). University of Toronto Press. May, T. (2013, March 10). We Will Win by Being the Party for All, Conservative Home ‘Victory 2015’ Conference. Westminster. https://www.conservative home.com/platform/2016/07/full-text-of-theresa-mays-speech-we-will-winby-being-the-party-for-all.html. Accessed 12 March 2022. May, T. (2016a, July 11). Speech to Launch Her Leadership Campaign. Birmingham. May, T. (2016b, July 13). Statement from the New Prime Minister Theresa May. Downing Street. May, T. (2016c, October). Speech to the Conservative Party Conference. Birmingham. May, T. (2016d, July 20). Prime Minister’s Questions. Official Record. c.818. May, T. (2016e, April 25). The United Kingdom, The European Union, and Our Place in the World. Address to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. May, T. (2016f, September 9). Britain, The Great Meritocracy, Speech. British Academy, London. May, T. (2017a, January 17). The Government’s Negotiating Objectives for Exiting the EU, Speech. Lancaster House. May, T. (2017b). Foreword: To Conservative and Unionist Party. Forward Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future: The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2017 . The Conservative and Unionist Party. May, T. (2017c, October 4). Speech to the Conservative Party Conference. Manchester. May, T. (2017d, January 9). ‘The Shared Society’: Speech at The Charity Commission Annual Meeting. May, T. (2018, October 3). Speech to The Conservative Party Conference. Birmingham. Office for Budget Responsibility. (2016a, October). Forecast Evaluation Report. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Office for National Statistics. (2016b). UK Balance of Payments, The Pink Book 2016. Office for National Statistics. Office for National Statistics. (2020). Balance of Payments, UK: January to March 2020. Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/eco nomy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/bulletins/balanceofpayments/ januarytomarch2020. Accessed 23 October 2021. Office for National Statistics. (2022). Public Sector Finances, UK: June 2022. Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/publicsector financesukjune2022. Accessed 22 July 2022.

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Osborne, G. (2015, July 8). Summer Budget Speech. https://www.gov.uk/ government/speeches/chancellor-george-osbornes-summer-budget-2015speech. Accessed 23 March 2022. Osborne, G. (2016, July 1). Speech to Manchester Chamber of Commerce. Manchester. Ostry, J., Loungani, P., & Furceri, D. (2016). Neoliberalism Oversold? Finance & Development, 53(2), 38–41. Resolution Foundation and Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. (2022). Stagnation Nation: Navigating a Route to a Fairer and More Prosperous Britain: The Interim Report of the Economy 2030 Inquiry. The Resolution Foundation. Tily, G. (2018). Trades Union Congress. https://www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/ukthird-bottom-global-investment-league. Accessed 23 March 2022.

CHAPTER 8

Conservative Governments and Education Policy in the Age of Brexit, 2015 to 2020 Joseph Tiplady

Introduction On the day following the 2015 United Kingdom General Election and David Cameron’s re-election as Prime Minister, the course of education policy for England over the next five years seemed to have been decided: in short, a direct continuation of the policies of the previous Coalition administration. In the Conservative Party’s 2015 general election manifesto, Cameron had committed to further embedding the landmark education reforms enacted by Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education up to 2014 and continued by his successor Nicky Morgan in the final 12 months of the Coalition government (Conservative Party, 2015). This continuity, from the Coalition administration Cameron had previously led to the newly formed majority Conservative government, can be found both in his approach to education across two key areas, namely personnel and policy, and in the ideational underpinning.

J. Tiplady (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_8

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However, following the British electorate’s decision in June 2016 that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union, the election of Theresa May in July 2016 as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister would mark the beginning of an ideational shift that would influence a limited but significant departure from the Conservative Party’s key education policies. A cursory review of May’s speeches and contributions on the topic may lead to a narrative that there was considerable discontinuity in education policy during her premiership. However, a more accurate characterisation would be of a twin track agenda of both notable continuities and of limited discontinuity. There were notable continuities in schools’ policy, with continued focus on literacy and numeracy, and in the opening of new free schools. However, there were also some discontinuities in personnel and in the ideational stance underpinning policy which, in part, drove some of the most significant departures from the settled approach to education policy that had developed in recent decades, most notably an attempt to extend the role of selective secondary education in the English state school system. In the short life of Boris Johnson’s first government and the brief period of his second up to January 2020, Johnson further contributed to the discontinuity in personnel, while his education policy largely consisted of an attempt to reconcile his predecessors’ preferred ideational views and to selectively combine and continue their respective policy legacies. This chapter will adopt a thematic approach to identify and analyse the significant developments, continuities and discontinuities in the education policy of the three Conservative governments across the five-year period which saw Nicky Morgan, Justine Greening, Damian Hinds and Gavin Williamson occupy the office of Secretary of State for Education. It is important to note that, since the passage of devolution legislation in 1998, education policy has been a formally devolved matter across three of the constituent nations of the UK, administered by the respective devolved administrations. Therefore, the Secretary of State for Education that sits in the Cabinet has direct authority for education in England only. In adopting a thematic approach, education policy for England will be examined by considering the key policies for each stage of the education system: covering core compulsory education, primary and secondary, through to tertiary education. The chapter will also separately address the funding and financing of education and the ideational shift which took place during this period.

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Political Actors and Machinery of Government One of the most notable ways in which a Prime Minister can demonstrate their agency is through the power of patronage to appoint Ministers. In forming his majority administration in May 2015, Cameron reappointed all but one of the same individuals to the education briefs across government that they had held during the Coalition. This should be understood as a key indication of the continuity of approach to education policy and its political priorities for the parliamentary term ahead. The most notable reappointment was that of Nicky Morgan as Secretary of State for Education. This sense of continuity was further reinforced by the reappointment of political actors closely associated with Michael Gove’s reforms, most notably, Nick Gibb as Schools Minister. It is also significant that those known to be close to the leadership of the Conservative Party continued in their positions. This included figures such as Nick Boles, who held a joint role as Minister of State for Skills at both the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and the only addition to the education ministerial team during Cameron’s second administration, namely Jo Johnson as Minister of State for Universities and Science at BIS. The significance of the reappointment of political actors to their ministerial posts is that, not only did this demonstrate continuity in personnel but also those appointed were Cameronites who shared the liberal conservatism that underpinned the Cameron project to modernise the Conservative Party, of which education was seen as a key part. Similarly, of those political actors reappointed to the education portfolios, all but one was first elected to Parliament for the first time at the 2010 UK general election. Given many of Cameron’s close allies could reasonably expect promotion on the advent of the first majority Conservative government for almost a quarter of a century, and with the departure of the Liberal Democrats from government freeing ministerial posts, that Cameron reappointed his close allies to the same roles in education demonstrated the importance he attached to embedding his reform agenda in education. From the outset, Theresa May’s approach to education as Prime Minister would be markedly different than her immediate predecessor. In a written statement to the House announcing changes to the machinery of government, one of her first acts as Prime Minister, May signalled a significant discontinuity in education administration, bringing all education policy and portfolio holders under one roof for the first time since

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2007 (May, 2016a). Although some might downplay the significance of these changes, critiquing the move as a shuffling of the deck chairs, these changes pointed to an underlying ideational shift and a more traditional view of education. In forming her Cabinet, May sought to distinguish her administration, both in policy and ideology, from Cameron’s governments. These shifts were reflected in the dismissal of key personnel at the DfE and the appointment of Justine Greening as Secretary of State. Nowhere else was the beginning of this subtle ideological shift more evident than in the political actors appointed to education portfolios, where those closely identified with the Cameron project were supplanted. To this end, as set out by Newell and Seldon (2019), the newly elected Prime Minister purposefully made appointments across her government to balance the Leave and Remain views from across the Conservative Party, while also selecting individuals who shared her desire for domestic reform and rewarding those who had backed her leadership campaign. This trend of discontinuity in personnel was continued by Boris Johnson on becoming Prime Minister in July 2019, with the appointment of Gavin Williamson as Secretary of State for Education, who despite supporting Remain during the 2016 referendum acted as Johnson’s campaign manager during the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election.

Primary: Consolidation and Consensus In its 2015 manifesto, the Conservative Party opened the section on education in England with a list of four commitments of which the first read ‘ensure a good primary school place for your child, with zero tolerance for failure’ (Conservative Party, 2015: 33). This was an unambiguous expression of the enduring importance of primary education as a political priority and a recognition by the Conservative Party of the salience of this issue to the members of the electorate it was targeting in the general election. The most significant indication of continuity in the Conservative Party’s approach to primary education was the direction in policy and the outcomes they sought to achieve. In the former, this would seek to further embed the changes made to the curriculum, assessment and leadership of primary schools. Among these express policy objectives, the most significant was the continued drive to increase standards in English and Maths, with the specific outcome to be a decrease in

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the number of pupils leaving primary education without having achieved the expected levels of attainment. In a speech on improving child literacy in England in September 2015, Morgan announced new standards for literacy and numeracy in primary schools with an expectation that every 11-year-old would reach a given standard in Maths and English (Morgan, 2015a). Morgan also outlined the introduction of resit examinations in the first year of secondary school for children who did not reach the expected level at the end of primary school. In November of the same year, in a major policy speech, Morgan announced three further measures to bolster standards through assessment and to track pupil’s progress through primary school (Morgan, 2015b). First, a new ‘reception baseline’ test with which to gauge children’s capabilities on joining primary school; second, and perhaps the most significant proposal, the assessment of Key Stage 1 pupils at age seven; and third, more rigorous exams at the end of Key Stage 2 to ensure pupils were making academic progress. The focus on standards and attainment in primary education represented a continuation of the work undertaken by the Coalition government, with those children sitting assessment at Key Stage 2 in 2016 the first to have examinations based on the new curriculum as introduced by Gove in 2014. Throughout May’s time as Prime Minister, she would retain the reforms made by Gove and Morgan under both the Coalition and Cameron governments and continue to implement the policy agenda in primary education to a great extent. This was set out early in the new administration’s life in a written statement to the House by Greening, who outlined the measures which would be retained, such as the reforms made to the curriculum and assessment, and those that would be dropped, including the proposed statutory resits for pupils in year 7 if they failed to meet the expected level of attainment at the end of primary school (Greening, 2016). In the same statement, Greening announced an important point of divergence with previous governments as she sought to reform primary assessment by simplifying it and placing it on a stable basis. The Conservative Party’s 2017 general election manifesto under May did not develop a distinctive approach to primary education for England, indicating instead that May would opt to continue the agenda set out by the Cameron government. This approach was clearest in the commitment to focus on the teaching of literacy and numeracy by building on the phonics screening test, and in the repetition of previously made

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announcements, such as an expectation that every 11-year-old would recall their times tables from memory (Conservative Party, 2017: 51). It would be implemented as part of Greening’s response to the primary assessment consultation (DfE, 2017: 26). Following the 2018 Cabinet reshuffle in which Damian Hinds was made Secretary of State for Education, he continued to embed the changes made by his immediate predecessor. These included publicly reaffirming the approach to primary assessment in an article for The Telegraph, in which he set out the justification for the continuation of primary school assessment as an accountability measure (Hinds, 2019).

Secondary: Meritocracy or Democracy? From May 2015, the approach of the newly elected Conservative government of David Cameron towards secondary education policy can be characterised as Coalition continuity and consolidation. The headline manifesto pledges from the Conservative Party regarding secondary education were directly related to the landmark reforms enacted by Michael Gove during the previous government. The second commitment made in the education section of the manifesto made specific reference to two of the three policies which formed the crux of Cameron’s secondary education policy until his resignation in July 2016: continued academisation of the school system, the pursuit of a standards agenda focused on schools deemed to be failing or coasting, and the opening of more free schools. Shortly after Parliament had returned, the new Cameron government moved quickly to implement its secondary education policy. One of the first pieces of legislation to be introduced was the Education and Adoption Bill (2016). The primary intention of the bill aimed to remove obstacles utilised by local authorities, campaigners and others, to speed up the conversion of local authority maintained primary and secondary schools into academies. In this instance, this was achieved by conferring powers of intervention and placing a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to convert local authority-controlled schools in England into academies if they were requiring significant improvement or special measures. One of the most significant clauses of the bill was concerned with raising standards specifically in ‘coasting’ schools, i.e. schools where students failed to make sufficient academic progress from Key Stage 2 assessment to their GCSEs examinations. For the first time, the Secretary

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of State for Education would be required by legislation to define the terms on which a school could be labelled as a coasting school. The Education and Adoption Act facilitated the beginnings of the Cameron administration fulfilling its manifesto pledges in education policy and completed its passage through Parliament before the end of the following February. The fact that this legislation was brought forward so quickly and achieved royal assent after just nine months demonstrated the importance the leadership of the Conservative Party attached to embedding education policy reforms prior to the onset of the EU referendum campaign which would duly occupy such a significant amount of the government’s attention. This legislation demonstrated that the Cameron government’s approach to secondary education policy was to continue and consolidate the key secondary education policies of the Coalition government: academisation and improving standards. The bill continued the structural reforms to the composition of schools across England, advancing the academisation of the school system, a policy that had been aggressively pursued by the Coalition government. This bill reaffirmed this approach by reducing the role of local authorities in the management and improvement of schools, and instead transforming this into a statutory duty requiring the Secretary of State to convert low performing schools into academies. Measures such as this also continued the centralising tendencies of the Coalition government in school improvement, a trend of successive governments in education policy for England, passing powers from local authorities to central government and the DfE. The second major policy continuity was exemplified by the use of legislation and a statutory instrument to address a longstanding issue in educational attainment whereby schools adequately pass performance accountability measures with a satisfactory number of students achieving good academic progress, but where many other pupils are not sufficiently supported to ensure steady development or are left unchallenged by schoolwork, and thereby fail to achieve their utmost potential. This saw a tool, first devised by David Blunkett to raise standards and measure GCSE attainment, broadened by Ruth Kelly to include English and Mathematics, retained and incrementally increased by Gove during the Coalition years, which was continued and placed on a statutory basis by his successor Nicky Morgan. The day after, following the granting of royal assent to the Education and Adoption Bill, the Government announced its headline education White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere, which explicitly set out

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its education agenda for the following five years (DfE, 2016: 3). In her Foreword, Morgan praised the achievements of the Coalition government, and later used language that emphasised continuity between the Coalition’s policies and those contained within the document, remarking that the plans would be ‘building on and extending our reforms’ (DfE, 2016: 3). The proposals for the government’s secondary education policy covered diverse subjects as conveyed by the chapter titles on topics such as: performance management and improving schools; curricula, assessment and qualifications; and accountability measures to monitor standards in schools. However, the landmark policy proposed in the document was to complete the transformation of the structure of the English school system by having every school become an academy, or be in the process of doing so, by the end of 2020, and that the end of 2022 would also mark the end of the involvement of local authorities in education, as they would no longer maintain any schools. The continuity and consolidation of secondary education policies during the Cameron government was further demonstrated by the language of the leadership of the Conservative government. On the day of the launch of the DfE’s key White Paper, the then Chancellor, George Osborne, set out its headline policy in his budget speech, stating that ‘we are going to complete the task of setting schools free from local education bureaucracy’ (Osborne, 2016). The full academisation of the school system and the definitive removal of local authorities from administering education and maintaining schools as envisioned by the Cameron government would have represented the final transformation of the school system in England. However, although some might speculate that Brexit destabilised education policy at this point, it should be noted that doubts about the trajectory of schools’ policy existed prior to the referendum with Conservative Party backbench MPs expressing concerns over the element of compulsion contained within the White Paper (Loughton et al., 2016). The election of Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and as Prime Minister, saw one of the most notable departures from secondary education policy in recent years as May sought to extend selection in England’s secondary school system. However, there was also an element on continuity in secondary education policy that can be attributed to Justine Greening as Education Secretary. Shortly after taking office, May set out her policy agenda for education in England in a landmark speech entitled Britain: the Great Meritocracy, announcing her support for the removal of the ban on new selective schools (May, 2016b). This was a

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significant departure in secondary education policy both for May and the Conservative Party. First, it reversed David Cameron’s long-time opposition to grammar schools, which dated back to the 2005 leadership contest. Second, this approach to secondary education reversed Conservative Party policy potentially dating as far back as the liberal conservative Sir Edward Boyle’s time as Shadow Education Minister, between 1964 and 1969, when he acquiesced to the rising tide of Labour’s comprehensivisation of the school system in England and Wales. This act of divergence put down a marker for May, in confronting her own party on the same issue that her predecessor had over a decade prior. It repudiated David Cameron’s modernising project of the Conservative Party, in which education was viewed as a key domestic policy area to convey this transformation, by moving away from selection in education endorsed by previous generations and becoming closely associated with contemporary secondary education policies such as the academies and free schools movement. Instead, May’s endorsement of selective secondary education was her sharpest break with established education policy and marked an ideational shift from the interpretation of equality of opportunity held by the liberal conservatism of Cameron, replacing it with a more traditional view of education, in which grammar schools were a means of effectively levelling the playing field for working- and middleclass pupils against wealthy, social liberals who paid for private education. This was also reflected in the Parliamentary Conservative Party, with Cameron’s stance on selective education being resented by backbenchers, whereas May’s policy was closer to the values of Conservative Party backbenchers, members, and supporters. The outcome of the 2017 general election, in which May lost her majority, effectively marked the end of her attempt to reshape the structure of the secondary education in England by reintroducing a greater role for grammar schools. In contrast to the strong narrative of discontinuity arising from May’s attempt to resurrect selective secondary education, there was substantive policy continuity delivered by then Education Secretary Justine Greening, through the implementation of the reform agenda set out by Morgan and the Cameron government for the opening of more academies and free schools. In January 2018, Greening was replaced in a Cabinet reshuffle by Damian Hinds. As Newell and Seldon (2019: 272) note in an interview with Hinds, during his time as Education Secretary schools’ policy was almost exclusively defined by the continued implementation of the reforms made under Gove and the Coalition government. From this point

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onwards, there was little to no policy development in secondary education with May abandoning attempts to resuscitate her policy agenda, with the sole exception to this being the announcement of an additional £50 million in capital funding to increase the number of places at Ofsted rated good or outstanding, selective schools (DfE, 2018). However, when shared between the 163 grammar schools in England, this equated to a little over £300,000 per school, a relatively inconsequential sum in the schools’ overall budget. On Boris Johnson’s election as Prime Minister, there was a reassertion of established policy in secondary education, with continuity in the case of schools’ policy. Johnson’s first administration continued to implement the Gove reforms, announcing the further expansion of the number of free schools, before committing to further pursue the policy in the 2019 general election manifesto (Conservative Party, 2019: 13). Other pledges in the manifesto broadly followed the policy themes of the Cameron and May administrations with commitments to continue to support choice and innovation in school provision, and to intervene in schools that consistently underperformed.

Tertiary Education: Competing Priorities The place of Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) in England in the Conservative Party’s education policy agenda during this five-year period was contested. The Cameron government’s approach to tertiary education policy was to continue and further develop the reform agenda of the coalition to a significant extent, which placed greater value on encouraging greater numbers of individuals to enrol at HE institutions. Although there was a significant degree of continuity in tertiary education between Cameron and May’s administrations up until January 2018, with policies and legislation being retained, after this date May moved to decisively rebalance tertiary education policy in favour of FE. In the Conservative Party’s 2015 general election manifesto, Cameron signalled his intent to continue to reform FE through the creation of a further three million apprenticeships in England. Among other policies in the FE sector were the continued abolition of low-level courses and their replacement by higher quality qualifications. In the autumn of that year, Nick Boles, reappointed as Minister for Skills, announced that further reforms to technical and vocational education would be recommended by an appointed Independent Panel on Technical Education, chaired by

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Lord Sainsbury, which included among its membership Professor Alison Wolf, who had previously conducted a review of vocational education for the Coalition government. The panel was specifically tasked with making recommendations to Ministers on reforms to improve the quality of technical education, to revise the qualifications system and to ensure it was providing the required skills for the twenty-first century. The panel reported in July 2016, and the Sainsbury Report as it became known, made 34 recommendations that the then government wholly accepted in its response, entitled the Post-16 Skills Plan (BIS & DfE, 2016a). The two most notable of these recommendations were the continuation of the streamlining of FE courses into 15 technical education routes, and the drastic simplification of the system of qualifications, with each of these specialisations leading to the award of single qualification, to be called a ‘tech level’ (BIS & DfE, 2016b). Before the end of 2015, the Conservative government published plans for delivering the three million apprenticeships. The document, English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision, was published in December and outlined the government’s plan to improve both the quantity and quality of apprenticeships (BIS & DfE, 2016c). In a major set piece speech by the Prime Minister on the theme of government delivery, on the day the document was published, Cameron set out plans for how his administration would deliver on several significant domestic policies, including apprenticeships (Cameron, 2015). The work undertaken in the FE sector by the Cameron administration sought to directly build upon and develop the policies of the Coalition government. Nick Boles, in reflecting on his time as Skills Minister, remarked that having achieved the delivery of two million apprenticeships during the Coalition government, there was a deliberate decision taken to continue the same approach to apprenticeships and make a bigger, improved offer to electorate (Thornton & Kidney Bishop, 2017). Similarly, the key publication setting out the government’s apprenticeship strategy, English Apprenticeships, repeatedly refers to the independent Richard Review of Apprenticeships (BIS, 2012), demonstrating that the latter served as a foundation to build on, and the substantive policy continuity between the two governments. On assuming the office of Prime Minister, May was fortunate to inherit an FE remit that would benefit significantly from the suggested reform agenda in the April 2016 Sainsbury Report on technical education in England. The replacement of thousands of existing vocational qualifications with newly established qualifications known as ‘T-Levels’, greater

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investment in the FE sector, and the commitment to create 3 million apprenticeships by 2020 were reaffirmed in the Conservative Party’s 2017 United Kingdom General Election manifesto (Conservative Party, 2017: 52–53). Although some might claim that May placed greater emphasis on the FE sector’s role in education, it is clear that, to a significant degree, May’s approach to FE policy maintained the existing reform programme, with many of these policies being initiated by the Coalition and continued by the Cameron government. However, following the loss of her parliamentary majority at the 2017 general election, the Prime Minister was not a bystander and did exercise agency during her administration through proactive decision-making to create a political environment that was conducive to her policy preferences, specifically the rebalancing of tertiary education towards FE. The Cabinet reshuffle of January 2018 should be viewed as the beginning of May’s attempt to secure an educational legacy in tertiary education, with those political actors who were blocking an authentic Mayite policy agenda dismissed and replaced with successors who were appointed on the condition that they would support the Prime Minister’s policy (Newell & Seldon, 2019: 221–222). This saw the removal of both Justine Greening and Jo Johnson and their replacement with Damian Hinds as Secretary of State for Education and Sam Gyimah as Minister of State for Universities, respectively. This change of personnel facilitated a major step away from previous tertiary education policy, and marked an attempt by May to partially fulfil the ‘burning injustices’ agenda she had outlined in her first statement as Prime Minister, in which she spoke of issues of opportunity in education and access to professional occupations (May, 2016c). The beginnings of a shift in policy was achieved through the commissioning of the Augar Review of tertiary education, an independent and wide-ranging review of post-18 education and funding for England, which in broad terms recommended a reallocation of resources from HE and towards FE (DfE, 2019). The review served as a vehicle to advance May’s policy agenda in tertiary education and represented a sharp break with her predecessors in this area. This shift in policy was continued and reinforced by May in an attempt to craft a distinct educational policy that became the core of her domestic agenda. To achieve this, May’s government was prepared to utilise tools previously reserved for exceptional circumstances to achieve their policy objectives, demonstrated through Hinds’ action in driving through the

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implementation of the new T-levels at the DfE by issuing the first Ministerial Direction at the department since at least 1990 (Institute for Government, 2021) to ensure their timely delivery. These actions were the clearest demonstration of an ideational shift during May’s tenure, as she sought to extend opportunity to working- and lower middle-class families by improving the esteem of technical and vocational education and as a true alternative to higher education, and the success of which May viewed as a key component of her industrial strategy (May, 2019). Although May did not achieve her policy objectives of increasing funding for and the esteem of FE during her own tenure, she has successfully influenced her successor, as demonstrated through a series of commitments in the 2019 Conservative Party election manifesto. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party committed to further investment in FE, including two billion pounds to update the FE estate and the opening of Institutes of Technology, the latter being a policy introduced by May in 2017. The Cameron government’s policy towards the HE sector was to adopt an approach of sustained reform. The development and implementation of policies to reform the governance of HE was, in part, a response to the outcomes of the previous reform agenda of the Coalition government, prompting a more formalised regulatory environment with increased oversight of the sector. At BIS, the Minister for Universities and Science was the only major education brief across government to receive a newly appointed minister, Jo Johnson. In Johnson, the HE sector received an individual close to the leadership of the Conservative Party and committed to delivering the reform agenda, as he was responsible for producing the Conservative Party’s 2015 manifesto. Johnson outlined the three key priorities for HE as teaching quality, social mobility and widening participation, and reforms to the regulatory and governance landscape (Johnson, 2015). These were then developed in the Green Paper (BIS, 2015), refined in a White Paper (BIS, 2016), before being introduced in the House of Commons as the Higher Education and Research Bill in May 2016, just four weeks before the UK’s European Union membership referendum. The justification as outlined during the policymaking process by Jo Johnson was to continue the approach of making significant structural reforms to both the governance and delivery of HE, and the funding of research. In the first instance, having tripled the tuition fees paid by undergraduate students and removed the cap on student numbers, the Cameron government made clear that greater accountability of HE institutions and their teaching was necessary to

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ensure value for money on students’ behalf, which required further structural reform. The Higher Education Bill would introduce: the Teaching Excellence Framework, a new accountability mechanism to assess the quality of teaching in HE institutions; the Office for Students, the new regulator for the sector; and UK Research and Innovation. The latter body would be introduced following Sir Paul Nurse’s independent review of the UK’s research councils, commissioned by the Coalition government, which reported in November 2015 and informed the government’s decision to reform the funding councils by merging them and bringing them under one umbrella body. The initial approach of May’s administration towards HE was largely of continuity, with only limited but significant changes to other aspects of HE policy. This was demonstrated by the fact that May was content for Jo Johnson’s Higher Education and Research Bill to continue its passage through Parliament, despite having only received its first reading prior to her election as Prime Minister. This Bill would reform the governance, accountability and research funding of HE, introducing the Teaching Excellence Framework, the Office for Students and UK Research and Innovation. However, one of May’s early departures in HE policy was set out in her key 9 September 2016 ‘Great Meritocracy’ speech, where she outlined a requirement of universities, as a condition of charging maximum tuition fees, to sponsor academies or to fund free schools (May, 2016b). This commitment was reiterated in the 2017 general election manifesto (Conservative Party, 2017: 50). Once more, these two examples characterised May’s early approach towards HE policy: a significant degree of continuity but with limited and important discontinuities that hint at the direction May desired to take the policy agenda. It also hints again at an ideational shift, towards a view of extending access to universities and opportunity facilitated by a closer relationship with schools, rather than the view held by Cameron of universities as centres of innovation, research and development with an integral role in the economy and having naturally closer links to business and trade.

Financing and Funding of Education In the financing and funding of education in England, there were significant continuities across the five years, with three policies being pursued and retained by successive governments. The first major reform, introduced by Nick Boles as Skills Minister in the Cameron government, solved the practical issue of funding the three million apprenticeships

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committed to in the 2015 manifesto. Through the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy, a hypothecated tax was first implemented in 2017. The continuation of this funding policy was perhaps reliant on the May government’s preference for technical and vocational education, over more traditional academic routes in HE, and the view that these were central to the economy. The second major reform that was continued throughout the five-year period was the development and implementation of the National Funding Formula for schools. This was initiated by Nicky Morgan and framed in a public narrative of creating a fairer funding system that would extend opportunity, by shifting to a system in which finance would be allocated per pupil, and was carried through by Justine Greening as this aligned with her agenda of social mobility and greater equality of opportunity in education. The third aspect of continuity between the Cameron and May governments in the financing and funding of education is a general decrease in spending across schools and tertiary education, with decreases in schools and FE, both in real terms spending and funding per pupil, as set out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in their annual report (2020). This continued a longer-term trend of reductions in spending on education in England, dating back to 2010. In assessing the degree of continuity between administrations over the period of 2015–2020, there are external factors to consider, which introduce an element of path dependency into the funding and financing of education. The first of these is the impact of demographics, as live births in England increased every year from 2002 to 2012, with the exception of 2008 (Office for National Statistics, 2020). The second is a legacy of the previous New Labour governments, with the Coalition and Cameron governments beginning to see the full impact of Alan Johnson’s reform to raise the participation age to 18, with the 2015/2016 school year seeing the first cohort of pupils to stay on in education, employment or training. Hence, there is a case that vocational and technical education and apprenticeships would have received greater attention in government regardless. Lastly, the financing of education was significantly impacted by the structural financial implications of Brexit, with the then Chancellor Philip Hammond concerned with good public finances and building a reserve to guard against the fallout of Brexit.

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An Ideational Shift Although there is a considerable degree of continuity across the education policies of the three governments, the limited but significant departures in policy were underpinned and can be attributed to a distinct ideational shift that took place between the Cameron and May administrations, which the Johnson government subsequently attempted to reconcile. The ideational shift that took place between the Cameron and May governments can be understood through their different approaches to education and where they depart from one another. Firstly, in Cameron’s liberal Conservatism, characterised by a liberal approach to both political economy and social policy as set out by Beech (2015: 3), education was closely identified with the modernisation of the Conservative Party, and became a key site of conflict early in Cameron’s leadership of the party. This was demonstrated by Cameron’s secondary and HE policies. In the former, Cameron rejected selective secondary education and grammar schools and instead endorsed academies and free schools, providing an early opportunity to define his leadership, which would subsequently form the backbone of his education agenda throughout his time as Prime Minister. Similarly, the latter would, despite an increase in tuition fees, see growth in overall student numbers, thereby widening access and increasing participation. In contrast, the form of conservatism May pursued contained elements of both more traditional and One Nation Conservatism. Although the latter has proven difficult to define, Hickson et al. (2020) characterises May’s ideational stance as ‘soft’ One Nation Conservatism. However, May drew upon strands of social conservatism and the One Nation tradition. The former could be found in the importance May attached to the institutions and values of the union of the United Kingdom and patriotism, family and faith. This is also demonstrated in her personal biography. Her father was a vicar, she still regularly attended church and her commitment towards her constituency was characterised as family-like, while the One Nation tradition could be seen in her belief in a pro-active state, communities and society (May, 2017). Education then holds a significantly different place in May’s conservatism when compared to Cameron’s and demonstrates the ideational shift between administrations. At the heart of this ideational shift was

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a fundamentally different interpretation of equality of opportunity, reminiscent of the tension between the democratic and meritocratic principles (Mandler, 2020). In this conflict, Cameron’s liberal Conservatism interpreted equality of opportunity as extending access to educational opportunity. However, although May might have shared Cameron’s modernising instincts, her One Nation Conservatism held a narrower interpretation of equality of opportunity, heavily influenced by the meritocratic principle, that supports for differentiation based on ability would provide opportunities to nurture hidden talent and act as a driver of social mobility. Similar sentiments were expressed by political actors within the Conservative Party who shared May’s attitudes towards education and resented Cameron’s approach as a privately educated public school pupil who was unable to see the value of grammar schools and further education. In contrast, May understood the importance of these institutions in levelling the playing field and extending equality of opportunity to working- and lower middle-class families in education.

Conclusion The period from 2015 to 2020 saw a significant degree of continuity in education policy across three consecutive governments. However, there were limited but significant discontinuities, which were driven by an ideational shift between the Cameron and May governments. The most notable demonstration of continuity can be found in schools’ policy, where the existing reform programme of expanding academies and free schools continued apace, and in tertiary education, with greater focus on technical education and changes to the governance of the HE sector. Perhaps, the most salient continuity during this period was the persistent failure of successive governments to deliver on their headline education policies, with the Cameron government having to drop its plans for the full academisation of the school system, and the May government failing to secure a greater role for grammar schools. In contrast to this, the discontinuity in policy was most evident in May’s attempt to fulfil her ‘burning injustices’ agenda, such as extending equality of opportunity to working- and middle-class pupils with grammar school expansion, and the beginnings of a shift in focus in tertiary education, away from more academic routes and towards technical education. These departures in policy were underpinned by an ideational shift, rooted in May’s conservatism that was influenced by more traditional and One

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Nation Conservatism, over Cameron’s liberal Conservatism. Boris Johnson’s initial months as Prime Minister witnessed an attempt to synthesise the policy legacies and accompanying ideational underpinnings of his two predecessors to create his own educational agenda. This was manifested in the commitment to continue to implement Cameron’s structural reforms in schools’ policy, while adopting May’s approach to tertiary education with greater funding and support for FE education with a more sceptical view of HE.

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Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Education. (2016a). Post-16 Skills Plan. Cm. 9280. The Stationery Office. https://ass ets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attach ment_data/file/536043/Post-16_Skills_Plan.pdf. Accessed 23 July 2021. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Education. (2016b). Report of the Independent Panel on Technical Education. The Stationery Office. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl oads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/536046/Report_of_the_Indepe ndent_Panel_on_Technical_Education.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2021. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Education. (2016c). English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision. The Stationery Office. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/upl oads/attachment_data/file/482754/BIS-15-604-english-apprenticeshipsour-2020-vision.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2021. Department for Education. (2016). Educational Excellence Everywhere. Cm. 9230. The Stationery Office. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/govern ment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/508447/Educational_ Excellence_Everywhere.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2021. Department for Education. (2017). Primary Assessment in England: Government Response. The Stationery Office. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gov ernment/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/644871/Primary_a ssessment_consultation_response.pdf. Accessed 27 July 2021. Department for Education. (2018). Drive to Create More Good School Places for Families. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/drive-to-create-moregood-school-places-for-families. Accessed 28 July 2021. Department for Education. (2019). Independent Panel Report to the Review of Post-18 Education and Funding. Cm. 117. The Stationery Office. https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/att achment_data/file/805127/Review_of_post_18_education_and_funding.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2021. Education and Adoption Act 2016, Chapter 6. The Stationery Office. https:// www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/6/contents. Accessed 20 July 2021. Greening, J. (2016, October 19). Primary Education: House of Commons Debate. Official Record. c. 37WS. https://hansard.parliament.uk/com mons/2016-10-19/debates/16101944000006/PrimaryEducation. Accessed 24 July 2021. Hickson, K., Page, R., & Williams, B. (2020). Strangled at Birth: The One Nation Ideology of Theresa May. Journal of Political Ideologies, 25(3), 334– 350. Hinds, D. (2019, April 20). It’s Our Duty to Check If Children Are Progressing in School—Scrapping SATs Would Leave No Way of Doing So. The

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Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/04/20/duty-checkchildren-progressing-school-scrapping-sats-would/. Accessed 27 July 2021. Institute for Fiscal Studies. (2020). 2020 Annual Report on Education Spending in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/R1832020-annual-report-on-education-spending-in-England%20%281%29.pdf. Accessed 31 July 2021. Institute for Government. (2021). Ministerial Direction by Department and Grounds. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/charts/ministerial-dir ections-1990-department-and-grounds. Accessed 29 July 2021. Johnson, J. (2015, September 9). Higher Education: Fulfilling Our Potential. University of Surrey. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/higher-edu cation-fulfilling-our-potential. Accessed 29 July 2021. Loughton, T. et al. (2016, April 13). Schools White Paper: House of Commons Debate. Official Record (Vol. 608, cols. 425–433). https://hansard.parlia ment.uk/commons/2016-04-13/debates/16041341000001/SchoolsWhite Paper. Accessed 22 July 2021. Mandler, P. (2020). The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War. Oxford University Press. May, T. (2016a. July 18). Machinery of Government Changes: Written Statement. Official Record, c 20WS. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/ 2016a-07-18/debates/16071825000004/MachineryOfGovernmentCha nges. Accessed 22 July 2021. May, T. (2016b, September 9). Britain, the Great Meritocracy: Prime Minister’s Speech. 10 Downing Street. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/bri tain-the-great-meritocracy-prime-ministers-speech Accessed 27 July 2021. May, T. (2016c, July 13). Statement from the New Prime Minister Theresa May. 10 Downing Street. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statementfrom-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may. Accessed 28 July 2021. May, T. (2017, January 7). I’m Determined to Build the Shared Society for Everyone. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/07/ determined-build-shared-society-everyone/. Accessed 31 July 2021. May, T. (2019, May 30). PM Speech at Augar Review Launch: 30 May 2019. Policy Exchange. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-ataugar-review-launch-30-may-2019. Accessed 30 July 2021. Morgan, N. (2015a, September 24). Improving Child Literacy in England. Charles Dickens Primary School. https://www.gov.uk/government/spe eches/nicky-morgan-improving-child-literacy-in-england. Accessed 22 July 2021. Morgan, N. (2015b, November 3). One Nation Education. Policy Exchange. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/nicky-morgan-one-nation-edu cation. Accessed 22 July 2021. Newell, R., & Seldon, A. (2019). May at 10: The Verdict. Biteback Publishing.

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Office for National Statistics. (2020). Number of Live Births by Sex, England and Wales: 1982 to 2019. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandco mmunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/adhocs/12417numberofliveb irthsbysexenglandandwales1982to2019. Accessed 30 July 2021. Osborne, G. (2016, March 16). Budget Statement. Official Record (Vol. 607, col. 96). https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-03-16/deb ates/16031632000001/FinancialStatement. Accessed 22 July 2021. Thornton, D., & Kidney Bishop, T. (2017). Interview Transcript—Nick Boles. Ministers Reflect Archive, Institute for Government. https://www.institutefor government.org.uk/ministers-reflect/person/nick-boles/. Accessed 25 July 2021.

CHAPTER 9

The Submerged Welfare State: Health and Social Care Policy in England from 2015 to 2020 Holly Jarman

Introduction By 2015, the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 had brought major changes to the health policy landscape, but the changes it outlined had yet to be fully implemented and the implications of those changes were yet to be fully realized. In 2016, debates over Brexit and health had begun to dominate conversations in the United Kingdom (UK) and its constituent nations. Would Brexit provide the benefits to the NHS that its champions claimed, or would Brexit harm the National Health Service (NHS) as opponents feared? In the background, the NHS and social care organizations struggled with ongoing problems including workforce retention and financial deficits, while healthcare quality and population health in

H. Jarman (B) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_9

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England continued on a worrying downward trajectory across several key indicators. In this chapter, I examine to what extent Conservative leaders 2015– 2020 diverged from the path of their predecessors. As the most significant policy changes during this period affected NHS England, I focus on England rather than developments in the other UK nations and on healthcare over public health and social care policies. The three devolved polities of the UK—Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—all have had legally separate healthcare systems for decades, and politically separate ones, with distinctive policies, since 1998. In these years, they each showed a high degree of policy stability, progressively moving along relatively consistent trajectories. In most cases this was towards implementation of a loosely similar model, with a focus on territorial integration through local health boards. Their relative stability and apparent underlying policy consensus are a striking contrast to UK government healthcare politics in England. Between 2015 and 2020, I argue, England’s healthcare, social care and public health systems formed a type of submerged welfare state (Mettler, 2011): a series of complex and mostly invisible networks with responsibility, but not always legal accountability, for commissioning, providing and improving health and social care. The top of the welfare ‘iceberg’, the Department of Health (and from April 2018) the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE&I), was still highly visible to the public and politically salient. However, the political and financial relationships between the centre, regional networks and local actors were much less visible. The result was a lack of accountability that ran in multiple directions. Politicians at the centre could claim they had funded care at record levels, claim credit as champions of patient safety and cut public health spending with little scrutiny. Regional networks could identify care improvements and opportunities for coordination but often did not have the means to implement them. The NHS as a whole appeared to be in financial balance while attaining that balance through unsound and short-term funding practices. And, as the Brexit debates demonstrated, it was easy for political actors to leverage strong public support for the NHS and fears about its imminent decline in arguments against the European Union (EU) despite the EU’s minimal involvement in its member states’ healthcare systems. This submerged welfare state is, however, a logical extension of reforms under prior governments, both the 2010–2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and New Labour governments since 1997, whose

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health policies were, in turn, built on Conservative thinking since the 1980s. Between 2015 and 2020, political leaders attempted to push health policy further down the path laid out by Tony Blair and Alan Milburn in the late 1990s but faced significant practical and political roadblocks. Some of the impacts of prior changes to the health system, austerity in other areas of the public sector and increasing income inequality began to be more visible, with serious consequences for the overall health of people in the UK. The UK public continued to strongly support the idea of the NHS, while becoming increasingly fearful that the system itself would be undermined. Social care spending declined, particularly for older adults, despite increasing demand due to England’s ageing population. Meanwhile, heightened political conflict during the Brexit campaign solidified the role of the NHS as a political symbol and resulted in grand promises about health and healthcare that could not be fulfilled. The resulting rhetoric would continue to impact health and social care policy through the present day.

Less-Than-Accountable Care What makes the Coalition’s proposals so radical is not that they tear up that earlier plan [the Blairite health reform]. It is that they move so decisively towards fulfilling it. (Stevens, as quoted in Timmins, 2012: 67)

2015–2020 saw continued implementation of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act (HSC Act). In 2012, after a troubled passage through the UK Parliament, the HSC Act laid out a blueprint for sweeping reforms of the NHS and public health in England. The changes were arguably the largest scale reform of the NHS since its creation in 1948. David Nicholson, the NHS Chief Executive, criticized the reforms as requiring ‘such a big change management, you could probably see it from space’ (Greer et al., 2014). The Act changed how healthcare was sourced, attempting to introduce more elements of market competition via new institutions, such as Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), demolished other parts of the healthcare system, decentralized responsibilities for public health to local authorities and made major changes to the regulation of healthcare finance and quality.

