You would think that the British would still be talking about another election gone wrong, as it has been only 10 days since June 8 developed into an unexpected disaster for Prime Minister Theresa May and the Conservative Party. But no, that news has almost totally been eclipsed (no pun intended) by something even rarer—the longest string of good, warm weather I have seen in the UK in many years. From my arrival last Tuesday to today (Sunday) I have hardly seen a cloud in the sky, and the weather is downright hot. As Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Well, politics will certainly regain its primacy as a conversational topic as the implications of this electoral surprise (to put it mildly) become starker in their possibilities; and the weather will inevitably return to the unreliability that has made the UK famous for millennia. But wouldn’t it be something if British politics become as unreliable as the weather usually is, for at that point the British world will seem to have turned upside down. Can we rely no longer on British weather to be so unreliable that visitors, who used to know they had to pack for all four seasons, will now have to guess which season will obtain? And can we no longer rely on British politics to be reliable and stable, allowing us to go about our shopping without hesitation? This new topsy-turvy world is hard to get used to.
Theresa May and the Tories wanted a larger majority to enable the Tory government drive a hard bargain in the Brexit negotiations, which start soon. They not only lost their majority, they lost the government as it will require a coalition now to form one. Their position in the negotiations is seriously weakened. They need a coalition partner to even form a government, and at present what seems the best of a bad lot and their most likely partner (at least the one the Tories are talking to) is the Democratic Union Party (DUP), a smallish very right wing Northern Ireland party that is still stuck in the 1970s on social issues like gay marriage. This will not be a coalition made in heaven; I would not expect it to last long as their needs on a Brexit negotiation package are starkly different—and then, where do the Tories go, to what coalition party can they turn which shares their hard-line Brexit policy view?
The Labour party, on the other hand, not only staved off demolition, but staged a miraculous resurrection. It had been thought to be on its last legs when the election was called by Mrs May (which may have been the primary reason she called the election: to drive a final stake through the heart of Labour which was predicted to be on the verge of marginalization with a totally inept leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who exuded very little visible charm for the average voter and whose philosophy sounded eerily similar to that of the bad old days of the 1960s and 70s when Labour governments led the UK into the arms of the IMF (the last and maybe the only so-called industrial country to ever need an IMF bailout). But the call for an election brought Corbyn to life like a zombie responding to the light of day, and he became, well maybe not charismatic, but at least likeable. And he struck many voters as honest, which struck them as unusual for a politician. So despite his 1960s-style redistributionist rhetoric, which they probably didn’t believe anyway, Labour voters returned in droves to their home party. Exit polls show also that his campaign, which emphasized issues of concern to the young—free tuition, job creation at the entry level, more and better programs for the dispossessed—brought a large wave of the millennial vote into the Labour camp. In all, Labour recorded the greatest gain from one election to the next since 1945.
Mr Corbyn deserves about half the credit for this, according to my British friends. The other half belongs to Mrs May, who proved that not only did she underestimate the ability of a Corbyn-led Labour Party to make a comeback, but she vastly over estimated her own ability to attract voters to Conservative ranks. In fact, she ran a miserable campaign, and did so poorly that there is serious threat that she will last as party leader and as Prime Minister. She seems not to believe in collegiality; the party election manifesto was written by a few of her advisors and not shown widely to party leaders, let alone the rank and file. It had, for example, a policy proposal to require the elderly to pay for their own care if suffering from dementia until their assets were run down to around 125,000 pounds. This was eagerly seized upon by the opposition as a “dementia tax.” Mrs May seemed unprepared for any political occasion that required extemporaneous thought. She skipped a TV debate of major party leaders, and is said to be very uncomfortable in any unscripted occasion, and in her campaign appearances she stuck to a few vague talking points emphasizing her strong leadership abilities, while proving the opposite in every such appearance. A post-election incident underlined this weakness: a serious fire in a tower block last Tuesday, the day I arrived, may have killed over 100 people (number of fatalities is nearing 80 and is not yet complete). Both Mrs May and Mr. Corbyn went to the scene to proffer condolences after it had been extinguished; Mr Corbyn spoke with both the fire crews to praise their work and many victims to give condolences or simply succor. Mrs May spoke with the fire crews to thank them but did not speak with any victims. I suspect she had no script for them.
