Theresa May buys time with apology to Tory MPs over election ‘mess’
Beleaguered PM is ‘contrite and
genuine’ in crunch meeting with 1922 Committee, promising to build consensus on
Brexit
Anushka Asthana and Jessica Elgot
Monday 12 June 2017 22.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 13
June 2017 07.06 BST
A contrite Theresa May bought herself time with
Conservatives MPs by apologising for failing to secure an overall majority,
while cabinet sources indicated that the prime minister would pursue a more
conciliatory approach on Brexit to shore up her leadership.
May addressed a packed session of her party’s backbench 1922
Committee on Tuesday with what was described as an “upfront mea culpa”. She declared:
“I got us into this mess, and I’m going to get us out of it.”
Senior insiders added that one of the ideas actively being
considered to win backing across parliament was “not to major” on the
controversial “no deal is better than a bad deal” position taken by May before
the election.
Also under consideration is whether to exclude overseas
students from the immigration numbers and even possibly to abandon the target
to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”. Although nothing has been
agreed, any softening of the position on immigration could maximise the chance
of a closer economic relationship with the EU.
May also admitted that the manifesto promise to make people
pay more for their social care had been a mistake and said there would be no
weakening of LGBT rights as the Tories attempted to secure an electoral pact on
Tuesday with the socially conservative Democratic Unionist party.
The prime minister said more would be done to reach out to
young voters and those working in the public sector. “She was contrite and
genuine, but not on her knees,” said one senior MP who attended the meeting,
adding that May had shown a warmer side. “There was none of the Maybot,” the
person added, claiming that any talk of a leadership challenge had been
silenced, for now at least.
Speaking after the meeting, MPs made clear that the prime
minister had bought herself time – with hopes that she could make it to the end
of Brexit talks in two years.
A cabinet member admitted that work was under way on how to
achieve a deal with the EU27 that could pass through a much more finely balanced
parliament, involving seeking areas of compromise with other parties. Reports
in the Telegraph and Evening Standard claimed that secret talks had already
begun between cabinet ministers and some Labour MPs.
Any shift in tone will be seen as a coup for advocates of a
soft Brexit, although those who campaigned to leave the EU are also offering
their support to the prime minister.
Ruth Davidson, the Conservative leader in Scotland, who has
won more influence after the party took 13 seats in Scotland, said she was
pushing for an “open Brexit” with maximum economic access after a private
meeting with May in Downing Street. Davidson added that the party needed to
reach out: “I do think that there can be changes in the offer of Brexit as we
go forward.”
Downing Street is also preparing to put forward a skeleton
version of a Queen’s speech, as the parliamentary mathematics threatens to
bring domestic policymaking to a halt unless the Tories reach out to opposition
parties.
The annual list of legislation, which may be delayed from 19
June, will have two big-ticket items of Brexit and counter-terrorism policy,
but see most of the domestic agenda ditched, according to one source. May’s
plans for a sweeping shakeup of education including new grammar schools could
be boiled down to a few pilots, they said.
However, despite jitters within the party and suggestions
that May’s days are numbered, her performance in front of the 1922 Committee
appeared to reduce anger about the shock result. After the vote stripped the
Conservatives of their majority and plunged the government into instability and
the need for coalition talks with the DUP, Heidi Allen, the MP for South
Cambridgeshire, said the prime minister would be gone within six months.
However, after the 1922 meeting, Allen – who has fought her
own party over disability benefit cuts and tough positioning on Brexit – said:
“I saw an incredibly humble woman who knows what she has to do, and that is be
who she is and not what this job had turned her into. She has lost her
armadillo shell and we have got a leader back.”
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Conservative MP for
Berwick-upon-Tweed, who has been an outspoken proponent of Brexit, said: “It
was very positive to hear her take very firm responsibility for not being able
to crystallise some of the seats we’d hoped to win. I felt she had very deeply
considered over the weekend whether she should continue and … came to us to
say: ‘I will continue for as long as you want me to do so.’ And I think that’s
exactly what we all hoped she would say.”
MPs said there was a tacit acceptance of the need to build a
better consensus. “A broader backing for Brexit has to be built and I think she
recognises that,” one former minister said. “She was clear she was responsible.
She agreed on the need to listen to all the wings of the party on Brexit.”