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But this pattern of political incentives and systemic reform was not new. The HSC Act continued the pattern of frequent reforms for potential political gains, sometimes known depreciatingly as ‘redisorganisation’, that stretches back to at least the early Blair governments (Smith et al., 2001). After a protracted period of deliberation, which included an unusual two-month pause in April 2011 to reformulate key provisions and increase the bill’s chance of passage, the law passed, but the result was a set of highly complex structures that proved to be a poor fit with how the NHS and public health in England worked in practice (Ham et al., 2015). Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary from September 2012 through July 2018, inherited a messy implementation process and a community of disgruntled stakeholders. He dealt with this situation through several key strategic actions. He sided with patients against the NHS in the Stafford Hospital scandal (which involved neglect of patients and subsequent high mortality rates), using the result of a public inquiry to the government’s advantage. He allowed Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive from April 2014 to take on a more significant role in NHS governance, which helped to keep blame at arm’s length from the Department of Health and health policy off the national political agenda. And in the longer term, he succeeded in turning the discourse away from competition and internal market reforms towards quality of care and patient safety, portraying himself as the patients’ champion against poor quality NHS services (Ham et al., 2015). This arm’s length approach is exemplified by the importance of the Five Year Forward View published in October 2014. Rather than laying out the Health Secretary’s or Prime Minister’s view on health reforms, as was frequently the case under prior governments, the report presents a ‘shared view of the NHS’ national leadership and reflects an emerging consensus amongst patient groups, clinicians, local communities and frontline NHS leaders’ (NHS England, 2014: 2). Despite Hunt sharing many of the same ideological positions on health markets as his predecessor, his tenure saw few big legislative reform efforts, in part because of the political scars left by passage of the HSC Act. In the absence of new statute, redisorganization continued apace at the administrative level. In 2016, for example, Monitor and the Trust Development Authority were merged into a new body, NHS Improvement. The two bodies governed the NHS jointly for only three years

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before merging into one agency, ‘NHS England and NHS Improvement’, or NHSE&I, in 2019 (Nuffield Trust, 2020). Below the national level, one of the HSC Act’s significant reforms was the abolition of Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), regional bodies within the NHS tasked with formulating and implementing plans for health improvement in their respective administrative areas. SHAs were never much loved by health policy commentators and often deemed to be ineffective or obstructive (Edwards & Buckingham, 2020). However, soon after their abolition it became apparent that some form of regional coordination would be needed to implement the HSC Act. As NHS Providers, a stakeholder group representing NHS trusts, stated: ‘No trust is an island…This means focusing on the needs of a local population and overcoming barriers between hospitals, mental and physical health services, local authorities, primary care and the wider public health system’ (NHS Providers, 2018a). In theory, integration could be highly desirable, with the potential to improve the quality of care delivered, pivot towards the types of preventative health interventions that could avoid more costly and significant healthcare later, and create local efficiencies in the system. Connections with social care could also prove particularly important as the English population aged and demand for home and chronic care rose. Because of the government’s slim majority and the prior fraught passage of the HSC Act, addressing questions of integration would preferably happen without having to attempt further legislative changes. Innovations seized on by NHS leadership took inspiration from health reforms in the United States, specifically, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which were initially promoted in the United States as a policy solution for rising healthcare costs. Accountable Care Organizations are coalitions of physicians, hospitals and other healthcare actors that take on joint responsibility for healthcare costs and quality within a defined population of patients (Song, 2014). As with many similar policy solutions based on strategic purchasing, the evidence that ACOs work is mixed at best, with some studies showing that they might actually have increased costs over time (Greer et al., 2020). In England, the concept of locally accountable care first took the form of Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), which were created in 2016 and renamed Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships in 2017. STPs were regional reform plans co-created by local governments, NHS providers and leadership in an attempt to improve

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health outcomes and increase efficiency in their area. 44 areas of England developed STPs. In 2017, Next Steps on the Five Year Forward View envisioned the most developed STPs would evolve into Accountable Care Systems (renamed in 2018 as Integrated Care Systems, or ICSs). ICSs are essentially more developed versions of STPs with better established relationships. There were few top-down requirements about how they should be structured, however, leading to considerable variation in their operation across England. In 2019, the NHS Long-Term Plan (created under new health secretary Matt Hancock) envisioned that all of England would be covered by ICSs by April 2021 (NHS England, 2019). At that point in time, 14 ICSs had been created from existing STPs. The Long-Term Plan stated that ‘ICSs will become the level of the system where commissioners and providers make shared decisions about financial planning, and prioritisation’ (NHS England, 2019: 102). Following similar principles, the Long-Term Plan also introduced Primary Care Networks (PCNs), geographically defined networks of primary care providers covering around 30,000–50,000 patients. One significant flaw with STPs, ICSs and PCNs, however, was that these key mechanisms for delivering integrated and ‘accountable’ care had no statutory authority. In contrast to the SHAs they replaced, STPs and ICSs were voluntary mechanisms. Observers noted that while stakeholders involved in creating them had correctly identified problems in delivering care in their areas, they had few tools available to create necessary changes and were forced to rely on persuasion. The processes used to come to consensus were sometimes duplicative, opaque and wasteful, although several of these operational problems improved as STPs aged (Ham et al., 2017a; IPPR, 2019). Many STPs were staffed by management consultants, at considerable cost to taxpayers, with their work often not public (Consultancy.uk, 2018). Because accountable care mechanisms had no statutory authority, they actually lacked accountability for key financial planning decisions. Within the NHS structure, NHS Trusts and CCGs bear financial responsibility, as outlined in law, while STPs and ICSs do not. Given that these partnerships were meant to be responsible for high-level prioritization and efficiency cuts, this lack of formal accountability was problematic. Early on, STPs were criticized for making decisions out of public view and failing to include all interested stakeholders in decision-making. In response to the initial national policy ideas proposed in 2016, some

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STPs set highly unrealistic, controversial, targets to save money and cut beds for which they would have no statutory responsibility (plans to cut beds were quietly dropped later on) (Ham et al., 2017b). What would happen, commentators wondered, if STPs/ICSs failed to deliver promised improvements, and what would be the consequences for health and social outcomes? One specific model of accountable care worth noting was ‘soft devolution’ of health and social care responsibilities to local authorities. In February 2015, local authorities in Greater Manchester announced that they would become the first English administrative region to have devolved responsibility for health and social care. This reform is best referred to as soft devolution as the new initiative did not change the statutory accountability of the participating local governments and NHS organizations, and nor was a new statutory body created (Walshe et al., 2018). In fact, the development of organizational structures happened before the UK Parliament formally granted the Secretary of State ability to transfer authority from bodies within the NHS to local authorities in January 2016. In 2015, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was reached between local authorities, NHS England and CCGs in Greater Manchester, stating that Greater Manchester would take over responsibility for its health and social care budget. In practice, that meant that commissioning functions and finances would be delegated to a joint commissioning board. A further MOU delegating responsibility for public health was signed with Public Health England in July 2015 (Walshe et al., 2018). A similar set of agreements was put in place in Cornwall to promote the integration of health and social care. Despite considerable local support for health devolution to Greater Manchester authorities, two governance questions remain. First, because the arrangement is ‘soft devolution’ and more akin to delegation of authority from the centre, national actors could potentially change course at any time and reverse their delegation decision. The Greater Manchester Partnership is not like the Scottish Government, which has constitutional authority over much health and social care policy. Rather, the Partnership has flexibility over how policy decided at the centre is implemented. In this sense, the Partnership is more like STPs and ICSs elsewhere in England (Walshe et al., 2018). The second question relates to the allocation of funding, which raises issues across all types of accountable care organizations. Financial accountability within the Greater Manchester Partnership remains with

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individual local governments and NHS Trusts. In the short term, the Partnership has been able to use a one-off Transformation Fund to incentivize local improvements, but once spent that money will not be replaced. And while the Partnership can control the local distribution of funding, it cannot control the size of the cake. Funding formulas provide some degree of certainty in this regard. But they do not address what might happen in the event of significant financial shortfalls—where would the blame lie? And how might shortfalls be addressed? In the case of STPs and ICSs, the government has addressed financial deficits through short-term strategies, including underspending at the national level and use of funds allocated to promote sustainability and transformation to plug gaps. But what might be the long-term consequences of these short-term strategies practised between 2015 and 2020 for the stability of the NHS and social care?

Financial Instability Organizational changes within the NHS were happening during a period of significant financial constraints for the NHS, social care and public health. In aggregate, public spending on health in England increased 2015–2020, but at a much slower rate than under previous governments. In real terms, Department of Health expenditure for England increased by 1.4% on average between 2009–2010 and 2015–2016. This increase was far less than the average increase in UK health spending over the prior 60 years at 4.1% per year. Spending on NHS England increased at a quicker rate than Department of Health spending overall, but was offset by significant decreases in the rate of non-NHS health spending in areas including public health, medical research and administration (Stoye, 2017). Experts estimate that an average increase of 4% in real terms per year is required to cover the needs of the NHS and see any improvements in services (Harker, 2019). Particularly at election time, government leaders frequently made the case that they were investing more in the NHS than ever before, touting ‘record’ levels of spending. Many of these claims were misleading, and some ignored the impact of inflation, causing politicians to exaggerate the extent to which the NHS would be able to translate additional funds into additional care. And the narrative of ‘record funding’ did not hold up when measured against increased demand for care. The result was ongoing, and worsening, financial instability in many parts of the NHS.

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Financial accountability for spending on healthcare services in England rests ultimately with the Department of Health and Social Care, but the Department delegates responsibility for monitoring spending to NHS England and NHS Improvement (NAO, 2020). The vast majority of DHSC funding flows to NHS England/NHS Improvement, which then disperses most of the money to Clinical Commissioning Groups. CCGs, in turn, purchase services from healthcare providers including hospitals, GPs and other community organizations in the form of NHS Trusts (King’s Fund, 2020). In theory, a system of controls designed to promote financial responsibility shaped NHS spending in England during this period. In 2013, after a scandal within the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, a review of 14 NHS Trusts with high mortality was conducted. The review identified significant problems with healthcare quality, safety and leadership across these Trusts. Following the review, 11 of the 14 Trusts were put into ‘special measures’ involving additional close scrutiny from Monitor or the NHS Trust Development Authority, the appointment of a new director charged with making improvements and partnership with a higher performing ‘buddy’ trust that could serve as a model for change (CQC, 2014). While the special measures system was originally introduced as a means to control quality and safety, in 2016 the same procedures were applied to healthcare finance, requiring parts of the NHS with significant deficits to come under increased scrutiny and implement leadership changes. While they recognized the need to make improvements, many Trusts questioned the focus on individual organizations within the NHS rather than the system itself. There were certainly some key indicators during this period that pointed to system-wide trends, e.g. rising labour costs. By 2018, for example, 60% of NHS Trusts placed in financial special measures in England were in London or the South-East where labour costs were higher (NHS Providers, 2018b). Between 2015 and 2020, both health providers, in the form of NHS Trusts, and payers, in the form of CCGs, ran significant deficits. The reasons for these deficits are many and varied, including increasing demand for care and price increases in generic medicines (NAO, 2020). In particular, in May 2016, NHS Trusts in England reported a historic record deficit of £2.45 billion that made national news headlines (Campbell, 2016). Furthermore, a majority of STPs and ICSs also ran deficits during this period (when considering the finances of their component bodies in aggregate). Although Trusts with the most financial distress

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were provided with loans from the DHSC as a short-term fix, many of them had no means to repay the loans and racked up large amounts of debt (NAO, 2020). Because NHS financing is so opaque, it can be difficult for outsiders to track financial flows. In aggregate, deficits in some parts of the NHS are often hidden by cuts made elsewhere, a trend that extends back several decades. During 2015–2020, many parts of the NHS had become financially unsustainable despite headline figures that showed overall balance. In 2018–2019, for example, deficits among Trusts and CCGs were counterbalanced by underspending by NHS England, in the form of delays in transformation funding, unfilled staff vacancies, income from GP rates rebates and counter fraud receipts, and savings made via direct commissioning of services (NAO, 2020). Ultimately, financial balance was only achieved via this central government management of central spending, as well as use of the Sustainability and Transformation/Provider Sustainability Fund originally set up to support changes made by STPs (Gainsbury, 2016). Commentators who watched this issue closely considered it to be a ‘fudge’ that deviated from the original intent of requiring care improvements in exchange for access to sustainability funding. Such short-term fixes, critics argued, are unsustainable in the long term (Gainsbury, 2019; NAO, 2020). Nor do they uphold the principles of financial accountability and transparency within the NHS that many political leaders, stretching back to the 1980s, have promoted. In overall terms, the Conservative government’s failure to deliver a more financially transparent and internally competitive NHS is in keeping with the failures of prior governments. This should surprise no-one. While the NHS became more fragmented during this period, political incentives to keep the NHS solvent did not change much. What changed between 2015 and 2020 were the tools available to central government to maintain that fiction—a shift away from the ‘regional financial managers’ approach of prior Conservative governments, and ‘financial managers embedded within the NHS Executive’ approach of New Labour, towards special measures, short-term loans, creative use of sustainability funding and central underspend. The same demographic changes driving increases in healthcare demand affected the costs of social care. As the population of England became older, on average, the need for care increased. The number of workingage people with a disability also increased. Some of the needed care was provided by local authorities through formal service agreements and paid

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for through general taxation. A small proportion was paid for by individuals contracting with private companies. But most care needs were met by families and friends of the person in need (Harker, 2019). This English model of means tested, local provision contrasts strongly with Scotland, where there was a national budget for social care and an entitlement to personal care for those aged 65 and older that was not subject to means testing (BMA, 2020). Total spending on adult social care in England dropped precipitously between 2010 and 2014. From 2014–2015 to 2019–2020, however, this situation reversed, due to additional spending allocated by the Treasury as well as additional powers granted to local governments to raise council tax. In allocating additional funds, the government hoped to reverse a disturbing, politically damaging, trend—financial failure and market exit among social care providers (CQC, 2015). By 2019–2020, social care spending had again reached 2010–2011 levels (Bottery & Ward, 2021). However, rising demand for formal and informal care overlapped with significant pressures on local authority budgets (Foster, 2022). Although, in principle, additional social care funding allocated to local authorities was ring-fenced, in practice, workarounds allowed them to spend some of the money on services other than social care (Simpson, 2017). In overall terms, rather than providing care to more people and addressing increased demand, spending increases were absorbed by the rising costs of care. Provider fees during this period outpaced inflation (Bottery & Ward, 2021), while workforce costs increased due to attempts to shore up recruitment in the sector and address the low wages paid to care workers. From 2016, the introduction of the National Living Wage increased providers’ costs, although, as of 2020, the median hourly wage for an adult social care worker in the independent sector was £8.50, only slightly above the legal minimum (Werner, 2021). Public health funding in England fared even worse than funding for the NHS and social care from 2015 to 2020, facing significant cuts in real terms that received little public attention. In November 2015, for example, Chancellor George Osborne’s spending review announced a £3.8 billion increase in funding for NHS England and additional funding for local authorities delivering social care, but a cut in funding for public health. The HSC Act had delegated more responsibility for public health to local governments, against a background of dwindling local funding. Funds for public health in England were provided to local authorities

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out of the DHSC budget, but while that money was effectively ringfenced, the overall amount allocated dwindled after 2015 in almost every area. Funding for sexual health services, health checks, adult obesity, drug and alcohol services, tobacco control, the promotion of physical activity and children’s public health programmes decreased in real terms between 2014–2015 and 2019–2020. Only the National Child Measurement Programme, which targeted child obesity, saw a funding increase (Thomas, 2019). Furthermore, cuts in spending were not even across different parts of England. The most deprived areas of England received the deepest cuts while reductions in the richest parts of England were less significant. £1 of every £7 was cut in the 10 most deprived parts of England, compared to £1 in every £46 in the 10 least deprived areas (Thomas, 2019). This is particularly problematic because many of the factors that determine population health, e.g. ability to access healthy food and secure housing, the ability to avoid or manage stress and anxiety, or access to safe places to exercise, are closely connected to income. Populations in the most deprived areas of England tend to have a higher prevalence of chronic health problems, many of which could be alleviated or even avoided with adequate preventative programmes.

The Health Policy-Outcomes Gap The decline in funding for public health posed significant problems for the Government’s health improvement plans. Health researchers have demonstrated that cuts in public health funding are particularly undesirable given the effectiveness and comparatively lower cost of preventative actions to improve health (WHO, 2014). Helping someone to stop smoking in their 30s, for example, may prevent them from developing heart disease, cancer or other serious health problems that impair quality of life, cause premature death and require considerable resources to treat later in life. Although the organizational forms of NHS England and public health looked very different by 2020 than they did prior to 2012, there had never been strong evidence that these organizational changes—even if substantially backed by additional resources for health and social care, which did not happen—would produce the improvements in health and healthcare outcomes that leaders were looking for. Furthermore, the

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scale of the reforms, significant as they seemed compared to prior reorganizations, paled in comparison with the systemic factors impacting health in England, such as population ageing, increased income inequality and other upstream causes of increased disability among working-age people. Demand for health and social care increased during this period, but increased demand was not a simple function of population ageing. The prevalence of chronic disease and disability among the workingage population was also rising. Expectations among the public for their healthcare were rising too, with more people demanding diagnostic tests and ‘personalised’ care (NHS Providers, 2019). However, one of the most alarming trends was the increased difficulty for some people in accessing routine care. Waiting times increased between 2015–2020, for Accident and Emergency (A&E) admissions and treatment, for diagnostic tests, and for both routine and specialist appointments, causing the NHS to miss government targets. The proportion of patients waiting over 4 hours in major A&E settings increased from just over 10% in 2015 to over 20% by 2020. The percentage of patients waiting over 6 weeks for a diagnostic test increased from slightly above the government’s 1% target to 3%. In 2015, almost all patients (about 92%) were waiting less than 18 weeks for hospital treatment. By 2020, the proportion had declined to around 83%. In 2015, around 85% of patients were waiting less than 62 days for their first cancer treatment. In 2020, only 75% were seen within that time (Baker, 2021). In terms of coordination between health and social care, delayed discharge, where patients who must be discharged from hospital into long-term care settings are healthy enough to be discharged but remain in hospital due to a lack of space in social care capacity, remained an important issue (Nuffield Trust, 2021). Across both health and social care, one of the biggest problems and financial headaches that remained unresolved during this period was the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. Social care is a sector that has long experienced high turnover rates due to low pay, the perception of caring as an unskilled profession, and the often mentally and/or physically stressful nature of the work. Nurses, in particular, tend to move out of social care in order to pursue what are seen as better career options in the NHS. In 2016–2017, when the National Audit Office examined the social care workforce, turnover among care workers was 27.8% on average, but higher among care workers and registered nurses (NAO, 2018). Until July 2016, Non-British EEA nationals were an increasing

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fraction of the social care workforce, although not at a level sufficient to meet rising demand. Despite these considerable challenges, the NAO found that the Department of Health and Social Care had not produced a workforce strategy since 2009 (and had no plans to do so), had not followed through on key commitments to enhance career development and tackle recruitment and retention, and had not sufficiently incentivized improved pay and conditions (NAO, 2021). Workforce shortfalls were most apparent among nursing staff. Despite an increase in service output of almost 10% between 2014–2015 and 2017–2018, the number of FTE nurses in the NHS increased only slightly over this period. The number of nurses began to increase again in 2017. But by 2019, the number of nurses and nursing graduates per head of population lagged far behind both the OECD average and comparator countries including Australia, Germany, France, the United States and Canada (Buchan et al., 2020). From 2011, the rate of improvement in age-standardized mortality rates and life expectancy slowed down significantly for both males and females, in stark contrast with prior decades. Nor was the rate of change consistent across the population. For some age groups and in some parts of England, improvements stopped altogether (Raleigh, 2021). In 2014, the UK’s infant mortality rate, which had been falling for decades, began to rise, and rise more steeply in the most deprived areas of the country (Hiam et al., 2020).

Brexit Rhetoric and False Promises Poor health and healthcare experiences among the UK population reinforced public perceptions that the NHS was under threat, a view that played a significant role in the Brexit debates. The NHS, in particular, was leveraged by both sides as a symbol of national identity. Pro-Brexit campaigners promised during the Brexit campaign that leaving the EU would free up funding for additional investment in the NHS, while antiBrexit campaigners raised fears that exiting the EU would harm the UK’s economy, restricting available investment in health and social care. The pro-Brexit argument on health was best represented by a slogan painted on a large red bus by the Vote Leave campaign: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS Instead’. The official NHS logo was prominently displayed next to the slogan, against advice from the Department of Health and Social Care that it should not be used

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and would confuse the public (McCartney, 2016). Similar claims were made on campaign posters and leaflets delivered to households. The £350 million figure was frequently mentioned by key pro-Brexit politicians, most prominently Boris Johnson. The specific claim was false, but nevertheless carried significant political traction. The £350 million figure was described by the head of the UK National Statistics Agency as ‘a clear misuse of official statistics’ (BBC News, 2017). It was a gross figure, based on an estimate, that did not account for funding flows into the UK from the EU including the negotiated rebate. Critics also pointed out that upon leaving the EU, money formerly allocated for payments to the EU would not automatically be available to be spent elsewhere. Nor did the claim address other financial flows between the EU and non-government bodies like universities (ONS, 2017). As part of an argument that the UK would be better off financially after Brexit, anti-Brexit campaigners noted that the claim emphasized the issue of public payments to Brussels and deliberately did not engage with the wider potential costs and benefits of leaving the EU. Some responded to the claim with arguments emphasizing the economic benefits of the EU’s single market, while others engaged in public debates about the use of statistics. One campaigner crowdfunded private legal action against Boris Johnson, which reached the High Court but was ultimately thrown out on the grounds that it was politically motivated (Reuters, 2019). Ultimately, none of this refutation mattered, as the claim tapped into the public’s considerable affection for the NHS as well as their fears that the system was being undermined over time. To place those concerns in context: in 2013, polling for the NHS’ 65th Anniversary found that the NHS was the institution most likely to make respondents ‘proud to be British’. Yet while respondents were highly satisfied with the current NHS, they feared for its future, with many noting that the NHS did not have enough funding, was understaffed, had long waiting lists and a topheavy management structure (Ipsos MORI, 2014). In 2018, polling for the NHS’ 70th anniversary found that the vast majority of people in the UK had little faith in its longevity. 77% of respondents polled thought the NHS would be very different in another 70 years, with 54% agreeing that ‘we will have to pay for services that are free at the point of use now’ and 23% suggesting that the NHS ‘won’t exist at all’. Only 20% agreed that the NHS would remain free at the point of use (Health Foundation, 2018).

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But the real strength of the Brexit bus claim was not just that it tapped into fears about a failing NHS (which had some credibility, as the rest of this chapter shows). It was that the claim connected these fears with public concerns about immigration. Facebook adverts and campaign leaflets portrayed the NHS and other social programmes as under threat from uncontrolled migration. This cross-issue linkage proved to be very effective, despite internal dissent from some pro-Brexiters who wanted instead to highlight global trade rhetoric. Dominic Cummings, Director of the Vote Leave campaign, stated in 2017 that the ‘connection between immigration, £350 million and the NHS’ was ‘absolutely vital’ and was ‘necessary to win’ the referendum. He noted that in 2000, focus groups reported unhappiness with immigration but did not blame the EU. By 2015, however, ‘the EU was blamed substantially for the immigration/asylum crisis and this was entangled with years of news stories about ‘European courts’ limiting action against terrorists and criminals’ (Cummings, 2017; Kettell & Kerr, 2021). Rather than disappearing once the campaign was over, the Brexit bus claim and associated rhetoric had a lingering effect on health policy. Under the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, the struggle to shape what Brexit would look like in practice, combined with the jostling among Conservative MPs who wanted to be her successor as leader, stalled action to address some of the policy challenges discussed in this chapter including workforce recruitment and retention and pharmaceutical pricing. To these existing concerns, Brexit added uncertainty about the continuity of medical supply chains, the UK’s position in medical and health research, and the future of health and social care regulation. With one eye on a future premiership, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove continued to repeat the Brexit bus claim and similar arguments, long after others, including Nigel Farage, admitted the claim was false (Johnson, 2017; Watts, 2016). Johnson and Gove had good political reasons to stick to this rhetoric, as many people still had faith in the Brexit bus claim even after it had been routinely debunked. Even by 2018, polling showed that a significant proportion of people who had heard of the claim, 42%, believed it to be true (36% believed it was false and 22% were unsure) (Stone, 2018). The health policy challenges presented by leaving the single market were enormous and consequential. By some accounts, Brexit posed significant risks in almost every area of health policy that would need to be

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managed, with a ‘no deal’ Brexit scenario potentially leading to the worst outcomes (Fahy et al., 2017, 2019, 2020). Politics sometimes got in the way of better preparedness, however. For example, the government had strong incentives not to publicly address questions of workforce planning. This issue was highly politically salient because, like the Brexit bus claim itself, it tapped into public concerns about both understaffing within the NHS and immigration. The uncomfortable position for those delivering Brexit was that the NHS continued to rely on staff from the EU. In 2019, about 65,000 non-EU nationals were employed in NHS Hospital and Community Health Services, and a further 121,000 were employed across the adult social care workforce (Macdonald, 2020). The public also tended to overestimate both the number of foreign nationals working in the NHS and social care and the number of foreign nationals receiving healthcare through the NHS, making this issue even more politically contentious. Brexit planning on health was largely opaque, with government ministers expressing reluctance to publish any analysis or planning documents that would undermine the UK’s negotiating position. Parliamentary scrutiny of planning documents was delayed amidst contentious discussion of statements by Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, about impact assessments conducted by his department, whether they existed and, if so, in what form. In mid-2017, a leaked internal assessment by the DHSC raised the possibility that the NHS could lose as many as 40,000 nurses by 2026. In December 2017, while giving evidence to the House of Commons Committee on Exiting the European Union, Davis stated that he did not believe that Brexit would cause a nursing shortage. He also admitted that the impact assessments mentioned in his prior statements to parliament did not exist in the form he described (Malhotra, 2017). In the absence of clear central direction, parts of the NHS varied significantly in their degree of Brexit preparedness. In August 2018, Politico reported that 35 out of 38 English Hospital Trusts responding to their inquiry had no formal contingency plan for a no-deal Brexit (Cooper, 2018). As of December 2018, an investigation by the British Medical Journal found that of 161 NHS Trusts in England responding, only 9% had established a ‘committee or body to oversee preparations for Brexit’. Only one-quarter of responding trusts and health boards felt able to disclose information on any current risk assessment relating to Brexit. Of

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those assessments that had been completed and were disclosed, most were ‘thin on detail’ (Iacobucci, 2018). In late December 2018, the government finally issued guidance advising NHS and social care organizations on how to prepare for a nodeal Brexit, only three months before the first anticipated ‘Brexit day’, 29 March 2019. Organizations were advised to ‘use this guidance as a prompt to test their own contingency plans’, but also to ‘await further information’ on key issues of concern including workforce planning and reciprocal healthcare (DHSC, 2018). But parliamentary opposition to the withdrawal agreement caused DHSC to go back to the drawing board from even this preliminary advice. Further guidance was published in September 2019 in preparation for changes anticipated on 1 January 2021, but again had to be withdrawn only days later, on November 5th (DHSC, 2019a; 2019b). New guidance was not forthcoming until August 2020.

Conclusion Since the passage of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012, many scholars have debated the question of whether or not the reforms represented large-scale revolutionary change (Powell, 2016). Some experts who were close to the action saw the HSC Act as revolutionary, while others maintained that the changes showed primarily continuity with earlier governments (Jarman & Greer, 2015; Timmins, 2012). This chapter adds weight to the latter argument. As implemented, the HSC Act represents continuity with previous governments and policies in that it both builds on the organizational foundation of prior reforms and is a response to political incentives that have changed little since New Labour. The result of these reforms, England’s ‘submerged’ welfare state, posed important questions for health politics in the years to come. While public support for the NHS remained strong, invisible relationships among many different actors often obscured the ways in which healthcare, social care and public health programmes were organized and financed. While networks of actors were tasked with delivering integrated care in their geographic areas, they often had no formal accountability for the reforms they recommended and thus little ability to realize change in practice. The submerged welfare state was also a poor fit with public perceptions of health and social care delivery, as evidenced in the Brexit debates. Ultimately, grand promises made about the HSC Act’s impacts on costs,

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quality and the internal market were not fulfilled, largely due to the system’s inability to meet rising demand.

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Greer, S. L., Klasa, K., & Ginneken, E. (2020). Power and Purchasing: Why Strategic Purchasing Fails. Milbank Quarterly, 98(3), 975–1020. Ham, C., Baird, B., Gregory, S., Jabbal, J., & Alderwick, H. (2015) The NHS Under the Coalition Government: Part One, NHS Reform. The King’s Fund. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/field/field_public ation_file/the-nhs-under-the-coalition-government-part-one-nhs-reform.pdf. Accessed 10 February 2022. Ham, C., Alderwick, H., Dunn, P., & McKenna, H. (2017a). Delivering Sustainability and Transformation Plans: From Ambitious Proposals to Credible Plans. The King’s Fund. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/delivering-sus tainability-and-transformation-plans. Accessed 10 February 2022. Ham, C., Alderwick, H., Edwards, N., & Gainsbury, S. (2017b). Sustainability and Transformation Plans in London. The King’s Fund/The Nuffield Trust. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/2017b-09/STPs-Lon don-Kings-Fund-September-2017b_1.pdf. Accessed 14 February 2022. Harker, R. (2019). NHS Funding and Expenditure. London: House of Commons Library Briefing Paper CBP0724. https://researchbriefings.files. parliament.uk/documents/SN00724/SN00724.pdf. Accessed 4 February 2022. Hiam, L., Dorling, D., & McKee, M. (2020). Things Fall Apart: The British Health Crisis 2010–2020. British Medical Bulletin, 133(1), 4–15. https:// academic.oup.com/bmb/article/133/1/4/5812717. Accessed 14 February 2022. Iacobucci, G. (2018). NHS Trusts Struggle to Produce Brexit Plans Amid Continuing Uncertainty. British Medical Journal, 363, k5346. https://www. bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5346. Accessed 14 February 2022. Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). (2019). Sustainability and Transformation Plans: What, Why and Where Next? https://www.ippr.org/files/ 2017-06/stps-devo-health-june2017.pdf. Accessed 2 February 2022. Ipsos MORI. (2014). What the Public Think of the NHS at 65. https://www. ipsos.com/sites/default/files/migrations/en-uk/files/Assets/Docs/Publicati ons/ipsos-mori-nhs-at-65-slides.pdf. Accessed 14 February 2022. Jarman, H., & Greer, S. L. (2015). The Big Bang: Health and Social Care Reform Under the Coalition. In M. Beech & S. Lee (Eds.), The ConservativeLiberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government (pp. 50–67). Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, B. (2017, September 15). My Vision for a Bold, Thriving Britain Enabled by Brexit. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/0/ boris-johnson-vision-for-brexit-bold-thriving-britain/. Accessed 14 February 2022. Kettell, S., & Kerr, P. (2021). The Brexit Religion and the Holy Grail of the NHS. Social Policy and Society, 20(2), 282–295.

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Macdonald, M. (2020, January 10). The Health and Social Care Workforce Gap. House of Commons Library Insights. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ the-health-and-social-care-workforce-gap/. Accessed 14 February 2022. Malhotra, S. (2017, November 29). David Davis Boasted of His Brexit Impact Analysis Papers. Now He Wishes They Didn’t Exist. The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/the-staggers/2017/11/daviddavis-boasted-his-brexit-impact-analysis-papers-now-he-wishes-they. Accessed 14 February 2022. Mettler, S. (2011). The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy. University of Chicago Press. McCartney, M. (2016). Health Department Warned Vote Leave Not to Use NHS Logo. British Medical Journal, 355, i5482. https://www.bmj.com/con tent/355/bmj.i5482. Accessed 9 February 2022. National Audit Office (NAO). (2018). The Adult Social Care Workforce in England. The National Audit Office. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2018/02/The-adult-social-care-workforce-in-England.pdf. Accessed 14 February 2022. National Audit Office (NAO). (2020). NHS Financial Management and Sustainability. The National Audit Office. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/upl oads/2020/02/NHS-financial-management-and-sustainability.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2022. National Audit Office (NAO). (2021). The Adult Social Care Market in England. The National Audit Office. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2021/03/The-adult-social-care-market-in-England.pdf. Accessed 14 February 2022. NHS England. (2014). NHS Five Year Forward View. https://www.kingsfund. org.uk/sites/default/files/field/field_publication_file/the-nhs-under-the-coa lition-government-part-one-nhs-reform.pdf. Accessed 10 February 2022. NHS England. (2019). The NHS Long Term Plan. https://www.longtermplan. nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/nhs-long-term-plan-version-1.2.pdf. Accessed 2 February 2022. NHS Providers. (2018a). Working Collaboratively in Health and Care Systems: A Briefing for Governors. https://nhsproviders.org/stp-governor-briefing. Accessed 4 February 2022. NHS Providers. (2018b). Special Measures: Five years on. https://nhsproviders. org/special-measures-five-years-on. Accessed 14 February 2022. NHS Providers. (2019). The State of the NHS Provider Sector. https://nhsprovid ers.org/media/688434/the-state-of-the-nhs-provider-sector-october-2019. pdf. Accessed 2 February 2022.

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Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2017). Leave Campaign Claims During Brexit Debate. Response to FOI Request. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/ transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/leavecampaignclaim sduringbrexitdebate. Accessed 14 February 2022. Powell, M. (2016). Orders of Change in the Ordered Changes of the NHS. In M. Exworthy, M. Russell, & M. Powell (Eds.), Dismantling the NHS? Evaluating the Impact of Health Reforms (pp. 17–36). Policy Press. Raleigh, V. (2021). What Is Happening to Life Expectancy in England? The King’s Fund. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/whats-happeninglife-expectancy-england#trends-changing-after-2011. Accessed 14 February 2022. Reuters. (2019, 14 August). UK Court Blocks Bid to Prosecute PM Johnson over Brexit Bus Claim. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-johnsoncourt/uk-court-blocks-bid-to-prosecute-pm-johnson-over-brexit-bus-claimidUSKCN1V410D. Accessed 14 February 2022. Simpson, P. (2017). Public Spending on Adult Social Care in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN200.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2022. Smith, J., Walsh, K., & Hunter, D. (2001). The “Redisorganisation” of the NHS. British Medical Journal, 323, 1262. Song, Z. (2014). Accountable Care Organizations in the U.S. Health Care System. Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management, 21(8), 364–371. Stone, J. (2018, October 28). British Public Still Believe Vote Leave “£350 Million a Week to EU” Myth from Brexit Referendum. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vote-leavebrexit-lies-eu-pay-money-remain-poll-boris-johnson-a8603646.html. Accessed 3 March 2022. Stoye, G. (2017). UK Health Spending. Institute for Fiscal Studies Briefing Note BN201. https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN201.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2022. The Health Foundation. (2018) NHS at 70: Public Perceptions. The Health Foundation. https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/nhsat-70-public-perceptions. Accessed 8 February 2022. The King’s Fund. (2020). How Funding Flows in the NHS. https://www.kingsf und.org.uk/sites/default/files/2020-04/NHS_Funding_Flow_April_2020. pdf. Accessed 4 February 2022. The Nuffield Trust. (2020). NHS Health Reform Timeline. https://www. nuffieldtrust.org.uk/health-and-social-care-explained/nhs-reform-timeline. Accessed 10 February 2022. The Nuffield Trust. (2021). Delayed Transfers of Care. https://www.nuffieldt rust.org.uk/resource/delayed-transfers-of-care. Accessed 14 February 2022.

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Thomas, C. (2019, November 5). Hitting the Poorest Worst? How Public Health Cuts Have Been Experienced in England’s Most Deprived Communities. Institute for Public Policy Research blog. https://www.ippr.org/blog/pub lic-health-cuts#anounce-of-prevention-is-worth-a-pound-of-cure. Accessed 14 February 2022. Timmins, N. (2012). Never Again? The Story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012: A Study in Coalition Government and Policymaking. Institute for Government/King’s Fund https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ sites/default/files/publications/Never%20again_0.pdf. Accessed 10 February 2022. Walshe, K., Lorne, C., Coleman, A., McDonald, R., & Turner, A. (2018). Devolving Health and Social Care: Learning from Greater Manchester. The University of Manchester. Watts, J. (2016, December 28). Michael Gove Clings on to Vote Leave’s Discredited £350m NHS Claim. The Independent. https://www.indepe ndent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-news-michael-gove-nhs-claim350m-twitter-vote-leave-eu-uk-a7498651.html. Accessed 14 February 2022. Werner, A. (2021). Living Wage Implementation in Adult Social Care: Challenges, Solutions and Benefits. Living Wage Foundation/Middlesex University. https://mdx.figshare.com/articles/book/Living_Wage_Impleme ntation_in_Adult_Social_Care_challenges_solutions_and_benefits/166107 25/2. Accessed 14 February 2022. World Health Organization (WHO). (2014). The Case for Investing in Public Health: Strengthening Public Health Services and Capacity. WHO European Region. https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/278 073/Case-Investing-Public-Health.pdf. Accessed 4 March 2022.

CHAPTER 10

Conservative Welfare Policies: Ideational Oscillation in the Age of Brexit Daniel Pitt

Introduction the palace is not safe, when the cottage is not happy. Benjamin Disraeli (1848)

Two major speeches have a direct relationship to this chapter as they set the political paraments of the Conservative Party’s policies. The first is David Cameron’s now famous Bloomberg Speech delivered on 23 January 2013, where he announced that he was in favour of a referendum on the UK’s place within the European Union. The second is George Osborne’s, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, speech at Sertec, called New Year Economy Speech on 6 January 2014. Osborne said, ‘I can tell you today that on the Treasury’s current forecasts, £12 billion of further welfare cuts are needed in the first two years of the next Parliament’. Osborne was

D. Pitt (B) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_10

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unambiguous that the Conservatives would be ambiguous about where the welfare cuts would fall. According to Osborne, the plans for the cuts would be published in detail after the election (Cowley & Kavanagh, 2016). Subsequently, the Conservative Party went into the 2015 general election with two significant election pledges stating that we will ‘find £12 billion from welfare savings, on top of the £21 billion of savings delivered’ in the previous Parliament (Conservative Party Manifesto 2015).1 The general election returned a majority Conservative Government for the first time since 1992, albeit with a small majority of 12. Consequently, the election result ushered in the Age of Brexit and thus provides the environment and context in which the social security policies were to be considered. Both Brexit and social security policies were germane political issues. For instance, welfare was one of the top issues in terms of salience in all three of the Conservative Party’s manifestoes during this period. It was the most salient issue in 2015, the second most in 2017 and the fourth in 2019 (Allen & Bara, 2021). It is not surprising that welfare is a salient issue as the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is the largest spending department in the whole of government with the majority of its spending going on benefits and State Pensions. Nevertheless, it is not the only department that has spending responsibilities in relation to welfare spending. For example, Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue (HMRC) is responsible for personal tax credits, child benefits and tax-free childcare policies. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) welfare spending sat at ‘£222.9 billion in 2018-19’ (OBR, 2019: 3). This chapter focuses on the social security policies of the Conservative Party in government during the Age of Brexit. The analytical framework revolves around examining the continuities and discontinuities of social security policies during the three administrations (Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s). Moreover, the driving ideational traditions behind these policies will be identified and discussed. It is argued that making work pay, achieving fairness between the taxpayer and the claimant, and the simplification of the benefit system have been policy continuities throughout the Age of Brexit. Yet, there have also been discontinuities. Some examples are the focal point of social security policies, the rhetoric used and the end of austerity politics. Relatedly, there was an ideational

1 See Driver (2011) and Page (2015) for the Coalition’s years welfare policies.

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shift towards a form of one nation conservatism during this period. Nevertheless, the ideational shift was neither smooth nor linear but rather more of an oscillation between competing ideational traditions.

Discontinuity of Personnel During the Age of Brexit, there was the obvious discontinuity of Conservative Party leaders and Prime Ministers. There were three Prime Ministers but there was a greater discontinuity of personnel in the DWP. There were seven Secretaries of State (SoS) at the DWP averaging just under 8 months in the position.2 The turnover in Secretaries of State was rather significant but not necessarily unique historically speaking, although it was a rapid turnover. Two Secretaries of State explicitly resigned from their post over Brexit. McVey resigned over May’s proposed Brexit Deal (The Times, 2018) and Rudd resigned over Johnson’s Brexit strategy (BBC, 2019). Moreover, Duncan Smith (IDS) officially resigned over his opposition to disability benefit cuts (BBC, 2016). Nevertheless, according to IDS’s detractors, he resigned to play a more prominent role in the Leave campaign to hurt the government and therefore to make a Leave vote more likely (Cameron, 2019). Crabb was appointed as his replacement, and it was suggested that Crabb was appointed because he was a Remainer, and that no Leave campaigner could have been appointed to the cabinet due to the referendum being only a few months away. David Gauke had the Conservative Whip removed from him under Johnson’s leadership, because Gauke voted for the Benn Act (Politics Home, 2019). Consequently, the DWP was indeed affected by Brexit in that it had a destabilising effect on its personnel. This discontinuity in personnel at the top of the DWP can be compared by juxtaposing it to the Treasury. There were three Chancellors during

2 These were Iain Duncan Smith (12 May 2010–19 March 2016); Stephen Crabb (19 March 2016–14 July 2016); Damian Green (14 July 2016–11 June 2017); David Gauke (1 June 2017–8 January 2018); Esther McVey (8 January 2018–15 November 2018); Amber Rudd (16 November 2018–7 September 2019); and Thérèse Coffey. Coffey was appointed on 8 September 2019 and was still in her post at the conclusion of the Age of Brexit. Green held the post for the longest amount of time (10 months and 28 days) and Crabb held it for the shortest period (3 months and 25 days).

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this period3 in comparison with seven Secretaries of State at DWP. The relative stability of Chancellors in comparison with the SoS means that the holder of the position has more time to augment their authority. This combined with the power and prestige of the Treasury within government would suggest that the Chancellor would be in a position of strength in relation to welfare funding and policy. Therefore, increasing the chance of the social security policies to be seen from a Treasury perspective rather than a welfare one.

Continuity in Purpose and Key Policies and Programmes Despite the discontinuity of personnel during the Age of Brexit at the head of government, the Treasury and the DWP, there was a substantial amount of continuity in policy and programmes. The aim was to limit spending on working-age benefits, protect pensioners, encourage work, alleviate state dependency and to simplify the benefits system. On 8 July at the 2015 Summer Budget Osborne said: The welfare bill is too high, and the welfare system traps too many people in benefit dependency. And for too long, the government has addressed low pay by subsidising it through the tax credit system, instead of delivering lower business taxes and asking business to pay higher wages. (Osborne, 2015)

Osborne also said, he wanted the government to ‘reward work and back aspiration’ (ibid.). The government would achieve this by introducing a National Living Wage, by cutting taxes and by reforming the welfare system. These policy measures would, according to Osborne, make the system affordable and fairer. The 2015 Summer Budget also had other vital policy announcements. These were the four-year freeze on workingage benefits; reductions in work allowance; a rise in the taper in Universal

3 Osborne was in post until 13 July 2016, when May, as the new Prime Minister, sacked Osborne and reportedly told him to ‘get to know his party’. May then appointed Philip Hammond as Chancellor and he stayed in post until 24 July 2019. Johnson, then after becoming Prime Minister, appointed Sajid Javid as his Chancellor and he was still in the post by the end of the Age of Brexit.

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Credit (UC)4 ; a limit on two children in receipt of benefits from 6 April 2017; and a reduction in the thresholds for tax credits. All of these policies, according to the Conservatives, were meant to reduce the welfare bill by getting as many people into the workplace as possible. Whilst the main thrust of the policy was continuity across the three administrations, there were minor reforms. At the Autumn Statement, on 23 November 2016, it was announced that the Universal Credit taper rate would be reduced from 65 to 63% from April 2017, thus reversing Osborne’s 2015 rise. This reversal, it was argued, would potentiality benefit around 3 million working households (HM Treasury, 2016). On 15 June 2018, the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report about the roll-out of UC. The NAO found that some elements of UC were working well, especially the relationships between work coaches and claimants. Nevertheless, some claimants had struggled to adjust to UC and there were concerns about the rates and allowances within the system. Later in 2018, Hammond in his Budget Speech said that ‘Universal Credit is here to stay’ and that the government will be funding it to ensure that it is a success. Hammond said: I have heard the concerns about the rates and allowances within the design of the system…Today, I can tell the House that I am increasing work allowances in Universal Credit by £1,000 per annum, at a cost of £1.7 billion annually once roll-out is complete. That will benefit 2.4 million working families with children and people with disabilities by £630 per year. (Hammond, 2018)

Moreover, Hammond reiterated a core policy aim that the welfare system should ensure that ‘work should always pay’ (ibid.). Part of making work pay was the Benefit Cap, which was originally introduced in 2013 by the Coalition and then tightened. Osborne, in the Summer Budget 2015, said:

4 The Flagship Universal Credit (replacing six ‘legacy benefits’ with one benefit) and its slow and inefficient role out was a continuation. The ‘Full Service’ was completely rolledout across the whole of the UK in December 2018. The aim of UC was: (i) to simplify and streamline the benefits system; (ii) improve work incentives; (iii) tackle poverty among low-income families; and (ix) reduce the scope for fraud and error within the system.

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We have already introduced a cap on the total amount of benefits any out of work family can receive, at £26,000. It encouraged tens of thousands into work. We will now go further, and reduce the benefits cap from £26,000 to £23,000 in London, and £20,000 in the rest of the country. (Osborne, 2015)

Another policy continuation in the Age of Brexit was the controversial two-child limit, which was expected to save around £3 billion per annum but the policy was severely criticised.5 A coalition of religious leaders claimed that the policy was ‘fundamentally anti-family’ (Guardian, 2015). From a one nation and a traditional conservative6 perspective, this claim is philosophically concerning. The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee’s, The Two-Child Limit, report (2019: 3) recommend the reversal of the policy because it ‘fails to achieve the government’s own objectives’ and it has ‘unintended consequences’. The reversal would mean, according to the report, that government should provide all children with support ‘through the benefits system’ (3 November 2019, HC 51: para 44, p. 15). Yet, Coffey, when providing oral evidence to the committee, argued that the two-child limit is a ‘popular policy in the country’ and that ‘people see it as a sensible way for the Government to use their taxes’ (16 October 2019, HC 50, Q 274). Consequently, the policy was still in place at the end of the Age of Brexit. There was also a continuation of policy in relation to childcare. Cameron as Prime Minister announced his plans to double free childcare for working parents on 1 June 2015. The policy was then introduced under May’s leadership on 1 September 2017. Greening, the Education Secretary said: For too long lots of families really struggled to manage the cost of childcare and that’s why we have delivered on our promise to provide 30 hours free – saving working families around £5,000 a year. (Greening, 2017)

5 See, for example, Child Poverty Action Group and Institute of Fiscal Studies reports on the two-child limit. 6 Traditional conservative beliefs have often been summarised by the three Fs—Faith, Flag and Family. For an intellectual espousal of this form of conservatism see Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

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There was also continuation in the New Enterprise Allowance (NEA) and the State Pension. NEA was originally reintroduced in 2011.7 The allowance supported people on eligible benefits to move into selfemployment. During May’s premiership, in April 2017, Phase 2 was launched, thus adding UC claimants who currently owned businesses to the scheme. Additionally, a new State Pension was announced on 19 March 2013. The aim of the new State Pension was to be simpler, in line with the Conservative Party’s aim to simplify welfare, and this, it was argued, would be achieved via a flat rate. The new State Pension was introduced on 6 April 2016, and it was the largest component of welfare spending. In 2019–2020, the State Pension accounted for £98.9 billion of public expenditure. The main thrust of the Conservative Party’s policies and programmes was kept in place during the Age of Brexit. Nevertheless, in November 2015, the DWP announced it was replacing the Work Programme and Work Choice with a new Work and Health Programme. The programme officially ceased on 1 April 2017. Under May, a work, health and disability green paper, was published and a new joined up approach under the slogan ‘improving lives’ was introduced.

Towards One Nation: An Ideational Oscillation Behind the social security policies, there were two competing ideational traditions. The first, which has been the paradigmatic and ‘favoured economic doctrine of the Conservative Party’, was economic liberalism (Beech, 2015: 4). The paradigm of economic liberalism, according to Gamble (2013: 54), is ‘sound money, free trade, and laissez-faire’. In short, economic liberals within the Conservative Party prioritise a small state, a reduction of welfare benefits and they believe that those who are currently impoverished will respond best to financial incentives rather than behavioural modifications. Beech writes that: Reductions in public expenditure, reductions of direct taxation, privatisation, and the scaling back of welfare provision are all consistent with the economic liberal conception of how to shrink the size and influence of the state and, by so doing, attain greater liberty for individuals. (Beech, 2015: 5)

7 A similar programme was setup during Margaret Thatcher’s Government called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme.

