Observer editorial
Theresa May fought a deplorable
election campaign which has left her without authority or credibility
Saturday 10 June 2017 22.00 BST
How did it come to this? How could a politician hailed for
her courage and tactical acumen a year ago be spending this weekend holed up in
Downing Street, friendless and widely ridiculed, a prisoner of her furious
party and of events that have spun out of her control? How could someone who
just days ago was confidently preparing to fulfil her ambition to guide Britain
into its new role abroad and refashion its institutions at home be now
preparing for the humiliation of resignation from her post that must surely
happen soon? How could a prime minister who seemed imperious just weeks ago
when she set out to destroy Corbyn’s Labour be laid so low, the power draining
from her as her backbenchers and senior cabinet ministers make demands she is
too weak to resist? Whatever happened to “strong and stable”, parroted to the
point of banality by May and her senior colleagues throughout the campaign.
Whatever the position of Theresa May three days after the election, it is not
strong and it is not stable.
The prime minister presided over one of the worst election
campaigns in history. She squandered a 20-point poll lead and her parliamentary
majority. The contrast between the prime minister of last July and the prime
minister we saw on Friday could not have been starker. Then, she stood outside
Downing Street claiming to be a leader attuned to the people, who understood
the European referendum vote as a demand for a different sort of politics. The
day after the election, she was the leader we have come to know in recent
weeks: inflexible and wooden, unable to acknowledge her defeat, she came across
as deaf to the message that the nation had just delivered.
May called this election as a vote of confidence in her
vision. She expected to win a mandate for her hardline approach to Brexit and
her programme of austerity easily. Instead, she lost seats. She has no mandate
for either. The result should put paid to her ruinous claim that no deal with
Europe would be better than a bad deal. It should sound the death knell for the
public spending cuts she championed, despite the pain it has inflicted on
countless lives.
Despite a campaign pitch based on her leadership qualities,
May avoided media appearances, debates and contact with the public wherever she
could. Her message was framed not around a positive vision, but around vicious
personal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. She sought a mandate for her Brexit strategy
without providing any elucidation of what it would be.
Her campaign was memorable for its strategic errors on
domestic policy and she offered no answers to the big questions facing Britain,
including the plight of a younger generation locked out of the proceeds of
prosperity. Despite enacting changes to the tax and benefit system that leave
low-income families thousands of pounds a year worse off, she claimed to be
fighting their corner. Instead of bringing the country together after the
Brexit vote, she launched an attack on “citizens of nowhere”. There were enough
who saw her for what she is: disingenuous, dogmatic, unstrategic.
May lost her election gamble, but Jeremy Corbyn unexpectedly
played a critical role in denying her an outright victory. His campaign was
widely acknowledged as exceeding expectations in the run-up to the election,
but the result shows how successful it was. He confounded his critics to secure
the largest increase in the party’s vote share since the second world war to
take Labour to 40%.
Corbyn has done what many of his critics thought would be
impossible. He built on the enthusiasm inspired by his leadership election to
attract support from young voters far beyond his membership base, building them
into an electoral coalition with metropolitan voters and Labour’s core
working-class vote. His was a strategic campaign that blended a popular policy
platform with a pragmatic position on Brexit that enabled him to keep
Leave-supporting voters within the Labour fold. And he did this in the face of
an overwhelmingly hostile media climate and in spite of being vastly outspent by
the Conservatives. The rightwing press were skilfully outmanoeuvred by Labour’s
digital activists. Their increasingly hyperbolic front pages went unseen by the
under-30s and, counterintuitively, to those who did see them, they helped
create support for an besieged underdog. The Mail, for the first time in a
while, seemed out of touch with a seismic movement in politics. After a year of
bilious cant against Remainers and Corbyn, it was left firing analogue bullets
in a digital age.
