A "national government" to deal with Covid-19: peak centrist mythology
During the pandemic there were widespread suggestions that political parties should come together in a government of national unity, but it's a mirage of consensus
Regular readers will be aware that I have a great animus against the notion of a consensual, centrist approach to politics which assumes that all problems can be resolved by sufficient discussion and debate by men and women of goodwill. As I wrote earlier this month, I believe passionately that doctrine, or ideology, or ideas matter, that they are the bedrock of the democratic process and that different parties and people hold different and fundamentally incompatible world views. This is in part because political discourse is not simply the accumulation and analysis of data and the drawing of conclusions from them, but feeling, instinct, sentiment: I argued this at length in April.
For me, the epitome of the centrist fallacy is the citizens’ assembly: peddling a lie that such bodies are chosen at random, they encapsulate the idea of getting people round a table and just thrashing things out, as if that will eventually lead to a “correct” answer. But it doesn’t and can’t, not in all things. In the early 1980s, the Conservative government was keen to privatise many of the nationalised industries, partly in the belief that they would be more efficient in private hands, but partly because the party believed it was a nonsense that the government should run a car manufacturer or an aerospace company or an hotel chain. Equally, the Labour Party was in favour of nationalisation for economic and other political and moral reasons. Both sides of the argument were wholly sincere, and there was no possibility of compromise or common ground.
These are some of the reasons I’m deeply sceptical of coalition governments, and, even more so, “national” or “unity” governments or a “government of all the talents”. Yet the notion keeps bobbing to the surface as some kind of panacea for major challenges, and did so during the Covid-19 pandemic. The argument was that the crisis was so grave, a multi-party (or even all-party) government should be formed to confront it, somehow providing unity and stability. This was not a mad, isolated notion: it was explored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in an article which imagined Sir Keir Starmer becoming Boris Johnson’s deputy prime minister, an idea Starmer had refused to rule out before he was elected Labour leader. Conservative MP George Freeman, who had recently left ministerial office, believed that a “Covid coalition” was becoming “unavoidable”.
In April 2020, a YouGov poll showed that 63 per cent of those surveyed would support “a Government of national unity, in which representatives from all the main political parties form a Government together, for the duration of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis”. There was even a petition laid before the House of Commons to “create a UK Government of National Unity to address the current Covid 19 crisis”.
(The previous year, the Green MP, Dr Caroline Lucas, had called for not just a government of national unity but an all-female cabinet specifically to hold a second referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, in a last-ditch attempt to stop Brexit. It was, perhaps, the ultimate centrist fantasy. A similar idea was endorsed by Phillip Lee, Conservative MP for Bracknell who defected to the Liberal Democrats in 2019. His reasoning is illuminating:
When the ‘Benn group’ was formed to try to get a parliamentary process to stop the Government from forcing their Brexit deal through, I used to sit in Hilary’s room, because as select committee chair, he had this grand set of rooms in the tower overlooking the river. You’d look around this room and you had Hilary Benn, Oliver Letwin, Philip Hammond. I was there, Guto was there, Dominic Grieve, Yvette Cooper, David Gauke, all in this room. Caroline (Lucas), Margaret Beckett. All these people in this room. You just thought, this is a Cabinet, this is a credible government. This a group of competent, able, well-motivated people who represent the broad majority, however you want to describe it, centre right or centre left, of people in Britain. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just swap places across the road with the monkeys who are currently in Cabinet? There was a brief moment where it started to become something we would consider.
Therein lies a lot of the motivation: we are better than the current lot, we are moderate and reasonable and decent. Quite how anyone could think that a government containing Oliver Letwin, Philip Hammond, Yvette Cooper and Margaret Beckett was in any ways sustainable escapes me.)
Of course, governments of national unity are not an innovation, and have been formed at times of the greatest political and strategic crisis. In May 1915, as his Liberal government was beleaguered during the Shell Crisis and the aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign, H.H. Asquith shored up his political position by inviting the Unionist opposition into a coalition, though he retained the most important ministerial portfolios for his own party. Although Lloyd George ousted Asquith in December 1916, the coalition would continue well past the end of the war, until October 1922.
In 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour cabinet was hopelessly split over the government’s reaction to the worldwide economic depression, the prime minister resigned, but, with the encouragement of George V, stepped away from the majority of his Labour colleagues and formed a “National Government” with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party. At the general election of October that year, the coalition won a crushing victory, snatching 554 seats in a House of Commons of 615, but that was deceptive: in fact the Conservatives had all but co-opted MacDonald. The National Government consisted of 473 Conservative MPs, 68 Liberals and 13 National Labour, the few allies of MacDonald who had left the Labour Party with him. For most of the 1930s, Parliament would operate more or less without an opposition.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Neville Chamberlain, who had become prime minister of the National Government in May 1937, invited Labour and the Liberals (who had left the administration in 1932 and become a fully fledged opposition party in 1933) to join his ministry, but they declined. He did, however, bring leading Conservative rebels like Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden into ministerial office. It was the continuing refusal of the opposition parties to join a government of (even more) national unity that was one of the reasons for Chamberlain’s downfall in May 1940: under pressure to broaden the administration, he pledged to resign if the Labour Party would not come into coalition. The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, consulted with his National Executive Committee, then meeting in Bournemouth, and the verdict was unambiguous. They would agree to joining the government, but not under Chamberlain. So it was that Winston Churchill became prime minister and the Labour Party entered the administration.