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The second was a one nation form of conservatism (see: Walsha, 2003; Seawright, 2010; and Hickson et al., 2020). The parameters and content of one nation conservatism are not always clear as it is often confused with economic and social liberalism. Individuals as varied as Iain MacLeod,8 Enoch Powell9 and Stanley Baldwin10 to name a few, have all been associated with it. Scruton (2006) in his chapter on Hayek and conservatism referred to two different stances that conservatives have traditionally taken towards the welfare state. He argues that some conservatives have been attracted to the arguments put forward by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke; that is a market economy that is combined with welfare provisions that aim to retain the loyalty of the citizens. This was juxtaposed by Scruton (2006) with the position that believes the welfare state is a threat that might undermine shared loyalty. In this chapter, the former is associated with the one nation form of conservatism and the latter with economic liberalism. The term one nation, in this chapter, is being utilised to refer to a conservatism that is in favour of a market economy but with government intervention, a focus on unity and solidarity in social policy and utilisation of the state to improve lives. This ‘dualism’ within the Conservative Party has also been commented on by various other scholars (Glickman, 1961; Greenleaf, 1983; Norton & Aughey, 1981).11 As well as economic liberalism vs one nation, as labelled in this chapter, this tension has also been referred to as ‘interventionist wets’ vs ‘Thatcherite dries’ (Heppell & Hill, 2005: 38), ‘Global Britain’ vs ‘Britain Frist’ (Gamble, 2020: 1) and ‘One Nation’ vs ‘Thatcherite Right’ (Pitt, 2021). This tension within the Conservative Party can indeed be creative. It can also be a useful tool for the party leader. For example, the leader could pick and choose the best solution from competing ideational traditions for the particular problem of 8 Iain MacLeod was a Conservative Member of Parliament for Enfield West (1950– 1970). He also held various position in Government including Chancellor of the Exchequer. 9 Enoch Powell was a Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West (1947–1974) and then became an Ulster Unionist MP for South Down (1974– 1987). 10 Stanley Baldwin was a three-time Prime Minister during the 1920s and 1930s and a Conservative MP for Bewdley. 11 In relation to the poverty and inequality see: Kevin Hickson, (2009) Conservatism and the Poor: Conservative Party Attitudes to Poverty and Inequality Since the 1970s. British Politics, 4(3), 341–362.

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the day (Aughey, 1996). Nevertheless, the tension can manifest itself in a negative form, in which the party leader, in this case Cameron, May or Johnson, had to manage, control and diminish the tension in order to formulate coherent policy positions. These two ideational traditions went head-to-head at the top of government but there was also a third ideational tradition competing for influence—traditional conservatism. This, however, was found more on the back benches. The competing ideational traditions created battles between the incumbents in the Treasury and DWP. Of course there are going to be clashes in government, especially between spending departments and the Treasury, but the competing ideational traditions created a further dynamic to this tension. The Conservative peer and Minister of State for Welfare Reform, in both Cameron and May’s administrations, Lord Freud, framed this battle as the clashing of agendas; that is, between a cuts agenda and a reform agenda. In this categorisation, Osborne and Hammond are firmly in the cuts rather than reform camp. Moreover, both men are economic liberals and both men were supportive of the politics of austerity. Osborne, when standing in for Cameron at Prime Minister’s Question Time, said: ‘we have got 1% of the world’s population, 4% of its GDP, but we undertake 7% of the world’s welfare spending’ (HC Debates, 17 June 2015: c316). These World Bank figures were utilised by Osborne to support his arguments that the welfare spending was disproportionate and ‘completely unsustainable’ and required cutting back (ibid.). Relatedly, IDS highlighted, in his resignation letter to Cameron, the clashing of agendas within the government as well as the ideational tension. Duncan Smith wrote: There has been too much emphasis on money saving exercises and not enough awareness from the Treasury, in particular, that the government’s vision of a new welfare-to-work system could not be repeatedly salamisliced. (BBC, 2016)

Crabb, IDS’s replacement, in a statement to the House of Commons, said that the government: will not be going ahead with the changes to PIP that were put forward. We have no further plans to make welfare savings beyond the very substantial savings legislated for by parliament two weeks ago, we will now focus on implementing. (HC Debates, 21 Mar 2016: c1269)

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Prima facie Crabb’s policy announcement, seen through the ideational lens seems to have been a win for the one nation view of welfare as Crabb did articulate some elements of it in his statement. Moreover, seen through the personal lens it could also be seen as a win for IDS over Osborne. This was despite the fact that IDS had to take the ‘nuclear’ option of resigning, which demonstrated the strength of economic liberalism and its cutting agenda. As a previous Tory leader had to use the ultimate weapon to move the policy dial towards a one nation position and to ensure that the most vulnerable—the disabled—were not disadvantaged. On the other hand, the change of policy could be interpreted as not being a direct consequence of Duncan Smith’s resignation per se, but rather Cameron’s considerations of realpolitik; that is, the parliamentary arithmetic (Grover, 2016). Yet, the policy’s passage through the House of Commons would have stood a greater chance if IDS supported the measure. The ideational oscillation between economic liberalism and one nation conservatism continued into May’s administration. This was despite May’s attempt to distance her premiership from the Cameron era’s social security policies by attempting to establish a distinctive social policy platform (Williams, 2017). Relatedly, May articulated her commitment to lead a one nation government in her speech on the steps of Downing Street and her intention to move away from economic liberalism as she had the belief in the good that government intervention can do (May, 2016). According to Page (2018), May believed that the government ought to be utilised to protect the not so well educated, the culturally marginalised and the economically insecure. According to Hickson (2020: 133), May ‘signalled a reduction in the pace of austerity’. In her 2018 party conference speech there was a section called ‘End of Austerity’ (Barwell, 2021; Guardian, 2018). Nevertheless, May’s appointee as Chancellor was committed to the cuts agenda and his whole economic strategy focused around cutting expenditure (Timothy, 2020). Philip Hammond refused to modify the party’s fiscal policy and he said to May, ‘you don’t need to actually do any of this stuff’ as ‘you’re miles ahead in the polls just talking about it’ (ibid.: 7). Hammond in his Spring Budget 2017 made it clear that his priority was building a resilient economy over welfare spending. May’s relationship with Hammond deteriorated and became ‘bitter and rancorous’ (Timothy 2020: 7). Consequently, the tension around social security policy continued during May’s premiership but the tension was between 10 Downing Street and 11 Downing Street. May did try, but unsuccessfully, to remove Hammond from his post as Chancellor (Shipman, 2017).

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May appointed her long-term friend Damian Green as SoS, who had been a self-styled advocate for one nation conservatism (Green, 2005). In September 2016, Green reaffirmed that under May’s premiership there would be ‘no new cuts’ to social security and tax credits. Green said, to Andrew Marr on his Sunday morning programme, that his tenure at the DWP would be different from IDS’s. Green said that ‘I am different from Iain – I will use different language’ (Green, 2016a). Despite the change in rhetoric, the thrust of welfare policy, according to Green, was the same that work should always pay. Green said that he was, along with IDS committed to ‘social justice’ (ibid.). Green defined social justice as not merely measuring the benefits bill but by measuring the help it is giving to individuals (ibid.), in other words, its impact. On 13 December 2016,12 Green stated that he believed that one of the prime objectives of the welfare system is to help people find work. He desired to ‘create a modern, civilised and fair welfare system, fit for the world of work in the twenty-first century’ (Green 2016b), accordingly reiterating the party’s social security aims during this period. Yet, despite Green’s closeness to the PM and his commitment to one nation conservatism, he did not carry the weight or the authority of IDS and therefore was unable to move the policy dial in his preferred direction. The consequence was, despite the Prime Minister’s policy vision and her commitments to tackling the ‘burning injustices’, that the strength of the Treasury was not counterbalanced by having a heavy weight in situ at DWP. Nevertheless, the ideational tensions grew stronger after the result of the 2017 general election. May, in her cabinet reshuffle, appointed Green as her First Secretary of State and he effectively became de facto deputy Prime Minister. Green’s replacement, Gauke, was a committed economic liberal. In similar vein to both Crabb and Green, Gauke did not carry the weight or status of having deeply thought about welfare reform before his appointment to the DWP. Indeed, Gauke was appointed because he could master a complex brief rather than initiate new policy proposals as the plan was to continue IDS’s policies and to fix UC (Barwell, 2021). Gauke’s replacement, McVey, according to Barwell (2021), was not May’s first choice. May originally wanted Greening to take the post, but she turned May down and became Education Secretary instead. Subsequently, there was an oscillation between the competing 12 The one-hundred-year anniversary of the creation of a department in charge of social security.

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traditions during May’s premiership. Economic liberalism remained the dominating ideology in terms of policy outcomes. Yet, it did not fully surmount the one nation tradition in terms of rhetoric due in part to the PM’s commitments. Johnson in the early part of his premiership aimed to position himself in the one nation camp. His Chancellor, Sajid Javid, in his Spending Round 2019 speech said that the Conservatives ‘are a One Nation party and this is a One Nation government’ (Javid, 2019). Javid also tried to distance himself and the government from the austerity politics of the Cameron/Osborne era and showed that he was willing to adjust fiscal policy away from the cuts agenda unlike Hammond. Javid said that ‘we are turning the page on austerity and beginning a new decade of renewal. A new economic era needs a new economic plan’ (ibid.). Javid turned on the spending taps. Javid said, ‘I am deciding to set the real increase in day-to-day spending next year at £13.8 billion’ or by ‘4.1%’ (ibid.). According to the Spending Round 2019 documents, it was the first time since the Spending Review 2002 that no government department, including the DWP, would be facing cuts to its day-to-day budget (HM Treasury, 2019). Relatedly, the turning on of the taps would mean that it was the ‘fastest planned real growth in day-to-day departmental spending in 15 years’ (ibid.: 1). Therefore, according to Javid, austerity had come to an end. Coffey, in the House of Commons, reiterated the fact that this would mean a budget ‘increase by 1.9% ahead of inflation for the first time since 2011’ for the DWP (HC debates, 7 October 2019: c1491). More spending commitments were announced. For example, on 20 September 2019, up to £6 million was announced for 100 Armed Forces Champion posts.13 Moreover, on 1 November 2019, Coffey announced a £10 million Universal Credit Transition Fund (Coffey, 2019). The aim, according to Coffey, of the fund was to assist vulnerable people to access UC and to utilise it as springboard into work. In addition, Will Quince, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Delivery, announced more funding for Funeral Expenses Payments (FEP) and an extra £3 million to support homeless people claiming benefits. The increase in FEP from £700 to £1,000 was the first increase in circa 13 At the time of the announcement, there were 46 Armed Forces Champions. They provide employment support and benefits advice to former servicemen and women and assist them in readjusting to civilian life.

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16 years, which marked a small policy discontinuity from both Cameron and May. Due to this extra spending under Johnson, ideational oscillation concluded, and the Party’s social security positions shifted towards a form of one nation conservatism. This was not yet a paradigmatic shift within the parliamentary party, but the one nation tradition started to get the upper hand over economic liberalism.

Recipients of Social Security Policies and a Rhetorical Oscillation The rhetoric utilised to communicate policy positions of the Conservative Governments from Cameron to Johnson also demonstrated the ideational tension that underpinned the Conservatives’ social security policies. For example, the ‘we are all in this together’ slogan was utilised to emphasise unity. It was straight from the one nation song sheet. Nevertheless, Osborne, on the Today programme, articulated a different rhetorical strategy saying that: they pull the door behind them and they are going to do their job and they look at their next-door neighbour, the blinds are down and that family is living a life on benefits. (Osborne, 2012)

Thus, Osborne rhetoric was creating a divide between those who are contributing and those who were not. This rhetorical strategy was utilised to demonstrate that there was an unfairness in the current welfare system. This unfairness, according to Osborne, was between those who pay in (those going out to work) and those who take out (those staying at home with their blinds down). As a core component of the Conservatives Party’s social security policies was to achieve fairness between these two groups, it was paramount to demonstrate that there was an unfairness that required rebalancing. Osborne utilised this rhetorical flourish to drive home the point to the British electors and to generate support for the policy. Both Cameron, May and Johnson all utilised one nation rhetoric although both May and Johnson tried to distance themselves from Cameron by utilising slightly different form of rhetoric. For example, Cameron utilised the slogan ‘Big Society’ (Edwards, 2012; Norman, 2010), whilst ‘Shared Society’ was favoured by May (Espiet-Kilty, 2018). May and Johnson tried to shift the ideational dial and to move the party’s direction away from the economic liberalism by adjusting their rhetoric.

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May declared at the start of her leadership bid, distancing herself from her predecessor, ‘we don’t just believe in markets, but in communities, we don’t believe in individualism, but in society’. According to Williams (2017: 131), May utilised rhetoric such as ‘fairness’, ‘making government work for all people’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘social mobility’. A ‘Great Meritocracy’, tackling ‘burning injustices’ and ‘the good that government can do’ were also part of May’s rhetorical repertoire in order to shift the party onto a one nation footing. For example, May in an article for the Sunday Telegraph outlined her view of the shared society: A society that doesn’t just value our individual rights but focuses rather more on the responsibilities we have to one another; a society that respects the bonds of family, community, citizenship and strong institutions that we share as a union of people and nations; a society with a commitment to fairness at its heart. (May, 2017)

May desired to seize the opportunity of Brexit to build a shared society. May thought that the way to do this was to embrace genuine and wideranging social reform. She wrote: We will move beyond the narrow focus on social justice – where we help the very poorest – and social mobility – where we help the brightest among the poor. Instead, we will engage in a more wide-ranging process of social reform so that those who feel that the system is stacked against them – those just above the threshold that typically attracts the government’s focus today yet who are by no means rich or well off – are also given the support they need. (ibid.)

In other words, there would be broadening out of policy to include the ‘Just About Manging’ (JAMs) as well as the those who were not managing at all. According to Hickson et al. (2020), these social groups have often been overlooked in relation to welfare programmes as they sit at or above the welfare line. May’s social policies, according to Page (2018), were aimed at tackling ‘inter-generational injustice’ as well as other injustices. This included pension reforms. In the Conservative Party 2017 Manifesto the desire to ensure that younger generations did not carry the burden of paying for the generous pensions of older generations was articulated. Relatedly, the 2017 Manifesto pledged to scrap the triple lock on the state pension after 2020 (which was introduced by the Coalition Government

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in 2010) and replace it with a double lock. Thus, creating a policy discontinuity, but there was another discontinuity from the Cameron era, which was the pledge to means test winter fuel payments for pensioners. Nick Timothy, May’s Co-Chief of Staff, thought that the intended changes to pensioner benefits were ‘tough medicine’ but ‘necessary’ (Timothy 2020: 18). Nevertheless, the policies were never introduced, as the Confidence and Supply Agreement between the Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party stipulated that there would ‘be no change to the Pensions Triple Lock and the universal nature of the Winter Fuel Payment’ (Cabinet Office, 2020: 2). According to Byrne et al. (2021), May’s ambitions to transform Britain during her premiership into ‘a Great Meritocracy’ and her commitment to tackling ‘burning injustices’ went unfulfilled. Under the leadership of Johnson, the 2019 Manifesto pledged to keep the triple lock, the winter fuel payment and pensioners’ bus passes. These pledges were more consistent with Cameron’s policy programme rather than May’s. Nevertheless, the pledge to ‘end the benefit freeze’ (Conservative Party Manifesto, 2019: 17) was a discontinuity with Cameron’s policy programme as the benefit freeze was announced in the 2015 Summer Budget and then legislated for in section 11 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016.

Indicative Achievements and Criticisms The achievements and criticisms in this section are indicative rather extensive and are from differing perspectives for illustrative purposes. Despite the ideational tension and oscillation in relation to the values and ideas underpinning social security policies, the Conservative Party could point to some achievements in the Age of Brexit. Priti Patel, at the beginning of the Age of Brexit, stated three core achievements: (1) there were more women in work than ever before; (2) there was high employment; and (3) people were moving off social security provision and into work (Patel, 2015). These achievements continued throughout the period. The figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published on 17 December 2019 showed that 32.80 million people were in work and that the employment rate was at 76.2%, which was a record high. Accordingly, the unemployment rate sat at 3.8% the lowest level since the mid-1970s (ONS, 2019). There were, of course, criticisms of the government, from both the left and the right.

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Conservative commentators, such as the Mail on Sunday Journalist, Peter Hitchens, argued that the increase in women in the workplace ought to be seen as a policy failure. Hitchens claimed, with his characteristic hyperbolic lexicon, that women in the workplace push down wages for men and this has led to a general fall in wages following the ‘conscription of women into labour force’ and into ‘wage- slavery’ (Hitchens, 2009, 2017). This is because, according to Hitchens, men are no longer earning a ‘family wage’ and as a consequence, women have to enter into the workforce. In a similar vein, Laura Perrins, the co-editor of The Conservative Women (TCW) website,14 argued that many women do not wish to enter the workforce but have due to money pressure. Additionality, Perrins argued, that more women and more people generally are entering into the workforce. The consequence is that ‘there is no one left to hold the baby unless you pay someone to do it’ (Perrins, 2015). According to Perrins, this means more government funding for childcare (which was the Conservative Party’s policy) and as a consequence the expansion of the welfare state, not a reduction as economic liberals within the party desired. In addition, traditional conservatives within the Conservative Party15 still held concerns about the welfare system despite the reforms implemented during the Age of Brexit. They had general concerns on whom the burden of the cuts were falling on and the type of reforms. Sir Edward Leigh MP (Gainsborough) thought it is a ‘mistake to cut the welfare benefits or tax credits of people who are already on small incomes and depending on their tax credits’ (HC Debates, 26 May 2016, c752). A more particular concern was about ‘couple penalties’ within the benefit system, which suggested the system had an anti-family bias. In September 2017, Fiona Bruce MP (Congleton) and the Conservative peer Lord Farmer, with the backing of over 50 Conservative MPs and 8 Peers, published A Manifesto to Strengthen Families, which was ground in traditional conservatism. Thus, demonstrating that there was another

14 Not to be confused with Conservative Women’s Organisation (CWO), which is affiliated with the Conservative Party. The TCW is neither affiliated nor a supporter of the Conservative Party. 15 Traditional conservativism within the Conservative Party has often been associated with the Cornerstone Group, which was headed by Sir John Hayes MP (South Holland and The Deepings).

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ideational tradition that was competing for policy influence. The manifesto addressed, among other areas, the financial distinctives within the benefits system. They argued for (i) a boost in the marriage allowance for lower income couples with children; (ii) enable those on Universal Credit and entitled to marriage allowance to receive it automatically; and (iii) reduce the remaining couple penalties in UC over successive budgets (Bruce & Framer, 2017). On 2 November 2017, Lord Farmer led a House of Lords debate on its proposals (HL Debates, 2 November 2017, c1542). Relatedly, Bruce led a Westminster Hall debate in February 2018, in which she asked the government to: continue to look at removing the financial disincentives for the poorest— those on low incomes—to form lasting couple relationships. It cannot make sense that a household can acquire more money in benefits if they split up than if they stay together. (HC Debates, 8 February 2018, c637WH)

In other words, these Conservative’s believed that the welfare system required further reform, but this reform should be pro-family, it should promote active fatherhood and should enable lasting relationships. Some Labour critics, however, claimed that the new welfare-to-work system was not working because individuals were obtaining jobs that were inadequately paid and they were not full-time or of ‘quality’. As a consequence, they argued these previous welfare claimants were in in-work poverty and therefore earning ‘poverty wages’. At a Work and Pensions Questions, Mike Amesbury, a Labour MP for Weaver Vale, said he believed that ‘[w]ell-paid, secure work is a good route out of poverty’ (which was the Conservative Government’s position), but he believed that there were too many people, especially young adults who were ‘not in education, employment and training’ or they were ‘in low-paid jobs and on zero-hours contracts’ (HC Debates, 7 October 2019, c1486). On the same day, Will Quince, in the House of Commons, addressed the issue of in-work poverty. He said: [s]ince 2010, there are over 3.7 million more people in work and 730,000 fewer children growing up in workless households. About three quarters of employment growth has been in full-time work, which has been proven to substantially reduce the risk of poverty. (HC Debates, 7 October 2019, c1484)

Conservative MP Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire), from the backbenches, cited The Resolution Foundation report that ‘low pay is falling

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for the first time in four decades’ and that since the introduction of the national living wage employees on low pay has fallen from ‘20.7% to 17.1%’ (HC Debates, 7 October 2019, c1484). A controversial issue during the Age of Brexit was the role out of UC and the increased usage of food banks (Lambie-Mumford, 2017; Loopstra et al., 2018) and the ‘localisation of responsibility’ (Strong, 2020). They first became an issue during the Coalition years, but they also continued throughout both May and Johnson’s administrations. In mid to late 2019, several Labour MPs blamed the proliferation of food banks on the economic and welfare policies of the Tory governments. For example, Toby Perkins MP (Chesterfield) claimed that there was a ‘direct link’ in the ‘increase in homelessness and poverty’ and the Conservatives’ welfare policies (HC Debates, 7 October 2019, c1497). Chi Onwuachi, the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, claimed that in her constituency the benefits freeze had been the reason for the proliferation of food banks (HC Debates, 7 October 2019, c1496). In addition, Diana Johnson, MP for Kingston upon Hull North, referred to the Trussell Trust’s finding that ‘nearly half of all food bank referrals are due to a delay in benefits being paid when universal credit is rolled out’ (HC Debates, 1 July 2019, c910). Nevertheless, Johnson did say that ‘even before universal credit was rolled out in Hull, the use of the Hull food bank was very high because we have widescale in-work poverty’ (ibid.). The conservative response to food banks was unsure and the party oscillated between positions, thus demonstrating the tension within the Conservative Party and within conservatism on this issue. According to Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator magazine, ‘[f]ood banks highlight a solution, rather than a problem’, and they were the Big Society in action (Nelson, 2015). Moreover, Conservative MPs Robert Halfon (Harlow) and John Glen (Salisbury) thought that food banks helped those people who fell through the cracks in the welfare system. Indeed, food banks within conservative thought can represent localism (solving the issue at source), volunteerism (local people giving their time) and a community spirit or neighbourliness (individuals and organisations donating the food) as captured by Cameron’s Big Society policy platform. As Nelson (2015) wrote, food banks ‘embody the way in which charities and communities can come together, to help people failed by government’. Relatedly, Jacob Rees Mogg, MP for North East Somerset, took a similar view that government cannot and should not do everything. He said, on Nick Ferrari’s LBC show, that ‘charitable’ and ‘voluntary

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support’ to one’s fellow citizens ‘is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are’ (Rees Mogg, 2017). He also argued that as food banks were now freely advertised at Job Centre Plus (unlike under the Labour Government) this would, of course, lead to an increase in usage (Rees Mogg, 2017). Yet, food banks can also be seen in a negative light within conservative thought. It can demonstrate the lack of stability within the home as family’s are unable to provide basic food staples for themselves. A former Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, pithily said, in a speech to Wynyard Horticultural Show in 1848, that ‘the palace is not safe, when the cottage is not happy’ (Moneypenny & Buckle, 1929: 709). In other words, food poverty and insecurity could have negative implications for law, order and civil unrest. Conservative’s utilising this line of thought could quote John Maynard Keynes’s observation that civilisation is a ‘thin and precarious crust’ (Keynes, 1933). If there is not enough crust to go around, this could lead to anarchy and disorder, the antithesis of conservatism. Accordingly, more targeted and personalised welfare spending could be advocated to reduce the demand for food bank usage.

Conclusion In the Age of Brexit, there was a continuation in core policy aims and objectives in the Conservative Party’s social security platform. This was despite the discontinuity of personnel and the oscillation between the two ideational traditions of economic liberalism and one nation conservatism. Additionally, the traditional conservative view of welfare was also competing for influence over the policy agenda but this tradition was mostly articulated from the back benches and from MPs and Peers associated with the Cornerstone Group or the Conservative Christian Fellowship. May tried to break away from economic liberal policies and austerity politics of the Cameron era, but she was unable to move past the rhetoric into policy implementation. Johnson, however, alongside his Chancellor, Javid turned on the spending taps and thus shifted the dial towards a one nation position on social security. Nevertheless, this was not yet a paradigmatic shift within the parliamentary party as economic liberalism still held sway in the Age of Brexit. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr Matt Beech, Karoliina Pitt and Paul Maginnis who read and commented on previous drafts of this chapter. I am also

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grateful to those who commented on previous drafts of this chapter during the workshop and at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting on 3 October 2021. Any mistakes are entirely my own.

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(Eds.), Social Policy Review 30: Analysis and Debate in Social Policy, 2018. Policy Press. Patel, P. (2015, May 13). Priti Patel: Employment at an All-Time High, Creating a More Prosperous Future for Britain. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/gov ernment/news/priti-patel-employment-at-an-all-time-high-creating-a-moreprosperous-future-for-britain. Date accessed 14 October 2021. Perrins, L. (2015). Laura Perrins: The Big State Is the Inevitable Result of Chaining Women to the Work Station. Available at: https://www.conservative woman.co.uk/laura-perrins-the-big-state-is-the-inevitable-result-of-chainingwomen-to-the-work-station/. Date accessed 4 November 2021. Pitt, D. (2021). Future Conservative Electoral Prospects: Time for Tory Socialism? Observatoire de la Société Britannique/French Journal of British Studies, 27, 267–291. Politics Home. (2019, September 4). Twenty-One Tory Rebels Lose Party Whip After Backing Bid to Block No-Deal Brexit. Available at: https://www.the times.co.uk/article/full-text-of-dominic-raabs-letter-of-resignation-as-brexitsecretary-g332qnz3g. Date accessed 11 October 2021. Röpke, W. (1960). A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market. Henry Regnery Company. Rees Mogg, J. (2017, September 14). Interview on the Nick Ferrari Show. Seawright, D. (2010). The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics. Continuum. Shipman, T. (2017). Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. William Collins. Strong, S. (2020, March). Food Banks, Actually Existing Austerity and the Localisation of Responsibility. Geoforum, 110, 211–219. Scruton, R. (2006). Hayek and Conservatism. In E. Feser (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Hayek. Cambridge University Press. The Times. (2018, November 15). Full Text of Dominic Raab and Esther McVey’s Letters of Resignation. Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/ article/full-text-of-dominic-raabs-letter-of-resignation-as-brexit-secretary-g33 2qnz3g. Date accessed 11 October 2021. Timothy, N. (2020). Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism. Policy Press. Walsha, R. (2003). The One Nation Group and One Nation Conservatism, 1950–2002. Contemporary British History, 17 (2), 69–120. Williams, B. (2017). Tory Ideology and Social Policy Under Theresa May: Current and Future Directions. Renewal, 25(3–4), 128–137. Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. (c.7) London: The Stationery Office. Work and Pensions Committee, The Two-Child Limit, 30 October 2019, HC 51: 2017–2019.

CHAPTER 11

Consistently Inconsistent? Assessing UK Climate Action in the Age of Brexit Jeremy F. G. Moulton

Introduction The story of United Kingdom’s (UK) climate action during the Age of Brexit is one of contradictions. At some moments, the UK positioned itself as a world-leading climate actor—instituting pledges that no other states had previously committed to and that many will likely follow in years to come. At other times, the Conservative governments have seemed hesitant or even resentful of the responsibilities that mitigating climate change has put upon them. In many ways, this is not remarkable. The UK’s role in climate action has long been questioned on its ingrained paradox, with a world-leading role that is simultaneously undermined by its domestic record and the politics surrounding climate change in the UK (Rayner & Jordan, 2010). With the institution of the Climate Change Act in 2008, which had strong cross-party support, the UK became the first country in the world

J. F. G. Moulton (B) Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_11

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to have a legally binding commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE). However, this success has not meant that the UK has enjoyed an uninterrupted tenure as a pioneer of climate action ambition in the years since the Act’s institution. The UK’s record on climate action is ‘riddled with tensions between demonstrations of leadership, in a variety of forms, and markedly unambitious additional actions’ (Moulton, 2021: 183). Whilst the UK might be consistently inconsistent in its role as a climate action pioneer, given the significance of the Age of Brexit (defined in the introductory chapter to this book) and the transition of the UK away from climate policy creation within the European Union (EU), the period addressed in this book, and in this chapter, marks a particularly significant time to judge the strengths, weaknesses and challenges to the UK’s approach to climate action. This is an especially vital topic of study for a number of reasons. Primarily, the centrality of climate policy cannot be underestimated, as climate change poses one of the most pressing existential threats to the future of humanity, and therefore, is now both a necessary and highly challenging part of any government’s policy portfolio (Levin et al., 2012). It is also an especially important policy area to analyse and understand in the context of the UK and its relationship with the EU, as well as its post-Brexit climate policy creation drive. The UK, when an active and engaged member of the EU, was a Member State that supported and promoted both domestic and international climate action, through commitments to higher-end GHGE reductions targets, innovative policy mechanisms (e.g. the EU Emissions Trading Scheme [EU ETS]) and using its diplomatic clout to bolster the EU’s international climate action (Bocse, 2020). As Carter and Childs have emphasised, ‘Brexit means that UK environmental and climate change policy is facing huge uncertainty and instability’ (Carter & Childs, 2018: 1011). Therefore, the breakup of this mutually motivating relationship is of importance to scholars both of UK governance and of wider climate governance. This chapter reviews the UK’s climate action contradictions in the Age of Brexit, tracing the journey from discussions surrounding climate action in the referendum campaigns (or lack thereof), to action and pledges once the result was known and the UK was negotiating its future relationship with the EU, and then finally to the UK’s self-proclaimed pivotal moment chairing the 26th Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Glasgow in

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November 2021.1 This story of climate action in the Age of Brexit is one that underlines the consistent inconsistency of UK climate leadership as the former Member State began the process of consciously uncoupling from the EU and the success it had enjoyed in the EU’s climate action policy domain.

The Referendum Campaigns As the starting gun of the Age of Brexit, the referendum campaigns make for an important opening of the analysis contained within this chapter and for an insight not only into Conservative Governments’ approaches to climate action but also to the wider general public in the UK and their policy priorities and expectations. The EU’s institutions, especially the European Commission, have long stressed the importance of environmental protection and, more specifically, climate action for Europeans. The belief within some parts of the Commission, a belief especially reinforced in the contemporary College of Commissioners headed by Ursula von der Leyen, has been that climate action will, because of its popularity, offer a particularly valuable form of output legitimacy for the EU (Grabbe, 2021: 93). That climate action could provide a path for EU actors to demonstrate its functional legitimacy is an idea that pre-dates the Age of Brexit (Lenschow & Sprungk, 2010; Oberthür & Dupont, 2010). This is a belief that had been (and remains) supported by successive Eurobarometer surveys that find that climate change is now seen as a very serious problem by around three quarters of Member State Europeans. And so, the referendum campaigns provide a particularly interesting case-study insight into the usefulness of this climate-action-as-legitimacy-builder strategy for the EU and whether the contemporary Conservative Government responded to this narrative and felt it was useful in campaigning to Remain. There were early signs that climate action might not be the narrative win for the EU and the UK’s place within the European project even before the referendum was announced. Data from November 2015,

1 Admittedly, COP26, hosted in November 2021, does fall outside of the primary remit of this edited volume. However, the conference was due to be held in November 2020 and cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, and because it was such an important moment in the UK’s Age of Brexit climate action, it has been included in this chapter.

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just four months before Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron announced to the House of Commons that there would be a referendum on the UK’s place in the EU, demonstrated that the UK may have been outlier in terms of support for climate action. Special Eurobarometer 435 found that 53% of those in the UK rated climate change as ‘a very serious problem’—compared to an average of 69% across the EU’s 28 Member States (Special Eurobarometer 435, 2015). Only two Member States rated lower than the UK in terms of this metric—Estonia (34%) and Latvia (37%). Nevertheless, with the EU’s emphasis on climate action, that over 50% of the polled UK public felt that it was a very serious problem and, especially given the scientific certainty that it was indeed a very serious problem, one might be tempted to suspect that the issue would have been one that would play something of a pivotal role in the referendum campaigns of 2016. In fact, climate change did not play anything close to a prominent role in the Brexit referendum, despite the seismic impacts the Leave vote would have for the field of climate action (Hepburn & Teytelboym, 2017). Instead, the Leave and Remain campaigns primarily focused on discussions of national sovereignty, EU and broader immigration, and a range of economic issues (Carter & Burns, 2018). To some extent, the lack of focus on climate action can be seen as somewhat remarkable for a number of reasons. A key aspect of the critique of the UK’s place within the EU had centred around the overbearing cost of ‘red tape’ on UK businesses—and environment and climate policy, with its accompanying ‘green tape’ had been one area that had been particularly emphasised by critics of EU membership, posing the threat that such policy would become something of a political football (Burns, Moore, et al., 2019; Carter & Burns, 2018).2 Furthermore, climate action (and climate change itself) does seem to have shifted to becoming a more positional issue in the period before and during the referendum campaign. Leave voters were found to be almost twice as likely to deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change than Remain voters, and two thirds

2 It should be noted that this is not a concern that was necessarily shared by British

businesses as much as it was a perceived concern on the behalf of businesses by the British public at large. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) had generally supported the continuation of the UK’s membership of the EU and the EU’s green-growth agenda as a pathway to ensuring clear consistency for British businesses (Burns, Moore, et al., 2019: 281).

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of Leave voters believed that the media was exaggerating the extent of the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change (Razzouk, 2016). This attitude to climate change was reflected in the make-up of the Leave campaign’s hierarchy itself, with several of the leading figures in the Vote Leave group including the Lord Lawson, Michael Gove and future Prime Minister, Boris Johnson having been identified as having links to climate sceptic think tanks and a record of having questioned climate science (Crisp, 2016). Whilst the Leave campaign may have been ready to fight on a climatesceptic platform in the 2016 referendum campaign, it is apparent that it was a fight that the Conservative government of the day (led by David Cameron’s push to Remain) did not want. In part, this can be put down to the inconsistency that Cameron’s Conservatives had already shown on the issue of climate action, both before they were in government and once they were in power. On winning the leadership of the Conservative Party, Cameron was keen emphasis his (and therefore his party’s) environmental credentials in order to appeal to a wider voter base, some of whom may have previously been put off by the Conservatives poor record on environmental action (Carter, 2009: 233). Once in office, Cameron had pledged to make the 2010 coalition government ‘the greenest government ever’. However, it was not long before the cracks in such ambition had begun to show, with a sharp credibility gap emerging between early ambition and governance reality (Carter & Clements, 2015; Moulton, 2021). Even before going into coalition government with the Liberal Democrat Party in 2010, Cameron’s Conservatives were being warned about the potentially divisive nature of climate change for a party already sharply divided on the issue of Europe. Interestingly, Tim Montgomerie drew a clear link between the nature of both issues writing for Conservative Home in 2009, stating that ‘the issue of climate change has the potential to divide the Conservative Party in the same way that Europe has divided us in the past’ (Montgomerie, 2009). Therefore, Cameron may not have wanted to risk opening another potential schism between a party (and a cabinet) already wrought by division. Regardless of the motivation of the Conservative Party and government in the run-up to the 23 June 2016 referendum, climate change was not brought into the Brexit debate in a concrete way. This, at the very least, underlines the fact that whilst it was a central part of the UK-EU working relationship, it was not one with which the UK public felt a great affinity (at least when compared with issues such as sovereignty, the

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economy and immigration). Nevertheless, as the next section details, the absence of climate change in the Brexit debate did not mean that climate action would be an ignored aspect of the Age of Brexit.

The Aftermath Despite the relative lack of attention given to the issue of climate change during the Brexit referendum campaign, because of the close and productive working relationship between the UK and the EU on climate action that had formerly existed, there were immediate concerns that Brexit would lead to a decline in UK environmental standards (Carter & Burns, 2018: 13; Moulton & Silverwood, 2018). This was unsurprising given that around 80% of UK environmental legislation was the result of EUlevel agreements (Environmental Audit Committee, 2016). Such was the overlap of the EU and UK ‘green’ policy domains, there had been scant academic attention to the specificities of UK climate policy alone, beyond the analyses of specific ‘flagship’ policy innovations (e.g. Carter and Jacobs’ [2014] assessment of the Climate Change Act ). The result of the referendum, therefore, represented a significant shift as the discussion turned to the possibility of the UK ‘going it alone’ (Moulton, 2021) on climate policy. This led to a significant increase in the level of attention paid to the topic in the post-referendum Age of Brexit (Burns, Moore, et al., 2019). In particular, there were questions around first, the level of ambition that the UK would offer in its post-Brexit climate action; second, the EU policy mechanisms that the UK was participating in as a Member State (e.g. the EU ETS); and third, whether removing the UK from the EU’s negotiating bloc would limit the UK’s entrepreneurial leadership capacity during United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations (Moulton, 2021). The next section will address the issues that emerged for each of these three considerations of climate action in the Age of Brexit and how successive Conservative Governments dealt with them.

Levels of Ambition It is well noted in the academic literature on the subject that the UK’s membership of the EU quickly transformed the country from one that made environmental policy in a piecemeal and reactive manner into a much more organised actor that sought to upload its policy preferences

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to the EU (see the example of the ETS in the section below) and form successful negotiation and voting groups on the policy domain (Burns, Gravey, et al., 2019; Jordan, 2003, 2004). Despite the significance of this shift, Jordan (2004) makes the claim that this was less of a wholehearted shift in the way in which the UK approached environment policy than it was a pragmatic change to meet policy-making realities (as evidenced by the variety in environmental implementation across different sectors). This was one of the key reasons there were concerns about the level of ambition that the UK would take forward through the Age of Brexit and into the post-Brexit era. However, despite misgivings, there were early signs that Brexit might not necessarily represent a reduction in the level of the UK’s climate ambition and that it might, conversely, lead to an elevation of environmental standards. Writing in Politico.eu,3 Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs called for Brexit to be a reimagining of the UK’s relationship with its natural environment, no longer hamstringed by EU regulation such as the Common Fisheries Policy: We believe there is a better way. If Brexit is our chance to take back control of our laws and our money, Green Brexit is our chance to give the environment a voice in this time of national renewal. Once the U.K. regains control over environmental policy we will draw upon our record of conservation, home and abroad, to take full advantage… In a Green Brexit, the U.K. will champion international action and continue to work with our European neighbours to protect the globe. (Gove, 2018)

Whilst Gove was writing from the perspective of broad environment policy (climate policy fell under the jurisdiction of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—an innovation that came with the appointment of Theresa May as Prime Minister in July 2016 and her disbanding of the Department for Energy and Climate Change),4 this

3 This was a noteworthy choice by the same Michael Gove who once famously commented ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts’, given that Politico.eu is a news source not widely read by the UK general public, being instead preferred by policy specialists in London and Brussels. 4 This Whitehall restructuring was in itself seen as a watering down of the UK government’s focus on climate action and a shift away from the Cameron Government’s preference for making climate change a signature issue.

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gave some cheer to those worried about climate action in the UK at this time. The UK did go on to show some serious ambition in its long-term commitment to climate action during the period after the result of the 2016 referendum. Perhaps the most notable moments of ambitions came in 2019. In May, the UK government became the first in the world to declare a ‘climate emergency’ (Turney, 2019). In June of the same year, one month before leaving office, Theresa May’s government amended the GHGE reduction target for 2050 set in the Climate Change Act , increasing it from an 80% reduction target (based on a 1990 baseline) to a net-zero target. These decisions came after high-profile protests in the UK, especially in London, led by the environmental group Extinction Rebellion, and the increased salience of climate change in the public discourse, in part due to the activism of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement. This made the UK the world’s first major economy to adopt such a target and clearly set out the position that the UK in the Age of Brexit was seeking to continue its role as an exemplary leader on the matter of climate change (Moulton, 2021: 185)—especially in terms of its relationship with the EU, wherein it went from partner to pioneer on the adoption of a net-zero strategy. In the same summer that the UK declared a climate emergency and modified the Climate Change Act to include the net-zero target, Commission President nominee, Ursula von der Leyen, presented her plan for the next Commission—the cornerstone of which was the European Green Deal, including a net-zero target for 2050 (von der Leyen, 2019: 5). Despite these flagship demonstrations of leadership, the Age of Brexit also saw the Conservative Governments running the UK towards a potential credibility gap in terms of its climate action ambition and the reality of its GHGE reductions successes. Whilst the UK had been successful in meeting the first of its three carbon budgets (the every-five-years interim targets leading up to the Climate Change Act ’s 2050 deadline), early warning signs emerged in this period that there was a shortfall in necessary policies being instituted to enable the successful conclusion of the fourth and fifth budgets (which have deadlines for 2025 and 2030, respectively) (Climate Change Committee, 2022). The rhetorical commitment to ambition was heightened in the run-up to the UK’s hosting of COP26, when the Johnson government committed the UK to a tougher 68% 2030 emissions reduction target (up from the 57% reduction called for in the fifth carbon budget). However, this primarily served to underscore the

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divergence between rhetoric and reality—with the credibility gap already being apparent for the former, weaker level of ambition.

EU-Level Policy Mechanisms As stated earlier in this chapter, prior to Brexit, around 80% of UK environmental policy had come from EU-level decisions. As part of the Brexit process, EU decisions and regulations were written directly into UK law to ease the transition and ensure some degree of continuity. However, there was clear concerns that there would be some climate policy mechanisms, ones where their very nature relied on the framework of multi-Member State EU, that would not be such an easy transfer and would need a more considered and negotiated response. The primary example of such a mechanism was the EU ETS—the flagship EU policy response to reducing industrial emissions in Europe. Before Brexit, the market-based-mechanism covered 11,000 industrial installations in the EU and accounted for around 45% of all GHGE—therefore making it a vital part of the emissions reduction path for Europe. The scheme was a cap-and-trade system, where in a cap placed on total emissions is set and slowly reduced. Emissions within the scheme have to be accounted for with allowances, which are available on the market or ‘grandfathered’ in, i.e. initially provided free of charge. The EU ETS is a central part of the EU meeting its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets (for 2030 and beyond). This section makes a small case study of this significant policy mechanism to provide insight into the divergence between the UK and the EU on climate governance. In the Age of Brexit, there was strong reason to believe that the UK would not simply abandon an ETS. The UK had been an outspoken proponent of introducing a cap-and-trade ETS to the EU in the 1990s, going as far as to institute its own ETS in hopes of ‘uploading’ its policy preferences to the EU ahead of the EU ETS’s development. Once instituted the UK remained active, calling for improvements and reforms to the scheme (Dupont & Moore, 2019: 56). The UK’s Climate Change Act and the meeting of the interim carbon budgets were also constructed around the UK’s use of an ETS (specifically the EU ETS) in order to measure and navigate GHGE reductions (CarbonBrief, 2020). An ETS also remained an attractive proposition for the Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit due to their preference (also demonstrated in the Council of the EU, pre-Brexit) for ‘technology neutral’ mechanisms

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(Dupont & Moore, 2019: 54), i.e. an ETS distinct from ‘command-andcontrol’ style regulation, instead allowing businesses to choose the path to emissions reductions that best suited their needs. Therefore, rather than the question being about the UK abandoning an ETS in a post-Brexit bonfire of the regulations’ (Coulter & Hancké, 2016), the question of the UK’s future in terms of this climate policy mechanism was whether it would continue within the EU ETS or pursue an independent alternative. Even before Brexit, there were clear signs that the EU ETS was not working to the extent that it had initially been hoped that it would— the foremost hallmark of which was a stubbornly low carbon allowance cost (Dupont & Moore, 2019; Moulton & Silverwood, 2018). In part, the depressed price of carbon allowances (or ‘credits’) was a result of the post-2008 financial and economic crisis (FEC) and the ensuing general decrease in economic activity in the covered industrial units (although several other factors have been linked to the price (Koch et al., 2014)). From the onset of the FEC, the carbon allowance price dropped sharply below e20 a tonne and dropped lower still through the 2010s and into the Age of Brexit. Clearly, such a low price would not provide a strong incentive for big polluters to reduce their emissions levels. If the UK was to ‘go it alone’ on climate action, and to fully commit to the ideal of a Green Brexit, an alternative, more rigorous ETS could have been seen to have provided fertile ground for success. However, there were other important considerations at play for the Conservative Governments at the time. There were considerations within the academic literature that if the UK were to choose to stay within the European Economic Area (EEA), then the UK would remain within the ET ETS (Dupont & Moore, 2019: 56). However, concerns about sovereignty and the power of ‘foreign judges’ became even more acute for Eurosceptics in organising the postBrexit arrangement, resulting in a rejection of the EEA option (Keating, 2022). Continuing participation within the EU ETS would certainly have meant acknowledging supremacy of EU law in this policy domain, and therefore this too was taken off the table. It is here, then, that we see a concrete divergence between the UK and the EU in terms of climate governance. In 2020, following consultations with businesses, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Government launched the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme Order establishing the UK’s own ETS (one that was unlinked to the EU system in terms of price— something that the consultation had found was the preference of UK businesses). The new ETS replaced the EU ETS in the UK on the day

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that the UK formally left the EU—1 January 2021. In terms of the policy success of the new scheme, there has been a marked increase in cost— therefore applying a greater pressure to business to reduce their emissions levels. As reported in The Guardian in January 2022, the independence of the UK ETS meant that, within the first year of the scheme’s operation, UK businesses had paid 10% more in carbon allowances than their EU counterparts (Harvey, 2022). Importantly, the UK government has subsequently chosen not to intervene in the scheme to artificially lower the price—demonstrating a long-term commitment to the market-basedmechanism, despite the spiralling of fuel prices in the UK. This decision represented that the UK, at least in terms of this policy preference, was not seeking a bonfire of the ‘green tape’ as a result of Brexit.