So the UK has a hung Parliament. Basic governance goes on without respite. That is the way countries work. But political governance, viz. an agreed position on the strategy for Brexit, must await the formation of a coalition government. Will it be a hard Brexit, i.e. no single market, but an overall trade agreement with the EU, no immigration (except maybe for favoured groups or individuals), etc.? Will the DUP agree with this as this would imply a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which the DUP does not favour. Will it be a soft Brexit, which it seems Labour favors as it would be the best job creation policy, remaining in the single market, and paying the price with largely unrestricted immigration for EU countries, etc. It is doubtful that Mrs May could get her party to agree on this. Or will it be a no-agreement Brexit, that is one in which the UK leaves the EU with no agreement about anything, trade finance, immigration, etc. Finally, would this government be unable to agree on a position and would this force another election? Some anti-Brexiters evidently hope for this outcome as they think another election would lead to another referendum in the UK which might go the other way the next time. Evidently the polls show that the polity remains pretty evenly split on Brexit, but most people have moved on these days to assume it will happen. So it may be that the anti-Brexiters are whistling in the dark.
Instead of simplifying the Brexit issue, Mrs May has complicated it beyond belief or comprehension. The number of possible outcomes has expanded it probably beyond the capacity of mere politicians to understand the process let alone control it. What I don’t see here is a leader of any party who would have the strength of will as well as the vision to see this through to a conclusion that will serve the national interests of all the countries involved.
My first reaction to what I have learned about this election since my arrival five days ago was that I had merely escaped one political mess for another. But a closer look reveals much difference and a singular similarity. The differences are that the drive to escape the EU is historic in its meaning. I am not saying that Brexit will, by itself, shatter European and Transatlantic solidarity in and of itself, but that it must be handled in ways that do not weaken that solidarity and in the long run maybe even strengthen it. The US political crisis is not so structural or strategic in nature. It is whether our institutions, primarily our courts and Congress, can stop a Presidency which may be in collusion with our most dangerous enemy, and whether a President who has set himself above the law and the Constitution can be stopped and constrained by those same institutions. But the similarity is that the intemperate actions of politicians out of their depth in such historic contexts, actions driven as far as I can tell by pure political self-aggrandizement, have put Brexit on a path which may in the end be severely deleterious to the solidarity and harmony needed to get through the momentous challenges that face Europe in the next few years. And in the US the politically self-aggrandizing acts of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and the tribal inclinations of their respective parties may lead American democracy in the same destructive ways to the worst-case conclusions with respect to a Western Alliance that is already in serious trouble. The politicians are messing us up.
The author is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh
Well, politics will certainly regain its primacy as a conversational topic as the implications of this electoral surprise (to put it mildly) become starker in their possibilities; and the weather will inevitably return to the unreliability that has made the UK famous for millennia. But wouldn’t it be something if British politics become as unreliable as the weather usually is, for at that point the British world will seem to have turned upside down. Can we rely no longer on British weather to be so unreliable that visitors, who used to know they had to pack for all four seasons, will now have to guess which season will obtain? And can we no longer rely on British politics to be reliable and stable, allowing us to go about our shopping without hesitation? This new topsy-turvy world is hard to get used to.
Theresa May and the Tories wanted a larger majority to enable the Tory government drive a hard bargain in the Brexit negotiations, which start soon. They not only lost their majority, they lost the government as it will require a coalition now to form one. Their position in the negotiations is seriously weakened. They need a coalition partner to even form a government, and at present what seems the best of a bad lot and their most likely partner (at least the one the Tories are talking to) is the Democratic Union Party (DUP), a smallish very right wing Northern Ireland party that is still stuck in the 1970s on social issues like gay marriage. This will not be a coalition made in heaven; I would not expect it to last long as their needs on a Brexit negotiation package are starkly different—and then, where do the Tories go, to what coalition party can they turn which shares their hard-line Brexit policy view?
