Ahead of the UK's General Election this Thursday (on Dec. 12), we brought Timothy Weaver of Rockefeller College to the show to share what's at stake and what to look out for in the last three days of the campaign trail.
Ahead of the UK's General Election this Thursday (on Dec. 12), we brought Timothy Weaver of Rockefeller College to the show to share what's at stake and what to look out for in the last three days of the campaign trail.
Photo credit: "Brexit protestor flags near the Palace of Westminster, London," by Chiral Jon.
If you're interested in hearing more about Weaver's work, you might like our last episode, where we spoke with the political scientist on the Opportunity Zone Program.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Timothy Weaver, an assistant professor of political science at Rockefeller College. With the UK's general election this Thursday, I asked Weaver to join us to share what's at stake and how to make sense of the current political climate.
NEWSCAST 1:
With just three days to go before the UK goes to the polls, the parties are making their final pitch to voters.
NEWSCAST 2:
Our agenda is radical, because people are demanding radical change. People, I believe, right across the classes.
NEWSCAST 3:
But we have a very simple and a very clear agenda, which is to get Brexit done and move the country forward.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So Britain wants out of the European Union. The EU has agreed to accommodate that up to a point. What are the sticking points preventing a final deal?
Timothy Weaver:
After Theresa May left Downing Street, when she resigned, when she failed to get her Brexit deal through Parliament, it led to a leadership election, and the winner of that leadership election was Boris Johnson. He claimed during that election that if he were to win, he would go to Brussels and get a new deal. Lots of people thought that that was very unlikely and worried that Britain was leading down the road of a so-called no-deal Brexit, whereby Britain would crash out of the EU without a deal. However, Johnson did in fact come back with a deal that was different in a couple of important respects to Theresa May's deal, and it seemed for a moment that he might get that deal through Parliament.
Timothy Weaver:
And the reason why the new deal looked much more likely to pass in Parliament was because it replaced what was known as the Irish backstop. The issue of the Irish backstop emerged because on the Island of Ireland, you have a country which is in the EU, the Republic of Ireland, but you also have a part of the UK called Northern Ireland. The question was always going to be what would happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in the case of Brexit? This was particularly a sensitive issue, because of the history of armed conflict between people on either side of that border, and the border itself became the place where that conflict was sometimes focused. And so the reason there was this thing called the Irish backstop was there to prevent the emergence of a border.
Timothy Weaver:
The idea was, Britain could leave, and while it was leaving, it would have to work out a way to not have any physical infrastructure at the border. The default way of doing that was to keep Britain, the UK, Northern Ireland, and the rest of the UK in the Customs Union. And a lot of people in the Conservative Party didn't like that, because they thought that wasn't real Brexit. Boris Johnson's new deal replaced the Irish backstop with something else, which essentially would keep Northern Ireland aligned with the rest of Ireland, so there wouldn't be any need for a hard border, but there would, though, have to be a border between Ireland, essentially down the Irish Sea, which meant that Northern Ireland would be treated differently to the rest of the UK, which the Conservatives' partners in government, the Democratic Unionist Party, didn't like.
Timothy Weaver:
And so although Boris Johnson was able to get a lot of support from his Conservative fellow MPs with this new deal, getting rid of the backstop and replacing it with these other arrangements, he lost the support of the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party. And so he had this big challenge, could I get this new deal through parliament? He briefly had a majority, and it looked like maybe he would be able to ram it through, but what happened was that Johnson lost. He won the vote on the deal, but he lost the vote on the so-called program motion, which sets out the timetable for dealing with passing the legislation. And it meant that the deal was then going to be subject to other parties bringing amendments.
Sarah O'Carroll: Which just seems to complicate everything.
Timothy Weaver:
Well, I think what Johnson was worried about was that this would be an opportunity to pick the deal apart or to do what one might call wrecking amendments, attach amendments to the bill that the people attaching it knew couldn't possibly get a majority, and to lead the bill to its inevitable demise. Therefore, Boris Johnson calculated that having lost the ability to pass the bill through Parliament and to get it into statute, to complete the legislative process, in other words, he would need to get a proper majority. And so therefore he said to the opposition, "Do you want to support me and vote to dissolve Parliament?" And in the end, after a couple of tries and some resistance, the opposition agreed and an election was called. And so that's what we'll have on Thursday.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I'd like to return to the discussion on border control. Why has this been such a contentious issue, and what does Brexit mean for Northern Irish people? Can you help us understand why militarizing checkpoints have risen to prominence again?