One remainer on the left of the party was teary-eyed as they
expressed their renewed support for the prime minister, while a hardline
Brexiter agreed, describing her as “very, very humble” and saying: “She has
bought herself time. She showed a side of her that was very appealing. A warmer
side.”
At the centre of the debate were concerns about the
manifesto. MPs admitted that it had been a disaster with voters, particularly
the so-called “dementia tax” and the decision to press ahead with school
funding cuts. “Public sector workers felt very strongly about austerity,” a
former cabinet minister said. “We have to offer a message of aspiration, which is
a very Conservative word.”
Jeremy Corbyn’s massive gains with public sector workers
appear to have driven anti-austerity into the centre of political debate, even
among Conservatives. May acknowledged several warnings from MPs who described
meeting people who said they could not vote Tory because of cuts to hospitals,
schools or failure to increase public sector wages in real terms.
Anna Soubry told the Guardian it had been an issue she
repeatedly encountered on the doorstep. Writing in a local newsletter, she
added: “We need a kinder Conservatism that recognises the very real concerns
about reduced school budgets, a shortfall in NHS and social care funding, and
that some of our most valued public servants such as nurses, have had their
wages cut.”
Others argued that it was OK for the Tories to keep their
position but that they had failed to make the economic argument during the
campaign. Soubry said it was outrageous that the chancellor, Philip Hammond,
had not been given a bigger role in the campaign.
Several MPs told May they had had difficulties rebutting
questions over school funding on doorsteps and in local hustings. May said that
Justine Greening would address the concerns, and sources stressed that the
education secretary had been making the case for better funding for schools for
some time.
Tories banged on the tables for about 30 seconds as May
arrived for the crunch meeting in a roasting hot room packed with members of
the House of Lords as well as MPs. May took questions, but one MP described
them as more like “speeches”.
There was no appetite for a leadership election, the MP
said. “That’s the last thing the country needs. She said she would serve us as
long as we want her, and that she’s been a party servant since she was 12 years
old, stuffing envelopes.”
MPs were pleased that the prime minister had removed her
joint chiefs of staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, as she pointed instead to
her new top aide, the former Tory MP Gavin Barwell, and the chief whip, Gavin
Williamson. One MP said that the party had faith in the “two Gavins”.
Jeremy Corbyn has won the first
battle in a long war against the ruling elite
Paul Mason
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
understood that before taking power, the left must disrupt and defy common
sense – just as Labour defeated the proposition that ‘Corbyn can’t win
Monday 12 June 2017
16.11 BST
To stop Jeremy Corbyn, the British elite is prepared to
abandon Brexit – first in its hard form and, if necessary, in its entirety.
That is the logic behind all the manoeuvres, all the cant and all the mea
culpas you will see mainstream politicians and journalists perform this week.
And the logic is sound. The Brexit referendum result was
supposed to unleash Thatcherism 2.0 – corporate tax rates on a par with
Ireland, human rights law weakened, and perpetual verbal equivalent of the
Falklands war, only this time with Brussels as the enemy; all opponents of hard
Brexit would be labelled the enemy within.
But you can’t have any kind of Thatcherism if Corbyn is
prime minister. Hence the frantic search for a fallback line. Those revolted by
the stench of May’s rancid nationalism will now find it liberally splashed with
the cologne of compromise.
Labour has, quite rightly, tried to keep Karl Marx out of
the election. But there is one Marxist whose work provides the key to
understanding what just happened. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist leader
who died in a fascist jail in 1937, would have had no trouble understanding
Corbyn’s rise, Labour’s poll surge, or predicting what happens next. For
Gramsci understood what kind of war the left is fighting in a mature democracy,
and how it can be won.
Consider the events of the past six weeks a series of
unexpected plot twists. Labour starts out polling 25% but then scores 40%. Its
manifesto is leaked, raising major questions of competence, but it immediately
boosts Corbyn’s popularity. Britain is attacked by terrorists but it is the
Tories whose popularity dips. Diane Abbott goes sick – yet her majority rises
to 30,000. Sitting Labour candidates campaign on the premise “Corbyn cannot
win” yet his presence delivers a 10% boost to their own majorities.
None of it was supposed to happen. It defies political
“common sense”. Gramsci was the first to understand that, for the working class
and the left, almost the entire battle is to disrupt and defy this common
sense. He understood that it is this accepted common sense – not MI5, special
branch and the army generals – that really keeps the elite in power.
