What if Remain Had Won...?
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2019
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Helen and David explore some counterfactuals: What if Remain had won in 2016? What if Corbyn hadn't got on the leadership ballot in 2015? What if Scotland had voted for independence in 2014? We consider whether British politics would be very different or whether a lot of what we are seeing in 2019 was coming anyway. Plus we explore if there are any circumstances in which the stranglehold of the two main parties could be broken in a general election and why the Lib Dems have so spectacularly failed to break it this time.
Talking Points:
What would have happened if Remain won the referendum?
- Cameron would have remained prime minister.
- UKIP probably wouldn’t have collapsed.
- Johnson would still have been in a good position to become prime minister.
What if Corbyn hadn’t been on the ballot for Labour leadership?
- The membership supports him, but he almost didn’t make the ballot.
- The next leader probably would have been Andy Burnham.
- Burnham would have fought the referendum with more enthusiasm, but the problems in the base would have remained the same.
- Corbyn expanded the membership by being on the ballot; he didn’t rebuild the old Labour coalition.
What if Scotland had voted for independence?
- This would have been a disaster for Cameron: he’s a unionist to the core.
- Negotiations would have been extremely complicated, especially over the currency question.
- Scottish independence would have posed an existential question for the Labour party.
Can a third party break through?
- It looked like the Lib Dems might do it, but the two main parties have pulled away.
- Is this a structural problem, or a contingency problem?
- First Past the Post forces voters to make hard choices, often between two unpalatable options.
- The revoke position is tricky, even if the donors like it. There’s no real way to reach hard core remainers in this electoral system.
- The Remain vote is more geographically concentrated. There are also voters who prefer remain but respect the referendum result.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Further Learning:
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. We're a week out from |
| 0:07.0 | polling day, but we're going to do some counterfactuals. Not what's going to happen, but what |
| 0:11.4 | would have happened if remain had won the referendum, or if Corbyn hadn't got on the ballot |
| 0:16.4 | paper for the Labour leadership, or if Scotland was already independent. |
| 0:24.8 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. This Christmas |
| 0:29.5 | has its thoughts that counts. Give everyone you know a subscription to the LRB for just |
| 0:35.3 | 1999, and they'll throw in a free 2020 calendar featuring some of the best of their fantastic |
| 0:42.2 | cover art. Find this special festive offer at lrb.me-fordslash-Christmas. |
| 0:50.3 | I'm here with Helen, it's just going to be the two of us today and we're going to explore |
| 0:57.0 | this in reverse order. So again, back from Brexit referendum through to Corbyn and then |
| 1:03.0 | the Scottish independence referendum. There are a couple of broad themes that we think |
| 1:07.1 | are interesting here. One of which is about how much the current election is to do with |
| 1:11.2 | contingencies. It's an unusual election, the two leading candidates to be Prime Minister, |
| 1:16.3 | frankly the only candidates to be Prime Minister, are very unusual politicians and British |
| 1:20.6 | politics feels very divided by these personalities, but there's a real question about whether |
| 1:25.2 | deeper forces are at work here, that sounds sinister not in the paranoid sense. And British |
| 1:30.9 | politics is where it's at because of things that in some ways predate the rise of Corbyn |
| 1:36.2 | and Johnson. The other question when I've been interested in for a long time and this |
| 1:40.1 | election really seems to bring it into focus is what would it take to break the stranglehold |
| 1:44.4 | of the two main parties? Because we keep seeming to be on the cusp of Labour and the Conservatives |
| 1:50.2 | losing their grip on British politics, one or other or both and another party coming through. |
| 1:56.6 | And yet it never happens and it's not happening now. We'll come onto the Liberal Democrats |
... |
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