Timothy Weaver:
Well, the worry is that if Northern Ireland leaves the Customs Union, as it would under Boris Johnson's deal, then it means that it creates the challenge of how do you deal with goods flowing in and out between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, including Northern Ireland? And there will have to be some kind of customs checks, and so the question is how can you do those customs checks without having border infrastructure?
Timothy Weaver:
Now, the government's saying that Northern Ireland would have harmonization with European customs rules in a whole series of areas, but not in others. And in those others where it wouldn't be harmonized, there would have to be some sort of check. They're insisting there wouldn't be checks at the border, so there wouldn't be physical infrastructure, but it's not necessarily completely clear how all kinds of infrastructure can be avoided.
Timothy Weaver:
And the worry is that if you have particular pieces of infrastructure in place, then those places become targets for people that want to disrupt the peace process. There's also the kind of deeper issue of identity, which is that one of the things that the Good Friday Agreement enabled was for people to be both British and Irish, in terms of what passports they hold and also perhaps what identities they have commitments to. And because we were both members of the EU, the question of whether or not you were European in the sense of being a member of the EU just didn't arise. But now it will arise again, and as those things begin to re-emerge they become politically meaningful again.
Timothy Weaver:
If you get into the position of forcing people to be one side or the other, which is what the Good Friday Agreement helped to dissolve to a significant degree, then the chances of reigniting those tensions and difficulties rise. Now, the question is how much do they rise? I think a lot of people, including myself, are worried that if those issues arise at all, the chances of conflict because of those issues increases at all, then that is really putting the Good Friday Agreement and the peace that it enabled into real peril, which is a dreadful thought, frankly.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So not just the disruption of having go through border checks and what that would mean for commerce and businesses who have to go to and fro or over the border throughout their daily lives, but also the big risk of a return to violence because of these ethnonational types of conflicts that the Good Friday Agreement tried to help dissolve in a sense?
Timothy Weaver:
Yes. Yes. The worry is that, both with respect to practicalities, there being some kind of a border, some sort of checks in some way or another, but also with respect to identity, means that the process that the Good Friday Agreement set in motion of reducing tensions, of allowing people to have a sort of plural set of identities, that process could be put into reverse and potentially with catastrophic consequences. Hopefully not, but the worry is that it could disrupt what has hitherto been a very successful development in the Irish question.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, what other issues are at play here that are most in discussion right now as we look ahead of this week's election, and how might you offer some context of which ones rise above the others as being really key to what's next for the UK?
Timothy Weaver:
What Boris Johnson was hoping was that this election would be about Brexit, and he wanted to be able to have a very clear and simple message, which was, "I've got a deal. I want to get Brexit done. You, the country, want to move on, so vote for me and we'll get it done."
Sarah O'Carroll: "Over my dead body will we not get a deal."
Timothy Weaver:
Right, exactly. They say, "We've got a deal, we just need to pass it through Parliament, and let's get it done." And unfortunately for the Conservatives, but not wholly unpredictably, once you call a general election, other things that people care about come onto the political agenda. And the thing that people in Britain are most concerned about, in addition and alongside Brexit, is the National Health Service. In Britain, the National Health Service is considered to be a wonderful creation, a civilizing force to which most British people are wholly committed. Their concern isn't about whether or not we should have an NHS, but that it should be properly funded and protected.
Timothy Weaver:
One of the things that the Labour Party have been arguing is that you can't trust the Conservatives with the NHS, which has been a tried and tested line over the decades, and also have suggested, which bears on the Brexit question, that if Britain were to leave the EU and do a trade deal with the US that the elements of the National Health Service would be subject to negotiation with the US, be it with respect to privatization or drug prices.
Timothy Weaver:
And so the NHS has interacted with the Brexit question to really undermine the Conservatives and to help Labour a little bit. The Labour party are the principal opposition party. So what we've seen in the last couple of weeks is the other issues in addition to Brexit, the NHS, creep onto the agenda, and Boris Johnson just wants to talk about Brexit. Labour wants to focus on the NHS, and at the moment Labour are getting more days of the news cycle with attention on non-Brexit themes than days focused on Brexit themes, which is meaning that the gap between the Conservatives and the Labour Party in the opinion polls is narrowing.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Which will just make it harder to predict the outcome, it sounds like as well.
