IT IS OFTEN said that in life one should be careful what one wishes for and as we continue to reflect on the fallout from the Brexit vote, the political meaning of this adage can be fully appreciated.
That decision cost the Prime Minister his job and placed the Leader of the Opposition under tremendous pressure to surrender his. Subsequently the presumptive leader of the Brexit campaign Boris Johnson opted out of the leadership contest and now the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has resigned. The turbulence in the British political scene appears to be keeping pace with the economic sphere and has created a political “hot potato” which makes the job of leader most unattractive at this time.
The new leader of the Conservative party will have the unenviable task of negotiating a soft landing for the UK. Prospective leaders understand the extent to which Brexiters are concerned about immigration and also know that the EU will want to link any maintenance of market access to free movement. There are, of course, other considerations, not least of which is the fact that this leader will be implementing a project that the majority no longer supports and will now face a hostile Parliament which has already sought an opinion from the Courts regarding the need to seek parliamentary approval to break the relationship with the EU. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Conservative politicians with a long-term perspective would want to avoid “Number 10” at this time since it is likely that the next occupant will have a short and uncomfortable stay.
The logical political question is how Cameron and his Conservative party got into this mess, since they both emerged from the last election looking quite good.
In 2010, Cameron had to settle for a coalition government in which he shared power with the Lib Dems and the 2015 pre-election polls were suggesting an equally tight outcome. Cameron, however, emerged from that election with a clear majority which would have been an impressive “high” on which to end his political career in 2020. Overnight, everything has changed and he is now forced to end his sojourn earlier than planned and hand what is effectively a “poisoned chalice” to a successor.
The response to this question is simple and located in the lead-up to the 2015 election which saw Cameron struggling within and outside the party. In an effort to appease Eurosceptics like Johnson, Cameron played what appeared at the time to be a masterstroke.
The promise of a referendum gave these people political “red meat” and cemented their support. It was not a promise to leave, but a promise to ask a question about leaving in an election that the Conservatives seemed destined to lose at any rate. If the outcome was another coalition, they could easily have bargained away the need to hold the referendum and if the Conservatives won outright, they could repeat the strategy used in the Proportional Representation referendum held in 2011 and campaign against it.
Cameron’s gamble succeeded and to his credit he strategised yet again to secure concessions from Europe before offering the vote. Perhaps he knew his effort to gain concessions would be futile but hedged his bets on his ability to convince British voters that a futile conversation was fruitful. Clearly, the British was less gullible than he thought; however, this mess all arose from a political promise made in a desperate political environment.
We here in Barbados know this dilemma well and can identify a parallel in the 2013 general election which the DLP won narrowly. In the lead-up to this campaign, it was widely accepted that the DLP would have had major difficulty securing a second term especially as the economy was already under considerable pressure. In this environment, Stuart’s “masterstroke” was handed to him by Arthur who made the cardinal error of being honest with the Barbadian public about their economic choices.
In response, Stuart made some promises of his own, which his members were happy to repeat since the vast majority of them probably never thought they would have been in a position to have to defend these statements. In both the UK and Barbados political leaders who few believed would have prevailed, gambled by making promises which were outlandish, unwise and imprudent and were caught in a conundrum because we bought into their strategies.
Peter W. Wickham is a political consultant and a director of Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES).Email: [email protected]
