Speaker spotlight: Professor David Runciman

Professor David Runciman is a political theorist at the University of Cambridge where he is Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). He has worked as a columnist for The Guardian newspaper and written for many other publications. He currently writes about politics for the London Review of Books. Professor Runciman’s latest book, Politics: Ideas in Profile, asks the big questions about politics: what is it, why we do we need it and where, in these turbulent times, is it heading?

Professor Runciman also led the team on the ELECTION podcast, the University's weekly politics podcast, asking the questions that no one else was in the run-up to the British General Election, with the most interesting people inside and outside the political arena. All the episodes can be listened to online, or downloaded through iTunes.

On 24 October, Professor Runciman will be taking part in a special live recording, ELECTION: LIVE!

CFI: Does victory for Jeremy Corbyn mean the end of Labour and what are the implications for opposition to the current government, given the collapse of the Lib Dems?

DR: This is clearly the big question for the next five years of British politics and beyond – and my answer is that I don’t know! But what I do know is that we are going to see new fault-lines opening up. One is between members of parties and MPs in parliament – this looks particularly acute for Labour, given the people who voted overwhelmingly for Corbyn are not represented by the party in parliament. But it could spell trouble for other parties too – there is a disconnect across the spectrum between the career politicians and the passions that drive popular frustrations with politics. Corbyn tapped that successfully, which might tempt others to try.

But if the Corbyn experiment ends with a crash, as I am pretty sure it will, it might give everyone pause about letting populism off the leash. I can’t see how Corbyn can reconcile his long-held political beliefs with the institutional constraints of parliamentary politics.  If that leads him to reject parliament – by appealing over the head of elected representatives to the people – he will do huge damage to democratic politics as well as to his own party. Yet if he compromises, what’s the point of him (especially as he doesn’t seem a particularly adept or competent politician)?  Will Labour be finished?  Probably not, since first past-the-post systems need a main party of opposition and I can’t see the Lib Dems filling that role, nor some new breakaway party getting its act together in time.

So is it plain sailing for the Tories? No, since they have their own deep-seated fault-lines and absence of effective opposition on the other side of the chamber will empower the discontents on their own side. Plus we have two votes looming that could change the dynamics of British politics again: the EU referendum and possibly another Scottish referendum after that. Lots could still shift the balance of power over the next five years.  Still, nothing will persuade me that electing Corbyn as leader of the Labour party was anything other than an indulgence and a mistake. People who support him say that he will shake things up, which is undoubtedly true. But we have to remember that shaking things up doesn’t automatically make things better (this isn’t the tech industry). It can make them worse as well, for everyone.

CFI: 2015 saw the highest turnout since 1997. Why do you think that is?

DR: Well, it’s all relative. Turnout was up a bit on the 2010 election, which in turn was up on the two before. What it shows is that the view that we are on an inexorable slide towards disengagement with electoral politics is wrong: people vote when they can see something real is at stake for them.  Often this means not so much that they are enthusiastic about the people they vote for as that they really don’t want the other side to win (it’s important to remember that turnout is often highest where divisions are greatest – in contemporary Iraq, for instance, or in Weimar Germany, where people voted in droves because they were terrified of the alternatives). The 2015 result was less an endorsement of the Tories than a clear expression of what people didn’t want to get stuck with (Miliband in power and/or a Labour-SNP government). Negative energy is a big part of what drives democracy: most of us are much clearer about what we don’t like in politics than about what we do like.

CFI: What's been the biggest political development in the UK in recent years?

DR: The rise of the SNP to its current position of dominance in Scotland is a huge change and has happened very fast: it has affected the dynamics of politics across the UK, including by making people feel that rapid change is possible (Corbyn’s even more dramatic rise reflects some of that). 

More broadly, the fragmentation of the electorate into different identities, which are hard to squeeze into a two-party system, has produced all sorts of turbulence. Some of these identities are national (as in Scotland), some are regional (London politics – where Corbyn has his powerbase – now looks pretty different from the rest of the UK), and some are reactions against these: anti-London feeling, for instance, or anti-immigration. 

As always, the challenge for the mainstream parties, and for anyone wanting to represent a broad coalition of interests, is to find some way of channelling the sharp negative energies into something bigger and more encompassing. Gordon Brown tried to get some impetus into the idea of British identity, but with very little success. Corbyn’s not going to manage it (he strikes me as more of a ‘Wolfie Smith’-style Islington nationalist, for anyone whose memories go back that far). And as for the prospect of a British politician who can plausibly make the case for the wider European identity we have in common, that seems more remote than ever. But also more necessary than ever. 

