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Good morning. It’s a comparatively light day in the House of Commons so both Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey have opted to try to get their issues talked about today via set-piece speeches.
There is not a great deal of content in the pre-briefed extracts of Badenoch’s speech, while Davey makes a substantial announcement in his. Therefore I think there would be more value in discussing the Liberal Democrat leader’s speech today and Badenoch’s tomorrow, barring any major events.
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Smooth moves
Ed Davey will shift his party’s position on the EU away from vague but warm words about repairing the relationship between the UK and EU to a concrete policy aim: that Britain should seek to re-enter a customs union with the EU. (Although setting party policy is not in the gift of the Liberal Democrat leader, the party’s membership is so pro-EU that any shift towards closer ties with Europe is certain to be approved by the Lib Dems’ policymaking processes.)
One challenge for the third party at Westminster is to have a distinctive position that gets you in the headlines and has an electoral constituency, but for whatever reason is not going to appeal to the government or the main opposition. And you can be sure neither of the latter parties is going to touch the topic of Britain rejoining the customs union.
There is no prospect of Kemi Badenoch embracing the customs union, for both her own ideological reasons and the balance of forces within the Conservative party. And for reasons of electoral calculation, Keir Starmer won’t either.
Under Badenoch, the Conservatives have had precious little to say about the Lib Dems. This is surprising, given that unless they can make a big dent in the 59 seats Davey’s party gained from the Tories in England, there isn’t a path to a Conservative parliamentary majority. Still, one thing that spooks some Lib Dem MPs is that they end up being seen simply as Labour-by-proxy by the Tory voters they won last time and need to hold on to.
So a distinctive position on which they can criticise Labour without risk of being crowded out by the Conservatives and that aligns with both their activists and core voters ticks a lot of boxes.
I think it is also the aspect of the UK’s estrangement from the EU that is the best recruiting tool for Britain’s pro-Europeans.
Why? Because most of the losses from leaving the single market are invisible or imperceptible. It’s the job you don’t apply for, the investment someone else doesn’t make, it’s the passport queue that might have been longer but possibly wasn’t. It’s a bigger deal than exiting the customs union but it is, as Janan Ganesh once put it, “the aggregation of marginal losses”.
Whereas being outside of the customs union brings tangible frustrations: the replacement part for your stereo that now costs more to ship than the part itself, the niche hobbyist shop you used to order from that no longer delivers to the UK. It’s a bunch of small, tiny frictions that you can’t avoid — other, that is, than by voting Lib Dem. Davey will hope he has a position that gives his party something to shout about for the rest of the parliament.
Now try this
I continue to very much enjoy the Traitors. (I really hope Minah will make it to the end but I worry she has made her first mis-step.)
Having played far too many sessions of Mafia, the party game that inspired the TV show, as a student, watching it gives me the feeling of a horror comedy, as you can see the players making all-too-familiar mistakes. If you want to play at home, I heartily recommend The Chameleon board game.
