Ask an insider from any one of the major political parties what kind of person his or her ideal candidate in 2024 would be, and you will probably get some version of the following:
He or she should be a stout local hero with experience outside of Westminster – preferably in regional government or in regional enterprise. He or she should have an everyman’s ambivalence on social issues, with views on economics that are a pleasing muddle – though he or she should be fiercely devoted to things like the NHS. His or her entry into Westminster should be done gingerly; he or she should, in some way, stand above the din of party, and should not come across as a natural politico. Above all, these people should be ciphers for a community, and should take up office less to legislate than to bring local grievances to the seat of Government – petitioner style.
It’s difficult to exaggerate how seriously Britain’s governing class takes this archetype, this local everyman done good. Through the 2010s, the ready solution to populism and, before that, ‘Trust in Politics’ was to load Parliament up with these community heroes. The age of svelte parachute candidates like David Cameron would end, and would give way to a new politics of local populism; indeed, this project has had no greater sponsor than Cameron himself. Even dissident figures like Dominic Cummings can’t resist the siren call of the brassy Midlands matron. He has called for one to head up the Labour Party, or even his new Startup Party.
The arrival of these figures en masse was designed, not so much to overturn the Westminster consensus, but to spread it out across a wider area. It was always a meagre concession. It did not offer any real change of course, only representation in the abstract. It pulled up new seats at the same table.
And nor have these community worthies done much, after all, to shore up the status quo. People are deeply unhappy with the existing order of things, and they do not care whether its local enforcer went to school with them or not. Still, the need to broaden the base of Britain’s governing class in this way is something that’s now taken for granted in Westminster.
George Galloway, the new MP for Rochdale, and Lee Anderson, the member for Ashfield, both fit this bill in all the ways that matter. Galloway and his Worker’s Party of Great Britain really does embody the ‘fiscally Left, socially Right’ formula that – as we are so often told by pollsters, think tanks and party operatives – would sweep the country if given the chance. Galloway is a royalist (he opted for the full-fat Parliamentary oath), and he revels in multiculturalism: his Britain will forever be the Britain of steel drums, anti-Apartheid sit-ins and the Greater London Council. His only seriously heterodox opinions in 2024 are about Israel-Palestine; in other words foreign policy – that most rarefied and abstract domain of politics. Gallowayism, further, is the bona fide politics of community engagement that Westminster keeps telling us it likes so much. Although Galloway’s career in public life has been an itinerant one, it has always been couched in particular communities and their interests; he has indeed courted controversy for being a little too willing to play to the local crowd.
Lee Anderson, too, trades in a bumptious localism. Anderson sees himself not so much as a politician who happens to believe in the death penalty and action on small boats, but as the avatar of a place: the Red Wall, or simply, Not London. The title of his Friday night GB News show – The Real World – speaks to this idea; for Anderson, politics is less about taking over Westminster than administering a brute lesson in the people and places that it’s forgotten about.
Galloway and Anderson are, in other words, exactly what Westminster has been claiming to want and need for the past decade and a half. And yet both have now been made political outlaws for patently obscure reasons. George Galloway has been marked as an enemy of democracy for having strong views on a far off war to which Britain is not a co-belligerent. Lee Anderson warns of Islamism and extremism, sure. But this is simply the boilerplate of David Cameron and Angela Merkel circa 2011 – only this time directed at the Mayor of London, rather than at schoolchildren.
These are strange grounds for proscription. As Barack Obama once said of Ukraine, neither of these things are “core interests”. But getting more people like Galloway and Anderson into politics apparently was. That the two find themselves picked off for trifles, then, is surely telling. We can only take it as a contortion, or a spasm.
What it reveals is a British governing class that can no longer think clearly about which parts of the status quo it values, what it wishes to defend and what it’s willing to compromise on. There is, increasingly, no vision, no appeals, no attempt, even, to win the public for the current social order through things like devolution, the Big Society or Levelling Up – only a frantic spackling to keep the exact conditions of, say, 2010 in place, forever.
And so, expect the contortions to become stranger still. Here is one: in 2024, your typical Labour moderate or Conservative of One Nation believes that immigration is beyond criticism, but that the political rights of those migrants can be revoked on a whim. Here is another: 14 years after he announced the death of the professional politician, David Cameron is in the parliamentary Conservative Party, and Lee Anderson is not.
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