'Not so different after all'' By Tony Barber February

By Tony Barber February 19, 2019

''The resignation of seven parliamentarians from the UK’s opposition Labour party is more than a symptom of political instability on the eve of Brexit.

It illustrates that the nation’s party political system is fragmenting in response to political, economic and social pressures in similar ways to the party systems of continental Europe.

What a delicious irony that, as the UK prepares to quit the EU on March 29, its political trends, and the social conditions and ideological battles that produce them, are as European as ever...

We can amplify this point. Just as the UK’s political splits are making it extremely hard to forge a consensus behind a Brexit plan, so the divisions in continental politics are making it difficult for mainstream European parties to unite behind efforts to rejuvenate and strengthen the EU...''

The similarities begin with the emergence of new types of hard-right and hard-left groups on the British and continental political spectra. Traditional moderate parties of the centre-left and centre-right are “out of touch with the realities of social change”, as Bryan Magee, a philosopher and former Labour MP, puts it.

Just as Germany’s Social Democrats, France’s Socialists and other centre-left parties are in retreat, so the UK Labour party is losing its grip on what was once a winning electoral coalition of urban liberals and the industrial working class. Wealth, educational and regional differences are dividing electorates in the UK as in EU countries.

Labour’s relative success in the 2017 national election disguised these difficulties. But they have become more acute because of the party machinery’s capture by Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, and his cabal of supporters from the communist tradition.

To this should be added the poison of anti-Semitism, which has spread in the Labour party under Mr Corbyn. In recent years anti-Semitism has emerged as a feature of anti-parliamentarian continental politics, as was underlined last weekend during the latest gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests in France.

At the time of the 2016 British referendum on EU membership, the nation’s most dynamic, militant rightwing movement was the UK Independence party. Ukip’s hostility to the EU and emphasis on national sovereignty gave it a passing resemblance to France’s National Front (renamed last year as National Rally) and the Dutch PVV.

At heart, however, Ukip was a deformation of the British Conservative party’s rightwing. Recently this has changed in a fundamental way. Ukip has swung in a far-right, anti-Islamic direction, such that it looks less like a political party than a movement such as Pegida (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”), the extremist group based in eastern Germany.

The leading rightwing nationalist force in British politics today is a faction of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives that calls itself the European Reform Group. As columnist Nick Cohen observes, this faction operates in the House of Commons “as a separate English nationalist party”.

In its intransigence and cultivation of a slightly eccentric public image, the European Reform Group shares features with Eurosceptic, anti-establishment elements of Italy’s ruling League party, led by Matteo Salvini. Like the League, the British faction has connections to influential business and financial interests. However, its political message, although obdurately anti-EU, is less virulently anti-immigrant than the League’s.

In the UK and continental Europe, moderate politicians like those who quit Labour on Monday are struggling to regain influence. On both sides of the Channel, still bigger battles lie ahead.