Jeremy Corbyn will remain as leader
Jeremy Corbyn started the year in a position that was stronger than it appeared, something the doomed attempt to remove him proved.
Now he looks unassailable, which probably slightly overstates his strength.
Party members are worried by what they see as the party\u2019s right-turn on immigration, and those worries will grow more acute if the pattern of Richmond and Sleaford \u2013 where the party suffered an exodus of Leave-backing voters to the right and of Remain-backing voters to the Liberal Democrats \u2013 continues in by-elections and elections next year. There is also growing concern about what is seen as the Labour leadership\u2019s frequent silence and inability to make news.
Neither of these worries will cohere into viable opposition to Corbyn, however. It\u2019s easy to imagine a candidate who could displace Corbyn: pro-European, pro-immigration and popular in the country at large. But there lies the problem: no such candidate exists in the parliamentary Labour party. The leadership is Corbyn\u2019s as long as he wants it.
If there is an early election, it won\u2019t be at a time of Theresa May\u2019s choosing
Next year will continue to be marked by questions of an early election. One reason being that the government has been forced to abandon or delay key planks of its agenda already, thanks to its wafer-thin majority \u2013 but is also in possession of a double-digit lead in the opinion polls.
An obstacle to such analyses is the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that the Prime Minister cannot secure an early election without either a two-thirds majority in the Commons or her government losing a vote of confidence. At that point, if a new government cannot secure a vote of confidence in itself, there is an election.
Theoretically, the government could put forward a motion of confidence and instruct its MPs to abstain and, seeing as it is unlikely that the opposition parties would declare their confidence in May\u2019s leadership, secure an early election that way.
There are some problems with that approach though \u2013 as the Institute for Government\u2019s Cath Haddon explains , it\u2019s not at all clear who the Prime Minister would be in the intervening 14 days \u2013 would it still be Theresa May? Someone else from within her party? Or Jeremy Corbyn?
All of those ambiguities mean that I think it is highly unlikely that May will call an early election out of choice. But the same arguments for calling one at a time of her choosing are all the arguments that may force her hand. So while I don\u2019t rule out an election next year, if there is one, it will be as much of a shock to May as to everyone else.
Angela Merkel will continue as Chancellor, but her power will be diminished
Angela Merkel\u2019s standing in Britain is odd. In regular times, she\u2019d be seen as a fairly dull centre-right politician. But the leftwing achievements of the SPD, her coalition partner from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013, mean that she is seen as cuddlier than she is, while her decision to allow a million refugees into Germany has made her a hate figure on the uglier parts of the right.
That means her success in the German elections next year has become a proxy war among Britain\u2019s elites, with the success of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) a subject for celebration among Britain\u2019s own nativists.
The reality, as I\u2019ve written before, is that what will decide Merkel\u2019s future is how well the parties of the left \u2013 the Social Democrats, the leftist Die Linke and the Greens \u2013 do. If they can cobble together a working coalition, they will likely force her out. Far more likely \u2013 unless Martin Schulz can give the Social Democrats an unexpected boost \u2013 is a more fractious repeat of the coalition of left and right that she has run since 2013.
Barring a terrorist attack, Marine Le Pen won\u2019t win
We\u2019ve known since early 2013 that Marine Le Pen, the fascist candidate for the French presidency, had a strong chance of winning the first round of the presidential elections and a puncher\u2019s chance of winning the second. (Under the rules of the French system, unless a candidate secures more than half of the vote in the first round, the top two go through to the run-off.)
But the victories for Donald Trump and Brexit \u2013 plus the fact that, as far as Britain\u2019s Brexit deal is concerned, elections on the continent matter to the United Kingdom more than ever \u2013 mean that here in Britain, people are waking up to the possibility that Le Pen could be France\u2019s next president.
I\u2019m not convinced that she will. For all the far right is gaining from sharing best practice between its activists, it is losing through the association with extremists abroad. Most of the four million people who voted for Ukip detest Donald Trump, and that goes even more so for the perhaps three to four million voters who didn\u2019t vote Ukip in 2015 but could potentially be persuaded to do so in the future. Don\u2019t forget that allies of Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate in Austria, believe the association with the anti-EU politics of Nigel Farage hurt their candidate.
The comparison between Le Pen and her cheerleaders abroad risks hurting her. But more important than that is that the victories of Trump and Brexit \u2013 and I should emphasise that the differences between Brexit and Trump are more important than the similarities, in my view \u2013 both ran with the grain of their respective political cultures. In the case of Vote Leave, euroscepticism is part of the warp and weft of British politics, just as white reactionary politics are part of the story of American politics.
It\u2019s worth noting that while the Brexit vote, Trump\u2019s victory and Matteo Renzi\u2019s defeat in the Italian referendum were cheered by Le Pen, they were all the work of forces that were to her left. One of Vote Leave\u2019s successes was largely in keeping Nigel Farage away from the cameras, Trump hijacked the party of the centre-right (albeit in the disturbingly right-wing context of American politics), and Renzi\u2019s defeat was an alliance of much of the political spectrum against his government and him personally.
Le Pen\u2019s assault on the French presidency has two problems. First, she has not hijacked a centre-right organisation, and she is pushing against, rather than towards, the cultural headwinds of French politics. There is a long tradition of voting against the anti-system parties in French politics, and my expectation is that the left and the centre will lend their votes to keep Le Pen out again in 2017.