UNFCC Negotiations Finally, it is important to assess the role of the UK as an international climate actor and potential climate governance leader in the Age of Brexit. The UK had a track record as being vital to the EU’s international climate leadership. The UK was central to the development of the EU’s actorness in this international policy domain, employing its own diplomatic capacity, its prominence in the United Nations (especially its permanent seat on the Security Council), as well as its wealth of diplomatic ties and networks to establish both climate action as a key international regime concern and the EU as a key international climate actor (Dupont & Moore, 2019: 56; Vogler, 2017). Therefore, the choice for the UK to leave the EU was clearly one that negatively impacted the EU’s capacity for climate leadership on the international stage—but likewise, questions remained on the extent to which the UK could (and would want to) remain an active international climate actor. Thus far, this chapter has demonstrated some of the ways that the UK offered international leadership at this time (such as the declaration of a climate emergency and establishing a 2050 net-zero target). However, the UNFCCC international climate regime represents an elevation of climate actorness that depends on the interrelation of powers with one another— i.e. one cannot be a climate leader in a vacuum. It was therefore notable that in September 2019, the UK got the backing from other states to host the important COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2020. Speaking at the time, Alok Sharma (then International Secretary, later the COP26 President), emphasised the importance of this for the UK:

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This nomination is testimony to the UK’s leading role in the global fight against climate change. UK aid has helped millions of people in developing countries to access clean energy and prepare for the impact of climate change. This is protecting our planet for future generations. (Sharma, 2019)

The UK’s hosting of the conference was also strongly linked with the Brexit-inspired ‘Global Britain’ strategy, outlining the perceived importance of climate action for the UK’s post-Brexit international role (e.g. International Development Committee, 2022). However, despite the importance of the conference and climate action for the UK, the Conservative Government quickly appeared to fall short of demands of the task at hand. Alarm bells started to ring when Claire O’Neill, who had been appointed to be the President of COP26 was removed from her post on 31 January 2020 and then wrote a public letter to Johnson, heavily criticising the preparedness of the government for the meeting. In the letter, O’Neill stated that that UK had a significant way to go to suitably lead COP26 and that: To do that will require a whole of government reset and for your team to move the vast and immediate challenge of climate recovery to the top of the Premier League of their priorities from where it is now - stuck currently somewhere around the middle of League One. (O’Neill, 2020)

This letter represented the serious misgivings within and outside of government about the level of attention that was being given to the issue and whether COP26 might go onto become a missed opportunity for the UK. In fact, the UK’s hosting of the conference was delayed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (the only time such a conference has been delayed). When the conference did take place, in November 2021, it was largely regarded, despite the additional lead time, as resulting in a failure. Two key factors can be stressed here—the lack of a renewal of 2030 targets that would keep global warming within 1.5C and the failure to achieve an agreement on an accelerated phase out of coal (Hales & Mackey, 2021). It was a disappointment that was acknowledged within the Conservative government. Photos of Sharma, President of COP26, crying at the conclusion of the talks were widely circulated in the news and on social media. Johnson admitted that despite being pleased with the progress the talks represented, it was a pleasure ‘tinged with disappointment’ (quoted

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in Mcdonald, 2021). Criticisms of the UK’s leadership were made both at home and internationally—underpinning that concerns about the conference turning into a missed opportunity for the UK were probably not misplaced.

Conclusion The Age of Brexit remains a markedly important moment to study policy continuity and change in terms of climate action in the UK. The decision of the UK to leave the EU represented a seismic shift in what had previously been a symbiotic relationship between the Member State and the European project on this policy area. The UK had been transformed by EU membership in terms of environmental credentials, but likewise had played a key role in shaping the form of EU climate action. This makes the break from the EU, a vital subject of study for those interested in UK and policy change. A mixed picture emerges in terms of the UK’s climate actorness in the Age of Brexit. The UK has maintained and improved its commitments to climate action. However, there is the credibility gap emerging, both on the domestic level, with a lack of policy currently in place to meet future carbon budgets, and at the international level, with the lacklustre preparations for and realisation of COP26. There also remains longterm concerns that, post-Brexit, the UK government will again prioritise economics over the climate crisis. The irony is, of course, that if Brexit has the negative long-term impact on the UK’s economy that many predicted and continue to identify, this will likely lead to an accompanying lowering of the UK’s emission levels.

References Bocse, A.-M. (2020). The UK’s Decision to Leave the European Union (Brexit) and Its Impact on the EU as a Climate Change Actor. Climate Policy, 20(2), 265–274. Burns, C., Gravey, V., Jordan, A., & Zito, A. (2019). De-Europeanising or Disengaging? EU Environmental Policy After Brexit. Environmental Politics, 28(2), 271–292. Burns, C., Moore, B., Gravey, V., & Jordan, A. (2019). Green Brexit: Rhetoric or Reality? Political Insight, 10(2), 37–39.

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CHAPTER 12

British Defence Policy and Brexit: Finding Stability During a Period of Uncertainty Philip Mayne

Introduction The defence policy of the United Kingdom (UK) during the period of Brexit was fundamentally driven by questions regarding the UK’s place in the world once it had left the European Union (EU). The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) laid the foundation for the defence policy of the UK in response to the changing security situation. The SDSR, written prior to the referendum, reflected a change in the security concerns of the UK. The key threats to the UK for the next decade made clear within the National Security Strategy, and which guided UK defence policy, were terrorism, the impact of technology and cyber threats, the ‘resurgence of state-based threats and intensifying wider state competition’ and ‘the erosion of the rules-based international order’ (HM Government, 2015: 15). These threats continued to influence the defence policies of all Conservative governments during the Age of Brexit.

P. Mayne (B) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_12

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In 2018, Theresa May’s government published the National Security Capability Review which reiterated the same threats stated in 2015, plus the inclusion of diseases affecting the UK (HM Government, 2018). The focus of the chapter is not to examine the threats to the UK, but the wider question around the UK’s ability to cope with these issues. One of the key questions regarding defence policy during the period of Brexit concerned the UK’s place in the world once it had left the EU. Following the referendum, questions were raised about the ability of the UK to meet the commitments required for it to continue to be a major player on the world stage. The significant cuts within the 2010 SDSR had raised questions about the UK’s role as a global power (Martin, 2015). The 2015 SDSR tried to reassure partners and allies that the UK was to continue to be a major player on the world stage. Cameron’s government stated that ‘Our vision is for a secure and prosperous United Kingdom, with global reach and influence’ (HM Government, 2015: 9). Protecting global influence was one of the main national security objectives stated within the review in order to reduce threats to the ‘the UK, our interests, and those of our allies and partners’ (HM Government, 2015: 11). Yet, the decision to leave the EU cast doubts among key allies and partners in the UK’s ability to meet its commitments. This chapter will demonstrate that the fears raised by the UK’s partners did not come to fruition. It will show that the United Kingdom’s defence policy between 2016 and 2020 largely remained committed to securing the interests of the UK and its partners. The UK continued to be committed to playing a major part in international institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In particular, the UK demonstrated its commitment by increasing its defence budget to meet the NATO commitments. However, meeting the defence spending requirements of NATO does not necessarily equate with the development of enhanced military capabilities. This chapter will also highlight that UK defence policy continued to be shaped by its relationship with its European partners. Here, we find both a continuation and a change in the defence policy of the UK during Brexit. The UK continued to see Europe as key to its security and continued to seek multilateral agreements. One of the key changes was the relationship with the EU. David Cameron and Theresa May tried to establish a tangible relationship with the EU on defence. However, the Johnson government did not pursue this course of action. When the UK left the EU, it did not have a security deal with the EU, even though its bilateral

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and multilateral relationships meant that the UK would still have ties with Europe and some indirect influence on its foreign policy. Leaving the EU did not signal an end of the UK being a European player.

EU? No. NATO? Yes. A transition from the EU did not signal a transition away from the UK’s role as a European power. The Cameron government reaffirmed the position that the UK was to continue to be a regional power. The 2015 SDSR clearly established the UK’s desire to continue to be a key player in European defence. The May government reaffirmed this within the National Security Capability Review which stated that ‘Our decision to leave the EU and bring decision-making and accountability closer to home does not alter our unconditional commitment to Europe’s security. Europe’s security is our security’ (HM Government, 2018: 8). Importantly, leaving the EU did not equate with an insular defence policy. Instead, the policies of the Conservative governments during Brexit demonstrated a desire for the UK to remain a global and regional power. At the heart of a ‘global’ Britain lies its relationship with its Western allies and NATO. This is not surprising, if we consider the role that the EU had in terms of UK security. For decades, NATO had been a dominant factor in British defence policy (Blackburn, 2015), and its importance grew in 2015 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Cameron government committed to meeting the NATO pledge to spend a minimum of 2% of GDP on defence (HM Government, 2015). In 2015, Chancellor George Osborne announced that to meet the requirement, real defence spending would grow by 0.5% each year (HM Treasury, 2015: 26). Even though there were concerns of a post-Brexit recession, the May government continued to protect the defence budget and its commitment to meet its NATO requirements, a fact reaffirmed in his post-referendum Autumn Statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond (Hammond, 2016). Each year the defence budget did increase as stated, despite Brexit concerns. In 2016, the defence budget was £46 billion (HM Treasury, 2016: 5), but two years later, the Defence Budget had increased to £52 billion. The National Security Capability Review (NSCR) reaffirmed the UK’s commitment to increase defence spending above inflation, to meet the NATO commitment (HM Government, 2018: 9). In September 2019, the Treasury announced that it had consistently met its commitment to grow the defence budget by 0.5%

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and would deliver a real terms increase of 2.6% between 2019–2020 to 2020–2021 (HM Treasury, 2019: 13), thereby meeting the requirements of NATO. The budget during this period demonstrated, as May had announced in 2018, that NATO remained the cornerstone of British security (HM Government, 2018). NATO grew in importance following the EU referendum, as the UK had lost one of the major pillars of its security structure. Prior to the referendum, Cameron declared that the EU was fundamental to British security (HM Government, 2015). It was not only in the interest of the UK to remain as a member of the EU, but it was in the interest of Europe and key allies like the United States. While the US-UK ‘special relationship’ was not going to end over Brexit, there were legitimate concerns that major Allies like the United States would give preferential treatment to the UK’s continental cousins (Jones, 2016). President Obama had made this clear during a press conference with the Cameron in April 2016, where he noted that the UK would go to the ‘back of the queue’ while the US tried to negotiate with the EU (Obama, 2016a). Importantly, Obama concurred with Cameron’s assessment that the distancing itself from the EU was detrimental to Western security in general (Obama, 2016a). This was also the position of NATO officials, who argued that leaving the EU would threaten decades of shared European security. NATO generals declared that leaving the EU would ‘lead to a loss of British influence, undermine NATO and give succour to the West’s enemies’ at a time where there needed to be more inclusion with the Euro-Atlantic community. Former US Secretaries of State were also concerned that Brexit would diminish the UK’s influence in the world and Europe would be weakened (Reuters Staff, 2016). Jones (2016) noted that as the EU diminishes, US disenchantment with Europe will increase, and eventually ‘the West could cease to exist’ albeit for some security agreements. He argued that the decision to leave would lead to the ‘West’s formal disintegration’ (Jones, 2016: 216). However, the declaration that the UK would meet its NATO spending commitment alleviated some of these concerns. Following the referendum, Obama (2016b) wrote in the Financial Times: I have no doubt that the UK will remain one of NATO’s most capable members — a nation that pays its full share for our common security and is a leading contributor to alliance missions. And, given the current

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threats facing Europe, I fully expect that Britain will continue to be a major contributor to European security.

As predicted by the then US president, the UK did remain a major contributor to European security. The UK’s defence position between 2016 and 2020 was one which increasingly showed a commitment to NATO, demonstrating that the UK still wanted to have a say in regional security. This is not surprising, as NATO had been at the heart of UK defence policy for decades, and the UK had been one of the few nations which had met its NATO minimum spending commitment. Between 2016 and 2020 the defence budget of the UK remained above the two-per cent of GDP requirement and showed an actual increase in spending (NATO, 2022: 8).

What Does a 2% Annual Defence Budget Increase Mean in Real Terms? The decision of the Conservative government to meet its international commitments demonstrated a continuation of a view that the UK should be a ‘Global Britain’. The Conservative government could proudly proclaim that it was meeting its two-per cent of GDP minimum spending commitment, something many of its European allies, including Germany and Spain, could not (Peel & Warrell, 2020). Meeting its NATO commitments was not surprising for the UK, as it had long possessed a good record of meeting its NATO commitments (Blackburn, 2015: 92). Although this is something the UK has done for years, this continuation during a period of Brexit eased the concerns of important allies. However, on closer inspection, meeting the minimum two-per cent target did not necessarily mean a significant boost in capability. Defence expenditure is defined by NATO (2022: 15) as ‘payments made by a national government specifically to meet the needs of its armed forces, those of Allies or of the Alliance’. Importantly, NATO does not establish specific targets that each member state must meet to reach the two-per cent spending threshold. Instead, its definition encompasses a number of sectors which allowed for some clever accounting from the British government to meet the commitment. In a statement made to the UK government in 2016, Malcolm Chalmers explained to a Defence Committee inquiry in 2016 that the UK was not on course to meet its

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NATO commitment (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2016). To remedy this, the government changed how it measured defence expenditure to meet its commitments. It was accused of ‘shifting the goal posts’ and being ‘creative with the books’ by Julian Lindley-French, Vice president of the Atlantic Treaty Association (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2016: 9). The Defence Committee concluded that ‘this “redefinition” of defence expenditure undermined, to some extent, the credibility of the Government’s assertion that the 2% figure represents a significant increase in defence expenditure’ (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2016: 12). Such creative accounting included £1 billion in war pensions and MoD civilian pensions, hardly a significant contribution to the actual ability to promote European security. Therefore, between 2016 and 2020, the figures provided by the government, and continuous assertations that the UK was meeting its target for NATO must be considered with this in mind. In 2018, the May government proudly continued to claim that the UK had met its minimum two-per cent of GDP spending target and championed the UK’s defence budget (HM Government, 2018: 7 and 14). While this demonstrated a commitment to NATO, it did not necessarily equate into actual enhanced defence capabilities.

Clarity and Carriers Meeting the defence requirements of NATO, between 2015 and 2020, was not merely a face-saving exercise for the Conservative governments. There had been commitments by successive governments to increase the capability of the UK in defence. Cameron (2014) declared that both Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers were to be built and made operational. This would mean that the UK would be able to have a carrier presence for most of the year. The two carriers would help to boost the perception that the UK was a leading global power (Zambellas, 2015). The perception of states matters internationally because the ability to influence the world depends largely on perceptions of states and their capabilities. Following the EU referendum, the perception of the UK as a global power mattered considerably. The UK needed to confirm that it was still a major player on the world stage. Meeting the promises made in the pre-Brexit SDSR would help to maintain the credibility of the UK. Between 2015 and 2020 the UK sought to develop defence capabilities that would allow it to face a range of challenges. For example, while the

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2010 SDSR had seen defence capabilities cut, the 2015 review announced Joint Force 2025 which would ‘project power globally’ and for longer periods of time (HM Government, 2015: 29). JF2025 was an expeditionary force of 50,000, an increase of 20,000 compared to the 2010 review, to be deployed for longer periods of time (HM Government, 2015: 29). This force demonstrated that the UK wanted to make sure it could be a global player. However, signalling to allies, and potential adversaries, that an actor still has relevance is not a cheap undertaking. In 1966, when France had left NATO, De Gaulle’s government had spent considerable amounts of money of defence, to demonstrate its ambition, ability, and reliability as an ally (Black et al., 2017). Brexit did bring about levels of uncertainty about whether the UK could afford to maintain its position as a major European power. In 2017, a report by the think tank RAND noted that the ambition of the UK could have potentially been influenced by necessity, for ‘If the post-Brexit economy were to falter seriously, there would be an option for Britain to reduce its level of ambition. A small reduction might see the shrinking of British defence engagement, the recalling of attachés…or the limited downgrading of the mission set’ (Black et al., 2017: 64). The ability of the UK to achieve its ambition of remaining a major power depended upon the economy not collapsing during the Brexit negotiations. One must be reminded here, that defence policy does not exist in a vacuum. Budgets often drive defence policy. Concerns were raised that economic uncertainty and difficulties with procurement could reduce the ability of the UK to meet its 2015 promises, and therefore, losing some of its prestige. This brings the conversation back to the issue of aircraft carriers. As already noted, the decision to develop both aircraft carriers was decided by the Cameron government. This continued to be championed by both the May and Johnson governments. In 2017, the National Audit Office made the position of the government abundantly clear: The government sees its new aircraft carriers as central to the UK’s future defence strategy and symbolic of the country’s standing internationally in the coming decades. They will give the UK political flexibility to act without depending on agreement from other countries for use of their bases. Ultimately, the carriers are designed to support direct military action, individual defence tasks (including deterrence and defence engagement),

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humanitarian aid and diplomatic initiatives. (National Audit Office, 2017: 14)

This position was then reiterated following the withdrawal of the UK from the EU (National Audit Office, 2020: 5), reflecting continued emphasis upon UK power projection during the Brexit negotiations. However, as a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (2018: 17) noted ‘for Global Britain to be more than a worthy aspiration, the slogan must be backed by substance’. The report continued ‘if Global Britain comes to be perceived as a superficial branding exercise, it risks undermining UK interests by damaging our reputation overseas and eroding support for a global outlook here at home’. Therefore, in the Age of Brexit, the UK needed to be able to back up its claims. Failure could potentially result in the undermining of British influence during a time of uncertainty. Alongside developing a relationship with Europe, developing UK capabilities would be vital to security post-Brexit (House of Commons Defence Committee, 2018). If we consider capabilities synonymous with a ‘Global Britain’, then aircraft carriers are at the heart of this. The decision for the UK to have two aircraft carriers was a welcome decision during Brexit. Between 2016 and 2020, considerable progress was made by the Conservative governments in developing the carrier capability of the UK. Both carriers were brought into service, the first squadron of Lighting II aircraft was formed, and the infrastructure needed to support the carrier strike group had also been mostly built. Importantly, the carriers were built in line with the timetable and within the budget set in 2013 (House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 2020: 3). However, there were a number of issues which had not been addressed by the governments during Brexit. The first major issue concerns aircraft. Aircraft carriers obtain their power through the ability to deploy aircraft globally. Without sufficient aircraft, carriers lose much of their power. In 2015, the MOD planned to purchase 138 Lighting II jets. However, only 48 had been ordered by 2020 (National Audit Office, 2020: 7). By the beginning of 2020, the UK had received only 18 jets (National Audit Office, 2020: 19). A total of 24 aircraft would be needed to allow for operations to be conducted in two locations simultaneously. The failure of successive governments to pin down the number of aircraft actually required for effective operational purposes meant that the carriers could be seen as a national branding exercise. A report by the House of Commons

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Public Accounts Committee in 2020 had highlighted that there had been considerable levels of uncertainty around what was required to make the UK carrier strike group effective. By 2020, there was no clear answer to how many aircraft would precisely be needed to meet a carrier capability (House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 2020, 7). The carrier strike group was also hindered by a delay in the Crowsnet airborne early warning radar, and a failure to understand ‘Carrier Strike’s support and operating requirements or costs’ (House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, 2020: 5). In 2017, it was announced that three solid support ships (which would carry food, ammunition and general stores) would become operational in 2026. In 2018, procurement began, but by the end of 2019 procurement halted. A report by the National Audit Office noted that: ‘achieving full capabilities of a carrier strike group depends on the new support ships being available from the mid-2020s. However, the Department now expects there will be a delay of between 18 and 36 months to the new ships entering service, meaning the first ship would be operational between October 2027 and April 2029’ (National Audit Office, 2020: 32). Therefore, these issues would restrict how the carriers could be used throughout the decade following Brexit. These complications and failure of successive Conservative governments to fully understand how the carrier strike group should be deployed and what was needed, demonstrated that the emphasis upon the carriers was some form of ‘Global Britain’ branding exercise. The UK having two aircraft carriers did demonstrate that the UK did want to remain a major power following Brexit, but, as one commentator wrote, ‘the new British Carrier force is hollow’ (Axe, 2020). Inaction by the governments during this period had hindered a key element of both Joint Force 2025 and the UK’s capability to be an actual global force. Post-Brexit decisions and defence budgets would have to alleviate some of the missed opportunities during Brexit, but the effects of these decisions would nevertheless affect and constrain the longer-term defence capabilities of the UK.

The UK Still Tied to Europe The decision to leave the EU led to concerns in Brussels about European defence. It was feared that Brexit would be detrimental to the EU’s defence capabilities. The EU would lose access to Europe’s largest military-spending power and its military capability could be reduced by one-quarter (Macdonald, 2016). Alongside losing one of its two major

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global powers, the EU would lose access to ‘a disproportionate share of Europe’s high-end military equipment’ (Black et al., 2017: 66). It would lose access to half of its carrier and nuclear submarine capabilities, and more than a third of its radar systems. Brexit was a potentially costly divorce for Europe. Europe was not completely severed from British capabilities, but the relationship had become more informal than before. As already noted, the UK placed NATO at the heart of its defence policy. This meant the Europe was not completely cut off from British resources. The EU could have access to UK forces, through a multinational military framework with NATO, in support of an EU operation on a case-by-case basis (Black et al., 2017: 67). This prediction seemed to be realistic in 2017, if one examines the stated intentions of the May government. In that year, the government published Foreign policy, defence and development: a future partnership paper which outlined the UK’s position on a defence relationship with the EU post-Brexit. This paper established that the UK would seek to collaborate with the UK on defence and security issues: Given the shared values of the UK and EU partners, the capabilities we offer and the scale and depth of collaboration that currently exists between the UK and the EU in the fields of foreign policy, defence and security, and development, the UK seeks to develop a deep and special partnership with the EU that goes beyond existing third country arrangements. (HM Government, 2017: 2)

The report continued to note that the partnership demonstrated both the UK’s shared history with the EU, but also ‘the UK’s commitment to promoting the values we share across the world, and to maintaining a secure and prosperous Europe’ (HM Government, 2017: 2). The report also noted that the future EU-UK relationship should be ‘unprecedented in its breadth, taking in cooperation on foreign policy, defence and security, and development, and in the degree of engagement that we envisage’ (HM Government, 2017: 18). In that year, the UK government perceived the interests of the UK to be similar to the interests of the EU. This understanding meant that the UK was to continue to have a close working relationship with the EU. The UK had a ‘deep commitment’ to European values and in the defence of these shared interests ‘the UK and EU will be stronger acting together’ (HM Government, 2017: 18). This policy was reflected within Theresa May’s putative Brexit deal, which sought

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to continue a ‘ambitious, broad, deep and flexible partnership’ on security and defence once the UK had left the EU (Department for Exiting the European Union, 2018). This position maintained the same until the Johnson administration. Although May’s policy had indicated that the UK would continue to support the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, which included UK personnel, expertise and the use of UK command and control facilities (HM Government, 2017: 19), these promises fell by the wayside under the Johnson administration. By the time the UK left the EU, no defence framework had been established by the Johnson government (Fella & de Mars, 2019). The UK government had deliberately rejected a formalised security policy with the EU. This did not mean that the UK was turning away from European security or had shut the door on opportunities to work with the EU. Instead, its decision was based upon the view that there was little incentive for the UK to join formal frameworks, over more flexible relationships (Latici, 2021). The above did not signal a significant change in defence policy of the UK. Instead, it actually demonstrated a continuation of the same approach to defence which had characterised the previous decade. Since 2010, the UK had sought out relationships with European partners as part of its defence policy. This approach to defence further developed between 2016 and 202, as the UK ramped up its efforts to develop new relationships in Europe, alongside its traditional ones. In 2015, the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) was spearheaded by the UK, establishing a collaborative force of up to 10,000 troops. In 2017, the JEF was expanded when Sweden and Finland joined. In total nine countries, including Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Norway, made up the JEF. The JEF was independent of international organisations and could work unilaterally or in support of NATO, EU and UN forces (Ministry of Defence, 2017). The Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, had stated that ‘This is a Force of Friends, and alongside Sweden, Finland, and our other partners in this force, we remain committed to security, in Europe and around the world’ (Ministry of Defence, 2017). When the JEF was finalised, in 2018, Fallon’s successor as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson had reiterated the comments made by his predecessor about the importance of Europe to British defence. The JEF sent a clear message that ‘our nations will stand together to meet new and conventional challenges and keep our countries and our citizens safe and secure in an uncertain world’ (Ministry of Defence, 2018).

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During this period, the UK developed several important defence agreements with EU members. These included the Treaty on Defence and Security Cooperation with Poland (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2018) and a Memorandum of Understanding with both Italy and Sweden. These agreements confirmed a commitment of the governments to develop and share Combat Air capabilities (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2019). Agreements on Defence and Security cooperation with Cyprus, Romania, Iceland, Hungary and the Netherlands were also signed (Urbanovská et al., 2021: 41). The fostering of more bilateral relationships, outside of the EU, demonstrated a continuation in a commitment to European countries, but also a change in the approach for British defence, with a focus on a range of different multilateral and bilateral relationships. Although further integration with European partners may appear contradictory when the UK was trying to move away from European integration, increasing bilateral relations was key to European defence. Successive Conservative governments had reiterated a ‘global’ Britain narrative, which had championed European defence. The evidence demonstrated that the UK was establishing strong defence connections with Europe. Importantly, these relationships meant that the UK could indirectly influence EU foreign policy without being part of the institution (Lehne, 2021). One of the major defence relationships the UK had developed with a European power was the UK’s security partnership with France. In 2010, the UK and France signed the Lancaster House Treaties. These treaties provided a fifty-year agreement which allowed for the joint use of aircraft carriers, a joint expeditionary force and cooperation over nuclear weapons. The decision between the two governments reflected both the cuts to defence budgets of both countries, but also reflected ‘a level of mutual trust not seen for decades’ (Wintour, 2010). Both France and the UK shared common interests, including the defence of Europe, and saw bilateral agreements as a means to achieve them. This emphasis on a bilateral relationship remained to be championed by Conservative governments from 2015 when the SDSR reiterated a commitment to work alongside partners, and Joint Force 2025 was designed to do so too. Without a fully operational carrier, the Royal Navy needed to work alongside France. As the only other European nuclear power and permanent member of the United Nations Security, France had been of great importance to European security and UK defence

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policy. The Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF), established at Lancaster House, became operational in 2016. In 2019, a Royal Navy ship escorted the French aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, and a French ship escorted the new UK aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. At the 2018 Anglo-French Summit, both states agreed to develop a shared strategic culture between European states and promised to achieve Full Operation Capability for the CJEF. In 2018, the French Armed Forces Minister, Florence Parly, affirmed that the Lancaster House Treaty, and Anglo-France relations, were not to be called into question by Brexit. Instead, there continued to be ‘a shared determination to pursue and deepen this relationship’ (Tran, 2018). In this regard, the defence policy of the UK remained tied to Europe, and indirectly with the EU. It must be made clear that Anglo-French relations were not always straightforward during Brexit. During the period of Brexit, there were some procurement problems between the two countries despite the fact that both had a history of working with each other on collaborative defence projects. Since 2010, there also had been some considerable successes in Anglo-French procurement. Both governments supported the One MBDA strategy, which unified the missile sector under one contractor, to eliminate duplication and save governments money (Magill, 2021). Since 2015, MBDA had become the primary contractor for both the UK and France. The MBDA agreement was able to break down barriers between defence industries and promoting interoperability (Magill, 2021: 65), but also allowed both the UK and France to have access to facilities without obstruction (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2015: 10–11). MBDA was fruitful and brought about the development of systems such as the new generation Sea Venom anti-ship missile. However, since 2016 some key programmes between the two countries had been hindered by Brexit. The Future Combat Air System, which would have developed the air capabilities of both countries, stalled following the UK’s decision to leave the EU. Importantly, the evidence demonstrated that this stalling had been caused by the UK with, in particular, the French government blaming Brexit for the decision to not take the programme further (Magill, 2021: 66). This was an important issue, because the programme cost the UK taxpayer £200 million, with little return for that investment. The decision to turn away from collaboration was disappointing because France indicated that it wanted to continue with the programme, and this could have helped develop

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Anglo-French cooperation further. Enhanced cooperation would be beneficial for the UK, for a number of reasons. It would help cut down the procurement competition against one of its main rivals, the development of FCAS would benefit the position of the UK as a defence technology leader, and it would help influence the UK’s position among European partners, who it needed to work with for regional security (Magill, 2021: 68). Therefore, while the UK continued to have close ties with France, Brexit appeared to have made the relationship more complicated. Nonetheless, between 2016 and 2020, the UK-French relationship remained strategically important. Bilateral and multilateral agreements appear to have grown in importance between 2016 and 2020 and have become a key element of both British and European defence policy. The UK-France relationship has been given most attention, as both parties are the largest powers in Europe. However, it is three countries which decide the defence of Europe, namely the UK, France and Germany. The UK-Germany relationship has been somewhat overshadowed or taken a back seat compared to other partnerships. However, in 2018 the UK developed a Joint Vision Statement which signalled a greater commitment closer military cooperation (Becker et al., 2020: 23). The statement was finalised in 2016, but the decision to leave the EU delayed the signing of the agreement. The German Foreign Office was concerned that signing a bilateral relationship would undermine the position of the EU in future negotiations (ShevinCoetzee, 2019). By 2018, these concerns had abated, and the treaty was duly signed. This treaty demonstrated a UK and German shared interest in working with key strategic partners. Prior to 2018, the security relationship between the UK and Germany was limited to joint armament programmes and traditional cooperation such as joint exercises (Becker et al., 2020: 11). The Joint Vision Statement opened up a range of possible avenues for further cooperation between the two states. Over the long term, these relationships could help to close numerous capability gaps for both countries, including the development of medium-to-longrange precision strike capabilities, which would be vital in a confrontation against countries like Russia (Becker et al., 2020: 25). Ultimately, examining the increase in bilateral relations between the UK and European partners has demonstrated that the UK has continued to be committed to European defence and has identified Europe as a key aspect of its defence policy. Closer ties with European allies may, of course, appear to be contradictory as the UK spent the years between 2016

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and 2020 freeing itself from formal institutions like the EU. However, it offered the UK a way to meet its ambition of being a key European actor, and influencing European policy, while being free from the rules of the European Union.

Conclusion Examination of the defence policies of the Conservative governments between 2016 and 2020 has demonstrated ‘more of the same’ in UK defence policy. Brexit did not result in the deviation of the key defence policies stated prior to the referendum. Instead, Brexit resulted in some of the policies increasing in importance. Defence in the Age of Brexit was focused on the UK re-establishing itself as a regional and global power. This decision was not caused by Brexit. Instead, the roots of defence policy during this period were to be found at the beginning of the decade and the cuts initiated in 2010. With the budget more balanced and the changing security threat, the UK decided that it needed to re-establish itself as a global player. This is not to say that Brexit did not influence some of the decisions taken by the Conservative governments. Brexit, however, has raised a number of questions about the UK’s role in the world. There were doubts about whether the UK would be able to meet its commitments or whether it would still be interested in European security. The evidence here has demonstrated that the UK has not turned its back on Europe. On the contrary, it has continued to demonstrate a commitment to its European partners and allies. The nature of the UK’s commitments did change, however. The UK was no longer tied to EU institutions and foreign policy. Instead, the UK focused on independent bilateral and multilateral arrangements with key partners to bolster ties with Europe. Through fostering stronger relationships with countries like Germany and France during this period, the UK could remain important to Europe, and still influence policy, but be independent of the EU. However, this does not necessarily demonstrate a significant change in policy, but rather an intensification of the same policy pursued since the beginning of the decade. Leaving one institution did result in the UK placing greater emphasis on another. British defence policy had been based on both the EU and NATO. With the UK leaving the former, the latter became more important. During this period, all Conservative governments reiterated

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their commitment to NATO. Meeting the two-per cent of GDP defence spending commitment was championed by the Conservative governments during the Age of Brexit. On closer examination, this defence spending was somewhat fudged to make the UK appear to be developing its forces more than the reality. War pensions, while needed, do not necessarily equate into capabilities. With that said, the UK did invest considerable amounts of public funds in the development of the JF2025, in particular the Carrier Strike Group. However, by 2020, a lack of clarity of its role and foresight had resulted in issues which will likely hinder the future capabilities of JF2025. A failure of consecutive Conservative governments to establish JF2025’s role during Brexit may manifest into real-life problems over the next decade. In a world of uncertainty, these issues need to be addressed quickly, if a truly ‘Global Britain’ is to be manifested.

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CHAPTER 13

Foreign Policy and International Development from Cameron to Johnson James R. Pritchett

Introduction This chapter examines the foreign policy approaches taken by the Conservative governments of David Cameron (2015–2016), Theresa May (2016–2019) and Boris Johnson (2019 until January 2020) between mid-2015 and early 2020, against the backdrop of withdrawal from the European Union (the so-called Brexit). It specifically considers the aspects of continuity and discontinuity in the ideas and approaches to foreign policy between the three governments’ policies over this period, with a focus on their shared desire in maintaining an international role whilst at the same time navigating significant foreign policy challenges: The continued fallout of the ‘Arab Spring’, including the Syrian Civil War, Russian revanchism and changes in the UK’s relations with the People’s Republic of China, the United States and the European Union.

J. R. Pritchett (B) Centre for War Studies, University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_13

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Additionally, the chapter discusses the UK’s developmental aid policies over this period, which preceded the reabsorption of the Department for International Development (DFID) into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September 2020 and, overall, assesses that whilst events have affected international policy (as always) the desire for international engagement has continued with no real change, broadly reflecting a continued commitment to, and development of, the ‘liberal-Conservative’ foreign policy of David Cameron.

Continuity and Discontinuity On gaining power in 2015, the Cameron government continued the Coalition’s foreign policy ‘doctrine’ of ‘liberal Conservatism’, drawing upon notions of communal social responsibilities in domestic conservative thought, adapted to the international realm. This liberal Conservatism was articulated in the 2010 election by Mr Cameron as: “Liberal, because Britain must be open and engaged with the world, supporting human rights and championing the cause of democracy and the rule of law at every opportunity. But Conservative, because our policy must be hardheaded and practical, dealing with the world as it is and not as we wish it were” (Conservative Party 2010: 109; see also Vickers in Beech & Lee, 2015; Beech, 2011). The principles of liberal Conservatism revolve around several interrelated positions: Firstly, a commitment to the protection and promotion of an enlightened national interest which includes a ‘liberal’ humanitarian obligation to the world, rather than a more traditionally ‘narrow’ realism. Secondly, a commitment to internationalism; ‘engagement’ with the world as a responsible actor, rather than withdrawing to isolationism (Beech, 2011) Thirdly, an Atlanticist commitment to the rules-based international order preferably under guardianship of the United States (and by extension NATO). Fourthly, what Cameron called ‘Commercial diplomacy’ that favoured free trade and trade policy to promote inward investment, British security and diplomatic interests (Cameron, 2006). Fifthly, a classically liberal stance in the promotion and ‘sound’ use of liberal trade as a means for promoting development and security abroad—to alleviate and avoid problems early-on and keep them at distance to the UK (see Beech, 2011; Vickers, 2015).

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The approach consciously distanced the Conservatives from the bullish, hubristic and decreasingly popular ‘Liberal’ interventionism of Labour (Cameron, 2006), but did not entirely reject the moral strand of foreign policy they had introduced by reverting to a more traditional nonideological Realism of previous Conservative governments (Beech, 2011), nor did it adopt a ‘neoconservative’ course of interventionism. Rather, liberal Conservatism reflected the cross-party convergence to a more liberal, indeed at times ‘activistic’, course of external policy that by 2015 had established humanitarian responsibilities and action as a ‘facet of Britain’s global role’ (Beech, 2015; Beech & Munce, 2019; Vickers, 2015). If humanitarianism was a liberal addition to Conservative foreign policy, its internationalism drew on a broader post-war cross-party consensus on foreign policy which maintained that Britain, by dint of specific geography, history, necessity and preference, is oriented towards such a stance. This tendency should be understood in the context of longrunning debates on Britain’s position as a ‘global’ actor. The dominant theme of such debates is decline, in both absolute and relative senses: The former regards the UK’s declining global position and strength following 1945, largely related to withdrawal from Empire, whereas the latter describes the UK’s global position by comparison to the United States and other powers (the Soviet Union, later Japan and recently the PRC) and which came to surpass Britain economically, militarily and politically since 1945 (in some cases by great orders of magnitude). As the oft-quoted phrase by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson had it, Britain had lost an Empire but struggled to find a ‘role’ in the world to replace it. Nevertheless, the ‘role’ pursued by governments since has broadly reflected the ‘three circles’ of interest described by W.S. Churchill in 1948 (Europe, North America and the Commonwealth) in relation to which Britain was uniquely placed to act as a diplomatic lynchpin with a level of influence across these spheres. This concept has endured, reflected by Prime Ministers of both parties when describing Britain as a transatlantic ‘bridge’ (Tony Blair) or ‘hub’ (Gordon Brown), and by the Coalition and then Cameron governments which described Britain as being near the centre of a ‘global network’ (see HM Government, 2015; also Sanders & Houghton, 2017) This internationalism might be dismissed as delusion when Britain’s resources no-longer allow the status

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of Britain’s imperial heyday1 but, conversely, it may reflect a pragmatic accommodation of real decline to the rank of a post-imperial ‘middle power’ whilst still attempting to use residual (but not wholly insignificant) power and influence to serve British interests and ‘stay in the game’ where possible and beneficial. The Cameron government rejected a declinist narrative in favour of continued (indeed, ostensibly reinvigorated) internationalism of the liberal Conservative mould, as had Thatcher and later, May and Johnson. The party’s, 2015 manifesto committed to a global role: ‘Britain standing tall in the world’ with a ‘stronger voice…on the world stage’, following a perceived decline during Labour’s tenure and the 2008 recession (Conservative Party, 2015: 17). Similarly, the 2015 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review (NSS/SDSR) described Britain’s defence policy as ‘international by design’, seeking to ‘project our global influence’ and maintain a positive global role as the ‘world’s leading soft power’ (HM Government, 2015: 13, 49) despite post-war decline.2 Both documents iterated the core features of liberal Conservatism outlined above: In a commitment to the rules-based international order and the international organisation on which it depends alongside a strong support for the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Secondly in ‘Commercial foreign policy’ as a means to international, as well as British, security and advancement, with the manifesto highlighting closer trading relations with extra-EU states, especially China, the United States, Brazil, India and Japan (HM Government, 2015: 72; see also Conservative Party, 2015). Thirdly, a globally activistic component through sustained commitments to global security, liberal democracy and human rights as well as a high aid budget ‘to support fragile and broken states and regions to prevent conflict [and] promote… conditions that drive prosperity all across the world: the rule of law, good governance and the growth of democracy’ (HM Government, 2015: 6). The SDSR also continued

1 As described by Tombs, an acute form of this view triumphantly claims that ‘Britain is a much diminished and weak country, barely able to function economically or politically on its own’ and should abandon pretences of internationalism and global power such as UN Security Council membership or withdrawal from the EU (Tombs, 2021:76). 2 As per indexes such as Portland Communications’ ‘Soft Power 30’, see Jonathan McClory ‘The Soft power 30; a global ranking of soft power’. https://portland-commun ications.com/pdf/The-Soft-Power_30.pdf.

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commitment to cultivate the means of projecting global influence with an expeditionary ‘hard power’ capability.

Global Britain By its nature, the 2016 referendum on British EU membership was largely a public debate about Britain’s decline and internationalist stance and bore with it the possibility of a significant change of course. These are, at heart, geopolitical and foreign policy matters. A ‘Remain’ decision would have seen the continuation of global engagement, albeit through an increasingly integrated EU, and with (owing to the EU’s own makeup) a consequently more continental, limited scope. On the other hand, ‘Leave’ could either see a shift towards a more isolationist stance or, as the main campaigns argued, a conscious continuation of an extra-European, global orientation.3 However, although the decision to ‘Leave’ resulted in a geostrategic reconfiguration that ended Britain’s ‘continental century’ (see Mayne’s chapter in this volume), it did not presage a change in respect to long-standing internationalism or even other aspects of the liberal Conservative approach of Cameron government. The incoming May government committed to the same projects, relations and organisations (sans EU et al., of course) and internationalist stance as its predecessor. Although assessed, perhaps erroneously, by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee as a policy (HoC Foreign Affairs Committee, 2017), this geopolitical stance, dubbed ‘Global Britain’ by May’s government, may in practice be understood as an exercise in reaffirming (to international as well as domestic audiences) continued international engagement, dispelling concerns of isolationism. It may also be understood as largely continuing the liberal Conservative doctrine whilst reemphasising Britain’s geography and inheritance as a globally engaged polity with appetite and scope for more. However, it should be noted that even had the government wished to alter course, so much of the capacities and focus of government after 2016 was concentrated on handling the negotiations of withdrawal from the EU that a real course change was unlikely, and that ‘Global Britain’ may have served the shorter-term issues of withdrawal as much as vice versa.

3 On this view, it is a Remain vote, which would most likely have committed the UK to a (gradually) changing course.

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Nevertheless, apart from the obvious case of the EU, Mrs May and her foreign secretaries retained, and sought to bolster, British involvement in the various international organisations on which they perceived British security and diplomatic weight depended. May’s articulation of this stance in her 2016 Party Conference speech ‘A Vision of Global Britain’ described a role in which ‘we play our full part in promoting peace and prosperity around the world…protect our national interests…national security, and the security of our allies’ (May, 2016). The 2017 manifesto reaffirmed the course, describing Global Britain in familiar Cameronera terms: As globally interconnected and a steadfast member of major international institutions, as well as ‘the world’s foremost champion’ of free trade, eager for bilateral trade agreements with other democracies (Conservative Party, 2017: 37–39); echoing Cameron’s commercial diplomacy. However, May was more sceptical of interventionism than her predecessor and in her address to the Republican Party Conference; in January 2017, she appeared to repudiate her predecessor’s involvements in Syria and Libya along with the Blair-Bush years of interventionism: ‘The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over’ (May: 2017a). Whilst adding a distinctly Realist message to this distinctly Realist audience, “nor can we afford to stand idly by when the threat is real and when it is in our own interests to intervene. We must be strong, smart, and hardheaded. And we must demonstrate the resolve necessary to stand up for our interests” (Ibid.) The demands of negotiating withdrawal from the EU doubtless tempered appetite for interventionism, if much were present, and during her time at Number 10, May authorised only the one additional and minute operation that could be considered interventionist, against the Assad regime in 2018 (see below). This reluctance was not a total volte face however and the government was still ostensibly committed to a moral course that extended British values of freedom, democracy, trade and the rule of law and continued British leadership in various human rights projects, for example, female education and the modern slave trade (Conservative Party, 2017: 37). The MoD and FCO’s 2017 International Defence Engagement Strategy, again billed as ‘international by design’ (MoD & FCO, 2017), further echoed the Prime Minister’s 2016 speech and the 2015 SDSR,

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promising global engagement, concerns about the erosion of the rulesbased international order and commitment to moral purpose in foreign policy. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson’s 2019 speech ‘Defence in Global Britain’ reiterated these commitments, as well as the need of global engagement and even intervention in a period of intensifying global great power competition. A key point of the speech was the commitment of an aircraft carrier flotilla, ‘East of Suez’ to the Indo-Pacific, to protect British interests, support partners and maintain the rules-based international order in light of the global ‘pivot’ to the region and assertive China (Williamson, 2019).4 Johnson’s 2019 electoral success was based partly upon promising both a generally internationalist neo-liberal ‘Global Britain’ stance to the established party base, whilst also appealing to Northern voters with what Gamble calls a ‘Britain First’ mandate, of greater state involvement in the North of England and potentially greater protectionism. Whilst this could see Britain ‘fall between two stools’, in Gamble’s estimation it will likely engender compromise that generally favours Global Britain (Gamble, 2020). The continued commitment to a ‘global role’ of some form should not come as a surprise, given that in 2015, the majority Cameron government inherited long-standing positions in NATO, the UN Security Council, the Commonwealth, countless other international organisations, and London’s position as a premier nodal point in the globalised economy (e.g. Takenaka et al., 2020). Rather, it appears more difficult for Britain to not be ‘global’ and at the time of writing the Johnson government continues to position the UK as an enabler and ‘hub’ within a network of democratic states (the ‘D10’, itself a revival of a pre-Brexit idea), whilst global soft-power rankings have remained very high.5

4 The idea of British activity ‘east of Suez’ has long been controversial in British foreign and defence policy. In 1967, eleven years after the Suez Crisis, the Chancellor Roy Jenkins conceded budgets could no longer allow the stationing of forces in the Middle and Far East. Nevertheless, such deployments have continued. 5 Although the UK has slipped, it remains in the top three countries. See McClory et al. (2018, 2019): https://softpower30.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TheSoft-Power-30-Report-2018.pdf. https://softpower30.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/ 10/The-Soft-Power-30-Report-2019-1.pdf.

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The European Union As the above highlights, the only real, although hardly insignificant, change in British foreign policy in this period was withdrawal from the European Union and the reduced role of the EU as an enabling institution to these ends, with its transition from membership to partner. This could be cast as the major recent exception to a bipartisan consensus on British foreign policy, but the issue was not limited to foreign policy qua external relations, and had distinct and long-running fault-lines that were by no means partisan. However, within the party we see clearer division: Despite his (and his party’s) general ‘Euroscepticism’ David Cameron had been openly supportive of ‘Remain’ (Cameron, 2019) where May had ostensibly been Pro-Remain, though less ardently than Cameron—her ‘Leave credentials’ would be questioned throughout her premiership. Johnson became closely associated with the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign and upon becoming Prime Minister altered the cabinet party makeup in line with a more pro-Leave position. This split and changing of the guard following Cameron’s resignation from office delineates the clearest discontinuity between the Cameron ministry, and his successors tasked with ‘delivering Brexit’. However, even this was no clean break and all-but-only reaffirmed the party’s long-standing ambivalence towards the EU (see Beech, 2011). Among even these Prime Ministers, a degree of continuity in ambivalent scepticism (essentially Conservative) of European Federalism and EU enlargement continued where the context (of ‘ever-closer-Union’)6 was making it increasingly impossible for such conservatism to be expressed as a member. This revealed a potential fault-line within the doctrine of liberal Conservatism; between its commitment to certain international institutions (the EU), on the one hand, and its Atlanticist and internationalist instincts, along with its pursuit of ‘enlightened’ but still national rather than supernational interest, on the other. Withdrawal obviously necessitated a break in the UK’s government departments. The entwining (albeit sometimes obstructive and reluctant) of British and European Union policy during British membership had been a feature of British politics since the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) if not before and this was further true of foreign and defence policy following the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. ‘Lisbon’ expanded ‘ever-closer 6 As Cameron himself encountered, see Cameron (2019, 646–647).