I understand that there are arguments for governments of national unity, and two seem to me pre-eminent. The first and lesser is an administrative and bureaucratic one: in the most serious times of crisis, the government should be able to enlist the services of the most gifted and capable public figures to manage immediate projects. In general, however, these will not be found predominantly in the ranks of opposition parties. I don’t mean that slightingly: there are men and women of great talent on all sides, but those whom you may wish to press-gang in an emergency will tend to be those with skills which lie outside the political mainstream, like Dame Kate Bingham, who chaired the government’s Vaccine Taskforce in 2020, or Sir Crawford Falconer, appointed chief trade negotiation adviser at the Department for International Trade during Brexit. Sometimes, though, a figure will fit perfectly, as Transport and General Workers’ Union general secretary Ernie Bevin did as minister of labour during the Second World War.
The second, more substantial, argument is that a government of national unity is symbolic, even performative: the fact of politicians setting aside party differences to co-operate on a major threat or challenge signals to the electorate and to the world that the country is unified and determined. That can be a strong case in wartime, when you have an enemy on whom the impression you leave matters. But the Covid-19 virus was unlikely to be cowed by a show of strength and solidarity among the political parties represented in the House of Commons.
It is a truism that all political parties are coalitions, a truism that has achieved such acceptance that I have written an article about it for The Critic. But parties must have some rough envelope of intellectual coherence: as Lord Kinnock memorably noted when Natalie Elphicke, MP for Dover, defected to Labour from the Conservatives in May, his party was “a very broad church but churches have walls”. Attempting to knit together several parties in one government runs the risk of an internally feuding nonsense, and seeking to encompass the whole spectrum of opinion is simply absurd. Political ideology is real and substantial and significant, and often mutually exclusive: a monetarist and a Keynesian will find it hard to stake out common ground on the economy, as will a unilateralist and a proponent of nuclear deterrence on defence.
One of the reasons that Brexit was so divisive was that, when reduced to its core, it represented a binary choice. Whatever your motivations, you either supported the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union, or you did not. It was not necessary for it to be based on profound feelings of identity or sovereignty, and could have been the finest of fine judgement calls, but the choice remained stark, Remain or Leave. This need not, contrary to a commonly held belief, mean that disagreements are bitter or vicious or lacking in charity: I voted to Leave, as I was always going to do, but I have many friends who were passionate Remain supporters, and we are entirely capable of remaining friends so long as all parties remain respectful, maintain good will and remain curious. But there is no resolution nor any possibility of a single solution acceptable to all sides.
To return to the pandemic, what benefits would a so-called “government of national unity” have brought? It is possible it could have represented to the electorate that the political class understood the gravity of the situation we faced, and that everyone, irrespective of party, was committed to meeting the challenge of Covid-19. But there are other ways of doing that. Much more likely, surely, it would initially have sublimated fundamental disagreements over policy in many areas, perhaps keeping a lid on them for a while, but sooner or later it would have meant that ministers dealing not only with health and the economy but education and law and order and criminal justice and welfare and transport and the environment would have butted heads within government as they wrangled over the best way to restore the nation to health.
These debates will always happen. In our system, they happen between parties in Parliament, and are adjudicated by the electorate every four or five years. They are debated and resolved in public, and they are the core of our democratic system. I am deeply unconvinced—to put it mildly—of the advantages of pushing these inevitable arguments within the cordon sanitaire of Whitehall, out of public sight and into the realm of the rumour mill and the gossip columns, and adding the jeopardy of losing coveted ministerial office.
This is not an argument that co-operation is politics is impossible or even undesirable. There are many issues to which possible solutions enjoy widespread and cross-party support, and there is nothing in our system which prevents that kind of collaboration (though I would add the cautionary note that sometimes measures which are popular across the spectrum can be inadequately scrutinised and stress-tested). Sometimes the reverse is true, and opposition to a measure can create the most unlikely alliances. Famously, Harold Wilson’s attempt to reform the House of Lords in 1968/69 through the Parliament (No. 2) Bill was defeated by the diligent and eloquent efforts of the arch-Tory Enoch Powell (Con, Wolverhampton South West) and the radical socialist Michael Foot (Lab, Ebbw Vale).
Nevertheless, politics is about ideas, debate, argument and persuasion. We should celebrate that, and strive to ensure that it remains conducted, in the words of Erskine May, with “good temper and moderation”. Disagreement is nothing to be frightened of, and opponents are not the same as enemies. When we face a crisis, we should not expect or require our politicians to dash into the same room and yoke themselves together in some show of solidarity, because there are established ways of finding consensus where possible, engaging in a common effort but retaining our ideological beliefs and distinct identities. There is rarely a need for a “National Government”.