Rugby World Cup: déjà vu encore une fois

On the last occasion when one of my bouts of blogging coincided with the Rugby World Cup, back in 2011, I lamented the predictability of it all and commented that for me the tournament held little excitement, even though I’m a keen rugby fan.

At that stage only four teams had ever won, only one more had appeared in a final, and a total of just eight had ever reached the semi-final in the six World Cups that had happened to that point. And four World Cups later, that statistic still holds good. Saturday's final will be contested by two teams who between them have won the last four tournaments.

For only a handful of games in the pool stages could it be said that the result was in doubt before the kick-off and the result mattered in deciding who qualified for the next stage. While it was good that Fiji beat Australia such meaningful contests were relatively few.

The contrast with football is stark. In the last 10 FIFA World Cups, seven teams have been champions, two more have appeared in the final without winning and 10 more have reached semi-finals. There is a sense that any game could spring a surprise and help decide who goes through to the next round.

This year's Rugby World Cup was supposed to be different. Ireland, who had never previously got beyond the quarter-finals, were ranked number one in the world. The hosts France seemed genuine challengers too. More teams than ever before seemed to be in with a real chance of progressing to the later stages, even if the lopsided draw put meant only two of the top five teams could reach the semi-final.

At first it seemed this change to the traditional order was a reality. Ireland and France beat South Africa and New Zealand respectively in the pool stages. But with these fixtures reversed for the quarter-finals the traditional giants of the southern hemisphere edged out the northern pretenders.

So now we have a final where I don't really want either team to win. I suppose we can draw some comfort between an apparent narrowing of the gap between the traditional top dogs and the historic also-rans and have to hope that this will continue so that the 2027 tournament is the one that sees the traditional order overturned.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it

At an academic conference some years ago, I heard a speaker say that the good thing about being a historian is that one's role is to interpret the past not to predict the future - a comment I found useful to remember when rereading my last post on this blog, a mere 11-and-a-bit years ago. 

I remember some people took it as an argument that the Liberal Democrats' prospects in the 2015 general election were not as bleak as was generally thought. But that wasn't my point.

It was intended as a challenge to a misinterpretation of history - namely that the smaller party in a coalition always get blamed and punished electorally. I pointed out that there hadn't been a coalition in Britain without an electoral pact between the partners, so there was no precedent here on which to base such a conclusion. I cited a couple of precedents in the Republic of Ireland where the smaller coalition partner had fared reasonably well – even gained support. So my post wasn't intended as a prediction – or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

With hindsight, I would say that junior coalition partners seem to get punished by the electorate if they do something that goes against the grain of what voters might have expected. The Irish Labour party did spectacularly well in the 1992 general election, and it was widely assumed that it would enter some some kind of rainbow coalition with the opposition Fine Gael and minor parties. 

Instead, it put the seemingly discredited Fianna Fáil party back in power, despite the latter receiving its worst result in over 60 years. Then midway through the Dáil term Labour switched sides and put Fine Gael in. So it antagonised supporters of both main parties and appeared shifting and unprincipled. It paid the price at the 1997 general election, when it barely retained half its seats.

Between 2011 and 2016 its performance mirrored the Liberal Democrats in many ways. Reaching a high point in the first election it entered a coalition with Fine Gael and found itself in the uncomfortable position of being a leftish party forced to make public spending cuts. Result: catastrophe at the next election. The Irish Labour party has never quite recovered and, like the British Liberal Democrats, is no longer even the country's third party.

Much of the debate after 2015 was over whether the Liberal Democrats were doomed by going into coalition in the first place or by mistakes made while in government. I suppose the foregoing comments push me to the first of these options. In entering government the party did three things that seemed contrary to what everyone would have reasonably expected: got into bed with a right-of-centre party after years of trying to outflank Labour on the left; appeared to cave in on the immediate issue of how soon to cut public spending; and abandoned its best-known policy of not increasing tuition fees.

Occasionally in politics circumstances will force a party into an unexpected volte-face. But if this is one the two main parties it will have a bedrock of support to fall back on and at least some friendly allies in the media telling its story. For the Liberal Democrats, who at the best of times found it hard to get their message across, were never going to get a hearing to explain choices that seemed so contrary to what people would have expected - however justified they might have felt these decisions to be. 

It may be unlikely that the party will end up in coalition after the next election, but if it does then it can only really be with Labour, which will be what everyone expects and therefore the story will be easier to tell. We shall see.

One reason why this blog ground to a halt back in 2012 is that I was finding it more and more difficult to find anything to say that might interest even my small band of readers. As I was trying to make sure that the Liberal Democrats held their ground in Watford and at least retained the mayoralty and control of the council, I felt this cause was not helped by adding my voice to public criticism of the party leadership. And yet uncritical boosterism held little appeal either. So there was nothing much to say.

At local government level at least we have continued to prosper, my dear wife being succeeded as mayor by the excellent Peter Taylor. And after 30 years as a councillor, I stood down in 2021. In theory I should have had more time for writing but have lacked an outlet and my keyboard has remained idle. So I will give this blogging thing another bash. No longer holding elected office I have more freedom to express myself, yet at the same time I have become more detached from politics. But that is not the only thing to write about. I hope it won't be 11 years until the next post.