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union’ into foreign and defence policy, with the maturation of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the office of the High Representative, and the External Action Service (EEAS); these developed greater coordination of member foreign policies and the movement of certain competences and duties to the EU level. Characteristically less integrated than other states (and less so during the Cameron years than during the Blair and Brown governments), these processes nevertheless involved increasing interdependence of the FCO (and the Department for International Development and Ministry of Defence) with the CFSP and its defence aspects.7 Furthermore, as part of the Political Declaration that accompanied May’s October 2019 withdrawal agreement, the UK was to continue in ‘ambitious, close and lasting cooperation on external action’ with the CFSP. However, for Johnson ‘Global Britain’ means a greater divergence with the EU, at least on matters of international trade, and to the chagrin of the EU, the Johnson government would also discontinue the Political Declaration, in favour of a freer hand on international matters and bilateral arrangements (Whitman, 2020, see also Gamble, 2020; Lehne, 2021). Withdrawal from the EU has presented the FCO with an acute challenge in requiring redevelopment of independent British diplomatic presence around the world with consulates, embassies, staff, etc., compounding strains made by ‘austerity’ policies of the Coalition. Whether this can be achieved smoothly remains to be seen (though it must in some fashion), the FCO will likely benefit from considerable budgetary expansion from its reunification with the Department for International Development in late 2020.

The Middle East and North Africa Since the 2003 Iraq War, if not before, the Middle East had become an area of acute attention for British foreign policy and the scope of this focus widened with the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, that saw counter-government movements (of great variety) and often-oppressive reaction by governments across the region. A notable example of the discord was the rise of the theocratic Islamic State (IS) organisation, initially growing out of the Iraqi conflict, to become an aggressive proto-state in much of eastern 7 This benefitted the EU greatly in providing access to Britain’s international diplomatic network.

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Syria and part of western Iraq. The Coalition government had displayed its strongest sense for interventionism in response to this threat which was twinned with support for other groups opposed to the incumbent Assad regime, as well as in Libya supporting rebels against the potentate Gadhafi with airpower. By 2015 these conflicts were entering phases which saw minimal change in British involvement; in Libya a sequel civil war rumbled on, and in Syria and Iraq a US-led coalition continued to fight IS largely with airstrikes and irregular forces. The May government proceeded with caution, though demonstrated some of its predecessors’ activistic instincts for the international rules-based order when in 2018, following the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, four Royal Air Force jets participated in American-led airstrikes on chemical-weapons infrastructure. This operation, distinct from the ongoing Operation Shader against Islamic State (begun 2014), was the only distinct interventionism of the May government as such, in the Middle East (and elsewhere). According to the Prime Minister, the intervention was ‘not about intervening in a civil war [or]…regime change’ (May, 2018) and limited to the deterrence of chemical-weapons use. Where her predecessor had gone to the House of Commons for support of a proposed intervention following suspected chemical-weapons use in 2013, May had not sought such approval in advance, avoiding arguments that the operation would lead to a larger commitment, and provided Parliament with a fait acompli; May won the ex post vote on her decision comfortably and the intervention proved as limited as intended (Strong, 2021). Apart from continued special forces operations in Syria and Iraq and some ambivalence towards the Saudi operations in Yemen, British engagement in the region continued generally in the hands-off manner, cautious of a repeat of Labour interventionism. Meanwhile, the Libyan conflict petered out and war with IS was largely won by Russian support of Assad, with a relatively limited US involvement in Iraq and along the border.

Russia Following the commencement of war with the Ukraine in 2014, Russia had quickly escalated in the index of Whitehall’s concern and featured as the key state threat to the rules-based international order and British

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interest in the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (HM Government, 2015). The Cameron government was highly critical of Russia within the EU and NATO, a position retained by May’s government, with the established EU sanction regime on Moscow continuing through withdrawal negotiations. Furthermore, throughout the 2015–2018 period, there was little opportunity for the improvement of relations as the conflict in the Ukraine continued and, in Syria, Moscow supported its allies in the Assad regime whereas the UK and United States backed some of the rebel groups; albeit both could agree in principle in opposing Islamic State. The possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 referendum added further to this deterioration and the following year the Prime Minister, in her address to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, described Russia as the chief threat to international order, through both conventional means and subversive information campaigns, and addressed Moscow directly; ‘we know what you are doing. And you will not succeed’ (May, 2017b). Anglo-Russian relations would further deteriorate following the March 2018 poisoning of the British double-agent Sergei Skirpal and his daughter Yulia by Russian agents using the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury. This led to the hospitalisation of the Skirpals along with others, including a policeman, Det. Sgt. Nick Bailey and the death of one Dawn Sturgess. As evidence of Russian state involvement came to light, the UK gained international sympathy and diplomatic capital, allowing Whitehall to lead the largest expulsion of Russian agents in history, not just from the UK, but from Russian missions by allies across Europe, Canada and especially, the United States.

China In contrast to Russia, the People’s Republic of China appeared in 2015 as a potential Eurasian partner for the Cameron government. World economic and political power was perceived to ‘pivot’ from the Atlantic, Europe and the Mediterranean to the Far East and Pacific (Clinton, 2011), with the rapidly growing economy of the PRC at the heart of it. The Cameron government, especially the Chancellor George Osborne, was eager to develop bilateral trade relations with Beijing, a move in accordance with the commercial diplomacy of liberal Conservatism. A state visit by PRC General Secretary Xi Jinping in 2015 bolstered the engagement embarked on by the Coalition government, sealing deals

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worth £40 billion and preparing the way for a visit to Beijing by Chancellor George Osborne on which he predicted a ‘golden era of Sino-British relations, with the UK as ‘China’s best partner in the West’ (Osborne, 2015). However, the ‘honeymoon’ period proved short-lived as scepticism of the PRC quickly mounted both among Conservatives and among key international allies (especially the United States and Australia), in no small part due to aggressive naval diplomacy in the South China Seas and concerns about Chinese-state-backed infrastructure. The subsequent May government largely held this course, albeit absorbed into the ‘Global Britain’ charm offensive, with the Prime Minister’s visit to China in January 2018. This visit did not achieve successes in trade deals compared to Mr Cameron’s efforts, and, to the consternation of her hosts, May did not sign a Memorandum of Understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative8 (Seldon, 2020: 385). However, the mood was still optimistic when the Chancellor, Phillip Hammond, spoke months later during his own visit of a ‘deep and strong’ partnership between the two countries, buoyed by developing economic cooperation and open trade (Hammond, 2018). Nevertheless, Sino-British relations were already ebbing: May’s chief advisor, Nick Timothy, had been publicly critical of the Cameron government’s support of increasing PRC involvement in British infrastructure, specifically the development of a nuclear power station at Hinkley Point, Somerset by the French-state owned EDF, with later involvement of the Chinese-state-owned CGN. Under pressure from her advisors, on the one hand, and French and Chinese governments, industry and other ‘stakeholders’, on the other, May paused the project in mid-2016. Although with additional enhanced security provisions the project would restart in September, it was clear even at this juncture that Anglo-Chinese relations were cooling (See Blackburn, 2016: 243–244; Seldon, 2020: 89–91).9 Similar security concerns dogged the development of parts of the UK’s 5G cellular network by the PRC’s state-backed telecommunications giant Huawei and the government was (again) caught between Cameron-era ambitions and the need to court one of the world’s fastest developing

8 The PRC’s geostrategically expansionist global infrastructure project. 9 CGN would later be blacklisted by the United States’ Department of Commerce due

to the company’s apparent links to military industrial espionage (Shepherd, 2019).

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major economies as a trade partner, on the one hand, and on the other, security and strategic concerns at home and among allies (Dowden, 2020). Through 2018 national and international concern mounted, especially among the ‘Five Eye’s intelligence allies Australia and the United States about the company’s links to PRC intelligence services, who began to remove Huawei equipment from their systems. In Britain, intelligence agencies, including the head of GCHQ and its dedicated Huawei product evaluation centre, also expressed the need for caution, though did not rule out a safe role for Huawei equipment in basic infrastructure (HCSEC Oversight Board, 2018: 4; Bond, 2019). Senior Conservatives including former leader Iain Duncan Smith and the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt were more adamant that Huawei’s involvement be cut entirely, furnishing the government with a nascent rebellion within the cabinet whilst the Party was continually divided over EU trade negotiations. In a tense meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) in April, May decided to proceed with Huawei involvement, despite objections from Hunt, her Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. The latter, it is now believed, leaked the decision ahead of official disclosure (a precedent for the highly sensitive NSC), resulting in dismissal and replacement by Penny Mordaunt (Seldon, 2020: 613). Highlighting the pressures of the situation, the PRC’s chargé d’affaires inferred that there could be ‘substantial’ repercussions for Anglo-Chinese trade and inward investment, should Huawei be precluded (BBC, 2019). The issue was effectively put on hold by the then-outgoing May government but would return to trouble her successor. In January 2020, the new Johnson government indicated that Huawei’s involvement would be limited to 35% of the 5G network and be restricted to non-sensitive peripheral sections. However, by this point, US-China trade disputes had become acute and Washington officials, including the White House, vocally critical. Vice-president Mike Pence also inferred in an interview with CNBC that the decision could undermine Anglo-American trade negotiations, further bolstering Conservative rebels opposed to the compromise (Macias, 2020). Later in the year, the Johnson government would alter its position, aiming to entirely remove Huawei from the network.10 10 In July 2020 the government accepted National Cyber Security advice on the matter and ‘reversed’ the decision to allow limited involvement, prohibiting the acquisition of

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Hong Kong & Xinjiang With historic links to Britain Hong Kong presented an opportunity for the commercial foreign policy of ‘Global Britain’ and was identified as one of 50 key partners by May’s International Trade Secretary Liam Fox (Fox, 2017). Via the ‘one country, two systems’ agreement with the PRC, the quasi-autonomous city-state also offered another route for commercial engagement with Beijing and through 2017 and 2018 the UK and HK struck collaborative agreements and understandings on the scope of this partnership to come. However, this relationship occasioned undermined relations with Beijing when in early 2019 the PRC’s client executive in Hong Kong tabled a National Security law that would further subsume Hong Kong to the PRC and curtail civil liberties. In response the UK and Canada issued a joint statement of concern over the law and its threat to the Sino-British agreement on the territory’s status in May. By June millions of protestors in Hong Kong were demonstrating against the Chinese Communist Party and the chief executive, which were forcefully suppressed by the authorities. For the following 12 months the issue, became the main sticking point with Anglo-Chinese relations and would lead to the government openly and repeatedly condemning the National Security Law (e.g. Raab, 2019a; Raab, 2019b), with Beijing growingly intolerant to international criticism in response. Whilst the situation in Hong Kong deteriorated through July 2019, the UK’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dame Karen Pierce, joined 19 other UN ambassadors to condemn Beijing’s mistreatment of Turkic Uyghur people in the province of Xinjiang. In October this was reinforced with a further, British-led condemnation by 23 UN states (Pierce, 2019). Although the FCO had raised concerns for several years prior, even during the Coalition government,11 and Prime Minister May had raised concerns behind closed doors with Premier Xi, these were the first incidences, at least since the Cameron ‘golden age’, of the British government openly criticising the PRC on the issue at the UN. In this, as in the Hong Kong case, taking an active and leading role in such condemnations when trade with the PRC could prove new 5G equipment from the Chinese company from the end of 2020 and sought a removal of Huawei technology from the UK network by 2027. 11 For example, Hammond (2015, p. 122).

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more profitable for ‘Global Britain’, displays how normalised Cameron’s liberal Conservatism had become within the Party, despite internal shifts between ideationally different factions represented by Boris Johnson’s succession. However, unlike the Arab Spring which afforded the Cameron government some latitude for liberal Conservative involvement, and even interventionism in Libya and Syria, the situation in Hong Kong and Xinjiang was a fundamentally different strategic proposition and the British government could not consider more direct intervention in either case. Nevertheless, it would continue to publicly condemn the PRC on these two oft-affiliated issues as well as on Beijing’s bullishness in the South China Seas, condemned, for example, by the E3 (UK, France and Germany) in August of 2019. Where May had sought to be more cautious of public criticism of Beijing’s human rights record in Hong Kong and Xinjing, the Johnson government was increasingly critical and has, to date opposed the National Security Law, vowed to offer citizenship to three million Hongkongese with British overseas passports, and sanctioned Chinese officials involved in Xinjiang. It remains uncertain what the next phase of British-Chinese relations will be: The Biden administration in Washington has taken a softer stance than its predecessor, which could indicate some possibilities of a return to more cordial relations, but this seems unlikely in the near-term. Concerns about the PRC’s geostrategic ambitions, behaviour in the South China Seas, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, subversion of Australia and other regional partners, espionage, and Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggest relations will not return to the ‘golden era’ of Cameron’s commercial diplomacy. With the advantages of hindsight, George Osborne’s courting of Beijing appears short-sightedly divorced from the wider geopolitical and strategic context of the PRC. As David Owen and David Ludlow point out, Easternisation and the ‘pivot’ to Asia will continue to be a challenge for British foreign policy (Owen & Ludlow, 2017, 229).

The US and Special Relationship Anglo-American relations have been widely regarded as vital to British foreign policy since the Second World War and a close relationship with the leading state of the free world made a certain amount of strategic sense in the Cold War and after, even if the partnership was not always equal, warm or so overtly beneficial as its keenest supporters argued.

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Indeed, Prime Ministers Eden, Macmillan and Heath regarded the United States pragmatically and coolly, but with its Churchillian roots and the close relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party developed a strong Atlanticist tendency which positions it as the self-perceived guardians of the ‘Special Relationship’ (See Beech, 2011; Honeyman, 2009). According to David Cameron, Atlanticism was influential in his approach to foreign policy (Cameron, 2019) and his majority government continued to cultivate the close relations with Washington as the Coalition had, although this should be understood in the context of postBlair foreign policy, when Anglo-American relations were in some need of rehabilitation, to the British people as well as in the United States, EU and wider world. At the same time, President Barack Obama had presented a subdued, even frosty, attitude towards Britain in the earlier years of his presidency, in part due to distancing himself from the Blair-Bush relationship and the Global War on Terror, as well as the refocusing US policy focus on domestic affairs and the ‘pivot to Asia’. Nevertheless, Cameron cultivated a cordial personal relationship with the President and the two worked on joint and multilateral responses to issues bilaterally and through the G7 (Cameron, 2019), influencing US and British involvement in Libya and Syria. The election of pro-Brexit Anglophile Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 (inaugurated early 2017) could have indicated further increasing transatlantic bon-homie, needed for post-Brexit Britain. However, Trump’s relationship with Theresa May was much less close than the mirror of the Reagan-Thatcher years Trump had hoped for. This was in no small part due to the personalities involved; Trump was a controversial character with an intense personality and not well regarded by the Washington establishment or the May cabinet before his election and, whereas Trump’s style was intensely personal, if at times erratic, May consistently struggled with and avoided the forging of less formal bonds with foreign leaders and possessed a more aloof disposition (Seldon, 2020: 58–68, 652). May privately found the President brash and rude, whilst Trump was often publicly critical of May’s handling of the EU withdrawal negotiations, most notably whilst visiting the UK after the Prime Minister had outlined her ‘Chequers Plan’. President Trump described the position as a bad deal that would ‘kill’ Anglo-American trade prospects and in the same interview lauded Boris

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Johnson as potentially a ‘great prime minister’ (Ballhaus & Gross, 2018). As Anthony Seldon points out, Trump’s comments had undermined the Prime Minister in a manner unprecedented in 100 years of AngloAmerican relations. (Seldon, 2020: 453). A similar furore emerged the following summer when disparaging comments about Mr Trump made by British Ambassador Kim Darroch were leaked to the press. The President responded with scorn of the ambassador as well as of the Prime Minister’s handling of Brexit, and again indicating his preference for Boris Johnson who was soon to replace May as Prime Minister. Despite such high-profile discord, on balance Anglo-American cooperation and relations continued as cordially as they may have done throughout May’s tenure, and Mr Trump’s White House was, at least diplomatically, more favourable of No. 10 than any other European government. This was aided by the fact that the Trump administration’s new Realist foreign and security policy, at first primarily orchestrated by figures like Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), Jim Mattis (Defense) and Nadia Shadlow, did not match the President’s more isolationist rhetoric. A vital issue in this regard was Mr Trump’s criticism of NATO and his indications that he would withdraw the United States from the alliance, especially if European NATO states did not meet the agreed threshold of 2% of GNI expenditure on defence.12 Clearly, this was deeply at odds with British foreign and security policy under Mrs May, which, like its predecessors, was strongly committed to close US-European defence cooperation via NATO. In this, the Prime Minister perhaps demonstrated Britain’s role in diplomatic connection when apparently prevailing upon the President to maintain the United States’ involvement and leadership of NATO and publicly commit to doing so during her 2017 visit (Seldon, 2020: 164–165). In other areas UK and US cooperation continued largely unchanged, generally limited to the common pursuit of the destruction of IS, opposition to the Assad regime’s use of chemical warfare, alongside which both governments were very cautious to avoid large-scale military interventionism and the Trump administration’s strikes on Syria, as with May’s were in proportion, limited affairs. As noted, President Trump had consistently spoken well of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary and as potential Prime Minister, whereas 12 For example, see BBC News. (2017). Donald Trump Tells NATO Allies to Pay Up at Brussels talks’, 25 May 2017; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40037776.

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Johnson had tacitly supported the Trump Administration in his journalism. Consequently, as Prime Minister, ‘Boris’ presented the Trump administration with a more welcoming Number 10, but despite intentions, a trade deal could not be negotiated before the election of Mr Trump’s successor, Joe Biden.

International Development The 2015 SDSR committed the Conservative majority government to a relatively large official development assistance (ODA) budget of 0.7% of GNI in accordance with UN targets. In 2015 this totalled approximately £12 billion (Garnett et al. 2018: 30) and the department came to command a budget some five times larger than the FCO. As per liberal Conservatism, development was a means of promoting values such as liberal democracy, good governance and human rights, and was sustained in civil aid involvement in the Middle East and North Africa, but the emphasis was on preventive aid. Indeed the NSS/SDSR specifically linked aid and security, describing a ‘whole of government approach’ that saw developmental aid, as a tool of ‘soft power’, as a means of promoting global security and so avoid the need for more extensive military interventionism (HM Government, 2015: 13, 14, 52). This was little different to the Coalition’s approach, which as Vickers points out could be criticised as ‘securitising aid’; using it for security objectives rather than needs-based distribution (Vickers, 2015: 238). Despite concerns in the aid industry, May committed to the same aid profile as her predecessor, with the 2017 manifesto stating that ‘global Britain should aspire to do even more’ and lead ‘the world in development’. It argued as the Cameron government had, that development aid helped avert problems and keep them at distance whilst strengthening British soft power (Conservative Party, 2017: 30). To this end the government continued aid funding at 0.7% of GNI and the figure became, like ‘Global Britain’, one of the Prime Minister’s shorthand phrases for continued international engagement. Untethered from the European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), however, the May government also aimed to spend this aid in ways considered more useful to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Greater controversy came with May’s Minister for the Department for International Development (DfID), Priti Patel, who had had been

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vocally critical of the department, particularly as it had been controversially ‘ring-fenced’ during ‘austerity’ measures and continued to provide aid to countries which no longer apparently needed it.13 Ms Patel pledged reform in line with ‘Conservative principles’, encouraging investment and trade, as well as to use aid in ways subject to condition of British interest (Patel, 2017; see also Lansdale, 2016). This more realist approach to a quasi-tied condition of aid was a potential change to the Cameron-era approach. British aid programmes continued throughout the period with the same untied spending profile in global projects against diseases, such as Malaria, TB, Ebola, Polio and HIV across Africa and Asia, and in disaster relief. Aid was also deployed in line with the campaign against IS, to the liberated cities of Mosul and Raqqa and, following the impact of Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean. Patel also managed to secure important changes to aid rules to allow greater flexibility in the use of aid in the event of crises (Philip, 2017). However, following allegations around improper meetings with Israeli politicians, Patel resigned in November 2017 to be replaced at DfID, again by Penny Mordaunt. Although less controversial, Mordaunt was not a return to the status quo ante and continued to combine aid with other tools of the state in support of British trade and security interests whilst avoiding explicitly tied aid. The Johnson government initially carried over the same expenditure and arrangements, though had begun early work on institutional reform, concerned that the DfID and FCO, as well as the new Department for International Trade, were too divided in pursuing policies related to the ‘Global Britain’ stance (Fox, 2020). In line with the liberal Conservative marrying of developmental aid to other policies, it would announce in 2021 the re-merger of the FCO and DfID.

Conclusion The period from 2015 to 2020 saw a general, though not exact, continuity in British foreign policy in the principles of Cameron’s liberal Conservatism despite the obvious upheaval of the decision and process of withdrawal from the European Union. These processes naturally occupied considerable governmental energy and focus at a time when the 13 An oft-cited example of the time was the continued aid to India, despite that country’s expensive space programme sending a probe to Mars in 2014.

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Prime Minister had already become the main voice and actor in British foreign policy, and by which the FCO’s own capacities and assets had been reduced by integration with the EU and cuts following the 2008 recession. Nevertheless, the governments of Cameron, May and Johnson in this time, sought to maintain and where possible expand, British diplomatic capabilities in line with the national interest. The decision to leave the European Union did not lead to a parochial or isolationist reorientation, but a greater emphasis on an already well-established internationalist strain in British foreign policy orientation. Acknowledgements My thanks to Matt Beech and other colleagues who were involved in this volume, for their critique and advice in the development of this chapter. Any remaining errors are my own.

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Lehne, S. (2021, March 30). Rivals or Partners? The EU-UK Foreign Policy Relationship After Brexit. Carnegie Europe [Online]. https://carnegieeurope. eu/2021/03/30/rivals-or-partners-eu-uk-foreign-policy-relationship-afterbrexit-pub-84197. Accessed 3 July 2021. Macias, A. (2020, February 7). Vice President Pence: “We’ll See” if UK Decision on Huawei Is a Deal Breaker for a Trade Pact. CNBC [Online]. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/pence-well-see-ifuk-decision-on-huawei-is-a-dealbreaker-for-a-trade-deal.html. Accessed 6 July 2021. May, T. (2016, October 2). Speech to the Conservative Party Conference. May, T. (2017a, January 26). Speech to the Republican Party ‘Congress of Tomorrow’ Conference. May, T. (2017b, November 13). Prime Minister’s Speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Mansion House. May, T. (2018, April 14). Statement on Syrian Air Strikes. BBC News. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43766966. Accessed 3 July 2021. McClory, J. et al. (2018) The Soft Power 30: A Global Ranking of Soft Power 2018 [Online]. Portland Communications/Facebook. https://softpower30. com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/The-Soft-Power-30-Report-2018.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2021. McClory, J., et al. (2019) The Soft Power 30: A Global Ranking of Soft Power 2019 [Online]. Portland Communications/Facebook. https://softpower30. com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/The-Soft-Power-30-Report-2019-1. pdf. Accessed 20 May 2021. Ministry of Defence and Foreign and Commonwealth Office. (2017). International Defence Engagement Strategy 2017 . The Stationery Office. Osborne, G. (2015, October 23). Interview with the BBC. https://www.bbc.co. uk/news/av/uk-34621254. Accessed 12 May 2021. Owen, D., & Ludlow, D. (2017). British Foreign Policy After Brexit: An Independent Voice. Biteback Publishing. Party, C. (2010). Invitation to Join the Government of Britain: Conservative Election Manifesto 2010. Conservative Party. Party, C. (2015). The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015. Conservative Party. Party, C. (2017). Forward Together: The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2017 . The Conservative Party. Patel, P. (2017, June 29). Speech at ‘What the World Needs from Global Britain’ Event. Department for International Development. Philip, C. (2017, November 1). Victory on Aid Rules in Wake of Hurricane Irma. The Sunday Times [Online]. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/victory-onaid-rules-in-wake-of-hurricane-irma-q7l8p9v6h. Accessed 17 June 2021.

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Pierce, K. (2019, October). Joint Statement on Human Rights Violations and Abuses in Xinjiang to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 29. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/joint-statement-onxinjiang. Accessed 3 July 2021. Raab, D. (2019a, September 26). Statement on Hong Kong to the House of Commons. col. 864. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2019a-0926/debates/E7A4A3F4-2095-4A5E-856A-2CD252EB86F8/HongKong? highlight=hong%20kong#contribution-D47FB274-DEA3-4A65-92B3-F12 0FCCCE1DA. Accessed 2 July 2021. Raab, D. (2019b, October 4). Foreign Secretary Statement on Hong Kong Protests [Press Statement]. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hong-kong-pro tests-4-october-2019b-foreign-secretarys-statement. Accessed 2 July 2021. Sanders, D., & Houghton, D. P. (2017). Losing an Empire, Finding a Role: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Seldon, A. (2020). May at 10: The Verdict. Biteback Publishing. Shepherd, C. (2019, August 15) ‘US Blacklists Chinese Nuclear Company Over Theft of Military Tech’ The Financial Times [Online]. https://www. ft.com/content/9601ebda-bf24-11e9-b350-db00d509634e. Accessed 5/21. Accessed 3 June 2021. Strong, J. (2021). Did Theresa May Kill the War Powers Convention? Comparing Parliamentary Debates on UK Intervention in Syria in 2013 and 2018 February. Parliamentary Affairs, gsab1 00 (pp. 1–20). https://aca demic.oup.com/pa/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pa/gsab001/6127572? login=true. Accessed 29 June 2021. Takenaka, H. et al. (2020). Global Power City Index 2020 [Online]. Institute for Urban Strategies, Mori Memorial Foundation. http://mori-m-foundation.or. jp/pdf/GPCI2020_summary.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2021. Tombs, R. (2021). This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe. Allen Lane/Penguin. Vickers, R. (2015). Foreign Policy and International Development. In M. Beech & S. Lee (Eds.), The Conservative-Liberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government (pp. 227–242). Palgrave Macmillan. Williamson, G. (2019, February 11). Defence in Global Britain. Royal United Services Institute. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/def ence-in-global-britain. Accessed 17 May 2021. Whitman, R. (2020). Why the UK Has Taken Foreign Policy out of Brexit Negotiations. Chatham House. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/07/whyuk-has-taken-foreign-policy-out-brexit-negotiations. Accessed 8 July 2021.

PART III

Four Nation Politics

CHAPTER 14

A Much Misgoverned Nation: England in the Age of Brexit Simon Lee

Introduction: A Not so Secret People In recent years, when exploring the politics of England, it has become a commonplace for politicians, media commentators and academics to cite the opening lines of G.K. Chesterton’s poem, ‘The Secret People’. ‘Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget; For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet’ (Chesterton, 1907).

For some, Chesterton’s vision of the English people rising up in revolution against a remote and arrogant state appeared to have come to fruition in the Age of Brexit when the people of England had spoken,

S. Lee (B) University of Hull, Hull, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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and spoken loudly as citizens, not once but on at least four occasions, and thereby become markedly less secretive (Hitchens, 2016). First, by voting in the 7 May 2015 United Kingdom (UK) General Election to increase the Conservative Party’s total number of seats in England by 22 seats to 318, helping to provide David Cameron with a parliamentary majority of 11, sufficient to enable his party to govern alone without the support of the Liberal Democrats, and to honour his commitment to hold an In–Out European Union (EU) referendum. Second, by voting by 53.4 to 46.6% in the 23 June 2016 referendum for the UK to leave the EU (Brexit). This vote had seen every administrative region of England bar Greater London (which voted 59.9% for Remain) voting to Leave by majorities ranging from 51.8% in the South East to 59.3% in the East Midlands. Third, by voting at the 8 June 2017 UK General Election in large numbers for the Labour Party (which increased its number of seats by 21 in England to 227, and its share of the vote in England by 10.3 to 41.9%), resulting in a net loss of 22 seats in England for the Conservative Party, a total sufficient to deny Theresa May not only her intended larger parliamentary majority in the House of Commons, but also any overall majority to deliver Brexit without the confidence and supply support of the Democratic Unionist Party. Fourth, by voting in the 12 December 2019 UK General Election to give Boris Johnson 345 or 65% of the seats in England, not only nearly twice the Labour Party’s total of 179 or 34% of seats, but sufficient to help give Johnson a parliamentary majority of 80 seats sufficiently large to ensure that he would be able to ‘get Brexit done’. In effect, the people of England had indeed voted to ‘take back control’ by leaving the EU, but, at the same time, they had shown, on the one hand in June 2017, their dissatisfaction and discontent with the austerity agenda and the policies towards the National Health Service in England pursued by the May Government was sufficient to deny it a majority at Westminster, and, on the other hand in December 2019, their support for Johnson’s promise to strengthen the National Health Service (NHS) and social care, invest in schools and invest ‘prudently and strategically to level up every part of the United Kingdom, while strengthening the ties that bind it together’ (Conservative & Unionist Party, 2019: 7), was sufficient to deliver an 80 seat Conservative majority. In exploring England during the Age of Brexit (from the May 2015 UK General Election until the UK’s withdrawal from the EU at the 31 January 2020), this chapter will argue that Brexit did not of itself

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enable the citizens of England to ‘take back control’ of their laws, borders and money because it did not in itself necessarily change the relationship between England’s citizens and the centralized institutions of the sovereign British state which continued to wield the real power to control England’s laws, border and money. Indeed, since during more than a thousand years of history, the citizens of England had never controlled via direct election any more than one of the three institutions of the British state, having never elected the House of Lords or the monarch as Head of State, and had only first elected the House of Commons by universal adult suffrage (over the age of 21) in 1929, it was not possible for the citizens of England to actually take back control of political power they had never in their history possessed or exercised in the first place. Furthermore, by facilitating the repatriation of power from Brussels and Strasbourg to Westminster and Whitehall, there was a very real possibility that Brexit might enable the further strengthening and deepening of the governance of England by the institutions of the centralized British state, via the greater use of delegated legislation and’Henry VIII clauses’ in Brexit bills, which would enable government ministers to amend or repeal particular provisions in an Act of Parliament using secondary legislation, and thereby further erode parliamentary scrutiny and the constitutional checks and balance operating upon the executive in England. Brexit may have redefined the UK and England’s relationship with one political union, and the electorate may have succeeded in demonstrating their disaffection with the institutions and governing elites of Brussels and Strasbourg. However, this chapter will assert that for the citizens of England to take back control of the political power wielded within and on behalf of their nation, they needed to act to redefine their relationship with the institutions and governing elites of a much older political union, namely that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Condition of England and the Irrelevance of Brexit The UK formally left the EU on the 31 January 2020. However, within days a major report on health inequalities in England was published which concluded: ‘England is faltering’. Having identified how the health of the people of England was ‘closely linked to the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age and inequities in power, money

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and resources-the social determinants of health’, the 2020 Marmot Review concluded that a decade of austerity had taken its toll on health in England, with life expectancy actually falling in the most deprived communities for women and (in some administrative regions) for men too (Marmot, 2020: 5). This decline was attributed to the impact of the austerity pursued by UK governments since May 2010 which had ‘adversely affected the social determinants that impact on health in the short, medium and long term’. Indeed, the Review concluded: ‘Austerity will cast a long shadow over the lives of the children born and growing up under its effects’ (Marmot, 2020: 5). At the same time, rates of child poverty in England, a critical measure for early child development had also increased since 2010 to a total of more than four million, with an average of one in five children (22%) living in poverty in England (before housing costs) and 30% living in poverty (after housing costs) in 2017– 18. The respective child poverty rates for London were 19% and 37% (Institute of Health Equity, 2020: 42). In truth, throughout the Age of Brexit, an almost continual litany of official governmental, parliamentary select committee, National Audit Office, academic, think tank and campaigning non-governmental organization reports would detail not only the extent to which England was faltering on a whole range of performance metrics relating to average real living standards, social mobility, education, health, housing and public service provision, due to the impact of austerity, but also the fact that the explanation for this faltering performance and relative national decline could be attributed overwhelmingly, if not completely, to failures in domestic politics and governance, but categorically not to the institutions and policies of the EU. For example, the 2020 Marmot Review itself had concluded that ‘the level of health inequality we see in England, is unnecessary’, but, if it was to be alleviated, it would not be ‘a matter of action by either central government or local government: we need both and we need leadership’, or else there was the risk of losing a generation. What was needed was political, and especially, Prime Ministerial leadership and ‘a reordering of national priorities’ (Institute of Health Equity, 2020: 150). England had become a much misgoverned nation, and one which justified a radically different approach to its politics, governance and political economy. However, it was equally clear, in terms of questions of political power and national sovereignty, that the principal and overwhelming sources of the misgovernance of England lay not with the supranational

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institutions of the EU in Brussels and Strasbourg, but with the domestic institutions of the British state in Westminster and Whitehall which had left England as the most centralized polity among major industrialized nations. Brexit in itself would do nothing to correct the constitutional imbalance in England which by 2013 had seen no fewer than 1293 statutory duties imposed upon English local authorities by the centralized British state, only 8% of which had existed prior to the election of the first Thatcher government (Lee, 2015: 152). Brexit in itself would do nothing to adjust the financial and fiscal imbalances within different parts of England, or between England and the other constituent nations of the United Kingdom which had been perpetuated by the archaic, non-statutory Barnett Formula (Lee, 2017). It had not been either the supranational European Commission or European Parliament which had led the UK government to provide a £1162 billion bailout (including £133 billion of cash) to irresponsible private financial institutions, following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, or to further reward those same institutions with £895 billion of cheap credit through Quantitative Easing (QE). This domestic monetary policy decision had resulted, as the Bank of England openly acknowledged, in a huge redistribution of wealth in favour of the richest 5% of households (Bank of England, 2012), while the richest 10% of households were estimated (depending upon the methodology used) to have each gained either £128,000 or £322,000 (Elliott, 2012). Had just half the £895 billion of new money created through QE been distributed among England’s 56 million people, they could have taken back control of their personal finances via an £8000 personal cash bailout. Nor had it been EU membership which had led David Cameron and George Osborne to initiate an ‘Age of Austerity’ (Cameron, 2009) which had resulted in school spending per pupil in England falling by 9% in real terms between 2009–2010 and 2019–2020, representing ‘the largest cut in over 40 years’ (Farquarson et al., 2021: 6), the 48.1% real-terms reduction in government funding for local authorities in England between 2010–2011 and 2017–2018 (National Audit Office, 2018: 4), and the 2015 Spending Review’s plans for NHS spending in England which would have meant a fall from its historic (since 1948) average annual real increase of 3.7% to only 1.1% for the decade from 2009–2010 to 2019– 2020 (Health Foundation, 2015). It had also been an entirely domestic UK government policy decision to treble university student tuition fees in England to £9250 and to also cut the value of student maintenance

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loans which meant that by 2019–20, the stock of student public debt in England had trebled to £121.813 billion, from £40.272 billion in 2012– 13 (Bolton, 2022: 35), the average student loan in England more than 50% higher than the next highest country (Norway), and that the proportion of students receiving loans in England (96%) was double that of the next highest countries (48% in both New Zealand and Australia) (OECD, 2020).

England and British Nationalism The ‘Brexit’ outcome of the EU referendum would not necessarily enable the people of England to ‘take back control’ of their laws, borders and money if it left unchanged the relationship between the people of England, as a political community of citizens, and the centralized institutions of the British state. And yet, the essential continuity of the Cameron, May and Johnson governments lay in their relentless red, white and blue British nationalism and their governance of England via the centralized power of the British state. In Opposition, David Cameron had affirmed ‘I am a believer in the Union, in the United Kingdom…I don’t want to be Prime Minister of England, I want to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, so we won’t do anything that puts the Union at risk’ (Cameron & Jones, 2008: 267–268). Consequently, following his party’s 2015 UK General Election victory, Cameron’s commitment was that ‘we can make Great Britain greater still’ (Cameron, 2015a), and his vision was of ‘A Greater Britain-that is our goal’ (Cameron, 2015b). In an even stronger British nationalist vein, Theresa May’s premiership was to be shaped by a relentless focus upon Britain: ‘Britain a country that works for everyone’; a ‘Plan for Britain’, ‘The British Way’, ‘Global Britain’; ‘The British Dream’; and Britain as ‘The Great Meritocracy’ and ‘The Shared Society’. Even before he became Prime Minister, as May’s Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson had shared May’s vision and enthusiasm for ‘Global Britain’. Once installed in Number Ten Downing Street, Johnson would wax lyrical about how his government would ‘level up across Britain’ because, in his judgement, it was time ‘we unleashed the productive power not just of London and the South East but of every corner of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland…the awesome foursome that are incarnated in that red white and blue flag who together are so much more than the sum of their parts’ (Johnson, 2019a).

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During their respective tenures as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, neither David Cameron, nor Theresa May, nor Boris Johnson would make a major speech about England, its politics, governance or political economy. Their respective perspectives upon the politics of Brexit would retain an undiluted focus upon the defence and promotion of the interests of Britain and the United Kingdom, the institutions of the British state and national identity defined as Britishness. The interests, governance and national identity of England were seen as being entirely synonymous with Britain and Britishness. In so doing, Cameron, May and Johnson would exhibit one of the definitive characteristics of the unacknowledged British nationalism which had shaped the agenda for national economic, social and political renewal of every United Kingdom government from the Attlee Government’s June 1945 ‘Let Us Face The Future’ to the Johnson Government’s December 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ political narrative. That characteristic had been the conflation and confusion, when referring to matters of national governance and public policy, of ‘England’ with ‘Britain’. And ‘Britain’ in turn has been used a convenient political shorthand for either ‘Great Britain’ (the nations of England, Scotland and Wales), ‘the United Kingdom’ (Great Britain and Northern Ireland) or ‘England’ as a nation in its own right, especially when referring to policy areas like health, social care, education and housing which have been devolved to directly elected representative institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. When Prime Ministers from Clement Attlee to Boris Johnson had referred to ‘our country’ and ‘one nation’, they have traditionally meant Britain, Great Britain or the United Kingdom but, since the onset of devolution, this term had been used as a substitute for ‘England’ by politicians and governments not wanting to concede that the remit of the British state in areas of devolved policy had not extended beyond England, a nation bypassed by devolution. Lest it be forgotten the European Union referendum campaign itself was conducted in England between two competing variants of British nationalism. On the one hand, as an unashamed British nationalist organization, the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign embraced outreach groups which included, among others, Women for Britain, Farmers for Britain, Lawyers for Britain, Muslims for Britain and Veterans for Britain. On the other hand, while both Wales Stronger in Europe and Scotland Stronger in Europe groups were established as part of the campaign to keep the UK in the EU, a national England Stronger in Europe group was never established, and so the Remain campaign in England was conducted under

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the jurisdiction of Britain Stronger in Europe, a classic British nationalist organization and political narrative.

England Under David Cameron: The ‘Devolution Revolution’ that Never Was The precursor to the Age of Brexit had been the ‘Age of Austerity’ which David Cameron had defined in a speech to the Conservative Party’s in April 2009 (Cameron, 2009). The damage inflicted by the ill-conceived and unnecessary pursuit of austerity upon England’s public services, society and economy would be the most important political and domestic policy continuity during Cameron and May’s respective tenures before Boris Johnson’s government initiated a significant departure from it, albeit one whose scale would not in any sense compensate for the ‘lost decade’ of underfunding, stagnating economic performance and falling average real living standards following the 2007–2008 financial crisis (Lee, 2015). Rather than any moves towards representative, executive or legislative devolution for England, to correct the imbalances in national democratic voice and accountability arising from the asymmetrical nature of devolution in the UK (Lee, 2017), the Cameron government would institute two alternative measures. First, while Westminster, as the UK’s parliament, would also remain England’s law-making body, the procedural measure of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ (EVEL) would be instituted for all legislation applying to England alone. It would mean no such legislation could be passed at Third Reading without its prior approval by a legislative consent motion from a Grand Committee made up of all MPs representing English constituencies (Conservative Party, 2015). However, this measure meant that the UK Parliament still retained a veto over any such legislation for England, if a majority of UK MPs, including those representing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, voted against it at Third Reading. Second, there would be further measures to strengthen and deepen the transactional political practice of defining central-local government relations in England via a series of elite-to-elite ‘deals’, negotiated largely in secret, whereby limited powers to administer policy and resources locally would be delegated by central government to local government. During the year prior to the 23 June 2016 EU referendum, it had appeared that one of the definitive characteristics of the Cameron government would be its promise of ‘a revolution in the way we govern

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England’, under the leadership of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (Osborne, 2015). With the Cameron-Clegg coalition government having previously signed 25 City Deals, on the 23 June 2014, Osborne had unveiled his ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda under which power and budgets would be ‘devolved’ in England but only ‘for any city that wants to move to a new model of city government and have an elected Mayor’ (Osborne, 2014). While Osborne acknowledged ‘Wales has its own parliament, and can pass its own laws’ (Osborne, 2014), the citizens of England would not be allowed to take back control of money or power via directly elected collective representative institutions, but instead would have to sign up to an individual executive mayoral model. One week after his party’s victory in the May 2015 UK General Election, Osborne had returned to Manchester to promise ‘radical devolution to the great cities of England’ in the form of ‘new city-wide elected mayors’ (Osborne, 2015). However, this would only be possible as part of ‘the deal’ with the Treasury in which none of its centralizing powers would be rescinded. Osborne claimed ‘I will not impose this model on anyone. But nor will I settle for less’ (Osborne, 2015). In short, while the Cameron government had committed itself to legislating to strengthen and deepen the legislative and executive models of devolution elsewhere in the UK, even a limited form of delegation of administrative power would not be sanctioned in England without the imposition of central government’s preferred model of mayoral governance. While prior approval referendums for such measures had become the established norm for devolution elsewhere in the UK, there would no such democratic exercises for the citizens of England. After all, in previous mayoral approval referendums conducted between 2007 and 2015, the majority of local referendums in England had voted against a mayoral model of local governance. Indeed, in May 2012, no fewer than nine out of twelve of England’s largest cities (by population) had rejected the mayoral model. As Brexit itself was to illustrate, the electorate of England could not be relied upon to deliver the answer to constitutional questions preferred or expected by the British power elite. Consequently, there was never a prospect of an authentic ‘devolution revolution’ for England, which would have enabled its people to take back local democratic control of their laws and money, even before the outcome of the Brexit referendum had put paid to Cameron and Osborne’s ambitions to deliver their second term agenda.

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England Under Theresa May: British Dream, English Stagnation As a staunch British nationalist and constitutional Unionist, like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, during her tenure as Prime Minister Theresa May showed absolutely no interest in the development of a national democratic institutional or policy narrative for England. From the opening statement in her campaign to succeed Cameron as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, via her Brexit negotiations, to her resignation statement, Theresa May showed herself to be a red, white and blue British nationalist. The relentless focus in the language of May’s speeches was upon ‘Britain’: ‘Britain a country that works for everyone’; a ‘Plan for Britain’, ‘The British Way’, ‘Global Britain’; ‘The British Dream’; and Britain as ‘The Great Meritocracy’ and ‘The Shared Society’. This was despite the fact that, given the context of devolution elsewhere in the UK, May’s capacity to influence policy towards health, education, local government, higher education, planning and housing would be limited to England alone. Indeed, because of the cumulative impact of the public service reforms implemented in England by the Blair, Brown, Cameron-Clegg and Cameron governments, a distinctive ‘developmental market’ model of public service delivery had developed in England whereby power had been devolved not to individuals as citizens, but to individuals as market actors, and to corporations (Lee, 2015, 2018, 2021). At the same time, by the time of the onset of the Age of Brexit, thanks to the reforms implemented by the Thatcher and Major governments, which had been built upon rather than dismantled by successor governments, England’s economy had been shaped for 37 years by a distinctive rentier-led, ‘renterprise culture’ British model of political economy (please see my earlier chapter in this volume on economic policy in the Age of Brexit). Not once during her tenure did May attempt to address politically the governance or political economy of England as a nation which could or should be separable from the UK, Britain and Britishness. For May, England and Englishness were to be defined culturally, by watching the cricket at Lord’s or listening to the BBC’s Test Match Special radio commentaries. Once May had dispensed with George Osborne’s services as Chancellor, neither she nor her new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, demonstrated any ambition to deliver significant new public investment in or policy innovation for the North of England, let alone for the

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whole of England (Lee, 2018), as the May Government became ever more consumed with the rancour and machinations surrounding the EU withdrawal negotiations. As a consequence, the politics and governance of England continued to be shaped by the fiscal austerity and transactional deal-making administrative delegation and decentralization which had been initiated under the Blair, Brown and Cameron-Clegg coalition governments. The full degree of Theresa May’s own constitutional conservatism, with the notable exception of Brexit, was highlighted when, two months after the UK had withdrawn from the EU, her Chief of Staff, Nick Timothy, had published his own agenda Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism. As part of his own British nationalist agenda for ‘Bringing Britain together’, Timothy had asserted: ‘it is time for the United Kingdom to become fully federal’ (Timothy, 2020: xxi). Indeed, he had noted not only how ‘Since 1999, Scotland and Wales have enjoyed devolved government, while England has not’, but also that a further constitutional imbalance had arisen because ‘While English MPs have no say over policies including health and education in Scotland and Wales, Scottish and Welsh MPs continue to vote on those policies as they apply to England’ (Timothy, 2020: 220). Because, for Timothy, devolution was ‘a lopsided solution that creates constitutional injustices and friction between the Union’s constituent nations’, his prescription was for the UK to move to ‘a fully federal structure’ (Timothy, 2020: 220). The principal opposing argument that ‘England is too big, compared to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to fit into a federal structure’ could be dismissed because ‘by that logic, the Union itself would be unsustainable’ (Timothy, 2020: 220). Consequently, under his constitutional blueprint, both an English Parliament and government would be created, but they would be located ‘in a regional city, rather than London, which would be a significant opportunity in the battle to rebalance the British economy’ (Timothy, 2020: 221). At the same time, the House of Lords would be replaced by an elected upper house whose role would be limited to ‘scrutinizing and amending legislation without challenging the primacy of the Commons’ (Timothy, 2020: 221). Timothy’s agenda for remaking conservatism to restore the British nation was framed as a solution to ‘the twin crisescultural and economic-that are engulfing British life’ (Timothy, 2020:

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228), but it only served to highlight the poverty of political imagination and action towards the politics and government of England which had characterized Theresa May’s tenure.

