Has Brexit destroyed party loyalty? Ruth Davidson’s resignation will show us

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/29/brexit-party-loyalty-ruth-davidson

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Your party leader embarks on a course of action that appears to threaten the constitution in order to achieve an objective that will severely damage the country. What should dissenting Tories do now? Turn against the leadership – even bring down the government and let in Labour? The old, emotive choice of party or country is back.

Meanwhile, Ruth Davidson resigns the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives. She says her new family comes first. But no one believes the timing is unconnected with Boris Johnson’s bid to stifle dissent by proroguing parliament. Whatever she says, most people think Davidson has made her call.

The old answer was to rebuild from the inside. For many MPs today that must feel like an impossible dream.

For three years and more, this question of party or country has been the flame beneath dithering politicians’ feet as they agonise about how to oppose leaving the EU while honouring the result of the referendum. Yet Brexit has left politicians and voters wondering which country has survived the binary choice of remain or leave. Once, when Theresa May claimed she was putting the country first, she meant Tory, leave-voting England. Only at the end did she try to address the future – the country that will emerge after Brexit – by engaging at last with all the parties.

On Tuesday, Jeremy Corbyn, was at it too. Signalling his readiness to back a cross-party bid to stop a no-deal Brexit, he also claimed to be putting the country first, which was unexpected news for his critics who thought control of his party was his only serious aim. Glum backbenchers of every persuasion are wondering which national interest their party even pretends to be operating in, and are branded as pygmy politicians by the two warring factions.

This week the question of party or country was the subtext for the latest in BBC Radio Four’s Great Lives series, which was on Ramsay MacDonald (on again this Friday at 11pm). At least it was meant to be, but we – I provided the factual narrative for broadcaster Shaun Ley’s passionate defence of the first Labour prime minister – had so much to say about the man himself that we never quite got to make a judgment on the country-or-party question. Infamously, the climax of MacDonald’s career was the moment when he walked out of his own Labour cabinet to head a national government composed predominantly of Conservatives, making a choice history has framed as country over party.

To Ley, MacDonald called it right. In my view, abandoning his party was a terrible misjudgment that could have destroyed it forever. Instead his decision has lent a misleading glamour to those who despair of the exhausting business of party management, of compromise and mediation, that party loyalty imposes. It has fostered a view of leadership that glorifies the individual over the organisation that sustains them in power.

Within weeks of his decision (weeks, it must be said, of deepening crisis), the single biggest thing that MacDonald walked away from his party to achieve – protecting the value of the pound by swingeing cuts on welfare spending at home – was undermined by the new national government’s decision to come off the gold standard. A move treated with horror only weeks earlier – in particular by the man who executed it, MacDonald’s chancellor, Philip Snowden – was now heralded as the breaking of the fetters. Keynes wrote in the Express: “We feel that we have at last a free hand to do what is sensible. The romantic phase is over, and we can begin to discuss realistically what policy is for the best.”

Even worse, the dole that MacDonald had accepted must be savaged was indeed cut, but the cuts were never as deep as those his Labour cabinet colleagues had refused to accept. It turned out that MacDonald’s ministers were right. He was wrong. Yet, while he has ever since been (excessively) excoriated by his party, and ultimately expelled by it, to many ordinary voters he was the national hero who put his country first.

Reduced to a rump of 52 MPs in the election that followed the end of the immediate financial crisis in 1931, Labour faced the slow and painful business of regrouping. At the same time, the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin began the equally slow and difficult business of turning a war-weary country to face the new threat of Nazism – only to be accused of facing the same choice as MacDonald but taking the other decision: putting his party ahead of the country. Baldwin felt rearmament could go no faster than voters in general and Tories in particular were ready to accept. Churchill, his career floundering, infamously and dishonestly accused him of delaying rearmament in order to win the 1935 election.

Yet for all the emotive power of the question, the truth is that this party-or-country thing is a false dichotomy, a piece of sham political rhetoric. The state of the parties themselves – divided, angry, argumentative – adds a new twist. Politics is dominated by zombie parties, sustained only by an antiquated first-past-the-post system that massively favours the status quo. The old pressure to remain a broad church, to tolerate difference, has withered. The matching obligation, for members to believe that however pathetic or dangerous or wrong the leadership, the party is more important, has dwindled too.

No-deal Brexit: cross-party rebel alliance gears up for clash with Johnson

Referendums may have a lot to answer for. In the decade Britain joined the common market, voters fell out of love with parties. At the start of the 1970s, about half of voters still claimed to have “very strong” party loyalty. By the end it was only a quarter. The affair that flourished when universal suffrage was young and mass party membership a novelty was over, and the romance has never been rekindled. For two generations now, since Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975, the electorally successful leaders of both main parties have governed not with their party but against it. At the same time, neglected by the leadership, parties have too often fallen into the hands of factions.

The old answer was to stay and fight, to rebuild from the inside. For many MPs today that must feel like an impossible dream.

It is typical that Davidson, a woman who seemed to offer a fresh, appealing political voice for Scottish Conservatism, has judged her departure shrewdly. She has resigned from the leadership, but not yet from her party. Scottish Tories can still hope.