CFI: Who do you think are the up and coming political stars of the future?

DR: There are all sorts of interesting people coming into politics all the time, often with very different perspectives and motives. I hope the era of philosophy, politics and economics (PPE)/Oxford dominated politics is over – nothing against PPE or Oxford (or at least not much) – it was just too narrow a pool from which to draw. 

The most interesting politicians are probably the ones with another side to them than just a career in politics: Dan Jarvis (ex-army) and Keir Starmer (ex-DPP) are the stand-out examples on the Labour side; perhaps Rory Stewart (writer/ex-diplomat) on the Tory side. Having said that, the word is that the new Tory intake of 2015 is generally more diverse and interesting than their Labour counterparts. The stars of the future are likely to be people we know very little about at present. That’s another reason why the rise of Corbyn is so underwhelming (I’ll stop going on about this in a moment): he’s such a throwback at a time when politics could be opening up to fresh voices.

CFI: Who was the most interesting to interview for the Election podcast?

DR: Probably the first guest, Maurice Glasman, the originator of the idea of ‘blue Labour’. He came on at the start of the year, well before the election campaign even started, and talked very presciently about the reasons why Labour was in so much difficulty.  I don’t agree with everything he said – I wouldn’t put as much emphasis on virtue or on faith as he does – but his analysis struck a chord in his willingness to talk about the need for Labour to find new ways to communicate what it stands for. He was also humorous – not true of all Labour people – and very wide-ranging in his frame of reference, making the connection between British politics now and the challenges the Tudors faced in building a state five hundred years ago. He exemplified what we were trying to achieve with our podcast: to have conversations about politics which are urgent and topical but also go wider and deeper than the usual three-minutes of partisan back-and-forth. I hope we succeeded.

CFI: Politicians have to be squeaky clean in all they do these days. So would the likes of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill have risen to the top today? And how would they have coped with today's media intrusion?

DR: Would they have risen to the top? Yes probably – that sort of political talent and drive is so rare that almost no political system can repress it.  How would they have coped with today’s media?  I guess a bit like Boris Johnson copes, using a mix of bravado, cunning and crossing of fingers. All politicians need luck when it comes to avoiding being brought down by their peccadilloes and the invention of Twitter hasn’t changed that. But what today’s media really demands is stamina to try to keep one step ahead of it – the most important quality, as Churchill always said, is the ability just to keep going.

CFI: Should England follow Scotland’s lead and lower the voting age?

DR: It’s hard to think of any good reason why not – it added energy and excitement to the Scottish referendum and did nothing to lower the tone of the debate (it might even have raised it!). The problem though is persuading young people to use the vote you give them – turn-out in the 18-24 age group was the lowest of any at the last election, far below the turn-out among the over-65s. There is a huge imbalance in the input of different generations into our politics, which means policy is skewed towards the elderly and against the young. Anything to redress that is a good thing. So yes, 16-year olds should get the vote; but more importantly they should actually vote when they get it.

CFI: Do you think the Liberal Democrats will recover from their crushing defeat in the 2015 elections?

DR: Short answer: yes, since there is a space in British politics for a liberal party of one kind or another that is not met by the two main parties. There will always be significant numbers of people who want what the Lib Dems have to offer. But the problem is that electoral reform, which is what the Lib Dems really need, is further away than ever. So any recovery will be slow and painful. And in their case, you can’t say there is a new generation of parliamentary talent coming through, since there are so few of them (and they’re all white men, which really doesn’t help). People who think an Osborne-led Tory party and a Corbyn-led Labour party will leave an open goal in the centre ground for the Lib Dems are making it sound much too easy: yes, the goal might be open, but the Lib Dems are going to be playing with their feet tied together for a long time to come.

CFI: Your next series of podcasts [beginning in January] will be more internationally-focused. Why?

DR: Because there are so many interesting elections going on around the world, starting in the US, where the presidential election has already taken some surprising turns (Sanders! Trump!!). It gives us a chance to talk to a wide variety of guests from far beyond Cambridge and to discuss how democracy works in places that our listeners might not be familiar with: when we are broadcasting there are due to be elections in Thailand, Uganda and Peru. I hope we’ll find interesting and informative things to say about them all.  As it happens, we have experts in Cambridge on all these parts of the world and we will try to use them to explain what makes these elections important (since every election is important to the people voting in it). But we’ll also touch base with British politics to reflect on what has happened since our first series ended in June. Which means more on Corbyn, if he’s still around (sorry, I can’t help myself).

This article was originally published on the Cambridge Festival of Ideas website.