England Under Boris Johnson: British Nationalism Revisited When Boris Johnson departed from the May Government, on the 9 July 2018, his resignation letter was couched firmly in terms of a British nationalist perspective on Brexit, lamenting the dying of the British people’s dream of ‘taking back control of their democracy’, as it suffocated under May’s ‘needless self-doubt’ (Johnson, 2018). There was no mention of England, let alone any considered analysis of its governance or political economy, as one would have expected of any self-respecting, authentic English nationalist. Similarly, when making his first speech as Prime Minister, Johnson defined his job as to be ‘Prime Minister of the whole United Kingdom and that means uniting our country, answering at last the plea of the forgotten people, and the left behind towns by physically and literally renewing the ties that bind us together’ (Johnson, 2019a). Moreover, in what would become the signature fervent British nationalism of his premiership, Johnson affirmed his government would ‘level up across Britain’ because, in his judgement, it was time ‘we unleashed the productive power not just of London and the South East but of every corner of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland…the awesome foursome that are incarnated in that red white and blue flag who together are so much more than the sum of their parts’ (Johnson, 2019a). There could not have been a clearer statement of Boris Johnson’s British nationalism. Moreover, when Johnson gave his first address as party leader to the October 2019 Conservative Party conference, in committing to ‘get Brexit done. Let’s bring our country together’, and ‘to take back control of our money and our borders and our laws’, all of Johnson’s policy commitments were located within a relentlessly British nationalist political narrative. England was never mentioned, even though all of the key policy pledges relating to the recruiting and training of more doctors and nurses, the construction of 40 new hospitals during the next ten years as part of what Johnson claimed was ‘the biggest investment in hospital infrastructure for a generation’, and the solution of ‘the problem of social care’ related to England alone, and not Scotland,

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Wales, Northern Ireland, Britain, Great Britain or the United Kingdom (Johnson, 2019b). This pattern was confirmed in the September 2019 Spending Round. England was not mentioned, let alone accorded primacy. Indeed, the significance of the Round was that its 2.4% planned increase in the average growth rate of Total Managed Expenditure marked the first sustained departure from austerity in the funding of public services in England since May 2010 (Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2019). Similarly, the central theme of the Conservative Party’s December 2019 UK General Election manifesto was getting Brexit done ‘to unleash Britain’s potential’, and not the potential of England. The party did not publish a separate manifesto for England (as did none of the major British political parties). There was no acknowledgement that the party’s plans for the NHS, social care, schools, universities, housing and roads were plans for public services and infrastructure in England alone. The solitary place in fifty-nine pages where the manifesto referred to England was in its affirmation of an ambition for ‘full devolution across England, building on successful devolution of powers to city region mayors, Police and Crime Commissioners and others, so that evert part of the country has the power to shape its own destiny. We will publish an English Devolution White Paper setting out our plans next year’ (Conservative & Unionist Party, 2019: 29). Once again, and unlike Scotland and Wales in particular, ‘full devolution’ for England would not mean executive and/or legislative devolution for England. On the contrary, ‘full devolution’ would mean limited local and regional administrative delegation or decentralization while operating within the constraints of the periodic spending reviews and rounds, with their centralized Treasury prescription over policy design and resource allocation. England would remain the most centralized of all the major industrialized countries, and the largest nation in the world without its own separate national parliament. The traditional British nationalist conflation and confusion of England with Britain would not be challenged by any of Boris Johnson’s plans.

Conclusion During the Age of Brexit from May 2015–January 2020 covered by this book, the citizens of England had not yet taken back control of their money, laws and borders because there had been no significant changes to

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enable them to so in their relationship, as a national democratic community of citizens, with the centralized institutions of the British state. These institutions continued to determine the exercise of political power, the constitution and law making, and the creation and allocation of money withing England. Any changes which did arise came about as the result of the outcome of the May 2015, June 2017 and December 2019 UK General Elections, and subsequent adjustments to domestic public policy in accordance with the respective programmes of the Cameron, May and Johnson governments, rather than because of Brexit per se. In terms of the control of England’s borders, they remained under the control of the UK government, as a sovereign state, as they had done throughout the duration of the UK’s membership of the European Community/Union. During the first six months of Boris Johnson’s premiership, increasing numbers of asylum seekers and migrants continued to cross the English Channel in small boats irrespective of Brexit (although the total number of people detected remained small299 detected in 2018, and 1052 in 2019) (Home Office, 2022), and the capacity of the UK government to police England’s borders continued to depend upon its working relationship with the French government and the other 26 member states of the EU. In terms of the laws governing England, during the Age of Brexit, these continued to be made by the centralized institutions of the British state. Brexit promised to remove EU laws, but it did nothing to remove the circa 1400 statutory powers wielded by central government over local authorities in England. In terms of control over money, throughout the Age of Brexit the UK government, through the Bank of England and the monetary policies devised by the Her Majesty’s Treasury, remained a sovereign state in control of the creation and supply of the pound sterling. England’s annual financial contribution to the EU amounted to around only one percent of total UK public expenditure in England, and well under 0.5% of England’s GDP. Brexit did not affect the continuing pattern of regular multiyear spending reviews (2015) and single year spending rounds (2019), which had entrenched the ever-greater centralized control of Her Majesty’s Treasury over the allocation of financial resources and the design of public policy for England’s public services, ever since their introduction in 1997. The citizens of England may no longer be directly governed by the laws and regulations drawn up by the unelected European Commission, except of course when they wish to trade with, work within or

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travel through the territories covered by the single European market and Customs Union. However, Brexit had done nothing to remove the wholly appointed and democratically unaccountable House of Lords, whose near 800 members the people of England had never directly elected. Moreover, Brexit would not have prevented David Cameron from creating 245 members of the House of Lords during his premiership, or Theresa May from creating 43 new life peers during hers, or Boris Johnson from creating 58 life peers during 2020 alone. Nor would it have prevented Tony Blair using his powers of patronage to create no fewer than 374 peers during his tenure as UK Prime Minister (Taylor, 2021: 1). The Age of Brexit had also done little or nothing to reverse the continuing trend under the Cameron, May and Johnson governments of the rolling forward of the frontiers of the developmental market of vital public service delivery in England, where control over public policy and resources has been devolved to networks of unelected corporations and quasi autonomous non-governmental organizations, and to the sovereign individual as a consumer and market actor, rather than as a citizen (Lee, 2018). The Age of Brexit had done nothing to bring about devolution of democratically elected political power for England, at either the national or local level. As fervent, red, white and blue British nationalists, wrapped in the Union Jack, during the Age of Brexit neither David Cameron, nor Theresa May nor Boris Johnson ever made a single speech about the politics of England as a nation separate from its governance by the institutions and interests of the British state. It simply did not enter into their political imagination. During the Age of Brexit, British nationalism continued to ensure that England was denied any national democratic political, institutional or policy identity. The institutional and power asymmetries of the British devolution settlement would continue and indeed be further entrenched. Consequently, while the UK’s withdrawal from the EU may have marked the end of the beginning of the Battle of Brexit, the Battle for England, and the question of who would control political power over it and within it, remained far from resolved as the UK unwittingly approached and entered the Age of COVID-19.

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References Bank of England. (2012). The Distributional Effects of Asset Purchases. Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Q3, 254–266. Bolton, P. (2022). Student Loan Statistics. House of Commons Library. Cameron, D. (2009, April 26). The Age of Austerity. Speech, Cheltenham. Cameron, D. (2015a, May 8). Election 2015a: Prime Minister’s Speech. Downing Street. Cameron, D. (2015b, October 7). Speech to the 2015b Conservative Party Conference, Manchester. Cameron, D., & Jones, D. (2008). Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones. Fourth Estate. Chesterton, G. K. (1907, November). The Secret People. The Neolith. Conservative and Unionist Party. (2015). Strong Leadership, A Clear Economic Plan, A Brighter, More Secure Future: The Conservative Party Manifesto 2015 (The Conservative and Unionist Party). Conservative and Unionist Party. (2019). Get Brexit Done Unleash Britain’s Potential: The Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2019. The Conservative and Unionist Party. Elliott, L. (2012, August 23). Britain’s Richest 5% Gained Most from Quantitative Easing-Bank of England. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/business/2012/aug/23/britains-richest-gained-quantative-easing-bank. Accessed 21 March 2022. Farquarson, C., Sibieta, L., Tahir, I., & Waltmann, B. (2021). 2021 Annual Report on Education Spending in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Health Foundation. (2015, October 31). How Funding for the NHS in the UK Has Changed Over a Rolling Ten Year Period. https://www.health.org.uk/ chart/chart-how-funding-for-the-nhs-in-the-uk-has-changed-over-a-rollingten-year-period. Accessed 21 March 2022. Her Majesty’s Treasury. (2019). Spending Round 2019, CP170. The Stationery https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/sys Office. tem/uploads/attachment_data/file/829177/Spending_Round_2019_web. pdf. Accessed 29 March 2022. Home Office. (2022). Irregular Migration to The UK, Year Ending December 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/irregular-migrat ion-to-the-uk-year-ending-december-2021. Accessed 21 March 2022. Hitchens, D. (2016, July 1). Did G.K. Chesterton Really Predict Brexit? The Catholic Herald. Johnson, B. (2018, July 9). Resignation Letter to the Prime Minister. Johnson, B. (2019a, July 24). First Speech as Prime Minister, Downing Street. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/boris-johnsons-first-speech-asprime-minister-24-july-2019a. Accessed 27 March 2022.

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Johnson, B. (2019b, October 2). Speech to the Conservative Party Conference. https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservativeparty/boris-johnson/news/106987/read-full-boris-johnsons. Accessed 27 March 2022. Lee, S. (2015). The Condition of England under the Coalition. In M. Beech & S. Lee (Eds.), The Conservative-Liberal Coalition: Examining The CameronClegg Government (pp. 145–161). Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, S. (2017). The Gathering Storm: Federalization and Constitutional Change in the United Kingdom. In R. Eccleston & R. Krever (Eds.), The Future of Federalism: Intergovernmental Financial Relations in an Age of Austerity (pp. 124–144). Edward Elgar. Lee, S. (2018). Law, Legislation and Rent-Seeking: The Role of the Treasury-led Developmental State in the Competitive Advantage of the Southern Powerhouse. In C. Berry & A. Giovannini (Eds.), Developing England’s North: The Political Economy of the Northern Powerhouse (pp. 59–82). Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, S. (2021). The Developmental State in England: The Role of the Treasury in Industrial Policy. In C. Berry, J. Froud, & T. Barker (Eds.), The Political Economy of Industrial Strategy in The UK (pp. 39–47). Agenda Publishing. Marmot. M. (2020). Foreword. To Institute of Health Equity. In Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (pp. 5–6). Institute of Health Equity. Institute of Health Equity. (2020). Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On. Institute of Health Equity. National Audit Office. (2018). Financial Sustainability of Local Authorities 2018, HC.834. National Audit Office. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2020). Education at a Glance. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Osborne, G. (2014, June 23). We Need a Northern Powerhouse, Speech, Museum of Science and Industry. Osborne, G. (2015, May 14). Speech: Chancellor on Building a Northern Powerhouse, Victoria Warehouse, Manchester. Taylor, R. (2021). Life Peerages: Creations Since 1958. House of Lords Library Briefing. Timothy, N. (2020). Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism. Polity.

CHAPTER 15

Scotland, Conservatism and the British Union, 2015–2020 Margaret Arnott

Introduction For United Kingdom (UK) Conservative Governments and for the wider Conservative Party 2015–2020 was an unsettled period for governance in general and for territorial politics governance in particular across the constituent parts of the UK, especially following the referendums of 2014 and 2016 (Arnott, 2020). Tensions between competing narratives about the future working of devolution in the UK, particularly over the future relationship of Scotland to the UK, were all too evident after the election of the Scottish National Party (SNP) majority government in May 2011 and the 18 September 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The political heat of constitutional issues intensified following the result of the 23 June 2016 European Union (EU) Referendum. The decision by David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership to help settle internal divisions within the Conservative Party did not appear to

M. Arnott (B) Professor of Public Policy, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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take on board the possible implications for the future domestic UK Union and Scotland’s relationship with the rest of UK (Kenny & Sheldon, 2019, 2020). This chapter reflects on the implications during 2015–2020 of a growing perception of political and constitutional disjuncture in the devolved UK. The chapter examines implications for UK Conservative governments in the territorial governance of a multinational UK, with particular reference to Scotland (Keating, 2021, 2022; McEwen, 2022). Tensions between different constitutional visions for Scotland’s place in the UK had been become more overtly significant across civil society in Scotland from the late 1980s during the Thatcher and Major Governments (Henderson et al., 2020). However, the pace of constitutional debates in Scotland following the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum results may have taken the UK Conservative Governments by surprise. The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum result did not mark the end for calls from across the political spectrum for reform to the ‘devolution settlement’. The chapter explores whether constitutional challenges prior to the 2016 EU Referendum, underpinned by the electoral divergence between Scotland, England and Wales, not only intensified after June 2016 but also marked a new period in the UK Conservative Government’s handling of the ‘devolution settlement’ in Scotland. There were recurrent political debates about Scotland’s position in the UK before 2016, but, it will be argued, the prospect of the UK leaving the EU in December 2020 raised very significant new repercussions for the day-to-day working of devolution as the UK government negotiated the processes for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. This chapter considers the UK Conservative Governments’ handling of discussion and negotiation about the terms of the UK leaving EU membership for the governance of devolved Scotland. While this did bring existing constitutional and political tensions to the fore, it can also be viewed primarily as a new promotion of the centralisation of powers by the UK government concerning the working of devolution following UK exit from the European Union. The statecraft of the UK Conservative Government under Johnson’s leadership was seen as ‘muscular unionism’. The repatriation of powers from the EU back to the UK Parliament posed fundamental questions about the nature of asymmetrical devolution in the UK (Morphet, 2021). Legislation in 1998 that had established the devolved Scottish Parliament was interwoven with continued UK membership of the EU. Devolved responsibilities therefore intersected with EU matters and responsibilities.

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That the EU referendum result had a marked effect on territorial politics and devolution in the multinational UK is probably an understatement. The result intensified tensions in the day-to-day working of devolution in the UK. In part, these tensions were due to the nature of inter-governmental relations in the devolved UK as the UK Government negotiated with the EU the terms of the UK leaving EU membership. In part the tensions also related to how devolution would work when the UK left EU membership, including its departure from the EU Single Market and the Customs Union. For the Scottish Parliament election in May, 2016, the SNP manifesto set out that should there be ‘a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will’ (SNP, 2016: x). Four particular themes are explored below in the chapter’s analysis of the UK Conservative governments’ approach to territorial governance in the period 2015–2020, namely, first, electoral politics and electoral divergence 2015–2020; second, the paradox of Unionism: the future of the multinational UK and its ‘Partnership of Equals’; third, Scotland and Brexit: A ‘Special Deal’?; and fourth, the impact of the Johnson Government December 2019–2020. The conclusion considers whether the nature of Unionism in the period for UK Conservative Governments 2015–2020 changed significantly following the referendum result of 2016. Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic marked a period of renewed centralisation in territorial governance (Morphet, 2021). Tensions were evident between the devolved administrations on the one hand and the centralist approaches of the Johnson Government on the other. There were also tensions between the UK Parliament and the devolved legislatures (Arnott, 2020). The UK Supreme Court rulings on constitutional matters and the working of devolution heightened overt political disagreements between devolved legislatures and the UK parliament and government. As Silk argues, in the Miller Cases, the Agricultural Sector (Wales) Bill, and also compatibility of the European Court of Human Rights and the legislative competence of devolved legislatures in Scotland and Wales: ‘… the Supreme Court has undertaken the role of determining the devolution settlement’ (Silk, 2018: 312).

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Electoral Divergence in a Disunited United Kingdom 2015–2020 Electoral divergence across UK and Scottish Parliaments General Elections between May 2015 and December 2020 raised challenging questions for the strategy and tactics of the Conservative Party at both the UK and Scottish governance levels. Territorial divergence in electoral voting patterns in UK was not new, but, against the background of the September 2014 Scottish and June 2016 EU Referendum results, the discourses and narratives informing the positioning of the UK regarding the UK multinational Union and the future of governance of Scotland in a multinational UK state presented competing interpretations of legitimacy and governance (Arnott & Ozga, 2016; Beech, 2022). The future relationships between territorial nations and regions in the devolved UK was both a political and constitutional area of contention within Unionist parties and also pro-independence parties, as well as between these parties. ‘Enhanced devolution’ for the governing of Scotland had different meanings across the political spectrum. As McHaig and Mitchell have argued: Prior to the Brexit referendum, Nicola Sturgeon had argued for a ‘double majority’ provision, an idea familiar to the EU member states, which would require a majority in each component nation of the United Kingdom for Leave. The argument was also made in the Commons during debates on the EU Referendum Bill. SNP MPs referred to federal states, including the United States, in which constitutional amendment required similar double majorities but this was rejected by other members from across the Commons (McHaig & Mitchell, 2017: 518). The 2015 UK General Election produced three electoral surprises that would have very significant ramifications for the working of devolution in the UK. At the UK level, the Conservative Party secured a majority, while the SNP became the third largest opposition party in the UK Parliament, and the UK Conservative Party committed to holding a referendum before 2017 on UK membership of EU in its UK election manifesto (Arnott & Kelly, 2018). The Conservative Party’s 2015 manifesto also tackled territorial representation in the UK Parliament concerning the working of devolution through the commitment to implement ‘English votes for English laws’ (EVEL) (Gover & Kenny, 2018). A revival in the performance of the Conservative Party in Scotland in both the 2016 Scottish Parliament Election and the 2017 UK General

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Election was against the political background of the politics of Scottish independence and of Brexit (Gover & Kenny, 2018; Torrance, 2020a). The Thatcherite legacy continued to shape domestic politics in Scotland and one of the questions considered below is whether the Conservative Party could restore its electoral fortunes in Scotland (Arnott, 2015; Arnott & Macdonald, 2012; Mitchell, 2014). Between 2015–2017, the Scottish Conservative Party were seen as the main Unionist party in Scotland, with the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) not making electoral inroads in Scotland. Its best electoral performance was in the 2014 EU election; securing 10.5% of the vote in Scotland (Clark, 2020: 312). This revival in electoral support for the Scottish Conservative party was not sparked by the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum result. The SNP were the main beneficiaries of that result in terms of increasing its party membership and SNP representation in the UK Parliament (Diffley, 2020; Torrance, 2020b). It was in relation to other Unionist parties in Scotland that the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party was able to make inroads in reviving its electoral support between 2015–2017. Electoral support for the Scottish Labour Party, and for the Scottish Liberal Democrats in the 2015 and 2017 UK General Elections, and also the 2016 Scottish Parliament Election, had not matched their pre-2015 electoral performance (Anderson, 2016). The result of the EU Referendum was added to SNP narratives as a means of reinforcing the disjuncture of the British political Union as a ‘partnership of equals’. During the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum campaign then Home Secretary, Theresa May argued that the UK domestic union of four nations was of ‘equal partners.’ In July 2016 at the start of her premiership, Theresa May set out the importance of ‘partnership’ with devolved governments in negotiating the terms of the UK leaving the EU membership. However, ‘…this rhetoric has not been matched by reality’ (Paun et al., 2019: 9). Constitutional issues had continued to feature prominently in Scottish politics in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish Independence result. Ruth Davidson was elected party leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in November 2011. Under her leadership, the party was able to regain some of its electoral success. In the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, the party had secured 15 MSPs under the AMS electoral system. By 2016 Scottish Election, the party secured 31 MSPs and replaced Scottish Labour Party as the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament. This revival in electoral performance of the Scottish

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Conservative and Unionist Party also translated to the 2017 UK General Election securing 13 MPs in Scotland compared to one MP in the 2015 UK General Election. In part, the revival could be explained by Davidson’s leadership style and was accompanied by a continued decline in support of the Scottish Labour Party (Henderson et al., 2020). However, by the 2019 UK General Election it was less clear whether the revival of the Scottish Conservative Party was lasting. The party in Scotland may have lost some electoral support to the UKIP Party but this is only part of the possible answer. In 2019 election, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party representation in the UK Parliament fell to 6 MPs from the 13 elected in June 2017. In percentage terms, electoral support for the Scottish Conservative Party had dropped by 3.5% to 25.1%. The decline in electoral support for the Scottish Labour Party was more marked, with the party’s support falling by 8.5% to 18.6% and securing only one MP in Scotland. To understand the changing fortunes of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party between 2015–2020 requires examining the extent to which changing narratives of Unionism and Scotland’s relationships with the rest of the UK and the EU are the backdrop to electoral support.

The Paradox of Unionism: The Future of the Multinational UK as a ‘Partnership of Equals’ Both the creation of the Smith Commission, and the ensuing 2016 Scotland Act, were part of the Cameron Government’s response to the outcome of the 18 September Scottish Independence Referendum, but the questioning of the UK’s relationship with the EU, in the light of the 2015 Conservative Manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on UK membership of the EU, marked a turning point regarding future constitutional and governing relationships within the UK. The 2014 Referendum result was argued by the UK Government to ‘have settled’ Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom and that there would be ‘an enduring settlement for the UK’ (UK Government, 2015). Both Cameron and May as Prime Ministers argued that, following the 2014 referendum result, further calls for a second Scottish Independence Referendum would be rejected, and the question had been ‘settled for a generation’ (BBC, 2014; Prime Minister’s Office, 2019a).

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During Cameron’s premiership, electoral divergence between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom/Great Britain drove the constitutional issue of enhanced devolution to Scotland up the political agenda. The 2011 electoral success of the SNP in the devolved Scottish Parliament election gave the SNP the opportunity to argue that it had a mandate to hold a Scottish Independence Referendum. The ensuing result in September 2014 was a victory for the pro-Union Better Together campaign which secured 55.3% of the votes cast. While the Scottish Independence Referendum result was perhaps narrower than might have been expected, opinion polls in the week just before the referendum had the gap between Unionist and pro-independence votes much smaller and narrowing (Curtice, 2019). Polling results provided by the Scottish Centre of Social Research between January 2007 and January 2012 showed support for independence dropping from 40 to 33% (WhatScotlandThinks, 2014). There were also signs that Conservative support in England and the “West Lothian question” was gaining more attention and political traction (Kenny & Sheldon, 2020). For the governance of Scotland, there were three key constitutional commitments in the 2015 Conservative Party’s 2015 UK General Election manifesto that would prove to have very significant repercussions. These were, first, a commitment to holding an EU referendum on UK membership of the EU; second, the introduction of English (or English and Welsh) votes for English laws for legislation affecting England (or England and Wales only); and third, enhanced devolution to Scotland following on from the recommendations of the Smith Commission. The Commission recommended that the political institutions of Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government should be enshrined in UK legislation and also that the Scottish Parliament should have full powers to hold Scottish Parliament elections (SPICe Briefing, 2015). Further powers would be devolved to the Scottish Parliament on franchise reform to extend the voting rights to 16 and 17 years old in devolved elections. There would be more devolution of welfare and social benefits, for example in relation to housing benefits. The Scottish Parliament would also have new powers to introduce new benefits in areas of its devolved responsibilities. The Smith Commission also proposed that the Scottish Parliament would have enhanced taxation powers. Income tax would remain UK-wide but the Scottish Parliament could introduce different rates and thresholds, with the Scottish Government providing additional costs to the UK Government if changes to income tax rates

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and thresholds incur additional costs. While able to pass the 2016 Scotland Act, that legislation arguably had not taken on board calls for even further enhanced devolution that the Smith Commission recommended (McCorkindale, 2016). Cameron’s resignation in the immediate aftermath of the EU Referendum result on 24 June 2016 led to a Conservative Party leadership election. Theresa May’s election as party leader in July 2016, along with the negotiations for the UK to leave EU membership, marked a new period for the UK Government’s approach to constitutional issues, including asymmetrical devolution. In July 2016, the May Government’s majority of 12 in the House of Commons would prove to be too slender to ensure that May’s approach to the UK leaving the EU membership was likely to be smooth, because of the scale of dissent within the Conservative parliamentary party. For Scottish Conservative MPs, this presented challenges juggling the different stances to UK’s EU membership alongside Unionism especially in relation to whether the UK retained membership of the EU Single Market and Customs Union. At the October 2016 Conservative conference, Ruth Davidson argued there were a number of challenges facing the future of multinational UK union such as immigration policy and a possible ‘hard’ Brexit shaping future UK relationships with the EU (Davidson, 2016). Tensions within the Conservative Party concerning possible routes and strategies for the UK exit from EU membership became more explicit in the weeks running up to the triggering of Article 50 on 29 March 2017. Ruth Davidson argued in July 2016 that “I want to stay in the single market..even if a consequence of that is maintaining free movement of labour” (Gordon, 2016). In December 2016, Davidson’s position moved from membership of the EU single market to one where the primary driver was to ‘“maintain the integrity of the UK domestic market”’ (Gordon, 2016), Following the first Gina Miller Case at the UK Supreme Court in November 2016, the UK executive was required to seek the approval of the UK Parliament to invoke Article 50 (Young, 2018). Michael Russell, the Scottish Government Cabinet Secretary for Government Relations and Constitutional Relations, set out ahead of a Scottish Parliament debate on 7 February 2017 on the triggering of Article 50 the view that: ‘…Triggering Article 50 will have profound impacts on devolved responsibilities and on the powers of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government. It is therefore right that the Scottish Parliament expresses its view’ (Scottish Government, 2017). The Scottish Government itself

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argued that the devolved legislatures in the UK should also be given the same right in considering whether Article 50 was triggered. With increased representation of Conservative MPs in Scotland following the 2017 UK General Election came potential tensions in the relationship between the UK Conservative Party and the Scottish Conservative Party. For the 13 Scottish Conservative MPs, the UK Party stance on EU membership did not sit well with traditional Conservative attachment to the UK political union. Under Ruth Davidson’s leadership, the Scottish party was aligned to the ‘Remain’ platform during the 2016 Referendum campaign. Within the Scottish Conservative Party, ‘Eurosceptics’ simply did not have the same foothold as those supporting the UK remaining in the European Union. Constitutional tensions between devolved nations and the UK government became increasingly more apparent during May’s premiership. After 2016, the number of Legislative Consent Motions (LCMs) withheld by the devolved Scottish Parliament increased during the process of Brexit legislation in the UK Parliament. The notable exception before 2016 had been the withholding of a LCM for the Welfare Reform Bill in 2011 (Paun, 2018: 1). LCM is the constitutional convention that normally the UK Parliament requires devolved Scottish Parliament consent to pass laws in areas of devolved responsibility (Cabinet Office, 2019). A LCM was withheld from the Withdrawal Bill in May 2018. The UK Government in May 2018 also brought a case to the UK Supreme Court contesting that the Scottish Parliament had acted outwith its devolved competence in passing the Continuity Bill despite the Presiding Officer’s judgement that the legislation was not in devolved competence of the legislature. This legislation proposed that the Scottish Parliament would be able to align devolved Scots law with EU law. On the grounds that this could result in regulatory divergence between Scotland and the rest of Great Britain, Scottish Conservative MSPs voted against the passing of the Bill in December 2020, with the vote at Holyrood splitting 90 to 29 in favour of passing the legislation. At the start of her premiership, Theresa May had identified the British political union as one of the key features of the Conservative Party and her own conception of conservatism (May, 2016, 2017). There was a need, May argued, to restore the nature of Unionism following the 2014 Referendum (Sheldon & Newell, 2019). At the start of May’s leadership, the solitary Scottish Conservative MP was David Mundell, who

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retained the post of Scottish Secretary of State. In the 2016 EU referendum campaign, both Mundell and Davidson campaigned for the UK to retain membership of the EU. In her first visit as prime minister to Scotland in July 2016, May committed to involving the Scottish Government in negotiations on the UK leaving the EU membership and the UK government to strengthen the ‘precious bond’ between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (UK Government, 2016). For May, stating the case for maintaining the British Union was very evident in early days of her premiership. Unionism was a bedrock of the party’s policies: ‘This visit to Scotland is my first as prime minister and I’m coming here to show my commitment to preserving this special union that has endured for centuries’ (May, 2016: x). Following the UK General election in June 2017, the 2017–2019 UK parliamentary term brought constitutional divisions to the fore. The future devolved governance of Scotland and divisions between Eurosceptics and those MPs who advocated continued UK membership of the EU were central to these divisions especially regarding the future relationships with EU following the UK leaving its membership. The Scottish Conservative electoral success in 2016 Scottish Parliament election was arguably also translated into success in the 2017 UK General Election (Torrance, 2020a). By securing 13 MPs in Scotland, it was the Conservatives’ best performance in Westminster elections since 1983. The SNP electoral performance at the May 2015 UK General Election had been a watershed for the party in Westminster elections: it had won 56 of 59 constituencies in Scotland. However, its support dropped in the 2017 election, securing only 35 MPs. Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson, the SNP Westminster Leader, both lost their Westminster constituencies to the Conservative Party. In England, Conservative Party electoral performance had presented a different picture, with the Conservative Party suffering a net loss of 22 seats. The May government lost its slim majority and now found itself a minority government with the Labour Party gaining 30 MPs across Great Britain, compared to the Conservative Party’s overall loss of 13 MPs. Having become a minority government, May entered into a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) at Westminster. Here there would be another twist and turn in the constitutional path for the working of devolution and relationships between the

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Scottish government and the UK government. Overt tensions in intergovernmental relations surfaced over a perceived lack of respect, in the eyes of the Scottish government, for devolved governments and legislatures. The deal negotiated between the Conservative Party and the DUP included an additional £1bn funding for Northern Ireland. The Scottish and Welsh governments argued that under the convention of the Barnett consequential and the Statement of Funding Policy, this would have knock-on effects of additional public funding for both Scotland and Wales. The Scottish Government was also in negotiations with the UK government to agree a new Fiscal Framework. The Secretary of State for Scotland, David Mundell, initially agreed with this assessment by the devolved Scottish government and that, ‘… he would not support “back door” funding that deliberately sought to subvert the Barnett rules’ (Birrell & Heenan, 2020; 592). However, subsequently the Prime Minister and Mundell would argue that Northern Ireland had previously received unique funding and that the agreement with the DUP was consistent with previous funding approaches in Northern Ireland (Birrell & Heenan, 2020; 592).

Scotland and Brexit: A ‘Special Deal’? The process of the UK leaving EU membership would pose questions for the future of working of devolution in the UK. In the SNP manifesto for the devolved election in May, 2016, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon argued that should ‘Scotland be taken out of the EU against our will’ there would be grounds for the Scottish Parliament to call for a second Scottish Independence Referendum (SNP, 2016: 5). In the 23 June 2016 Referendum, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted for the UK to remain in the EU while England and Wales voted to leave. Scotland voted to remain by 62% to 38% and Northern Ireland by 55.8% to 44.2%. On the 24 June 2016, following the 2016 Referendum result Sturgeon commented that a second referendum on Independence for Scotland ‘”was highly likely”’ (Arnott, 2019). Given the UK vote for Brexit, and the commitment in the SNP manifesto to a new Referendum if material change was made to UK’s relationship to Europe, Sturgeon further noted: ‘”It is, therefore, a statement of the obvious that a second referendum must be on the table, and it is on the table"’ (BBC, 2016). The UK Government’s triggering of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on 29 March 2017 and the formal negotiations with the EU on the terms of

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the UK exit raised issues about uncertainty concerning the future powers of the UK government and those of the devolved administrations in the UK. The Scottish Government and the SNP Westminster Parliamentary Group used the narratives of a ‘power grab’ on devolution powers held by the Scottish Parliament if the UK Parliament passed the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, to which over 300 amendments had been submitted in the House of Commons alone (Torrance, 2020b). Among issues raised by the Scottish Government and the Westminster SNP, Parliamentary Group Clause 11 was highlighted as a potential ‘power grab’ by the UK Government. Under Clause 11 the UK Parliament and UK Government would retain powers of devolved competency that had ‘intersected’ with EU competency (McEwen, 2018). Potential legal and constitutional implications of the repatriation of powers from the EU to the UK were raised by both the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government. The Scottish Government’s Minister for UK Negotiations on Scotland’s Place in Europe, Michael Russell, argued that: ‘Clause 11 of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill contains a new limitation on devolved competence of extraordinary scope’ (Russell, 2017). Added to these debates was the Scottish Government’s desire to continue with ‘differentiated arrangements’ with the EU following the UK’s exit in 2019: ‘It should be noted that there is already a range of asymmetric and differentiated arrangements within the EU and single market framework’ (Scottish Government, 2016a: vi). A key priority for the Scottish Government was ensuring that devolved administrations and legislatures would be ‘fully engaged’ in the negotiations for the UK to leave the EU membership (Scottish Government, 2016a). Russell also argued in his statement to the Scottish Parliament that at this stage the First Minister was not: ... willing to bring forward a legislative consent motion at this time. We cannot recommend to this (Scottish) Parliament that it consents to the EU Withdrawal Bill as presently drafted and although their procedures are slightly different, that is exactly the same position as the Welsh Government which will today lodge their relevant memorandum in the name of their First Minister (Russell, 2017).

From the Scottish Government perspective, ‘a flexible approach’ to dealing with the exit of different devolved territories in the UK should be adopted by the UK Government (Scottish Government, 2016b, 2017). Furthermore, it argued, the Scottish Parliament should be required to

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ratify the Brexit deal agreed by the UK Government with the EU (Arnott, 2020). Scotland’s status as an ‘equal partner’ in the UK featured prominently in the stance of the First Minister and of the Leader of the SNP Group in Westminster (Scottish Government, 2016a). The option of a second Scottish Independence Referendum had been raised also in the event that the UK Government opted for a ‘hard Brexit’, and if a differentiated deal for Scotland’s future relationship with the EU, especially in terms of membership of the single market, was not pursued by the UK Government (Scottish Government, 2016a). While ruling out holding a second Scottish Independence in 2017, after Theresa May’s speech on Brexit strategy on 17 January 2017, the Scottish First Minister suggested that there was now a greater likelihood of a further Scottish Independence Referendum if a ‘flexible deal’ for Scotland was not considered by the UK Government. The Scottish Government pressed the UK Government for on-going involvement in negotiations for Brexit and raised issues about the effectiveness of the Joint Ministerial Committee (JMC Europe) in considering the input of the devolved territories. On 11 January 2017 Angus Robertson, Deputy Leader of the SNP and also leader of the SNP Group in Westminster argued in the House of Commons that the UK Prime Minister should delay invoking Article 50 until the Stormont crisis was solved. The SNP Parliamentary Group at Westminster also raised potential implications of the proposed Great Repeal Bill by the UK Government for the procedures and practices of EVEL in the Parliament’s legislative process. The Scottish Government had also contributed to the Supreme Court hearing at the end of 2017 arguing that, under terms of the Scotland Act 2016, legislation affecting devolved matters should also be considered by the Scottish Parliament. Theresa May’s tenure as UK Prime Minister following the June 2017 General Election was shaped by three factors. First, in the immediate aftermath of the election, the Conservative parliamentary party had become even more fragmented with divisions on how the UK should leave EU membership and doubts expressed over May’s ability to retain her posts as PM and a leader of the Conservative Party (Atkins, 2022). Second, the May minority government and the ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs was not always an easy relationship to uphold between the two parties during the Brexit negotiating process. Third, there was also an increasingly strained relationship

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between the Scottish and Welsh governments, the devolved legislatures and the UK Conservative Government. The Queen’s Speech opening the new parliamentary term in June 2017 included a commitment by the new UK Conservative Government to work ‘with Parliament, the devolved administrations, business and others to build the widest possible consensus on the country’s future outside the European Union’ (HM Government, 2017). With the triggering of Article 50 in March 2017, the timescale for May to reach an agreement with EU on the terms of the UK exit and to secure Westminster parliamentary approval was very tight even if a ‘consensus’ could be reached. In January 2019, Theresa May had invited leaders of opposition parties to a meeting with her about how to make progress on the terms of the UK leaving the EU. The background was the need to hold a ‘meaningful vote’ on the deal agreed by the May Government for the UK leaving the EU. When she suffered further humiliating parliamentary defeats at Westminster, May duly resigned in May 2019, to be replaced by Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister on the 24 July 2019. One of the last reviews set up by Theresa May before leaving the post of Prime Minister was The Dunlop Review into UK Government Union capability. Lord Dunlop had previously held a constitutional post as devolution adviser to David Cameron from 2012–201, and under the May Government had served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Northern Ireland Office 2016–17 (and also the Scotland Office 2015–2017). The Dunlop Review would consider the future institutional working of devolution as the UK departed EU membership (Dunlop, 2019). In this first weeks of the Johnson Government, Lord Dunlop submitted his report to the new Prime Minister.

Scotland the British Union Under the Johnson Government During Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party leadership campaign, he had made a commitment to making a ‘stronger union’, and in a hustings event in Perth in July 2019 Johnson had argued, in response to a question about priorities for a Johnson Government, ‘“My first priority is obviously the union”’ (BBC, 2019). Like his immediate predecessors Cameron and May, Prime Minister Johnson was making the British nationalist case for making the future of the Union a key political priority for his government.

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To this end, he had set up a ‘Union Unit’ in No.10 and his Prime Ministerial role included the title ‘Minister for the Union’ (Prime Minister’s Office, 2019b). A second Scottish Independence Referendum was also rejected by Johnson. Alister Jack MP, appointed by Johnson as Secretary of State for Scotland, made clear his view also that an Independence Referendum was ‘once in a generation’ (Brown, 2021). Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had herself set out the possible routes to holding to a second Scottish Independence in April 2019, with her preference being for a legal and agreed process with Westminster and the passing of a Sect. 30 order in the UK Parliament enabling the Scottish Parliament to hold a referendum that would be regarded by both parliaments as legitimate. In August 2019, Ruth Davidson stood down as leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, and was succeeded by Douglas Ross, MP, for Moray. Ross had won his Westminster seat in the 2017 UK general election with a swing of 16.5% to the Conservative Party, unseating the SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson. Since 2016, opinion polls had shown that support for Scottish independence was increasing. In November 2019, a MORI/STV poll had support for independence and the Union each at 48% (Gray & Ormstom, 2019). The Dunlop Review had reported to the Prime Minister in autumn 2019, but, in the early months of the Johnson Government, how it would reform the working of devolution in the light of the UK leaving EU membership was still work in progress, which in turn raised questions if the Johnson Government would draw on the recommendations of the Dunlop Review (Dunlop, 2019). For incoming Prime Minister Johnson, parliamentary arithmetic on achieving approval of the terms for the UK leaving its EU membership was still problematic. As a minority government, electoral concerns were all too evident. Therefore, Johnson decided to call an early general election, to be held on the 12 December 2019. Fast tracked legislation was passed in October 2019, with the support of opposition political parties, to allow the Prime Minister to call an early General Election. The Conservative 2019 manifesto gave a commitment to establish a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission within the first year of office to consider democracy, institutions and trust (Conservative Party, 2019: 48). The outcome of the 2019 UK General Election result gave the Conservative Party a secure 80 seat majority in the House of Commons which

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changed executive-legislature relations with opposition parties and meant backbenchers having less influence over the direction of government business in the Commons. For the Scottish Conservative Party, its support in Scotland dropped by 3.5%, compared with the 2017 UK General Election, with the party losing seven of its Scottish consistencies to secure only six MPs in Scotland. Changing levels of parliamentary support in Scotland for the Conservative Party were apparent alongside opinion poll evidence of growing support for independence (Gray & Ormston, 2019). Equipped with a large majority, the UK Conservative Government was able to press ahead with Brexit legislation including the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill 2020 and the UK Internal Market Bill 2020. For the working of devolution in the UK, post Brexit legislation would have significant repercussions for the nature of the British political union (Arnott, 2020; Keating, 2022). During the first year of the Johnson Government, its centralisation of powers by Whitehall previously held by the EU, including those which intersected with devolved competences, was reflected in SNP Scottish Government policies. There were delays in the timetable for Common Frameworks and also the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Devolution and the ‘levelling up’ agenda posed challenges also for scrutiny and legitimacy of UK-wide policy direction that intersected with the Scottish Parliament’s devolved powers. The implications for asymmetrical devolution in UK of the Johnson government’s approach to the working of the Union raised questions for the reframing of Unionism.

Conclusion The nature of the Conservative Unionism exhibited by UK Governments changed significantly after the May 2015 UK General Election, and especially following the EU referendum result of June 2016. Brexit also marked a period of renewed and greater centralisation in territorial governance. The tensions evident since June 2016 between UK Conservative Governments and devolved administrations have become more salient and public given the centralist approach of a Johnson Government prioritising Brexit since 2019. More speculatively perhaps, prioritising a centralised version of Unionism throws into question continued attachment on the part of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party to a version of Unionism that accommodates both the preservation and the extension of devolved powers.

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References Arnott, M. A., & Kelly, R. (2018). Smaller Parties. In L.Thompson & C. LestonBandeira (Ed.), Exploring Parliament. Oxford University Press. Atkins, J. (2022). Rhetoric and Audience Reception: An Analysis of Theresa May’s Vision of Britain and Britishness After Brexit. Politics, 22(2), 216–230. Anderson, P. (2022). (2016) The 2016 Scottish Parliament Election: A Nationalist Minority, a Conservative Comeback and a Labour Collapse. Regional and Federal Affairs, 26(4), 555–568. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2016. 1193488(accessed21March Arnott, M. A & Macdonald, C. M. M. (2012). More Than a Name: The Union and the Un-Doing of Scottish Conservatism in the Twentieth Century. In Torrance, D. (Ed.). The Strange Death of Unionist Scotland—The Scottish Conservative Party 1912–2012. Edinburgh University Press. Arnott, M. A. (2015). The Coalition’s Impact on Scotland: Policy, Governance & Expectations. In M. Beech & S. Lee (Ed.), Coalition’s Politics Evaluated: Examining the Cameron-Clegg Government. Palgrave Macmillan. Arnott, M. (2019). Scottish Government. In G. Hassan (Ed.) The Story of the Scottish Parliament: The First 20 Years. Edinburgh University Press. Arnott, M. (2020). Missing Links: Past, Present and Future Interparliamentary Relations in the devolved UK. Institute of Welsh Affairs. Arnott, M. A., & Ozga, J. (2016). Scotland: In Federal Britain? Oxford Review of Education, 42(5), 253–265. BBC. (2014, September 19). David Cameron statement on the UK’s future: Full Speech. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-29271765. Accessed 21 March 2022. BBC. (2016, June 24). Brexit: Nicola Sturgeon Says Second Scottish Independence Vote ‘Highly Likely. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-sco tland-politics-36621030. Accessed 21 March 2022. BBC. (2019, July 5). Boris Johnson: ‘Brexit Will Entrench the Union’. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-48889522. Accessed 21 March 2022. Beech, M. (2022). Brexit and the Decentred State. Public Policy and Administration, 39(1), 67–83. Birrell, D., & Heenan, D. (2020, July). The Confidence and Supply Agreement between the Conservative Party and the Democratic Unionist Party: Implications for the Barnett Formula and Intergovernmental Relations in the UK. Parliamentary Studies, 73(3). 586–602. Brown, A. (2021, October). ‘Alister Jack Rules Out Second Independence Referendum for Another 25 years’ The Scotsman. https://www.scotsman. com/news/politics/alister-jack-rules-out-second-independence-referendumfor-another-25-years-3409166. Accessed 21 March 2022.

