Reclaiming the Revolution by Barber Stephen;

Author:Barber, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Buckingham Press, The

VII

You couldn’t imagine politicians more different than the aristocratic Conservative Jacob Rees-Mogg and the campaigning socialist Jeremy Corbyn. And yet in coming to national prominence after the 2015 general election, each were undoubted leaders of the fantasy populist politics which had engaged so many in Britain.

Rees-Mogg was David Cameron’s worst nightmare, not simply because he was a huge embarrassment waiting to happen, an eccentric ‘human museum’ who looked nothing like modern Britain. No, the problem was that he represented an old reactionary Conservative right, and this is something from which, as leader, Cameron had sought to detoxify his party. Similarly, Corbyn was the embodiment of an old reactionary socialist left which had been all but ‘modernised’ out of Labour via Tony Blair’s New Labour transformation in the 1990s. This type of politics had the luxury of never having to be implemented, never tested in policy or the real world. Against things more than in favour. They were fantasies.

As backbench MPs, both gained a reputation for rebellion and often voted against their own party front bench. And both were swept to prominence by popular trends attracted to the fantasy politics they espoused. Neither had ever sought office, for office is where compromise happens.

They really were the odd men out. Largely unelectable in normal times, their views and approaches firmly at the peripheries. ‘His manners are perfumed but his opinions are poison. Rees-Mogg is quite simply an unfailing, unbending, unrelenting reactionary,’ wrote the former Conservative MP turned journalist Matthew Parris, ‘His record on every moral, social, sexual or reproductive issue I’ve looked at is brute moral conservative. He has been a straight-down-the-line supporter of every welfare cut I’ve checked.’34

Meanwhile, during thirteen years of Labour government under Blair and then Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbyn defied his party whip an amazing 428 times. He demonstrated very little loyalty to his party or colleagues and never sought advancement to the front bench.35

Britain’s Westminster parliamentary system is different from the consensual European assemblies with their coalitions, consensus and cooperative U-shaped chambers. The Westminster system has been dominated by two parties, one which forms a government, the other the opposition. Broad-church parties always have their fringe groups – but it is on the fringe that for the most part they stay. The times were changing.

What was it that Rees-Mogg once casually told the broadcaster and political commentator Andrew Neil? ‘Vox populi, vox dei.’ You could not make it up.

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