{"id":2287,"date":"2019-02-20T16:45:02","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T16:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2287"},"modified":"2019-02-20T16:45:02","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T16:45:02","slug":"british-politics-is-undergoing-a-values-realignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2287","title":{"rendered":"British Politics Is Undergoing A Values Realignment"},"content":{"rendered":"

download as a pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

The main British political parties, Labour and Conservative, are large \u2018broad-church\u2019, \u2018catch-all\u2019, or \u2018big tent\u2019 parties.\u00a0 They are now experiencing their first splintering based more on values cleavages than political ideology.\u00a0 At the time of writing, eight Labour and three Conservative MPs have quit to form a block of \u2018Independents\u2019.\u00a0 Both parties have broken because they have grounded on the rock of \u2018Brexit\u2019.<\/h3>\n

More MPs may or may not follow but thanks to the deep values-based schism created by the EU Referendum, it\u2019s likely that the UK is seeing the start of a significant political realignment. \u00a0As the FT said today (20th<\/sup> February 2019), it means, ironically, that Britain\u2019s politics are becoming more like those of Europe.<\/h3>\n

Here\u2019s what\u2019s going on in values terms, using the simple two-dimensional model of Ron Inglehart of the World Values Survey. \u00a0Instead of a one-dimensional political spectrum (as the House of Commons is literally built to accommodate), it\u2019s two dimensional.<\/h3>\n

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(From The Silent Revolution in Reverse, Inglehart et al 2018)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s the same again with my own annotations.<\/p>\n

For readers outside the UK, the reason these defections from Labour and Conservative are significant is that they could change the political arithmetic of \u2018Brexit\u2019 which is at a crucial stage.<\/p>\n

The ERG (European Research Group) is a network of right-wing Eurosceptic and usually climate-sceptic MPs, founded in 1993 to fight against European integration.\u00a0 The current Chairman is Jacob Rees Mogg MP.\u00a0 A previous Chairman, Chris Heaton-Harris MP, played a central role in a campaign within the Conservatives to force then-Prime Minister David Cameron to abandon onshore wind farms, the cheapest form of renewable energy and regarded as crucial to decarbonization of the UK.\u00a0 Heaton-Harris is a devotee of climate sceptic Bjorn Lomborg and now a\u00a0 Minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union.<\/p>\n

The ERG has been pulling the Conservatives rightwards and UKIP-wards and exploiting the values overlap between the extreme right voters for the Conservative Party and the anti-Europe pro-coal anti-wind, anti-immigration party UKIP, to do so.\u00a0 Both renewable energy and the European Union are part of so-called \u2018reflexive modernization\u2019, new ways of doing things (eg sustainability) which Cameron tried to promote in his early phase of \u2018detoxifying\u2019 the Conservative Party.\u00a0 He had to abandon that to stop the party splitting over Europe, and to retain his leadership.<\/p>\n

The UK voted 48.1% Remain and 51.9% Leave in the 2016 Referendum (margin of 3.8%).\u00a0 Legally that was only advisory but Cameron (who expected Remain to win) had pledged to act on the result.\u00a0 \u00a0He then resigned.\u00a0 In Parliament the Conservatives and Labour are both split over Europe.\u00a0 Since July 2017 a majority of the country<\/a> have swung (increasingly) to be pro-Remain (analysis by the UK\u2019s leading pollster here<\/a>). \u00a0Most if not all the defecting MPs are in favour of a Second Vote, ie putting Brexit back to the people.\u00a0 The polling shows a lead of 8-10% to Remain, and some of that is due to those who voted Leave changing their minds.<\/p>\n

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Above: a long running YouGov poll (from August 16 to 4 Feb 19) showing the progressively larger majority against leaving the EU, since July 2017. <\/em><\/p>\n

This is the immediate reason why these defections are significant (and Theresa may has no majority in Parliament without support of the small Northern Irish DUP which is pro-Leave, although most people in Northern Ireland are pro-Remain).<\/p>\n

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On 23 June the day of the EU Referendum I tweeted \u2018#EUref if Britain votes Remain it will change the political culture. If Leave it will only change the political parties\u2019. \u00a0\u00a0By which I meant that a vote to Remain would be a vote for the future and modernity, and confirm the \u2018reflexive\u2019 changes such as towards a clean-tech and open culture, as \u2018normal\u2019 but a Leave vote would be a social throwback which would precipitate some sort of reconfiguration of politics.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The tweet was a bit trite perhaps but the underlying social factors driving a slow increase in the percentage of Pioneers with their \u2018progressive\u2019 values, have not gone away, and there is a huge skew to younger people favouring Remain.\u00a0 Many of them assumed that Labour\u2019s Jeremy Corbyn would turn out to be against Brexit but the opposite has proved to be the case.<\/p>\n

In short although political change in the UK is a lagging indicator of social change not least because the first-past-the-post-system of geographical constituencies hugely favours and over-represents the two large \u2018catch all\u2019 parties, and so anchors most politicians in those parties for fear of losing their jobs, the slow but powerful current of values change will sooner or later prove an irresistible force.\u00a0 The most dynamic expression of this in the UK right now is support for the school and student strikes over climate change, led almost entirely by young women, most too young to vote.\u00a0 If it was possible to vote for @gretathunberg she would be likely to get elected.<\/p>\n

That may encourage campaigners for \u2018progressive\u2019 causes but their greatest challenge in the coming years, and that of politicians who share their values, is going to be to find ways to design campaigns and politics which reaches across rather than entrenching values divides (see for instance why forced PCness is not a good strategy<\/a>).\u00a0 As Peter Lilla has argued<\/a>, it is the politics of the common good, not of identity differences which we need, and that requires acceptance of values diversity.<\/p>\n

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For more on Brexit and evidence of the values split and dynamics see some of my blogs using the CDSM Cultural Dynamics Strategy and Marketing Values Modes<\/a> model of Settlers, Prospectors and Pioneers:<\/p>\n

\u2018Brexit Values Battle<\/a>\u2019 (March 2016) showed that security-driven Settlers in the UK, France, Italy and Germany shared a common dislike of the EU and immigration<\/p>\n

Brexit Values Story Part 1<\/a>\u2019 (February 2017) –\u00a0 my own story of how, it appeared to me, values had helped drive the politics of the Referendum result.\u00a0 That drew on many sources (blog here<\/a>, slides with main content here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s dilemma<\/a> (July 2017) \u2013 choosing the old or the young (so far he has opted for the old)<\/p>\n

Brexit Values Story 2.1<\/a> (August 2017) with values maps and data on how people had voted in the 2017 General Election, comparing this with their Leave\/Remain votes in 2016<\/p>\n

And Inglehart et al (source of above diagram) using a similar values model but one that does not measure the Prospectors: \u00a0The Silent Revolution in Reverse: Trump and the Xenophobic Authoritarian Populist Parties<\/a><\/em>(free pdf) and his 2018 bookCultural Evolution<\/a><\/em>, and forthcoming with Pippa Norris (published already in the US) Cultural Backlash<\/a><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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download as a pdf The main British political parties, Labour and Conservative, are large \u2018broad-church\u2019, \u2018catch-all\u2019, or \u2018big tent\u2019 parties.\u00a0 They are now experiencing their first splintering based more on values cleavages than political ideology.\u00a0 At the time of writing, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2287"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2298,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions\/2298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}