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Kenny, M., & Sheldon, J. (2019). Will a No Deal Brexit Lead to the Break-Up of the UK? Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Kenny, M., & Sheldon, J. (2020). When Planets Collide: The British Conservative Party and the Discordant Goals of Delivering Brexit and Preserving the Domestic Union, 2016–2019. Political Studies, 69(4), 965–984. May, T. (2016, July 13). Theresa May Delivered Her First Statement as Prime Minister in Downing Street. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/sta tement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may. Accessed 21 March 2022. May, T. (2017, September 11). PM Statement: 20th Anniversary of Vote for Creation of a Scottish Parliament. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ pm-statement-20th-anniversary-of-vote-for-creation-of-a-scottish-parliament. Accessed 21 March 2022. McCorkindale, C. (2016). Scotland and Brexit: The State of the Union and the Union State. King’s Law Journal, 20(3), 354–365. McEwen, N. (2018). Brexit and Scotland: Between Two Unions. British Politics, 13(1), 65–78. McEwen, N. (2022, April 4). Irreconcilable Sovereignties? Brexit and Scottish Self-Government, Territory, Politics and Governance. https://www.tandfo nline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/21622671.2022.2044898?needAccess=true. Accessed 21 April 2022. McHarg, A., & Mitchell, J. (2017). Brexit and Scotland. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19(3), 512–526. Mitchell, J. (2014). The Scottish Question. Oxford University Press. Morphet, J. (2021). The Impact of COVID-19 on Devolution: Recentralising the British State. Policy Press. Prime Minister’s Office. (2019a, July 4). PM Speech on the Union. www.gov.uk/ government/speeches/pm-speech-on-the-union-4-july-2019a. Accessed 21 April 2022. Prime Minister’s Office. (2019b, July 30). Full List of New Ministerial and Government Appointments. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/full-listof-new-ministerial-and-government-appointments-july-2019b. Accessed 21 April 2022. Paun, A. (2018, May 15). The Scottish Parliament Has Rejected the Brexit Bill—Are We Heading for a Second Independence Referendum? Institute for Government Blog. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/sco ttish-parliament-has-rejected-brexit-bill-are-we-heading-second-indep-refere ndum. Accessed 21 March 2022. Paun, A., Sargeant, J., Wilson, J., & Owen, J. (2019). No Deal Brexit and the Union. Institute of Government.

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CHAPTER 16

Wales and the Conservative Government, 2015–20 Roger Awan-Scully

Introduction A defining reality that any discussion of Conservatism and Wales must inevitably address is the Conservative party’s long-standing unpopularity there. The Tories are one of the most electorally successful parties in the democratic world—but not in Wales, where they last won a general election in 1859 (Awan-Scully, 2019). The history of electoral politics in Wales since then is overwhelmingly one of anti-Conservative one-party dominance: by the Liberals from the 1860s until the First World War, and Labour from 1922 onwards. Labour have come first in both votes and seats in Wales at every one of the last 27 general elections, and at all six elections to the devolved Senedd.1 This electoral history has 1 The devolved National Assembly for Wales that was created in May 1999 changed its official name in May 2020 to the Welsh Parliament / Senedd Cymru; its headquarters in Cardiff Bay was already popularly known as ‘the Senedd’. In the discussion here I generally use Assembly when specifically discussing matters before May 2020, and Senedd otherwise.

R. Awan-Scully (B) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_16

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had a broader reflection in political consciousness. Welshness has often been defined at least partly in opposition to Conservatism and research into contemporary Conservative electoral weakness found it to be at least partly grounded in the perception of them as an ‘English party in Wales’ (Wyn Jones et al., 2002). The Conservatives have thus often found themselves governing a Welsh nation that is largely hostile. This antipathy hit new lows in the 1980s and 1990s. The economic impact of Thatcherism was brutal in a nation heavily dependent on declining, subsidised heavy industries and the public sector, and the 1984–1985 Miners’ strike deepened both the socioeconomic toll and the political bitterness. The appointment of a series of Welsh Secretaries of State from English constituencies after 1987 further alienated an electorate who, in the 1997 general election, responded by ousting every remaining Welsh Conservative MP. While the creation of the devolved Assembly in 1999 offered an electoral way back for the Welsh Tories, it also reinforced their alienation from power: out of government in London, and facing potentially permanent opposition in Cardiff Bay. The return of the Conservatives to power at Westminster in May 2010 meant that, for the first time, different parties were leading governments at different ends of M4. This situation was replete with potential difficulties for the Tories. While there was no serious independence threat in Wales, there was also no stable devolution settlement in Wales. Nor was there an agreed political direction for the party to follow. The party’s Assembly leadership had, for a decade or so, been edging the party towards a more positive approach to devolution—something that was also the strong preference of their Liberal Democrat coalition partners.2 But Welsh Conservative grassroots were still instinctively devo-sceptic, as were many Welsh Conservative MPs. Meanwhile, the austerity agenda of the Cameron government promised plentiful scope for conflict with their Labour-led counterpart in Cardiff Bay.

2 Nick Bourne, who became Welsh Conservative Assembly leader in August 1999, spent

much of the next decade slowly encouraging his party to adopt a more positive attitudes towards Welsh devolution, as well as to the Welsh language. The contrast between the Welsh Conservative Assembly election manifesto in 1999—which was still devo-sceptic in tone, and spoke of ‘linguistic apartheid’ emerging in Wales—and the party’s manifesto in the 2007 Assembly election, is substantial.

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Ambivalence and growing antagonism characterised London-Cardiff relations during the period of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Prime Minister David Cameron initially offered warm words about a ‘respect agenda’ defining relations with the devolved nations and institutions.3 His government, with strong Liberal Democrat encouragement, facilitated a March 2011 referendum in Wales on greatly enhanced lawmaking powers for the Assembly—and then fully honoured the clear vote in favour of such powers.4 But after the appointment of David Jones as Welsh Secretary in 2012 in place of Cheryl Gillan, a more devo-sceptical and politically combative approach began to emanate from the Wales Office. The increasing trend for Conservatives to target the performance of the Labour-run Welsh NHS for political attacks in the run up to the May 2015 general election also did nothing to ease tensions. As that election drew near, relations between the governments in London and Cardiff were increasingly strained.

Welsh Conservative Leadership in Government, 2015–2020 The Conservatives are an avowedly unionist party, but their unionism— like the union itself—has often been flexible. Tories accommodated their Scottish brethren operating a largely independent party structure, under the brand of Unionist rather than Conservative, for decades until the 1960s (Seawright, 1999). They also maintained for many years an even looser form of association with Ulster Unionists—a distinct party whose elected MPs nonetheless took the Conservative whip in the House of Commons until 1972. More recently the party has embraced greater autonomy for their Scottish leadership and more distinct Scottish branding in the wake of the near-thing of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum (Awan-Scully, 2018, Chapter 4). Such autonomy and independent leadership have, however, remained largely absent from the party in Wales. The Welsh Conservatives continue, as they have long done, to have very limited financial resources or staffing, 3 See for example, the speech by then newly installed Prime Minister Cameron to the Assembly in May 2010 (as reported here: BBC (2010)). 4 The Conservatives officially remained neutral in the referendum on greater Assembly law-making powers. The majority of their Assembly members, however, campaigned in favour.

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and little autonomy over policy formation. Nor is there a clear Welsh leadership figure. The Conservative leader in the Senedd has, since 2011 (and when there is more than one candidate), been elected by a ballot of party members in Wales.5 But that election grants no mandate beyond the Senedd. There is no Welsh equivalent to the role given in recent years to the Scottish Conservative leader. Since the party’s return to government at the UK level in May 2010, the most obvious Welsh leadership figure within that government has been the Secretary of State for Wales. In outline, the job of Welsh Secretary remains much as when it was first established in 1964: a dual role of fighting Wales’ corner inside the UK government and leading for the UK government in Wales. But while Welsh Secretaries never had a heavyweight Whitehall department behind them, the role was substantially downgraded after 1999 when the vast majority of its responsibilities, and civil service staff, were transferred to the new devolved institutions. No significant policy formation, or even policy implementation, element remains for the position of Welsh Secretary. The title, and the cabinet status that comes with it, might still provide a sufficiently effective and ambitious politician the platform for a powerful party leadership role. But, unlike in Scotland with Ruth Davidson, no such Welsh Conservative figure has emerged during the entire devolution era. Indeed, during Cheryl Gillan’s period as Welsh Secretary from 2010 to 12 (after she had shadowed the role in opposition from 2005 to 2010), the job was held by an MP who did not even represent a Welsh constituency.6 During the 2015–2020 period, the Welsh Secretary-ship was held by three individuals. Stephen Crabb had been appointed to succeed the sacked David Jones in July 2014. In place of Jones’ often antagonistic approach, and with both the Scottish independence referendum and the 2015 general election on the horizon, Crabb immediately adopted a more conciliatory tone. An able media performer, Crabb sought to reach out to political opponents and to achieve a consensus around constitutional issues (as discussed below). However, although seen at the time as one 5 There have been two membership ballots for Welsh Conservative Assembly leader: in 2011 Andrew R.T.Davies defeated Nick Ramsey; in 2018 Paul Davies won from Suzy Davies. Andrew R.T.Davies’ resumption of the leadership in January 2021, however, happened without a membership ballot as he was the only candidate to come forward. 6 Gillan was MP for Chesham and Amersham, in Buckinghamshire, from 1992 until her death in 2021.

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of the party’s rising stars—indeed, he subsequently stood for the party leadership after Cameron’s resignation in 2016—Crabb made no efforts to carve out a specifically Welsh leadership role in his time as Welsh Secretary, before he was promoted to head a major UK government department (Work and Pensions) in March 2016. Crabb was succeeded by Alun Cairns, who remained Welsh Secretary until the first official day of the 2019 general election campaign. Cairns came to the role with the advantage of substantial experience in the Assembly,7 followed by serving as MP for Vale of Glamorgan since 2010: he thus had considerable familiarity with the major operators in both London and Cardiff. This advantage might have been significantly greater had familiarity led to respect. But few in the Assembly had ever been impressed by Cairns, and his absence had not made the heart grow fonder. For his part, Cairns as Welsh Secretary appeared happy to return the contempt of his political opponents with interest, and he enthusiastically took a populist and politically aggressive approach in confronting Welsh Labour. His populism included gestures such as abolishing tolls on the M4 Severn bridge (which understandably pleased many drivers) and renaming the crossing the Prince of Wales Bridge (which seemed to meet with public indifference).8 Cairns’ political effectiveness, though, was hampered by the publicly difficult relationship he had with the Conservative Senedd leader Andrew RT Davies (despite Davies sharing a broadly populist political approach) with neither willing to accept the other as the leading party figure in Wales. Ultimately neither Davies nor Cairns survived in post until the 2019 general election. Davies was ousted by unhappy Senedd colleagues in summer 2018, and Cairns was forced to resign from Cabinet the following year with the waters of scandal lapping at his feet.9 After the December 2019 election Prime Minister Johnson appointed Simon Hart as the new Welsh Secretary. As Crabb had done, Hart

7 Cairns was a regional Assembly Member for South-East Wales from 1999–2011. 8 Polling suggested limited public support in Wales for re-naming the M4 bridge; see:

R.Osborne (2018). 9 Cairns resigned when it emerged that he had supported the nomination of Ross England as Tory Senedd candidate in Cairns’ own Vale of Glamorgan constituency, and that he continued to employ England, even after England had been blamed in court by a judge for the collapse of a rape trial in which the alleged victim was also a former employee of Cairns (BBC, 2019).

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benefited greatly from simply not being his predecessor. A more widely respected figure across all parties, Hart immediately approached the relationship with Welsh Government in a more cooperative spirit. The respect agenda, it appeared, was back. Yet Hart was no-one’s idea of a dynamic leader for the Welsh party. He was a competent representative for Conservatism in Wales and spokesperson for the UK government. But the paucity of genuine Welsh Conservative leadership remained.

The Conservative Government and the Welsh Devolution ‘Settlement’ While Wales is now well into its third decade of devolved governance, it continues to lack a clear and stable devolution settlement. Indeed, such has been the instability over the structures of Welsh devolution that the term ‘settlement’ could be regarded as more aspirational than accurate. Since 2010 it has fallen to the Conservatives—previously strong opponents of devolution, and with many in the party still harbouring, at best, ambivalence towards it—to address this issue. The National Assembly was initially created with weak powers and based on a highly confusing model of devolution—much of which was essentially carried over from the failed devolution proposals of the 1970s. The model was not only confusing on its own terms. Being based on very different principles to both Scottish and Northern Irish devolution, it introduced significant inconsistency into the governance of the UK as a whole. The 2006 Government of Wales Act conducted some minor constitutional ‘tidying up’.10 It also provided for a future referendum on ‘primary’ law-making powers (i.e. broadly equivalent with the powers enjoyed by the other devolved chambers). That referendum occurred in 2011, delivering a 63.5 per cent endorsement of an enhanced legislative role for the Assembly. However, those enhanced law-making powers were to be wielded within the existing ‘Conferred Powers’ model of devolution.11 The 2011 vote also said nothing about the policy scope of 10 Among the changes introduced by the 2006 Act were the formal recognition of the distinction between the Welsh Government and the Welsh Assembly. See: legislation.gov.uk (2006). 11 A Conferred Powers model of devolution permits a devolved institution to act only in those areas where powers have specifically been granted; a Reserved Powers model permits the institution to act in all policy areas except for those which have been specifically

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devolution, and it did nothing in terms of fiscal (taxation or borrowing) powers for devolved government in Wales. The latter had been less urgent during the early years of the Assembly, when increasing public spending by the UK government generated rapidly growing devolvedlevel resources via the Barnett formula. In the years after 2010, with austerity beginning to bite at all levels of government, power over the purse was a much more pressing concern.12 After the 2011 referendum, Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan established an official inquiry into devolution. The Silk Commission’s first report, on financial aspects, led to a modest 2014 Wales Act that included devolution of some minor taxes.13 But the second part of the Commission’s work— on broader constitutional issues—remained to be addressed. Stephen Crabb inherited this issue, but dealing with it was further complicated by the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and the Smith Commission set up there to seek broad, cross-party agreement on further enhancements of Scottish self-government. Crabb sought to move ahead in a similarly consensual manner. However, his task was made more difficult by the fundamental differences that remained between, and sometimes within, the political parties on the model of devolution that should be adopted, fiscal powers, the policy scope of devolution and other matters. There were particularly wide divisions on many of these issues within the upper ranks of Welsh Labour. First Minister Carwyn Jones’ expansive preferences for devolution went alongside a willingness to think radically about the constitutional future of the entire UK; such views found little common ground with those of Shadow Welsh Secretary Owen Jones. The 2017 Wales Act that eventually followed (finally passed with Alun Cairns in situ as Welsh Secretary, although nearly all the serious work on it was done while Crabb was still at the Wales Office) adopted the Silk Commission’s proposal to shift the basis of Welsh devolution from a Conferred to a Reserved Powers model. But passage of the Act only

reserved to Westminster. Constitutional scholars generally concur that, in practice, the reserved powers model offers a more expansive approach to devolution. 12 For detailed analysis of the background to the 2011 Welsh referendum, the vote itself and the agenda that it left unfinished, see Wyn Jones and Scully (2012). 13 The Silk Commission is the informal name for the Commission on Devolution in Wales, chaired by Sir Paul Silk. Its work is archived at (Commission on Devolution in Wales, 2014).

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occurred after long and sometimes angry disputes over the number and scope of powers to be reserved to Westminster. The initial list of such powers was so lengthy and all-inclusive as to raise fears in Cardiff Bay of a major ‘power grab’ by Whitehall. Even the much slimmed-down final list still left many supporters of enhanced devolution uneasy. The 2017 Act made other significant changes, including the granting of some income tax-varying powers, and modestly increased borrowing powers. But fiscal devolution for Wales was to remain much more limited than that for Scotland, while there was no movement on the devolving of policing and criminal justice, or on the issue of a distinct Welsh legal jurisdiction. In these latter respects, Welsh devolution continued to lag well behind not only Scotland but also Northern Ireland. And as a consequence, the UK as a whole was little closer, if at all, to developing a coherent overall model of devolved governance than when the Conservatives had assumed office in 2010.

Brexit and Wales There were good reasons for thinking that Wales had a strong self-interest in voting Remain in the June 2016 Brexit referendum. Wales had benefitted substantially over many years from EU Structural Fund aid to some of its poorer areas. Welsh agriculture did better than most from the support structures of the Common Agricultural Policy. The Welsh private sector economy leaned heavily on several large, export-oriented industrial firms located in Wales (notably Airbus, Ford and GE Aviation) that might suffer badly from leaving the EU’s single market. And Welsh ports depended greatly on their role as the main conduit for Ireland’s physical trade with the rest of the EU. Wales, it seemed, had much to lose from Leave.14 But Wales voted Leave by 52.5% to 47.5%. Even after UKIP’s significant electoral successes in Wales from 2014 to 2016, the result still came as a shock to much of the Welsh political class. EU membership, and a broader sense of ‘internationalism’, had been integral to how much of the nation’s political, social and cultural elites had long defined and understood Welsh identity (in more or less explicit contrast to Englishness). Now, lacking any public mandate to resist the move towards Brexit, 14 A good summary of the evidence on the potential economic consequences of Brexit was provided by this research paper (Welsh Assembly, 2018).

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the Welsh Government sought to fight for what it perceived as Wales’ best interests. The consistent approach taken was to argue for the softest Brexit possible, preserving maximal access to EU markets, and to seek guarantees that potential losses from Brexit (such as Structural Funds, and Welsh farmers losing out on both direct financial support and EU export markets) would somehow be made good by the UK government.15 But Brexit posed wider challenges for Welsh devolved governance than just the potential economic consequences. The assumption of EU membership was built into how all the UK’s devolved institutions had been established, and powers in some major devolved policy areas (such as agriculture and the environment) had always been exercised in a context that was heavily defined by EU structures and rules. What would replace these structures and rules? And who would get to decide? A clash between mutually incompatible positions soon developed. The UK government took the—hardly unreasonable—position that while they were willing to discuss such matters and negotiate with the devolved governments, it was ultimately for the UK government and UK parliament to decide on UKwide matters. The devolved administrations took the position, also hardly unreasonable, that as they were the competent governments in fields such as agriculture and the environment it was for them to decide what new rules and structures they should sign up to in these devolved policy fields. As with the 2017 Wales Act, there were accusations from the Welsh Government (and Plaid Cymru) of a ‘power grab’ by Westminster. These difficult constitutional and political issues were exacerbated by personal ones, namely the evident lack of respect for Cairns and (later on) Prime Minister Johnson within the Welsh Government. Astonishingly, given the long history of utterly poisonous relations between Labour and the SNP and their fundamental differences on the future of the union, Carwyn Jones found himself working closely with Nicola Sturgeon against the UK government at several points in the Brexit process: arguing both for more consultation and involvement, and for substantive changes in UK government positions.16 15 A clear early statement of the Welsh Government’s demands in the Brexit process is given in the January 2017 White Paper Securing Wales’ Future: Transition from the European Union to a new relationship with Europe (Welsh Government, 2017). 16 Jones and Sturgeon issued joint public statements on Brexit in July 2017, September 2017 and June 2018. In November 2018, they very publicly wrote a joint letter on the same subject to Prime Minister May.

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The UK formally left the EU at the end of January 2020. Internally at least, the UK government was able to impose its will on the Brexit process. It would be the UK government that decided the new frameworks governing agriculture and environmental matters. A Shared Prosperity Fund would replace EU Structural Funds, implemented from Whitehall and with the devolved governments likely to be largely shut out.17 Little was done by the UK government to respond to the Welsh Government’s concerns about Welsh farmers and ports—and the impact swiftly began to be felt.18 It remains to be seen whether Wales will reap longer-term economic gains from Brexit that will compensate for such losses, or what might be the ultimate political consequences of how the process was handled.

The Electoral Consequences To describe the Welsh Conservative electoral record between 2015 and 2020 as ‘mixed’ would be a considerable understatement. Indeed, postwar heights and historic lows were both experienced—and only several months apart. In the 2015 general election, the Welsh Conservatives made a significant contribution to David Cameron’s narrow but unexpected majority, with a gain of three seats. Brecon and Radnor was comfortably taken from the hapless Liberal Democrats, but their other two gains (Gower and the Vale of Clwyd) were as unexpected as they were narrow: Gower had not been represented by a Conservative since the nineteenth century. Overall, the election left the Conservatives still well behind Labour in Wales, but having had no MPs as recently as a decade previously, to now reach eleven was a major achievement. This was the first time the Welsh Tories had managed double figure parliamentary representation since the general election of 1983. The Welsh Conservative party was to be much less happy the following year with their performance in the Assembly election. They had entered 2016 with strong hopes of improving on their 2011 performance—where they had reached an all-time high in the devolved chamber of 14 seats, and for the first time had finished in second place ahead of Plaid Cymru. But the Welsh Tories’ Assembly campaign found itself severely hampered

17 On the Shared Prosperity Fund, see the excellent briefing provided by (Brien, 2022). 18 On the rapid impact of Brexit on Welsh ports, see (BBC, 2022).

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by the travails of the party’s Westminster government. An unpopular March budget and the Panama Papers revelations did little for the Tory brand in general, nor did the very public splits in the party over the forthcoming Brexit referendum (which happened just seven weeks after the Assembly contest). But the Welsh party’s electoral strategy was also badly hampered by the ongoing junior doctors’ strike in England. Attempts by Andrew RT Davies and colleagues to attack Welsh Labour for their record on managing the NHS in Wales were fatally undermined by the problems just over the border; Carwyn Jones repeatedly, and effectively, defended Labour against Conservative criticism by pointing out the absence of any similar doctors’ strike in Wales. The campaign ended with the Tories losing the three net gains they had made five years earlier, and slipping back to third place in the Assembly behind Plaid Cymru. But perhaps at least as important to the party was that, nearly two decades into devolution, the election had shown that they had made little or no progress in overturning Labour’s dominance at the devolved level, or in finding a route to escaping their own position as a seemingly permanent party of opposition in Cardiff Bay. If 2016 was disappointing, 2017 was to prove even more so. Theresa May’s surprise calling of a June general election to win a mandate for Brexit negotiations initially looked as if it might produce an historic advance for Welsh Tories. The first Welsh poll of the campaign showed the Tories ten points ahead, and apparently on course to sweep up a slew of seats long held by Labour. Some of the first signs that things might not go that well for them, however, came in May’s Welsh local elections. The Conservatives made a reasonable overall advance, across all of Wales’ local authorities a net gain of some 79 councillors compared with the 2012 local elections where they had performed poorly. But this result still left the party in third place in Welsh local government, and was nowhere near the sort of move forwards that the early general election polls had been suggesting.19 Nonetheless, even the results of these local elections did not prepare many for the surprise outcome to the general election. The faltering Conservative campaign, and a greater degree of Labour resilience than many had expected, saw the polls steadily turn around—with Tories 19 The headline numbers of councillors in Wales conceivably underplays Conservative strength somewhat. In several rural parts of Wales (notably Powys, where the Conservatives hold both parliamentary seats), the tradition of independent councilors remains strong.

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particularly losing ground among young and more well-educated voters. But even so, on the night it was still a shock that to see the Conservatives party fall short of overall majority across Great Britain, and in Wales for them to lose three seats, ending up back where they had been before the 2015 election.20 These electoral ups and downs of the party, though, were only to get more dramatic in 2019. The unplanned-for European election in 2019 was a disaster for Tories everywhere, but nowhere more than Wales, where party got 6.5 per cent of the vote and finished in fifth place.21 The Brexit Party won in Wales, as across the UK, but the Tories also finished behind Plaid Cymru, Labour and the revived Liberal Democrats, and only very narrowly escaped finishing sixth behind the Greens. Through mid-summer things continued to look bleak for the party as they lost the Brecon and Radnor seat in a Westminster by-election to the LibDemocrats. But after the general election was called by Prime Minister Johnson in the autumn, their repeated calls to ‘Get Brexit Done’ managed to marginalise the Brexit Party as much in Wales as elsewhere. Meanwhile, the putative ‘remain alliance’ between Plaid, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens failed to generate any significant traction with voters. Most of the Conservatives’ potential gains in Wales, however, were from Labour. In the end, the Conservative vote share rose only modestly from 2017.22 But by successfully marginalising the Brexit Party and consolidating pro-Leave support behind themselves, the Tories were able to reap considerable seat gains while pro-Remain forces were split between a faltering Labour party and others. The Conservatives re-captured Brecon and Radnor; made five seat gains in north Wales, coming within 213 votes (in Alyn and Deeside) of wiping out Labour in the region; and also captured Bridgend (the seat, in the Assembly, of former First Minister Carwyn Jones) for the first time since 1983. In fact, the final Welsh Conservative seat total of fourteen equalled their best post-war performance of that year, and it also meant that the Welsh Tories had more 20 The 2017 general election result saw the Welsh Tories lose the Gower and Vale

of Clwyd seats that they had gained in 2015; they also lost Cardiff North, which had originally been gained in 2010 and held reasonably comfortably in 2015. 21 The Conservative vote share in Wales in the 2019 European election was lower than that in any English region, and also below that in Scotland. 22 The 2019 Welsh Conservative general election vote share, at 36.1 per cent, was only 2.5 percentage points higher than in 2017.

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than punched-their-weight in contributing to Boris Johnson’s substantial parliamentary majority. Beneath these headline numbers, there was further good news: the Welsh Conservative vote share of 36.1% was their highest since December 1910. And while the Conservative vote share in Wales continued to be lower than in England, the gap—at 11.1 percentage points—was the lowest since the nineteenth century. After an electorally turbulent few years, the Welsh Conservatives entered the 2020s buoyant. Labour dominance in Wales had not yet been over-turned, but it had—in general elections at least—been significantly reduced. With fourteen MPs and more than a third of the Welsh vote, the Tories were in a position scarcely imaginable two decades previously. It remained to be seen, though, how much of this advance reflected the very peculiar politics of Brexit, or whether it might indicate a longerterm trend towards eliminating the Conservatives’ enduring electoral underperformance in Wales.

Conclusion The Welsh Conservatives ended the 2015–2020 period with much to be pleased about. They had delivered the Brexit that Wales had voted for, and had reaped a significant electoral reward for doing so. The notion of Wales being a fundamentally anti-Conservative nation looked more shaky in 2020 than it had done for at least a century, if not longer. But still some significant issues were unresolved. Amidst a resurgent Scottish independence movement and ongoing problems regarding the status of Northern Ireland within ‘Brexit Britain’, Wales’ long-term position in the British political union was uncertain. Even leaving aside these wider issues, a sustainable and coherent model of devolved government for Wales had not yet been arrived at. Nor had the Welsh Conservatives themselves come to a clear solution for how they should function, and be led, as a constituent part of the wider party. And at least two key questions remained. Would the Tories’ success in delivering Brexit produce long-term benefits to Wales? And had the Conservatives found a sustainable strategy to end their long-term alienation from much of the Welsh electorate?

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References Awan-Scully, R. (2018). The End of British Party Politics? Biteback. Awan-Scully, R. (2019). 1859 and All That: The Enduring Failure of Welsh Conservatism. In P. Cowley, & R. Ford (Eds.), Sex, Lies and Politics: The Secret Influences that Drive Our Political Choices. Biteback. BBC. (2010, May 17). Cameron Offers ‘Respect’ Agenda to Assembly. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/south_east/868 8160.stm (accessed 25 January 2022). BBC. (2019, November 6). Alan Cairns Resigns in Ross England Rape Trial ‘Sabotage’ Row. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-politics50302173 (accessed 25 January 2022). BBC. (2022, January 23). Welsh Ports had 30% Less Traffic due to BrexitShipping Chief. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-600 99413 (accessed 25 January 2022). Brien, P. (2022). The UK Shared Prosperity Fund. House of Commons https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbpLibrary. 8527/ (accessed 30 March 2022). Commission on Devolution in Wales. (2014). Archive. https://webarchive.nat ionalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20140605075122/http://commissionondevolu tioninwales.independent.gov.uk// (accessed 25 January 2022). Legislation.gov.uk. (2006). Government of Wales Act 2006. https://www.legisl ation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/32/contents (accessed 25 January 2022). Osborne, R. (2018, July 2). More Than Half of People do not want Second Severn River Crossing to be Named After Prince Charles, Poll Reveals. ITV https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2018-07-02/more-than-half-ofNews. people-do-not-want-severn-bridge-to-be-named-after-prince-charles-poll-rev eals (accessed 25 January 2022). Seawright, D. (1999). An Important Matter of Principle: The Decline of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. Ashgate. Welsh Government. (2017). Securing Wales’ Future: Transition from the European Union to a new relationship with Europe. Welsh Government. https:// gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2018-10/white-paper-securingwales-future.pdf (accessed 25 January 2022). Welsh Assembly (2018) How might different Brexit scenarios affect the Welsh economy? https://research.senedd.wales/2018/12/03/how-might-differentbrexit-scenarios-affect-the-welsh-economy/ (accessed 25 January 2022). Wyn Jones, R., Scully, R., & Trystan, D. (2002). Why do the Conservatives Always do (Even) Worse in Wales? British Elections and Parties Review, 12, 229–245. Wyn Jones, R., & Scully, R. (2012). Wales Says Yes: Devolution and the 2011 Welsh Referendum. University of Wales Press.

CHAPTER 17

Alienation and Destabilization: Northern Ireland in the Age of Brexit Cillian McGrattan

In his 2012 party conference, the then leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and First Minister of Northern Ireland, Peter Robinson, stated that ‘as the leader of the party that seeks to represent the whole community, I’m not prepared to write off over forty per cent of our population as out of reach’ (Tonge et al., 2014: 181). Despite having virtually any Catholic party members and close to statistically zero Catholic voters, the sentiment seemed genuine, for in 2018, Robinson, now out of office and having lost his seat, was returning to the theme: the result of the Brexit referendum in destabilizing the acquiescence of moderate, bourgeois Catholic/nationalist opinion in the Union meant that Ulster unionists ought to prepare for a border poll on Irish reunification: ‘I don’t expect my own house to burn down,’ he stated, ‘but I still insure it because it could happen’ (Hutton & Ferguson, 2018). Perhaps either offering a response to a journalist or simply politicking, Lord Empey of

C. McGrattan (B) Ulster University, Belfast, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6_17

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the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the second-placed unionist party to the DUP, accused Robinson of ‘playing into the hands of our country’s opponents’. In truth, as Tonge et al. point out, in what remains the most recent study of the DUP, Robinson’s attitude had changed considerably—even from as recent as 1995 when he was defending the Union ‘as a necessary resistance to the oppression of Protestants, viewed as inevitable in a united Ireland’ (Tonge et al., 2014: 181). Along with middle-class nationalist instability, Empey also missed working-class Protestant/unionist alienation to which Brexit has contributed. On this point: At the time of writing—in the aftermath of some of the largest loyalist riots in years in April 2021, and facing into a summer of discontent—the historian Henry Patterson’s Guardian commentary of October 2019 seems disturbingly prescient. Patterson pointed out that the DUP’s Brexit policies—in particular, its alliance with Theresa May’s Conservative government —represented an outworking of divergent class politics: The party, having supplanted the UUP in 2005, straddled both middle-class and working-class Northern Irish Protestant interests. As such, it attempted to marry the anti-Brexit business community with the working-class loyalist reaction to the referendum, which integrated ‘Brexit into a vision of unionist retreat and loss during the peace process’ (Patterson, 2019). This sense of loss, of course, predates the Brexit years, yet as nationalist grievance with the referendum result mobilized into a cross-class, cross-segmental (among the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the majority nationalist party Sinn Féin), and cross-border (the Northern and Southern political classes) movement, disquiet continued to grow within unionism and loyalism during these years concerning exactly what Brexit would mean for the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This chapter explores these under-currents. And, to extend the metaphor, it suggests that a degree of tranquillity exists, superficially, at the elite political level where neither the main nationalist nor unionist political parties have broken definitively with the devolutionary arrangements established under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) of 1998, both have been engaging in a similar-but-distinct type of shadow boxing or under-the-surface politics with successive Conservative governments. This somewhat vague set of circumstances relate to the ambiguities of the referendum itself and the immediate aftermath. Northern Ireland voted 56%–44% to ‘Remain’, with only the DUP among the main parties having campaigned to ‘Leave’. However, the ethno-religious split was

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Fig. 17.1 Voting on Brexit referendum. Yellow = Leave; Blue = Remain (Color figure online)

seemingly even more stark: 85% of Catholics voted to remain in the EU compared with only 40% of Protestants. (When filtered through the ethno-nationalist lens, 88% of self-defined Irish nationalists voted to ‘Remain’ compared with 66% of unionists voting to ‘Leave’) (Garry, 2016). When rendered geographically the split is stark: More or less, an east/west division with the outliers of a couple of Belfast constituencies and the prosperous North Down coast (see Fig. 17.1).

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Alienation and Negotiation: The DUP and the Conservatives As Arthur Aughey pointed out in his seminal text on the 1985 AngloIrish Agreement, Under Siege, the articulation or framing of successive British governments’ relationship to Northern Ireland has given rise to a series of contradictions that undermine and hollow-out Ulster unionism’s constitutional position. That is to say, the notion that Britain and Ireland were somehow guarantors of the ethno-religious blocs internal to Northern Ireland placed London in the ‘incompatible’ situation of being both pro-unionist and non-aligned giving rise to the inevitable conclusion that ‘[c]learly the British government cannot be taken at its word—if only because it cannot simultaneously be neutral and partisan’ (Aughey, 1989: 39). The DUP had successfully replaced the UUP as the majority party of unionism during the early 2000s by playing on these fears—in particular, the idea that Tony Blair was more concerned with keeping republicans within the peace process than on allaying unionist concerns about the direction of politics.1 By the 2010s, however, British electoral volatility meant that the DUP’s 10 MPs had become increasingly significant in the prospect of a hung parliament. Thus, in January 2010 David Cameron, who was then leader of the Conservatives, held talks with both Northern Irish unionist parties about the possibility of an electoral pact in the forthcoming general election. The idea of joining an alliance with the DUP exercised many in the Conservatives and precipitated a backlash from the small Northern Irish branch of the party. Meanwhile the existing (from 2009) pact with the UUP ended after the latter failed to win any seats in the 2010 general election. The prospect of a hung parliament returned at the end of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and in 2014 reports surfaced that Cameron had again opened talks with the DUP. The small but outright Conservative victory in May 2015 rendered moot the potential deals struck by both Labour and the Conservatives with the DUP. The putative agreement with the Conservative party was leaked to the press in 2017 and would have involved the DUP supporting the government in

1 See Cillian McGrattan, Northern Ireland, 1968–2008: The Politics of Entrenchment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 156–80; see also Henry Patterson and Eric Kaufmann Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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any no-confidence motions and voting alongside the government except on welfare reform or matters exclusive to Northern Ireland. Perhaps more interestingly, from the perspective of British territorial politics are the promises made by the Conservatives to explore changing corporation tax in Northern Ireland, to ‘ensure Northern Ireland would receive “fair share” of Government contracts and of infrastructure investments to enhance communication and transport between Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ (Bell, 2017). Following the result of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 (see below), the DUP pivoted towards the Conservative government of Theresa May and away from overtures by the Irish government. Those overtures sought to develop a position on Northern Ireland and the EU post-UK withdrawal on an all-Ireland basis—initially, through the establishment of a North–South forum to sit alongside the North–South Ministerial Council, which was created under the B/GFA. There were suggestions that the DUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, had not been briefed about these proposals; but the party also rebuffed them on the grounds that Brexit involved ‘domestic political’ implications. The DUP’s position was seemingly that the Republic and Northern Ireland shared common interests. Thus, Jeffrey Donaldson, a senior DUP MP, stated that: What we’re really looking for is a special deal for the island of Ireland which enables free movement of goods and people on the island, and preserves the institutions we’ve created under the various agreements. (Leahy, 2016)

However, he implied that pressing those interests would involve a common front against Brussels: ‘The people we’ll need to convince are the EU’ (ibid.). This pivot gave way and formed part of an informal relationship with the May government, which, for its part, could count on the DUP to maintain around a 30-seat majority in the Commons. The informal arrangements became functional after the 2017 snap election that saw the Conservatives falling just short of the 236 seats needed for a majority (out of 650 in the Commons) with 317 MPs returned. For its part, the DUP won two extra seats bringing its total to 10—its best ever general election return, with a percentage swing of over 10%. The election represented a strengthening of the grip of the two main ‘ethnic tribune’ parties, with Sinn Féin gaining 3 seats on an uplift of 5%—these

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gains occurred at the expense of the more centre ground Social Democratic and Labour Party and the UUP, who gained no seats and lost 2% and 6% of the vote share, respectively.2 It was, perhaps, not surprising to the voters of Northern Ireland, who were well used to prolonged political negotiations, that the ‘confidence-and-supply’ agreement (26 June 2017) between the government and the DUP took over two weeks to conclude—nor that an announcement about a finalized deal after three days of talks had to be somewhat embarrassingly withdrawn as premature (Craig, 2017). For its part, the DUP promised to support the government on motions of no-confidence and on key legislative instruments including the Queen’s Speech, the budget and finance bills. The agreement also stated that: In line with the parties’ shared priorities for negotiating a successful exit from the European Union and protecting the country in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the DUP also agrees to support the government on legislation pertaining to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union; and legislation pertaining to national security. (Cabinet Office, 2020)

It was, however, the government’s pledge to spend an extra £1 billion in Northern Ireland over the subsequent two years that attracted most attention. In the context of a decade of austerity and the financial uncertainty of Brexit, the money and the amount (which was to target infrastructure, health and education in Northern Ireland) created waves of surprise across the UK’s political spectrum. For instance, Jeremy Corbyn, the then Labour leader, criticized the deal as ‘clearly not in the national interest’; Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Féin, commented that it would facilitate a ‘Tory Brexit which threatens the Good Friday Agreement’. The former Prime Minister and opponent of Brexit, John Major, also condemned the deal as threatening efforts to restore power-sharing in

2 See, BBC Online, ‘Election 2017 [Northern Ireland General Election]’ [N.D.]. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2017/results/northern_ireland; accessed on 30 April 2021. It was, arguably, the psephological work of Paul Mitchell that introduced the idea of ‘ethnic tribunes’, who outbid or underbid intra-bloc rivals—essentially by being more green or more orange as the case might be, or by adopting a calibrated pragmatism—to Northern Irish political science literature; see, for instance, Paul Mitchell, Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O’Leary, ‘Extremist Outbidding in Ethnic Party Systems: Tribune Parties in Northern Ireland, Political Studies, 57(2) (2009), pp. 397–421.

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Northern Ireland, following the collapse of the Assembly earlier in the year (see below). Arguably, the greatest anger and incredulity were to be found in Cardiff and Edinburgh. The Welsh First Minister, Carwyn Jones, for example, was particularly scathing: The deal, he argued, involved ‘throwing money at Northern Ireland while ignoring the rest of the UK’, it amounted to ‘cash for votes’ and represented ‘a straight bung to keep a weak prime minister and a faltering government in office’ (BBC Online, 2017a). For the SNP’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, the agreement represented a subversion of the Barnett formula, which is designed to allocate money fairly around the UK’s regions (Asthana et al., 2017). Amid concerns that the Conservatives had made secret pledges to the DUP on not extending Great British abortion and gay rights to Northern Ireland, the deal also proved particularly uncomfortable for the Conservative’s Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson. Davidson, who is gay, had, at the time, been planning to marry her partner and she was vocal in her demand to May that the arrangement would see ‘absolutely no rescission of LGBTI rights in the rest of the UK’ (BBC Online, 2017b). Yet, in constitutional terms, Davidson, as a unionist, would find common ground with the DUP over the status of Northern Ireland post-Brexit. Thus, in October 2018 she, together with the Scottish Secretary, David Mundell, wrote to the Prime Minster to complain that: Having fought just four years ago to keep our country together, the integrity of our United Kingdom remains the single most important issue for us in these negotiations. Any deal that delivers a differentiated settlement for Northern Ireland beyond the differences that already exist on an all-Ireland basis (e.g. Agriculture), or can be brought under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement, would undermine the integrity of our UK internal market and this United Kingdom. (Walker, 2018)

Critically, Davidson and Mundell stated that they ‘could not support any deal that creates a border of kind in the Irish Sea and undermines the Union or leads to Northern Ireland having a different relationship with the EU than the rest of the UK’. Davidson and Mundell’s sentiments were echoed the following month by Boris Johnson who was then Foreign Secretary at the DUP’s annual conference:

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We would be damaging the fabric of the Union with regulatory checks and even customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea that are already envisaged in the withdrawal agreement. Now, I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement. (Quinn, 2019)

Indeed, it was this latter issue—essentially the question of where customs and trade checks and tariffs should begin—that marked the souring of the DUP-Conservative relationship. As it became apparent going into 2019 that the Irish Sea border was a distinct possibility—owing to fears in Dublin and Brussels that a land-border would be open to attacks by ‘dissident’ republicans—a distinct cooling became apparent. But by the time the DUP refused to support the October 2019 Brexit Withdraw Agreement, Boris Johnson had already been Prime Minister since July that year (BBC Online, 2019a, 2019b). Johnson’s second term as Prime Minister began in December 2019 following a general election that definitively shook the DUP from its position as power-broker.

Destabilizing Nationalism: Brexit and the Return of Border Politics Although the Brexit era witnessed the DUP making electoral gains at Westminster, it also gave way to a couple of, arguably, underappreciated election results on the island of Ireland. The March 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election, for instance, was the first time that the devolved institution did not contain a majority of members who were identifiably Ulster unionist: thus, just over 45% of people voted for unionist parties (including a unionist independent, the Conservatives and the Progressive Unionist Party [the latter of whom did not win a seat]). Furthermore, by increasing its vote share by over 3% Sinn Féin came within a fraction of matching the DUP’s vote share and won 27 seats to the latter’s 28 (BBC Online, 2017c). The election had been triggered following the resignation by deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin in the fallout over revelations about financial waste and cronyism on the DUP’s part in a renewable heating initiative. In the volatile political environment of claim and counter-claim turnout rose 10% from the previous Assembly election to 65%.

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Meanwhile in February 2020, Sinn Féin became the largest party by vote share in the Republic, outstripping Fianna Fáil and Fianna Gael (the traditional parties of government) by 24.5% to 22.2% and 20.9%. The almost 11% swing to Sinn Féin did not equate exactly to seats, as the party still struggled to pick-up second preference votes outside of its urban strongholds. Although its 37 seats saw it as the second largest party in the Dáil (after Fianna Fáil (38) and ahead of Fianna Gael (35)), it found itself frozen out of government by the creation of a grand coalition (with rotating Taoiseach-ship) involving Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael and the Green Party (BBC Online, 2020). In other words, both north and south of the border a Brexit-inspired neo-nationalism began to make an impact. Indeed, much of The Atlantic magazine’s explanation of the Irish general election results can be applied to the Northern Irish nationalist constituency: Though the seismic shift has largely been attributed more to voter dissatisfaction with mainstream parties than to Sinn Féin’s support for the unification of the Republic of Ireland with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, it nonetheless comes at a nationalist moment in the country—one in which anti-English sentiment, brought on by Brexit, has grown. (Serhan, 2020)

This ‘nationalist moment’ saw a coalescing of nationalist political parties around a broad anti-Brexit stance that was frequently framed as being about the prioritization of the B/GFA. Sinn Féin, for instance, had warned that since Brexit would entail a redrawing of the boundaries between the UK and the EU, the possibility of ‘hard’ border on the island of Ireland would disrupt the harmonization of economic activity that had occurred since the late 1990s (McCann & Hainsworth, 2017). As mentioned above, the Irish government attempted to convene an all-Ireland Brexit discussion forum that was rejected by unionists. The idea was brought to pass in the form of a ‘Brexit Stakeholder Forum’ under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Forum met in plenary session four times between April 2016 and February 2017 and held 14 sectoral meetings during the winter of 2016–17. Typically, these were one-day symposia addressed by politicians, academics, business leaders and NGO spokespeople. Although the B/GFA established fora to bring together political actors from across the British Isles, the focus of the Brexit discussion groups was an all-Ireland and EU

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affair—Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, for instance, delivered a keynote address at the fourth plenary on the 30 April 2017. As the Taoiseach Enda Kenny explained at the second plenary in February 2017, in part, the aim was to construct a cohesive Irish national(ist) response to Brexit around government-designed aims: The Irish government will oppose a hard border, argue for free movement on this island, seek EU funding for cross-border projects to protect the rights of EU citizens, whether from North or South. But this requires that we work together, North and South, all of us. We must not return to a hard border or create a new border of the future… [sic] This is a political matter, not a legal or technical matter. It will have to be solved by political leadership with creativity, imagination and innovation. (Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, 2017)

Dublin-London relations are beyond the scope of this paper, but the somewhat platitudinous principles Kenny sought to associate with political leadership reflected the tendency within Anglo-Irish negotiations throughout the past five decades where rather open-ended sentiments would be expressed by Irish politicians to the bafflement of Whitehall officials.3 However, in addition to avoiding a hard or new border, the Irish government focussed on protecting citizenship rights as it saw as being integral to the B/GFA. This included vouchsafing the Erasmus university placement scheme for Northern Ireland’s two universities (provided students also enrol at an Irish university) and a commitment to maintaining the European Convention on Human Rights under the harmonization elements of the 1998 Agreement (Government of Ireland, 2019). In retrospect, the overarching strategy seems to have been to prioritize a joint approach with Barnier and the EU over-and-above partnerships with Ulster unionism and/or Westminster. As Katy Hayward and Mary Murphy point out, this had been largely achieved by the summer of 2017. Thus, they cite a joint press conference in Brussels involving Barnier and the Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, at which Barnier stated that: ‘Our aim is to ensure that the Common Travel Area and Good Friday Agreement (of which the UK has a special responsibility as co-guarantor) are not affected by the UK’s decision to leave the

3 See, for instance, Thomas Hennessey, Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005).

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Union’ (Hayward & Murphy, 2018: 277). The co-option of the EU as a joint guarantor of the B/GFA represented a new and much enhanced role for Brussels within the peace process, having been a very marginal player during the talks in the 1990s and barely involved in the subsequent devolutionary settlement. The ‘nationalist moment’ also witnessed the development of a number of civil society initiatives, outwith, though often linked to politicians and political parties. Perhaps the most prominent among these is the Ireland’s Future group whose steering committee consists of musicians such as Frances Black, academic historians and legal scholars such as Colin Harvey and Brian Feeney and former victims’ Commissioner Patricia McBride and current victims’ lobbyist Andrée Murphy (Ireland’s Future, n.d). The group, which began to hold public events at the beginning of 2019, has adopted the raison d’être that ‘Brexit has dramatically changed the social and political dynamic on this island. The prospect of a new constitutional arrangement on the island of Ireland is growing’ (ibid.). More precisely, the group is calling for the triggering of the clause in the B/GFA in which the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland can set up a reunification referendum (in Northern Ireland).4 It is difficult to come up with a more precise definition of this idea than that which was expressed by the Northern Ireland editor of the Irish Times: ‘It’s an ugly “count the Taigs, count the Prods” way of examining constitutional affairs’; it has been treated with extreme caution by the Irish government, with Taoiseach Micheál Martin describing it as ‘very, very divisive’ (Moriarty, 2020a). Nonetheless, the Ireland’s Future spokesperson, the human rights solicitor Niall Murphy,5 argues that Brexit has inspired a wave of Irish nationalism, which, in the traditional mistaken interpretation of his pedagogic motivations, Murphy avers, King Canute could not ‘hold back’. There is, thus, an inevitability about Brexit and Irish unity: ‘English nationalism’, Murphy argues, ‘has imposed an economic border in the Irish Sea. Irish nationalism didn’t. English 4 The relevant clause states that if the wish expressed by a majority in such a poll is that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland, the Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament such proposals to give effect’; see Schedule 1, Sect. 1. The full text of the Agreement is available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/att achment_data/file/136652/agreement.pdf; accessed on 13 May 2021. 5 Murphy describes himself as a ‘keen Gael’ and is a chair of an Irish language school in north Belfast; see https://krw-law.ie/niall-murphy/; accessed on 13 May 2021.