It may be short of a win, but it remains a sensational
result for Labour and cements Corbyn’s position as leader of his party. He has
led Labour to a position where, if there were another general election later in
the year, victory looks far from impossible. He has responded to the growing
crisis that has beset our political institutions since the 2008 financial
crisis in a bold and imaginative way, engaging a new generation that had found
little inspiration in the existing political establishment. He has harnessed
the anger of the dispossessed as well as the energy and optimism of the young.
He successfully punctured some of the cynicism that has descended over British
politics.
But Thursday’s result leaves the most important question
unanswered. Who now has the authority to govern Britain? We stand on the brink
of the most important international negotiation since the Second World War, led
by a prime minister lacking in authority and political capital. May’s decision
to trigger article 50, and then call an election, was catastrophic. It is the
second time in two years a Conservative prime minister has risked Britain’s
national interest for personal political advantage and party management.
The two-year clock on a transitional deal continues to tick.
But our politics looks as though it will be gripped by paralysis in the weeks
to come. There now exists a majority of MPs in parliament in favour of a softer
approach to Brexit. But the erosion of her majority means May will undoubtedly
be held hostage by her party’s Eurosceptic right. It is impossible to see how
this can resolve itself.
This election result also adds instability to the union. The
SNP’s significant losses mean the Scottish independence question is settled for
now. But things look less assured in Northern Ireland, where the collapse of
power sharing has created a fraught situation.
This election saw the wipe out of the moderate unionist and
nationalist parties. Sinn Fein’s absence means only the hardline unionist DUP
will be represented in Westminster, leaving nationalist voters in the province
with no voice. As Jonathan Powell writes on these pages, any deal May strikes
with the DUP will overturn the convention that the British government is
neutral between unionists and nationalists. How could May claim neutrality if
her government is propped up by the DUP’s 10 MPs? In reaching out to them, May
is jeopardising the peace brought about by the Good Friday agreement.
One of May’s most prominent attacks on Labour was that a
vote for Corbyn was a vote for a coalition of chaos. There is a terrible irony
in the fact it is now May who will be forced to rely on an agreement with the
DUP in order to govern. Members of a party rooted in conservative Christianity,
the DUP’s MPs are some of the most reactionary, socially illiberal voices in
parliament. Anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion, the party counts creationists
and climate change deniers within its ranks. Any alliance with the DUP would be
at odds with efforts by Conservatives to shed their image as the nasty party.
May finds herself in an impossible position. She must
respond to the electorate’s rejection of austerity and hard Brexit. There are
moderates in her party who will demand it of her. But those to the right of her
will try to prevent her from doing so. This election result calls for a far
more open style of governing. There is a need to build a coalition in the
Commons for a Brexit deal that puts Britain’s economic prosperity first: the
obvious arrangement would be continued membership of the single market. Yvette
Cooper’s proposal for Brexit talks to be led by a cross-party commission with
the Brexit secretary at the helm deserves consideration.
Discredited, humiliated, diminished: May has lost
credibility and leverage in her party, her country and across Europe. Where
there was respect, there is ridicule; where there was strength, there is
weakness; where there was self-assurance, there is doubt. She looks too weak to
deliver her manifesto, too vulnerable to tackle dissent and too enfeebled to
lead Britain. It is impossible to see her having the influence, authority or
credibility to serve her country.
Who’s afraid of Jeremy Corbyn?
Me, that’s who. And all Americans who
fear for the future of the West.
By JAMES P.
RUBIN 6/10/17, 9:49 AM CET
Updated 6/10/17, 3:25 PM CET
LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May barely survived
Thursday’s election. The political damage is such that fewer and fewer
observers believe she will be able to serve out her full term. Politically, it
looks like Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was the big winner, as his party
surprised the pollsters and pundits (again) by gaining some 30 seats in
parliament rather than losing that many or more, as was expected when the
election campaign began.
