It is time to remember 1918, and hold a 'multi-coupon' election

I have been beginning a debate with my friend and Radix colleague Joe Zammit-Lucia about whether or not a general election is the only way out of the government's current impasse. Quite reasonably, he suggests that the Conservative Party will never call one - to quote A A Milne, "for fear of finding something worse".

What has given me an excuse to return to the debate are the rumours emerging from the government that, like me, they believe first, that Jeremy Corbyn's refusal to talk to Theresa May has guaranteed that he would lose any election. Second, that this is the traditional way in which parliamentary democracies sort out these kinds of muddles and that is to call elections.

My main nervousness about it is that - if the parties continue to pretend that they behave as if they were all of one mind - then we will be no further forward. Voters might reasonably complain that they were being sold pigs in pokes.

So what is to be done? My proposal is that, uniquely, for one election only, Parliament should wave the deposit, so that - alongside the traditional parties - we can vote for a Soubry party of Tory remainers, a Moggite party of Conservative party of hard brexiteers, and a Starm-ite (either love it or hate it, like Marmite) of Labour remainers.

Nor should we pretend that the Lib Dems are any less divided. It is just that the Liberal Leavers have drifted off to vote for others. Even so, I know at least two Lib Dem MPs who seriously struggled with their consciences about Theresa May's last vote.

Alternatively, we could keep the deposit rules in place and pay for Brexit with the proceeds.

But to be serious, government figures have been fulminating about the 'constitutional impropriety' of MPs taking control of the agenda, as they seem likely to do today. The real constitutional impropriety is a government that is unable to enact its business but refuses to call an election.

The election almost exactly a century ago, in December 1918, was known as the coupon election - the coupon was provided to candidates across various parties who were approved by the coalition government. Perhaps what we need now is a multiple coupon election, so that every constituency includes a candidate to make the case for their version of the way forward.

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The least competent government ever? No, it's worse than that...

This post first appeared on the Radix blog...

Have we ever had such an incompetent government? Isn’t it so embarrassing?

That is how the chattering classes seem to be reacting to the admittedly dire performance of our own government when it came to rising to the challenge of Brexit. But I have to say: I don’t really agree with their fundamental analysis. 

The problem with Theresa May’s government is not that it is exceptionally incompetent, it is that most recent UK governments have been just as incompetent, but – for reasons that may be obvious – the members of the House of Commons are no longer going along with it.

You might even call political incompetence a great British tradition.

For a generation or more, MPs of each ruling party have casts their votes obediently for a range of wholly incompetent ideas – nuclear expansion, mortgage tax relief, public-private partnerships, rail privatisation – though most thinking people knew exactly where they would lead, and said so. Not perhaps by definition, but in the incompetent way the policy and legislation was constructed.

Suddenly, the incompetence we have been living with has become obvious because – for the first time – MPs are working together to call a halt. 

The situation does not reveal an unprecedented lack of competence – it reveals and old and very predictable kind of British incompetence.

So are British officials uniquely incompetent? Certainly not, but they are unexpectedly deferential to party leaders (or they have been until now). Also, let’s face it, the UK system of government encourages a couple of pretty useless skills – doing nothing about an obvious problem or abuse for decades, and then riding roughshod over everyone to impose some half-baked idea.

When we need politicians skilled in negotiating or listening to find an acceptable middle way – as we had to in Northern Ireland – we had to bring in an American, from where the system encourages that kind of behaviour.

I know the Americans admire our system because it encourages witty repartee. The problem is that that this is a less than useful skill when it comes to uniting the nation. Still, this is our system and we have lived with it for so long it is hard to recognise any more competent possibilities.

Our loss unfortunately. Especially when the funeral bell appears to be tolling for our system of government: a case of never sending to know for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for us.

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Misunderstanding the Munich crisis

Those fascinated by the events of Munich eighty years ago will be aware that there are two books out which assume rather different interpretations. On is by the novelist Robert Harris, who has made no secret of his pro-Chamberlain views. The other one is by me, and Munich 1938 puts rather greater weight on the testimony of the pro-Czech writer Shiela Grant Duff than he does.

Now, it so happens that I have been sent a copy of the letter sent by Shiela to The Observer three decades ago, complaining about Robert Harris's opinions back then (thank you, Penelope). I reproduce it here without further comment:

"20 September 1988

In his monstrously misleading article as your guest political diarist, Robert Harris follows the now embedded myth that what was at stake at Munich was whether we should fight for the Czechs. 

In fact, Chamberlain’s concern was, above all, to prevent the Czechs from fighting for themselves, and the French from honouring their solemn treaty obligation to go to their aid should Germany attack.

Munich was only the final scenario of a policy which the British government had been following more or less consciously since it came to power in 1935. The ‘wets’ in the Foreign Office were not those who opposed appeasement, as Robert Harris seems to think, but those who concealed – or perhaps honestly did not recognise – the true war aims of German policy and the iniquity of the Nazi regime.

The Czechoslovak government realised this from the start and, with greater foresight than ourselves, immediately began to fortify its frontier, build up its army and air force, augment its massive armaments industry and tried to develop the only international security system which would have prevented the German general staff from allowing Hitler to fight a war on two fronts – the Franco-Czech-Russian alliance.

Throughout the pre-war period, we not only refused to have anything to do with this allowed Hitler to “enter his backyard” in the Rhineland, thus depriving France of this demilitarised safety zone on a frontier, and positively encouraged him to look for German expansion in central Europe. Neither Austria nor the Sudetenland had ever formed part of Germany before.

What appalled Chamberlain was not the weakness of Czechoslovakia but its strength, in the dreadful fear that, if the Czechs defended themselves, we and the French would be drawn in. The Berchtesgaden-Godesberg meetings were concerned, not with preventing Hitler from invading Czechoslovakia, but making sure that the Czechs would neither defend their fortifications, nor use their army or air force.

At 2 o’clock in the morning of 22 September 1938, the British and French ministers aroused President Benes from his sleep to tell him that, if war broke out, not only would neither we nor the French intervene, but on the contrary, would hold the Czechs responsible for any catastrophe which followed. Benes surrendered. The German armies marched in, took possession of the tanks, planes, the guns, the armament factories, and turned them against us and the French on the Western front, defeating the French and expelling us from Europe just two years later.

“A triumph for all was best and most enlightened in British life”?

Shiela Grant Duff
Observer correspondent, Prague, 1936-8"

You can buy copies of Munich 1938 on kindle and as a paperback.

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