If Westminster is, as Andrew Neil termed it, \u201ca tiny, toy-town world beyond the reach of most of us,\u201d then the House of Lords is that rare, discontinued train set, whose eBay bidding chain is made up of collectors with money to burn.
Arriving at the peer\u2019s entrance \u2013 of course it has more than one entrance \u2013 the tall man in the tailcoat on the front desk asks: \u201cIf sir wouldn\u2019t mind waiting in the lobby, please.\u201d His sentence structure is as strange as his use of the third person. Several coat pegs have \u00ab\u00a0reserved\u00a0\u00bb written above them and the ceremony of the place is forthright.
Lord Ashdown, though, appears unfazed.
After a brisk march through a few echoing corridors, during which not one person says hello to him, the former Royal Marines captain gestures towards an enormously long table flanked by just two leather chairs. Ashdown was created a Life Peer in 2001 and has been an outspoken constitutional critic of the second chamber ever since; which begs the question, then, why did he accept the title in the first place?
He prefaces a confident answer with a shrug. \u201cI came into this place to get rid of it. How else can you get rid of something unless you\u2019re in the right place to vote to get rid of it, or at the very least for its reform? I think it is an affront to have an undemocratic second chamber. The principle of democracy is that those who make the laws have the power to do so because they have been conferred through the ballot box.\u201d
While Ashdown might resent what he calls the \u201ccreature of the executive\u201d, he isn\u2019t entirely against all of that creature\u2019s comforts. \u201cI suppose if you want to keep it then alright, all this gold-plated stuff isn\u2019t too uncongenial; but far too many of their Lordships get their feet under the table and lose whatever radical principles they had before. They get so seduced by being called Milord every other second that they want to keep the place going.\u201d
So what should the second chamber look like, according to Ashdown? \u201cMy view is that it should be elected as it is elsewhere in the world. It should be geographically based, it should be based on regions, and it should be elected on a term different from the House of Commons. It should be elected by proportionate representation and if it was then it would have a wider diversity of people.
\u201cOf course, the Commons has primacy but that doesn\u2019t mean that it should have absolute primacy. This place does some of its job well; it\u2019s a good revising chamber but it\u2019s very bad at holding the government to account.\u201d
The investment manager Gina Miller told the New Statesman last year that in campaigning to block the Conservative government\u2019s move to invoke article 50 without reference to the Commons, she was \u201cdoing the Labour party\u2019s job.\u201d If reformed, as Ashdown insists is necessary, can the Lords provide an effective opposition when one is absent elsewhere? He explains: \u201cThe House of Commons is supposed to be the watchdog of the government, but in truth it\u2019s more like a lapdog. You see it now, Labour failing to oppose the government on things that really matter \u2013 the interception bill, Brexit for example, where their position has been so weak. The House of Lords does, then, compensate for the failings of the Commons, but nowhere near as much as it should, and would do if it was elected. If you had a second chamber that successfully did its job in holding the executive to account, I would argue that you wouldn\u2019t have had the poll tax, and you wouldn\u2019t have had the Iraq war.\u201d
Ashdown says that the second chamber should be elected but retain its power of veto; couldn\u2019t that be viewed as a contradiction in terms? What would stop the Lords from preventing something that had been decided democratically in the Commons? What if the Lords wanted to block Brexit? Ashdown takes a deep breath. \u201cI would caution against that. The people have voted and whether you like it or not, that is superior to both Houses. We must allow the government to enact Brexit, but that doesn\u2019t mean that it should be allowed to go through completely unamended.\u201d
In a democracy, the principle of a popular mandate ought to be sacrosanct; but if we restrict the second chamber\u2019s role to scrutinising and amending legislation, are we missing an opportunity for better governance? Why not let the Lords have an originating function? Ashdown suggests that some degree of competition between two elected chambers could be healthy, noting the positives of plurality. \u201cIf you look at the model of other second chambers around the world – there are 84 by my count – only four are not elected. These are Belarus, Ukraine, Britain and Canada. Not very good company, is it?
\u201cI think they all have a limited power of check. Now take, for instance, treaties. The government has the ability to introduce treaties, part of their own prerogative, not subject to parliamentary scrutiny at all. The Nato treaty is one, Brexit is another. I think that the House of Lords should have a particular role in the ratification of treaties. The present Salisbury Convention, which isn\u2019t bad, could simply be translated into law very easily. In any case, I accept the primacy of the Commons, but it must not have total primacy.\u201d
Ashdown\u2019s politics are decidedly centrist, informed by the habit of compromise and in favour of coalitions. All things considered, his views on the Lords are perhaps unsurprising. But in a political climate that is so obtrusively partisan, how optimistic can he be about recovering the centre ground? Ashdown is emphatic: \u201cThere has never been a successful government that has not been of the progressive centre. Extreme governments, on either side, lead you to disaster. If you will not be receptive to the idea of coalitions then you can\u2019t provide sensible government.\u201d
Britain\u2019s duopoly, Ashdown warns, is a dying concept. He adds with a finger wag: \u201cThe truth is that democracy is not divided in two. I mean, what do you know in the internet age when people have multiple choices? They want to have a bit of this and a bit of that. The world is not divided into Conservatives and Labour. There are people with a whole range of views and it is one of the remarkable things about our time. If our lives are pluralist, then how can you make our politics binary?\u201d
This article originally appeared in the New Statesman’s Political Studies Guide for 2017.<\/p>\n

\n

\nSimilarity rank: 0.6\n<\/div>\n

Sentiment rank: 0<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n