With May now leading a less than stable minority government,
and Corbyn energized and lionized by his unexpected success across the country,
it is time to take seriously the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn—an old-school
socialist who opposes NATO’s very existence as a provocation to Russia and
regards U.S. foreign policy as a tool of corporate America—becoming prime
minister of the UK. It could happen if May is unable to keep things together
over the coming months—which also means examining the dynamic of a Donald Trump
and Jeremy Corbyn duo taking over that most celebrated of international
pairings, the U.S. UK “special relationship.”
One sure consequence of a Prime Minister Corbyn is that the
White House would have to consider France, not the UK, as the strongest and
most reliable U.S. ally in a crisis. Not only did the French election bring the
West a leader who espouses values like tolerance, integration and the rule of
law, but France’s President Emmanuel Macron is clear-eyed enough to recognize
the danger Russia’s territorial aggression, relentless hacking and election
sabotage pose to Europe and the world.
By contrast, Corbyn has argued that the West is to blame for
Russia’s behavior. According to Corbyn, it was NATO’s decision not to disband
after the fall of communism in 1989 and then its eastward expansion that
provoked the Kremlin. And therefore, the invasion of Crimea was an
understandable Russian response to these and other mistakes made by NATO.
Unfortunately, then for Trump, a long-time anglophile who
has talked with such delight about plans for a presidential sleep-over at
Buckingham Palace later this year, U.S. security interests will require
Washington to shun the Corbyn-led British in a crisis and adopt a new policy of
“France first.” Freedom fries, anyone?
Meanwhile, one can only imagine what the Kremlin would think
about a Prime Minister Corbyn. The damage already done to NATO’s credibility
and deterrence by Trump’s reluctance to reaffirm the core collective security
commitment in the NATO Treaty, Article V, is bad enough. But the damage to
NATO’s solidarity and cohesion posed by Corbyn leading Britain is beyond
Moscow’s imaginings. Russia has been working to drive wedges between key
members of the trans-Atlantic alliance since the height of the Cold War.
In Corbyn, Russia would have the ultimate “useful idiot” – a
leader of a top NATO government who genuinely believes the alliance should not
exist, who blames NATO for tensions with Russia, and who has said he would
never follow NATO’s strategy of nuclear deterrence. Kremlin operatives would
probably feel like they hit the “power ball” jackpot in a geopolitical lottery.
Labour’s more sensible officials have done their best to
moderate or mask Corbyn’s underlying attitudes in order to make him more
electable. The Labour manifesto on international affairs, for example, is vague
in the extreme, consisting mostly of a series of security questions a Labour
government would address. But Corbyn has been a public opponent of British and
American foreign policy for some 25 years, and so his record and his views are
impossible to hide.
Americans have almost no experience with political leaders
from the far left, like Corbyn, who have made a career of attacking U.S.
foreign policies time and again. The best analogy for Corbyn would be to those
U.S. opponents of the Vietnam War who traveled to Hanoi to denounce their own
country. In such a setting, Corbyn would probably be comfortable manning the
proverbial anti-aircraft gun. Over the years, whether talking about Hamas,
Hezbollah, North Korean dictators, or virulent anti-Semitic opponents of
Israel, he has always found a way to be supportive of America’s enemies and
critical of American policies.
Having debated Corbyn on and off over the last 20 years, I
have no doubt that his condemnation of U.S. policy is heartfelt. The problem is
that somehow for Corbyn, America is almost always in the wrong for the wrong
reasons. Whether it was the first Gulf war, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan or
Iraq, Corbyn not only questioned the effectiveness of U.S. policies—which was
perfectly legitimate and unfortunately often accurate—but he also ascribed
malign intent to them. Whether it was profit, or imperialist greed, for Corbyn,
America’s motives were always suspect. To debate Corbyn was to constantly fend
off labels like “corporate villain” or “war criminal.” It was rarely a
respectful difference of opinion about how best to achieve shared objectives in
a complicated world.
In all probability, there will never be a Corbyn government;
more likely, the Tories will muddle along. But as an American living here, it
is troubling to think how close he came.
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