Where do classical liberals go next?

The General Election and political realignment

In recent years I have often argued for a particular thesis about contemporary politics, one that I first formulated almost twenty years ago as a prophecy but which has now become an analysis. That is that most representative democracies have experienced or are experiencing a realignment of politics. The essential argument is as follows. In all political systems and particularly representative ones, there are always two broad ‘sides’ or tribes, even though there are many matters that are politically controversial and the number of ways views on those issues could be combined is amazingly large.

This binary alignment happens because one particular issue has very high salience: it matters a great deal to a very large part of the population (usually because it comes from a very deep social division). This is the aligning issue.

Usually there is a secondary aligning issue that divides each of the two sides produced by the primary one – so there are tensions within the two sides. Roughly every 40-50 years the aligning issue changes. This disrupts the existing voter ‘tribes’ and produces new ones – allies suddenly become opponents and enemies become friends. This causes a period of political confusion in which parties shift and change (or split) to reflect the new voter divisions, as their old coalition falls apart.

The detailed argument is that from the 1920s through to about nine years ago the alignment issue in politics in most countries was free markets versus government, capital versus labour, or capitalism versus socialism. Although this is still a dividing question it is now the secondary one. The primary division in politics now, the new aligning issue, is nationalism versus cosmopolitanism or in David Goodhart’s phrase ‘anywheresversus somewhere’. This sets graduates against those who have not gone to university, people who work in the immaterial sector of the economy versus those who work in the physical part, the inhabitants of globally connected metropolitan areas against those who live in the countryside and small towns and ex-industrial areas, and those who value traditional identities (particularly national ones) against those who welcome innovation and cultural diversity.

The key issues in the new alignment are no longer public ownership versus private enterprise or free markets versus government action. Big questions now are immigration and migration more generally, whether nation states should surrender or pool parts of their sovereign power by binding themselves by treaties and agreements interpreted by courts, and what the role of expertise and qualifications should be in governance.

In 2019 there was widespread recognition that a realignment was taking place, and a general perception that the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson had adapted to this new alignment and put together a new voting coalition on the nationalist side of the new divide. This involved their taking a clearly nationalist position (supporting Brexit and promising to control immigration) while also shifting to the left on economics (the levelling up agenda). This meant they won a lot of new votes from people in traditionally Labour areas, who had not voted conservative before, and flipped a lot of seats in the North and Midlands (as well as coming a close second in many others). They expected to lose some seats in the South East as voters who combined free markets with cosmopolitanism (free market Remain voters for example) switched to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In the event they did not do that for one main reason – Jeremy Corbyn.

It is fair to say that after 2019 the Conservative Party and its leaders made a total and utter hash of that electoral victory and its basis, the post-realignment coalition. What they should have done politically (disregarding what one might think of it on principled grounds) was to double down on the offer they had made in 2019 and become a clear but moderate national collectivist party, one that leaned left on economics and right on culture and nationalism. A combination of sincere principle and donor influence meant they did not do this. In the event they managed to alienate both wings of the coalition they had in 2019. They alienated the liberal cosmopolitan part of their coalition by measures like the Rwanda bill and the rhetoric around stopping the boats. They also alienated the nationalist part of their coalition by talking tough about immigration while not actually doing anything effective and presiding over a big growth in legal immigration. They alienated the free market element of their support by presiding over a record level of taxation while annoying the newer, more economically left voters they had appealed to with the promise of ‘levelling up’ by doing nothing towards that either. (These voters were also among those enraged by the failure to ‘do something’ about immigration). Meanwhile all voters were fed up with the state of public services and serial ministerial incompetence.