Timothy Weaver:
Yes, yes. This is the third general election since 2015. There's one in 2015, one in 2017, and now one again this year, and the last two have been surprising. 2015 was a shock to people, because the Labour Party did much worse than expected. It was expected that they would probably be the largest party in Parliament, if not get a majority. Then in 2017, everybody overestimated how well the Conservatives would do, and it turned out that they lost their majority.
Timothy Weaver:
And so this time people are very nervous, because they don't want to overestimate the Conservative vote and they don't want to underestimate the Labour vote, and so people who are doing polling and people that are trying to make general election predictions are having to sort of grapple with the ghosts of the recent past in terms of getting things wrong. At the moment, the current polling shows the Conservatives with a lead of about 10% on about 42% of the vote and Labour on about 32% of the vote.
Timothy Weaver:
But because we're a parliamentary system, the big question is how does it translate into seats? There are 650 seats in Parliament, but because some parties, for example, Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, don't take their seats in Westminster and because the speaker doesn't vote and because the deputy speakers don't vote, it means that really to get a majority you need to have 320 seats.
Timothy Weaver:
So 320 is the the magic number. If the Conservatives get to that, then they have a good chance of getting their Brexit deal through. Johnson will count that as a victory and argue that his gambit of having the election was successful. The difficulty, though, for the Conservatives is that if they fall short of 320 seats, they don't really have any coalition partners they can draw on, so for them it's an outright majority in Parliament or bust.
Timothy Weaver:
Whereas for the Labour Party, they don't have to get anywhere near 320 to have the chance of forming a government, because they could do it in coalition or with the support of the other parties who are anti-Brexit parties, the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats and maybe one or two other, Greens or Welsh Nationalists. And so if the Labour Party get maybe more than 260 seats, then they would have a chance of being the government, and then the issue of Brexit would not be resolved, and the likely result then would be a second referendum.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And have we seen Boris Johnson negotiate how Labour has been pulling NHS back into the conversation and also being able to talk about it in his own way, or have we seen him mostly sticking to Brexit and not even trying to acknowledge the argument of the NHS being something we should pay attention to as being just as important?
Timothy Weaver:
Well, he tried to, I think, preempt the inevitable attacks on the NHS by announcing before the election even started new investment, record investment in the NHS. The problem is, the Conservatives don't have that much credibility on the NHS, and so people may have some trouble believing that. He's also issued some outright denials about the possibility of the US trade deal involving the NHS. And Donald Trump on a visit there recently tried to help Boris Johnson, I think, by saying, "Oh no, no, we're not interested in doing anything with the NHS. I've never heard about that. I don't know where anybody got the idea from," even though Trump himself said that everything was on the table, including the NHS, a few months ago. So Johnson has been trying to preempt the Labour Party's critique by saying, "We're going to spend more money on the NHS, none of it's up for sale," but that's facing some credibility issues to say the least.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Brexit and the general election has been a lot to keep up with, with how fast things change and a lot of important conversations happening. But is there anything else you'd want to share that we should be thinking about or be reading up on before Thursday?
Timothy Weaver:
I think the thing to look out for is what happens in the final days of the campaign among the undecided voters. At the moment it looks like the Conservatives will get a small majority, and the reasons for that have to do with the Leave vote, people that voted Leave in the referendum, all flocking to the Conservatives, and people having some doubts about the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Labour Party. However, in the last few days, it could be that those people that are still saying they don't know who to support end up going back to supporting Labour and away from the Conservatives, and if that happens, then Johnson could be in the position of having fewer MPs than he does now and maybe leaving Downing Street.
Timothy Weaver:
So it could be that on Friday we have a new person going to see the Queen, that person being Jeremy Corbyn, or it could be that there's no majority for anybody, a hung Parliament, and negotiations among the parties. And then we'll see whether or not the price for a coalition government is Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Leader, stepping aside for somebody else to take his place. So those are the things to look out for in the last few days of the campaign.
Sarah O'Carroll: Well, Tim, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Timothy Weaver: My pleasure.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll, and that was Timothy Weaver of Rockefeller College. If you're interested in hearing more from Weaver, you can tune into our last episode, where we spoke about the Opportunity Zone program. You can let us know what you thought of the fall season. We're at mediarelations@albany.edu, or you can find us on Twitter, @UAlbanyNews.