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nationalism has delivered an economic united Ireland and will impose it’ (Moriarty, 2020b). As it is currently envisaged under the B/GFA, a ‘majority’ result would be enough to precipitate Irish reunification. The Ireland’s Future is nonchalant in regards to the possibility that that would potentially mean a large group of people being captured within a constitutional settlement that would be anathema to their political and cultural outlook (given that this group would constitute around 1 million people or around a fifth of a united Ireland, it is unsurprising that Dublin has been tepid). Colin Harvey, for instance, has dismissed the potential of a violent backlash ‘threat of violence is not an argument and it’s not an argument that I will entertain or listen to’ (Moriarty, 2020a). The 2021 census may well return a Catholic majority in Northern Ireland (Gordon, 2018), and, for Harvey, reunification is a matter of democracy: ‘that’s the rules’ (Moriarty, 2020a). Ireland’s Future’s focus on English nationalism is of a piece with mainstream commentary in the Republic. For instance, the high-profile columnist Fintan O’Toole has argued that Brexit has seen Britain (or more specifically, the ‘England of Brexit’) awakening from one delusion (for O’Toole, a nostalgia for Imperial sovereignty) and entering another nightmare: In the Joycean allusion underpinning O’Toole’s depiction of English nationalism, emerging from one historical nightmare does not necessarily mean that you awake to a placid reality’ (O’Toole, 2018a).6 Quoting a famous passage in Ulysses, O’Toole explains: ‘“History,” Stephen [Dedalus] replies, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Then, from Stephen’s perspective, we read: “From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?”’. O’Toole ignores Joyce’s point about the fact that Stephen is ‘trying to’ awaken from history-as-nightmare. He is not quite asleep, not quite awake, but still in that liminal state of awareness— powerless, but conscious of his impotence. The point being that O’Toole misses the implications of the transitional state of affairs that characterized the years after 2016. Again, the notion of inevitability underpins the argument that ‘the great difficulty of Brexit was always going to be Ireland’. This difficulty, he avers, is because of an untidily drawn border and differences in approach to history.

6 For a longer narrative about Britain’s post-Imperial malaise, see Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (London: Head of Zeus, 2018b).

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In fact, no real alternative was considered when the Border Commission carried out its work in 1925. The implication that the border is the problem then leads logically back to the idea of getting rid of it through a reunification poll. As with the Ireland’s Future project, O’Toole’s analysis is emblematic of the irredentist impulse of Irish nationalism, which problematizes Irish politics on the question of the border. Within this understanding, there is little place for alternative positions, for if the border is the problem, then ending partition is the solution. Both O’Toole and Harvey are simple and eloquent in this regard: for Irish nationalism, Brexit is an English concern that requires Irish responses.

The Northern Ireland Protocol The first attempt at agreeing a solution to the border issue was mooted by Theresa May in December 2017. The so-called backstop was an appendix to a draft British withdrawal agreement, which proposed that Northern Ireland would remain within the Single Market until a solution was reached regarding the siting and implementation of customs controls. Although Irish nationalists supported the proposal, the DUP was vociferous in its dismissal of the arrangement. Initially upon taking office as Prime Minister Johnson sought an alternative that would see Northern Ireland remaining aligned with the EU on product standards, but that it would remain in the UK customs zone. Johnson’s idea was that technology could be developed to check products going into the Republic that could track movement across the border to Northern Ireland (and onwards to Great Britain). Essentially this would mean an invisible border. However, given the fact that such technology did not exist, the idea was ultimately rejected by the EU. The Northern Ireland Protocol of October 2019 effectively replaced the backstop meaning that the UK would leave the EU Customs Union as a whole entity, but that Northern Ireland would be required to adopt EU Single Market regulations on produce and goods. In short, Northern Ireland would be an entry point into the EU and checks would be carried out in Northern Irish and Great British ports. The new protocol, which was due to come into effect from January 2021, represented an attempt to square the circle of Northern Ireland having a land-border with the European Union by affording the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly the power to decide whether or not to abide by certain EU regulations, particularly in the area of agri-food.

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For unionists, this institution of a ‘sea border’ represented a U-turn by the Johnson government. Although the British government argued that since the Northern Ireland Assembly retained the power to reject the arrangements, some unionists suggested that the protocol represented a hollowing-out of the principle of consent enshrined in the B/GFA. In other words, that constitutional change had occurred in the absence of a referendum. As pointed out above, in practice, this has come to mean that Northern Ireland can opt out of EU alignment. However, as a detailed report by a team of academics at Queen’s University, Belfast for the academic project, The UK in a Changing Europe, pithily noted: ‘This is a rather crude tool that offers a get-out clause rather than being a means of giving legitimacy to the consequences of the Protocol on Northern Ireland in the medium to long term’ (Hayward et al., 2020: 8). For unionists, the democratic deficit is compounded by the effective lack of political representation at the European level—or, to be more precise, the imbalance between Dublin representing Northern nationalist opinion and the persisting contradictions of the UK government’s neutrality on Northern Ireland that Aughey pointed out in the 1980s.7 In a more recent treatment of the ideological landscape of Northern Ireland in the wake of Brexit, Aughey suggests that a definite change ‘nationalist mood’ has occurred—in part because it has worked to usherback in the UK state within nationalist awareness. Aughey cites Lord Bew’s contribution to a House of Lords debate on Brexit and Northern Ireland: The B/GFA had allowed nationalists ‘to consider themselves citizens of Europe – possibly evolving towards Irish unity, possibly not – and continuing to enjoy the National Health Service and their pension from London as before’ (Aughey, 2020: 265). As Aughey points out, this disconnect has been heightened because Brexit has seemingly been imposed by the British government. The nationalist ‘mood’, then, is characterized by a return of the traditional preoccupation with the border and a belief that Brexit has made reunification inevitable: Nationalists ‘assume

7 See,

for instance, the commentary of the Irish Times columnist Newton Emerson—for example: Newton Emerson, ‘Mapping of Belfast accord veers off-course’, Irish Times, 27 June 2019; or the written evidence of the economist Graham Gudgeon to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in September 2020, available at https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/submission-to-ni-affairs-committee-inquirybrexit-and-the-ni-protocol/; accessed on 13 May 2021.

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knowledge of where things are going because unity is here already – and only a border poll away’ (ibid.: 275). It is perhaps this feeling of disconnect that has led Irish nationalists to turn away from the North–South and East–West institutions of the B/GFA and instead to set up a series of discussions among themselves. In any event, the ignoring of those institutions represents something of an under-appreciated development within Irish nationalism, which has tended to place a much greater emphasis on the 1998 Agreement and its complex institutional architecture than unionism ever has. It suggests that Peter Robinson’s concerns that the DUP is failing to court Catholic votes is akin to wishful thinking: The articulation of Brexit by nationalist leaders is increasingly premised on ending partition and revising the union settlement.

Conclusion Although it was presumed that the DUP’s hard-line stances against abortion and equal marriage would appeal to conservative Northern Irish Catholics given the liberalization of Sinn Féin and the SDLP’s views on the latter issue. Yet, as Tonge et al. point out, despite the ‘encouragement to Catholics to join the party’, the DUP recruitment team has ‘hardly been knocked down in the rush; double figures have yet to be reached’. The historical hangover of ‘vitriolic denunciations’ of the Catholic church by the Rev Ian Paisley in particular persists as a major impediment to sizeable vote transfers (Tonge et al., 2014: 223). In the event, the Brexit era saw the passing of same-sex marriage legislation and the expansion of reproductive rights in the absence of the executive. As Fidelma Ashe points out, a key part of this quiet revolution occurred due to activists reframing the abortion debate about rights being less to do with the peace process than about how ‘the conservative history’ of the ethno-religious divide ‘had infringed on women’s bodily rights’: The claim that decision making power over women’s bodies should move from the state to women, transgender men and non-binary people was not based on what we can do for ‘you’, or the society, or the community, it was based on what the society can do for women in terms of returning bodily autonomy and reproductive decision making power back to those

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who had been denied that power historically by a conservative state. (Ashe, 2019: 159)

Reproductive rights had been an area that was delegated to the Northern Ireland Assembly. However, in the absence of a functioning Executive and in the midst of a civil society campaign (spearheaded by a storytelling movement of women sharing their experiences) in July 2019, the Labour MP Stella Creasy placed a motion before Parliament that would decriminalize abortion unless devolution was restored by 21 October. The motion, which was attached to a government Bill extending the legal power to delay a Stormont election, was passed by 322 to 99. In the same debate, MPs backed a similar same-sex marriage amendment by 383 to 73 (BBC Online, 2019a). The first marriage ceremony took place on 13 January 2020, just two days after the new programme of government for Northern Ireland was agreed and ten days before the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act was given royal assent. That programme for government, ‘New Decade, New Approach’ (NDNA), paved the way for the Assembly to return on 11 January 2020. Along with a range of pledges for healthcare investment and a resolution to an outstanding pay dispute involving teachers, the NDNA committed the Executive to ‘tackle climate change head on … in line with Paris Climate Change Accord’ and to make tackling paramilitarism a ‘priority’ (Northern Ireland Office, 2020). As Katy Hayward and David Phinnemore pointed out at the time, the NDNA made no mention of the cross-border bodies or aspirations towards harmonized rights and economic cooperation that were so important to the 1998 Agreement. ‘Also notable’, they continue, ‘is that there is no mention at all of the democratic consent mechanism that was such a critical addition to the protocol’ in October 2019 (Hayward & Phinnemore, 2020). That mechanism facilitated the application of Single Market arrangements on customs, tax, services and goods, and state aid to Northern Ireland unless the Assembly decided otherwise.8 As with the revolution in reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, the key decisions and omissions seemingly took place off-stage. However, as this chapter has tried to chart, at the time of the fifth anniversary of the referendum, the underlying political 8 Revised Protocol to the Withdrawal Agreement [17 October 2019]. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-protocol-on-irelandnorthernireland-and-political-declaration; accessed on 17 May 2021.

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themes of alienation, suspicion, division and antagonism that were exacerbated and accelerated by Brexit remain very much alive in Northern Ireland.

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Index

A Abortion, 20, 317, 325, 326 Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), 151, 153 Accountable Care Systems, 152 Adams, Gerry, 316 Age of Austerity, 3, 108–110, 115, 118–121, 261, 264 Amesbury, Mike, 187 Apprenticeship Levy, 139 Attlee, Clement, 18, 67, 80, 263 Austerity, 15, 49, 65, 69, 73, 108–113, 115–118, 120, 149, 172, 179, 180, 182, 189, 239, 249, 258, 260, 264, 267, 269, 298, 303, 316 Australia, 50, 160, 242, 243, 245, 262 Authoritarian, 76 B Backbench Business Committee, 97 Baker, Steve, 15, 35, 159

Baldwin, Harriett, 187 Baldwin, Stanley, 178 Balfour, Arthur, 97 Bank of England, 72, 107, 116, 261, 270 Banks, Aaron, 71 Barnett formula, 261, 303, 317 Barnier, Michael, 35, 38, 39, 320 Barroso, José Manuel, 28 Belfast Agreement. See Good Friday Agreement Belgium, 117 Benn-Burt Act 2019, 16, 39 Benn, Tony, 17 Bercow, John, 17, 98 Berlin, 34 Biden, Joe/Biden Administration, 245, 248 Big Society, 183, 188 Black, Frances, 321 Blair, Tony, 2, 18, 57, 68, 69, 91, 149, 150, 233, 239, 246, 266, 267, 271, 314

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Beech and S. Lee (eds.), Conservative Governments in the Age of Brexit, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21464-6

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332

INDEX

Blue wall, 79 Blunkett, David, 131 Boles, Nick, 127, 134, 135, 138 Border Commission, 323 Borrowing, 109, 112, 116, 303, 304 Boyle, Edward, 133 Brady amendment, 36 Brazil, 117, 234 Brexit Age of Brexit, 3, 5, 13, 15–17, 19, 21, 23, 109, 110, 118, 119, 121, 172–174, 176, 185, 186, 188, 189, 195–197, 200–205, 207, 211, 218, 225, 226, 257, 258, 260, 264, 266, 269–271 Brexiteers, 32, 39, 94 Brexit Party, 41, 59, 61, 308 Brexit Stakeholder Forum (Ireland), 319 free trade agreement, 31, 34, 35, 39 Green Brexit, 201, 204 Leave/Remain, 4, 16, 54, 59, 66, 75, 78, 128, 198, 199 no deal exit, 93, 95 Norway model , 31 Remainers, 51, 59, 61, 62 soft/hard, 38, 55, 94 sovereignty, 13, 22, 23, 28, 38, 71, 72, 198, 199, 204, 260, 322 Switzerland model , 31 Britain, 2, 25, 26, 29–31, 49, 55, 60, 65–70, 72–78, 83, 91, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 185, 213, 215, 217, 222, 232–237, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247, 259, 262, 263, 266, 268, 269, 281, 314, 322 Britain Stronger in Europe, 264 British/Britishness, 1–6, 11–13, 17, 21–23, 25, 26, 55, 65–70, 72–75, 77, 80–83, 88, 90, 91,

98, 109, 113, 116–119, 126, 183, 198, 213–215, 217–222, 224, 225, 232, 234–242, 244–250, 259, 261–263, 265–271, 279, 283, 290, 309, 314, 315, 318, 319, 323, 324 British nationalism/nationalist, 1, 2, 111, 114, 116, 262–264, 266–269, 271, 288 Brown, Gordon, 2, 3, 51, 69, 112, 113, 233, 239, 266, 267 Bruce, Fiona, 186, 187 Brussels, 29, 32, 36, 37, 69, 70, 76, 161, 201, 219, 247, 259, 261, 315, 318, 320, 321 Budget 25 November Autumn Statement and Spending Review, 111 8 July 2015, 110, 111 deficit, 49, 108, 111, 120 Build back better, 109 Bulgaria, 28 C Cabinet Brexit Committee, 33 Cairns, Alun, 301, 303, 305 Callaghan, James, 68, 80, 96 Cameron, David, 2, 3, 5, 12, 14, 15, 25–30, 35, 42, 47–51, 53, 56, 58, 65, 69–73, 77, 78, 87–93, 96, 108–116, 118–120, 125, 127–142, 172, 173, 176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198, 199, 212–214, 216, 217, 231–239, 241, 242, 244–246, 248–250, 258, 261–267, 270, 271, 275, 280–282, 288, 298, 299, 301, 306, 314 Bloomberg speech, 28, 70, 71, 171 Cameron Government, 3, 14, 15, 116, 128–134, 136–139, 141,

INDEX

201, 212, 213, 217, 232–235, 237, 241, 242, 245, 246, 248, 250, 264–266, 280, 298 Cameronites, 14, 127 Canada, 81, 160, 241, 244 Carney, Mark, 107–109, 116, 121 lost decade, 107–109, 116–119, 121, 264 Carswell, Douglas, 71 Catholic, 311, 313, 322, 325 Centralisation, 276, 277, 290 Change UK (Independent Group for Change), 17 Chequers, 34, 35, 38, 42 China, 117, 234, 237, 241–243, 245 Christians on the Left , 20 Church of England, 82 Clarke, Ken, 26 Clegg, Nick, 2, 3, 13–15, 88–90, 110, 119, 265–267 Climate change Climate Change Act , 200, 202, 203 Climate Change Action, 195 climate sceptic, 199 COP26, 197, 202, 205–207 EU Emissions Trading Scheme ETS, 196 European Green Deal, 202 Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), 196, 202, 203 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme Order, 204 green tape, 198, 205 net zero, 202, 205 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 196, 200, 205 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), 149, 152, 153, 155, 156 Coffey, Thérèse, 176, 182

333

Collective ministerial/cabinet responsibility, 88, 99, 101 Common Fisheries Policy, 201 Commonwealth, 68, 72, 222, 223, 232, 233, 237 Conservatism, 4, 20, 22, 69, 114, 140, 141, 173, 176, 178–181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 232, 238, 267, 283, 297, 298, 302 Conservative, 2–6, 12–18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 37, 40, 41, 48, 51–62, 65, 68–71, 73, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88–92, 96, 100, 107, 116, 121, 126, 127, 132, 148, 149, 156, 162, 172, 176, 186–189, 195, 197–200, 202–204, 206, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 225, 226, 231–233, 238, 243, 248, 258, 275–277, 281–284, 287, 288, 290, 298–300, 302, 306–308, 312, 314, 315, 317, 318, 325 Conservative Christian Fellowship, 189 Conservative-Liberal Coalition/coalition, 14 Conservative Party, 2, 5, 11–21, 25, 37, 40, 47, 50, 54, 67–71, 78–83, 88, 110, 111, 117, 121, 122, 126–134, 136–138, 140, 141, 171–173, 177, 178, 184–186, 188, 189, 199, 232, 234, 236, 246, 248, 258, 263, 264, 266, 268, 269, 275, 278–285, 287–290, 297, 306, 314 Conference 2016, 30, 236 manifesto 2015, 71, 92, 125, 128, 134, 137, 139, 172, 278, 280 Constitutional conservatism, 267 Constitutional reform/constitution, 69

334

INDEX

Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, 99 Constitutional Unionist, 266 Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission, 289 Cooper, Yvette, 95 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5, 16, 19, 21, 37, 39, 56, 58, 60, 61, 65, 74, 78–80, 96, 115, 316 Cornerstone Group, 15, 186, 189 Corn Laws, 17 Cornwall, 49, 53, 153 Cosmopolitan liberalism, 79 Coveney, Simon, 320 Covid-19/pandemic/coronavirus, 5, 63, 101, 121, 197, 206, 245 Cox, Geoffrey, 33 Crabb, Stephen, 173, 179–181, 300, 301, 303 Creasy, Stella, 326 Crosby, Lynton, 50, 56, 57 Culture/cultural/culture wars, 12, 20, 50, 54, 63, 67, 75, 77, 82, 83, 108, 109, 223, 267, 304, 322 Cummings, Dominic, 29, 37, 74, 162 Cyprus, 222

D Dáil, 319 Davidson, Ruth, 279, 280, 282–284, 289, 300, 317 Davies, Andrew RT, 300, 301, 307 Davies, Suzy, 300 Davis, David, 30, 34, 35, 73, 163 Decentring, 16 Defence 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), 211–213, 222, 234, 236, 241, 248 aircraft carriers/carrier strike group, 216–219, 222, 223, 226, 237

Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF), 223 Confidence and Supply Agreement, 185 defence spending, 212, 213, 226 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 16, 31, 40, 56, 57, 93, 96, 185, 258, 284, 285, 287, 311, 312, 314–318, 323, 325 Euro-Atlantic community, 214 Future Combat Air System (FCAS), 223 Joint Force 2025 (JF2025), 217, 219, 222, 226 Joint Vision Statement (Germany), 224 Lancaster House Treaties (France), 222 MBDA strategy, 223 National Security Capability Review (NSCR), 212, 213 National Security Strategy, 211, 234 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 212–217, 220, 221, 225, 232, 237, 241, 247 Royal Navy, 222, 223 special relationship, 214, 234, 246 technology and cyber threats, 211 terrorism, 211 Treaty/Agreement on Defence and Security Cooperation, 222 UK role as global power/UK role as a European/regional power, 212, 213, 216, 225 United Nations Security, 222 Denmark, 221 Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU), 30, 31, 35, 221 Deregulation, 2 Devolution

INDEX

asymmetrical, 264, 276, 282, 290 Common Framework, 290 double majority, 278 electoral diversion, 17, 278, 281 Fiscal Framework, 285 Holyrood, 283 housing benefit/welfare and social benefit, 281 Legislative Consent Motions (LCMs)–Welfare Reform Bill 2011, Withdrawal Bill 2018, 283 Minister for the Union, 289 Partnership of Equals , 277, 279, 280 Statement of Funding Policy, 285 taxation, 3, 109, 157, 177, 281, 303 UK Shared Prosperity Fund, 82, 290, 306 Unionism, 277, 280, 290 Union Unit, 289 Disraeli, Benjamin, 171, 189 Donaldson, Jeffrey, 315 Duncan, Alan, 15, 100 Duncan-Smith, Iain, 173, 179, 180, 243 Dunlop Review, 288, 289 E Early Parliamentary General Election Bill, 41 Eastern Europe/European, 2, 12, 14, 22, 28, 29, 49, 59, 66–69, 71, 75, 78, 80, 81, 88, 117, 197, 201, 212, 213, 215–217, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 247, 308, 324 Economic liberalism/liberals, 177–180, 182, 183, 186, 189 Economics/economy, 3, 5, 20, 28, 33, 35, 50, 57, 63, 68, 72, 74,

335

75, 82, 107, 109–117, 119–121, 138–140, 160, 178, 180, 200, 202, 207, 217, 237, 241, 260, 263, 264, 266–268, 304 decline, 68, 108, 109, 112, 119, 121 Eden, Anthony, 246 Education and Adoption Bill 2016/Act, 130, 131 Education level, 75 Education policy academies, 130, 131, 133, 138, 140, 141 Augar Review, 136 curriculum, 128, 129 Educational Excellence Everywhere, 131 free schools, 126, 130, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141 grammar schools, 133, 134, 140, 141 literacy and numeracy/English and Maths, 126, 129, 131 National Funding Formula, 139 primary, 5, 18, 22, 28, 50, 58, 118, 126, 128–130 secondary, 75, 118, 126, 129–134, 140 selective secondary, 126, 133, 140 special measures, 130 tertiary/FE/HE, 126, 134–142 Elected mayors, 265 Elite/elitist, 4, 15, 18, 72, 73, 76, 114, 259, 265, 304, 312 Empey, Lord, 311, 312 Employment, 69, 112, 113, 115, 139, 182, 185, 187 women in the workforce, 186 England, 4, 5, 12, 48, 51–53, 58–60, 63, 67, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 89, 118, 125, 126, 128–136, 138, 139, 148–160, 163, 164, 237,

336

INDEX

257–271, 276, 281, 284, 285, 301, 307, 309 English Devolution White Paper, 269 Englishness, English, 6, 22, 49, 57, 79, 89, 126, 128, 131, 132, 151, 153, 157, 257, 261, 266, 268, 269, 281, 298, 304, 308, 321–323 English Votes for English Laws (EVEL), 89, 264, 278, 287 Environmental policy, 200, 201, 203 Equal opportunities/equality of opportunity, 75, 108, 133, 139, 141 Estimates Days, 97 Estonia, 198, 221 Ethnically diverse, 79 EU/European Union 2016 referendum, 19, 20, 65, 92, 100, 128, 199, 202, 235, 241, 258, 283, 285 Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, 16, 285 Common Agricultural Policy, 304 Common Commercial Policy, 31, 116 Common External Tariff, 31 Common Security and Defence Policy, 221 Court of Human Rights, 54, 277 Customs Union, 16, 33–38, 116, 117, 121, 271, 277, 282, 323 December 2017 Council, 33 Eurobarometer, 197, 198 European Communities Act (1972), 22, 94 European Economic Area (EEA), 159, 204 EU Structural Fund, 304, 306 institutions, 4, 12, 22, 26, 30, 32, 39, 54, 67, 74, 76, 197, 225, 238, 260, 261, 270

Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), 221, 222 Parliament elections 2009, 49 Referendum Bill/Act (2015), 15, 27, 92 Shared Prosperity Fund, 306 Single market, 16, 26, 30, 31, 33–35, 40, 73, 116, 117, 121, 161, 277, 282, 286, 304, 323 Withdrawal Act, 11, 36, 95, 326 Withdrawal Agreement, 4, 5, 11, 34, 36, 38, 40–42, 59, 60, 94–96, 101, 164, 239, 318, 323, 326 Euro-enthusiasts, 15 Europe, 12, 22, 26, 28, 30, 42, 51, 59, 66–70, 73, 199, 203, 212–215, 218–225, 233, 241, 263, 285, 286, 324 European Council, 29, 31–33, 35, 36, 38, 40 European Economic Community, 2 European Research Group (ERG), 16 Europhile, 57 Euroscepticism, 5, 20, 68, 238 Eurozone, 26, 27, 70, 77 Exchange Rate Mechanism, 68 Extinction Rebellion, 202

F Faith, 73, 140, 161, 162 Fallon, Michael, 221 Family, 140, 176, 183, 184, 186, 189 Farage, Nigel, 13, 17, 29, 41, 49, 162 Farmer, Lord, 186, 187 Farmers for Britain, 263 Federal, 12, 21, 267, 278 Feeney, Brian, 321 Fianna Fáil, 319 Fianna Gael, 319 Field, Frank, 74

INDEX

Financial crash/crisis, 28, 49, 77, 107, 108, 113, 117, 119, 261, 264 Finland, 221 First Minister of Northern Ireland, 311, 315 Fiscal, 108–111, 113, 115–118, 120, 121, 180, 182, 261, 267, 303, 304 Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011/Bill, 39, 89, 90, 93, 95 Food banks/Trussell Trust, 188, 189 Foot, Michael, 17 Foreign policy Africa, 239 Arab Spring, 231, 239, 245 Asia, 245 Atlanticist, 232, 246 Caribbean, 249 Chinese Communist Party, 244 civil aid, 248 Cold War, 245 Commercial diplomacy, 232, 236, 241, 245 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), 239 Commonwealth, 232 declinist narrative, 234 democracy, 67, 236, 248 development aid, 248 Easternisation, 245 espionage, 245 European Community Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), 248 European Federalism and enlargement, 238 European Union, 66, 213, 220, 222, 225, 231, 235, 238, 246, 249, 250 External Action Service (EEAS), 239 Five Eye’s, 243

337

Global Britain, 30, 116, 178, 206, 215, 218, 219, 226, 235–237, 239, 242, 244, 245, 248, 249, 262, 266 Global War on Terror, 246 Hong Kong, 244, 245 Huawei, 242–244 humanitarian, 218, 232, 233 human rights, 232, 234, 236 International Defence Engagement Strategy 2017, 236 internationalism, 233, 235 interventionism, 233, 240, 245, 248 Iraq, 239, 240 Islamic State (IS), 239, 240 isolationism, 232, 235 Libya, 236, 240, 245 Middle East, 239, 248 national security, 236 National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015(NSS/SDSR), 234, 248 People’s Republic of China, 231, 241 Realist, 247 rule of law, 232, 234, 236 Russia, 231 Sino-British, 242, 244 South China Seas, 245 special relationship, 234, 246 Syrian Civil War, 231 Turkic Uyghur people, 244 United States, 231, 233, 234, 245, 246 Xinjiang, 244, 245 Yemen, 240 Foster, Arlene, 315 Fox, Liam, 244, 249 France, 31, 94, 120, 160, 217, 222–225, 245

338

INDEX

Free movement of goods, capital and labour, 73 Freud, Lord, 179 Frost, David, 37–39, 42 Future Customs Arrangements , 32

G Gaitskell, Hugh, 80 Gang of Four, 17 Gauke, David, 173, 181 GDP, 112–114, 118, 120, 121, 179, 213, 215, 216, 226, 270 General elections 1945, 1, 2, 18, 58, 109, 233 2015, 2, 4, 5, 11–15, 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28, 47, 48, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 70, 71, 100, 110, 119, 125, 134, 172, 258, 262, 265, 270, 278–281, 284, 290, 299, 300, 306, 308 2017, 16, 17, 40, 41, 47, 48, 54, 57, 62, 87, 100, 119, 129, 133, 136, 138, 181, 258, 270, 278–280, 284, 287, 289, 290 2019, 2, 4, 13, 16, 17, 19–21, 47, 48, 59, 62, 101, 108, 119, 121, 134, 258, 269, 270, 280, 289, 301, 308, 318 German/Germany, 67, 68, 78, 117, 120, 160, 178, 215, 224, 225, 245 Gibb, Nick, 127 Gillan, Cheryl, 299, 300, 303 Gina Miller case, 282 Glasmann, Maurice, 74 Glen, John, 188 Globalisation, 73, 76, 109 Godsiff, Roger, 74 Good Friday Agreement, 32, 38, 312, 316, 320

Gove, Michael, 26, 29, 30, 36, 38, 73, 125, 127, 129–131, 133, 134, 162, 199, 201 Grayling, Chris, 73 Great British ports, 323 Greater Manchester Partnership, 153 Great Repeal Bill, 287 Green, Damian, 15, 181 Greening, Justine, 126, 128–130, 132, 133, 136, 139, 176, 181 Greens, 41, 308 Grieve, Dominic, 94 Griffiths, Nigel, 74 Grocott, Bruce, 74 Gyimah, Sam, 59, 136

H Hague, William, 71 Halfon, Robert, 188 Hammond, Philip, 27, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118, 139, 174, 175, 179, 180, 182, 213, 242, 266 Hancock, Matt, 152 Harris, Tom, 74 Hart, Simon, 301, 302 Harvey, Colin, 321, 322 Hayes, John, 15, 186 Health and Social Care Act 2012, 147, 149, 164 Healthcare, 147–149, 151, 155, 156, 158–160, 163, 164 Heath, Edward, 2, 67 Her Majesty’s Opposition, 16, 88 High Court, 161 Higher Education and Research Bill 2016, 137, 138 Hill, Fiona, 31, 56 Hinds, Damian, 126, 130, 133, 136 Hoey, Kate, 74 Hopkins, Kelvin, 74 House of Commons

INDEX

Committee on Exiting the European Union, 163 Defence Committee, 215, 216, 218 Foreign Affairs Committee, 218 Public Accounts Committee, 218, 219 The Speaker, 16, 40, 97, 98 Work and Pensions Committee, 176 House of Lords Constitution Committee, 98 European Union Committee, 28 Reform Bill, 89, 90 Howarth, Alan, 74 HSBC, 82 Human Rights Act, 82 Hungary, 222 Hunt, Jeremy, 16, 37, 59, 150, 243 I Iceland, 222 Identity conservatives, 78, 81, 82 Identity liberals, 78, 79, 81 Immigration asylum, 162 borders, 21, 49, 51, 72, 78, 80 mass immigration, 73, 77 migrant, 49, 69 Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination Bill 2020, 290 Imperialists, 82 India, 117, 234, 249 Industrial/industrial strategy, 114, 117, 137, 203, 204, 242, 304 Injustice/injustices, 121, 184, 267 Institute for Fiscal Studies, 139 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), 152–155 Internal Market Bill/Act, 290 Internationalism, 73, 232–235, 304 International Monetary Fund, 72, 120 Investment, 37, 108, 109, 112–114, 116, 120, 121, 136, 137, 160,

339

223, 232, 243, 249, 266, 268, 315, 326 In-work poverty, 187, 188 Ireland North/South, 5, 31–34, 36, 38–40, 42, 56, 57, 81, 93, 94, 118, 148, 259, 262–264, 267–269, 284, 285, 304, 309, 311, 312, 314–324, 326 Ireland’s Future group, 321 Irish backstop, 34 Irish Sea (border in), 317, 318, 321 Irish Unification/reunification, 82, 239, 311, 322 Islamist/Islamic, 49 Italy, 222 J Jack, Alister, 289 Javid, Sajid, 59, 108, 118, 174, 182, 189, 243 Johnson, Alan, 139 Johnson, Boris, 2, 3, 16, 30, 35, 37, 47, 50, 59, 61, 66, 73, 95, 108, 118, 121, 126, 128, 134, 137, 142, 161, 162, 172, 199, 204, 231, 245, 247, 258, 262–264, 266, 268–271, 288, 309, 317, 318 Johnson, Diana, 188 Johnson Government, 3, 5, 11, 14, 40, 82, 109, 116, 119, 120, 140, 202, 212, 217, 221, 237, 239, 243, 245, 249, 262, 277, 288–290, 324 Johnson, Jo, 127, 136–138 Joint Ministerial Committee, 287 Jones, Carwyn, 303, 305, 307, 308, 317 Jones, David, 262, 299, 300 Jones, Owen, 303 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 28, 30, 36, 38

340

INDEX

K Kelly, Ruth, 131, 278 Kenny, Enda, 320 Keynes, John Maynard, 189 Kirk, Russell, 22

L Labour Party, 1, 2, 4, 12–14, 16–21, 26, 63, 67, 68, 73, 78–80, 258, 279, 280, 284, 308, 312, 316 Latvia, 198, 221 Lawson, Lord, 199 Lawyers for Britain, 263 Leigh, Edward, 15, 186 Letwin, Oliver, 95 Levelling-up/level up, 5, 37, 109, 118, 258, 262, 268 Levido, Isaac, 41 Liberal Conservatism/Conservative, 69, 127, 133, 140–142, 232–235, 238, 241, 245, 248, 249 Liberal Democrats, 13–16, 26, 41, 50–53, 56–58, 61, 62, 69, 71, 79, 89, 92, 120, 127, 258, 279, 306, 308 Liberalization, 2, 325 Liberal parliamentary party, 96 Liberal Party, 17 Lister, Eddie, 37 Lithuania, 221 Living wage, 118, 188 Local authorities, 130–132, 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 261, 270, 307 involvement in education, 132 London, 27, 49, 50, 53, 56, 77, 79, 113, 117, 118, 155, 176, 201, 202, 237, 260, 262, 267, 268, 298, 299, 301, 314, 322, 324 Lord Ashcroft, 13

M Maastricht Bill, 14 MacLeod, Iain, 178 Macmillan Government, 14 Macmillan, Harold, 2, 67, 246 Major Government, 14, 266, 276 Major, John, 5, 15, 68, 119, 316 Mann, John, 74 March of the makers , 113, 120 Marmot Review, 260 Martin, Michael, 321 Marx/Marxism, 20, 80 May, Theresa British Dream, Great Meritocracy, Shared Society, 262, 266 Burning injustices , 115, 117, 136, 141, 181, 184, 185 Lancaster House speech, 35 McBride, Patricia, 321 McDonnell, John, 74 McGuinness, Martin, 318 McLoughlin, Patrick, 73 McVey, Esther, 36, 173, 181 Methodism, 20 Milburn, Alan, 149 Miliband, Ed, 19, 50, 51 Mills, John, 19, 74 Ministerial resignations, 12, 100 Mitchell, Austin, 74 Morgan, Nicky, 73, 125–127, 129, 131–133, 139 Multiculturalism, 69 Multinational UK, 276 Mundell, David, 283–285, 317 Murphy, Andree, 321 Murphy, Niall, 321 Muscular unionism, 276 Muslims for Britain, 263

INDEX

N National Health Service (NHS), 147–164, 258, 261, 269, 299, 307, 324 National identity, 13, 67, 75, 160, 263 Nationalism, 21, 75, 321–323, 325 National Liberals, 17 Netherlands (the), 221, 222 New Culture Forum, 83 New Decade, New Approach (NDNA), 326 New Enterprise Allowance (NEA), 177 New Labour, 6, 18, 68, 69, 119, 139, 148, 156, 164 New Left, 17, 18 NHS Trust Development Authority, 150, 155 NHS Trusts, 151, 152, 154, 155, 163 Nicholson, David, 149 Northern Ireland, 31–34, 36, 38–40, 42, 56, 57, 81, 82, 93, 94, 118, 148, 259, 262–264, 267–269, 284, 285, 304, 309, 312, 314–324, 326, 327 Northern Ireland Assembly, 318, 323, 324, 326 Northern Ireland Protocol, 5, 323 Northern Powerhouse, 111, 113, 265 North-South Ministerial Council, 315 Norway, 221, 262 Nurse, Paul, 138 Nuttall, David, 91, 92 O Obama, Barrack, 214 Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), 112, 113, 172 Old Left, 18 Old Right, 18 O’Neill, Claire, 206

341

One Nation Conservative, 2, 15, 119 One Nation socialism, 2 Onwuachi, Chi, 188 Opposition Days, 97 Orange Book liberals, 15 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 72 Osborne, George, 26, 27, 56, 72, 108, 110–115, 120, 132, 157, 171, 172, 174–176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 213, 241, 242, 245, 261, 265, 266 New Year Economy Speech, 171 O’Toole, Fintan, 322, 323 P Paisley, Ian, 325 Parliament, 12–17, 25, 35–42, 47, 50, 53, 57, 70, 71, 80, 87, 88, 90–101, 115, 116, 127, 130, 131, 138, 149, 153, 163, 171, 172, 179, 240, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267, 269, 276–290, 305, 314, 321, 326 Parliamentary Voting system and Constituencies Bill, 90 Patel, Priti, 185, 248, 249 Patriotism, 63, 80, 140 Peelites, 17 Pensions Triple lock/double lock, 185 People’s Pledge campaign, 70 Perkins, Toby, 188 Plan A, 110 Plan B, 111 Poland, 222 Police and Crime Commissioners, 269 Powell, Enoch, 178 Primary Care Networks (PCNs), 152 Private Members’ legislation, 97 Privatization, 2

342

INDEX

Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, 81 Progressive Unionist Party, 318 Pro-independence, 278, 281 Protestants, 312, 313 Public health, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 164 Public Health England, 149, 150, 153 Public spending, 109, 116, 120, 154, 303 Putin, Vladimir, 73 Q Quantitative Easing (QE), 49, 110, 261 Queen’s Speech 2017, 91, 288, 316 Quince, Will, 182, 187 R Raab, Dominic, 36, 244 Racism, 80, 82 Radicals, 17 Ramsey, Nick, 300 Reagan, Ronald, 246 Recession, 49, 110, 213, 234, 250 Reckless, Mark, 71 Red Wall, 20, 48, 57, 60, 62, 65, 78, 81 Rees Mogg, Jacob, 188, 189 Repatriation, 69, 259, 276, 286 Republic of Ireland, 319 Resolution Foundation, 119–121, 187 Retained EU law, 94 Robbins, Olly, 30, 34, 36 Robertson, Angus, 284, 287 Robinson, Peter, 311, 312, 325 Roman Catholicism, 20 Romania, 222 Röpke, Wilhelm, 178 Ross, Angus, 289 Ross, Douglas, 289

Rudd, Amber, 173 Russell, Michael, 282, 286 Russia, 224, 240, 241

S Sainsbury, Lord/Sainsbury report, 135 Salmond, Alex, 51, 284 Salzburg, 35 Same-sex marriage, 50, 325, 326 Scotland, 21, 52, 57, 58, 60, 81, 89, 93, 118, 148, 157, 262–264, 267–269, 275–281, 283–287, 289, 290, 304, 308 Scotland Act 2016, 280, 282, 287 Scotland Stronger in Europe, 263 Scottish Centre of Social Research, 281 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, 279, 280 Scottish Conservative Party, 279, 280, 283 Scottish government, 153, 281, 282, 284–287 Scottish Independence, 58, 82, 279, 287, 289, 309 Scottish Independence Referendum, 275, 276, 279–281, 285, 287, 289, 299, 300, 303 Scottish Liberal Democrats, 279 Scottish National Party (SNP), 21, 27, 41, 50–52, 58, 60, 61, 81, 93, 275, 277–279, 281, 284–287, 289, 290, 305, 317 Scottish Parliament, 276–279, 281–286, 289, 290 Scottish Parliament Election 2011, 279 Second World War, 1, 245 Senedd, 297, 301 Shared Prosperity Fund, 82, 290, 306

INDEX

Shared Society, 66, 121, 183, 262, 266 Sharma, Alok, 205, 206 Shore, Peter, 80 Silk Commission, 303 Simonites, 17 Single European market, 2, 77, 271 Sinn Féin, 312, 315, 316, 318, 319, 325 Skinner, Dennis, 74 Skirpal, Sergei and Yulia, 241 Smith Commission, 280–282, 303 Smith, Owen, 78 Social attitudes, 75 Social care, 147–149, 151, 153–160, 162–164, 258, 263, 269 Social conservatism, 140 Social Democratic Party, 17 Social liberalism, 69, 178 Social security, 172, 174, 177, 180, 181, 183, 185, 189 Somewheres/Anywheres, 77 Southern Powerhouse, 113 Sovereignty, 13, 22, 23, 38, 72, 198, 199, 204, 260, 322 Special relationship, 214, 234, 245, 246 Standing Order 14 & 27, 97 State Pension, 172, 177, 184 Stevens, Simon, 149, 150 Stewart, Rory, 59 Stormont, 287, 326 Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), 151, 152 Stringer, Graham, 74 Stuart, Gisela, 19, 74 Sturgeon, Nicola, 278, 285, 289, 305, 317 Supreme Court, 39, 95, 277, 287 Sustainability and Transformation Plans/Sustainability and

343

Transformation Partnerships (STPs), 151–156 Sweden, 117, 221, 222 Syria/Syrian, 91, 93, 94, 236, 240, 241, 245–247

T Taoiseach, 320, 321 Teaching Excellence Framework, 138 Territorial governance/territorial politics, 5, 275–277, 290, 315 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 18, 60, 68, 119, 120, 234, 246, 261, 266, 276 The Crown, 96, 98, 101 The Daily Mail , 29 The Daily Telegraph, 29 The Hague, 34 The Spectator, 29, 188 The Times , 29, 37, 173 Thorneycroft, Peter, 14 Thunberg, Greta/Fridays for Future movement, 202 Timothy, Nick, 31, 56, 180, 185, 242, 267 Tolerance, 75 Trade, 22, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 42, 50, 68, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 138, 162, 232, 236, 239, 241–244, 246, 248, 249, 270, 304, 318 Trade Union movement, 74 Treasury, 3, 14, 110, 157, 171, 173, 174, 179, 181, 265, 269, 270 Treaty of Rome, 28 Trump, Donald/Trump administration, 246–248 Truss, Liz, 73 Tusk, Donald, 29, 32, 36, 38

344

INDEX

U Ukraine, 5, 213, 240, 241 UK Supreme Court, 277, 282, 283 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), 312, 314, 316 Ulster Unionists, 299, 311 Unemployment, 2, 49, 52, 73, 185 United Kingdom (UK), 1–5, 12, 13, 26–40, 42, 49, 52, 55, 57, 60, 63, 67–72, 74, 76, 79, 82, 87, 89, 91, 93–96, 98, 100, 107–114, 116–121, 126, 127, 137, 138, 147–149, 153, 154, 160–163, 195–207, 211–226, 231–233, 235, 237–239, 241, 242, 244–247, 258–267, 269–271, 275–290, 300–306, 308, 316, 317, 319, 320, 323, 324 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), 13, 17, 28, 49–51, 53, 54, 57, 69–71, 279 United States, 117, 151, 214, 231–233, 241, 243, 278 Universal Credit (UC), 175, 182, 187, 188 V Varadkar, Leo, 40 Veterans for Britain, 263 Villiers, Theresa, 73 von der Leyen, Ursula, 197, 202 Vote Leave campaign, 19, 74, 160, 162, 263 W Wales anti-conservative, 53, 297, 309 Cardiff Bay, 298, 304, 307 Conferred Powers model, 302 devo-sceptic, 298, 299

Government of Wales Act 2006, 302 Miner’s Strike 1984–85, 298 Panama Papers, 307 Plaid Cymru, 305–308 Reserved Powers model, 302, 303 Senedd, 297, 300, 301 Wales Act 2017, 303, 305 Wales Stronger in Europe, 263 Welsh assembly leader, 300, 301 Welsh labour, 301, 303, 307 Welshness, 298 Welsh NHS, 299 Welsh secretary, 299–301, 303 Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, 185 Welfare state/welfare benefit cap, 175 benefit dependency, 174 tax credits, 172, 175, 186 West Lothian question, 281 Westminster, 5, 49, 55, 59, 66, 76, 77, 82, 114, 121, 187, 258, 259, 261, 264, 284, 286–289, 298, 303–305, 307, 308, 318, 320 Westminster model, 87–89, 96, 97, 100, 101 Wharton, James, 92 Whigs, 17 Williamson, Gavin, 126, 128, 221, 237, 243 Wilson, Harold, 18, 67 Woke, 83 Wolf, Alison, 135 Women for Britain, 263 Work and Health Programme, 177 Work choice, 177 Work Programme, 177 World Bank, 179 Wyatt, Woodrow, 17 Y Yorkshire, 49, 52