Once you accept that, you begin to understand the scale of
Corbyn’s achievement. Even if he hasn’t won, he has publicly destroyed the
logic of neoliberalism – and forced the ideology of xenophobic nationalist
economics into retreat.
Brexit was an unwanted gift to British business. Even in its
softest form it means 10 years of disruption, inflation, higher interest rates
and an incalculable drain on the public purse. It disrupts the supply of cheap
labour; it threatens to leave the UK as an economy without a market.
But the British ruling elite and the business class are not
the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact
quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have
become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property
speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of
the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to
die-hard Brexiteers.
The hard Brexit path creates a permanent crisis, permanent
austerity and a permanent set of enemies – namely Brussels and social
democracy. It is the perfect petri dish for the fungus of financial speculation
to grow. But the British people saw through it. Corbyn’s advance was not simply
a result of energising the Labour vote. It was delivered by an alliance of
ex-Ukip voters, Greens, first-time voters and tactical voting by the liberal
centrist salariat.
The alliance was created in two stages. First, in a
carefully costed manifesto Corbyn illustrated, for the first time in 20 years,
how brilliant it would be for most people if austerity ended and government
ceased to do the work of the privatisers and the speculators. Then, in the
final week, he followed a tactic known in Spanish as la remontada – the
comeback. He stopped representing the party and started representing the
nation; he acted against stereotype – owning the foreign policy and security
issues that were supposed to harm him. Day by day he created an epic sense of
possibility.
The ideological results of this are more important than the
parliamentary arithmetic. Gramsci taught us that the ruling class does not
govern through the state. The state, Gramsci said, is just the final
strongpoint. To overthrow the power of the elite, you have to take trench after
trench laid down in their defence.
Last summer, during the second leadership contest, it became
clear that the forward trench of elite power runs through the middle of the
Labour party. The Labour right, trained during the cold war for such trench
warfare, fought bitterly to retain control, arguing that the elite would never
allow the party to rule with a radical left leadership and programme.
The moment the Labour manifesto was leaked, and support for
it took off, was the moment the Labour right’s trench was overrun. They
retreated to a second trench – not winning, with another leadership election to
follow – but that did not exactly go well either.
As to the third trench line – the tabloid press and its
broadcasting echo chamber – this too proved ineffectual. More than 12 million
people voted for a party stigmatised as “backing Britain’s enemies”, soft on
terror, with “blood on its hands”.
And Gramsci would have understood the reasons here, too.
When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony –
pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an
intellectual. Even if a man is treated as “trained gorilla” at work, outside
work “he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line
of moral conduct”. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks]
On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to
stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare
against the ideology of the ruling elite.
Eighty years on, the terms of the battle have changed.
Today, you do not need to come up from the mine, take a shower, walk home to a
slum and read the Daily Worker before you can start thinking. As I argued in
Postcapitalism, the 20th-century working class is being replaced as the main
actor – in both the economy and oppositional politics – by the networked
individual. People with weak ties to each other, and to institutions, but
possessing a strong footprint of individuality and rationalism and capacity to
act.
What we learned on Friday morning was how easily such
networked, educated people can see through bullshit. How easily they organise
themselves through tactical voting websites; how quickly they are prepared to
unite around a new set of basic values once someone enunciates them with
cheerfulness and goodwill, as Corbyn did.
The high Conservative vote, and some signal defeats for
Labour in the areas where working class xenophobia is entrenched, indicate this
will be a long, cultural war. A war of position, as Gramsci called it, not one
of manoeuvre.
But in that war, a battle has been won. The Tories decided
to use Brexit to smash up what’s left of the welfare state, and to recast
Britain as the global Singapore. They lost. They are retreating behind a human
shield of Orange bigots from Belfast.
The left’s next move must eschew hubris; it must reject the
illusion that with one lightning breakthrough we can envelop the defences of
the British ruling class and install a government of the radical left.
The first achievable goal is to force the Tories back to a
position of single-market engagement, under the jurisdiction of the European
court of justice, and cross-party institutions to guide the Brexit talks. But
the real prize is to force them to abandon austerity.
A Tory party forced to fight the next election on a programme
of higher taxes and increased spending, high wages and high public investment
would signal how rapidly Corbyn has changed the game. If it doesn’t happen; if
the Conservatives tie themselves to the global kleptocrats instead of the
interests of British business and the British people, then Corbyn is in Downing
Street.
Either way, the accepted common sense of 30 years is over.
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