The Labour party, on the other hand, not only staved off demolition, but staged a miraculous resurrection. It had been thought to be on its last legs when the election was called by Mrs May (which may have been the primary reason she called the election: to drive a final stake through the heart of Labour which was predicted to be on the verge of marginalization with a totally inept leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who exuded very little visible charm for the average voter and whose philosophy sounded eerily similar to that of the bad old days of the 1960s and 70s when Labour governments led the UK into the arms of the IMF (the last and maybe the only so-called industrial country to ever need an IMF bailout). But the call for an election brought Corbyn to life like a zombie responding to the light of day, and he became, well maybe not charismatic, but at least likeable. And he struck many voters as honest, which struck them as unusual for a politician. So despite his 1960s-style redistributionist rhetoric, which they probably didn’t believe anyway, Labour voters returned in droves to their home party. Exit polls show also that his campaign, which emphasized issues of concern to the young—free tuition, job creation at the entry level, more and better programs for the dispossessed—brought a large wave of the millennial vote into the Labour camp. In all, Labour recorded the greatest gain from one election to the next since 1945.
Mr Corbyn deserves about half the credit for this, according to my British friends. The other half belongs to Mrs May, who proved that not only did she underestimate the ability of a Corbyn-led Labour Party to make a comeback, but she vastly over estimated her own ability to attract voters to Conservative ranks. In fact, she ran a miserable campaign, and did so poorly that there is serious threat that she will last as party leader and as Prime Minister. She seems not to believe in collegiality; the party election manifesto was written by a few of her advisors and not shown widely to party leaders, let alone the rank and file. It had, for example, a policy proposal to require the elderly to pay for their own care if suffering from dementia until their assets were run down to around 125,000 pounds. This was eagerly seized upon by the opposition as a “dementia tax.” Mrs May seemed unprepared for any political occasion that required extemporaneous thought. She skipped a TV debate of major party leaders, and is said to be very uncomfortable in any unscripted occasion, and in her campaign appearances she stuck to a few vague talking points emphasizing her strong leadership abilities, while proving the opposite in every such appearance. A post-election incident underlined this weakness: a serious fire in a tower block last Tuesday, the day I arrived, may have killed over 100 people (number of fatalities is nearing 80 and is not yet complete). Both Mrs May and Mr. Corbyn went to the scene to proffer condolences after it had been extinguished; Mr Corbyn spoke with both the fire crews to praise their work and many victims to give condolences or simply succor. Mrs May spoke with the fire crews to thank them but did not speak with any victims. I suspect she had no script for them.
So the UK has a hung Parliament. Basic governance goes on without respite. That is the way countries work. But political governance, viz. an agreed position on the strategy for Brexit, must await the formation of a coalition government. Will it be a hard Brexit, i.e. no single market, but an overall trade agreement with the EU, no immigration (except maybe for favoured groups or individuals), etc.? Will the DUP agree with this as this would imply a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which the DUP does not favour. Will it be a soft Brexit, which it seems Labour favors as it would be the best job creation policy, remaining in the single market, and paying the price with largely unrestricted immigration for EU countries, etc. It is doubtful that Mrs May could get her party to agree on this. Or will it be a no-agreement Brexit, that is one in which the UK leaves the EU with no agreement about anything, trade finance, immigration, etc. Finally, would this government be unable to agree on a position and would this force another election? Some anti-Brexiters evidently hope for this outcome as they think another election would lead to another referendum in the UK which might go the other way the next time. Evidently the polls show that the polity remains pretty evenly split on Brexit, but most people have moved on these days to assume it will happen. So it may be that the anti-Brexiters are whistling in the dark.
Instead of simplifying the Brexit issue, Mrs May has complicated it beyond belief or comprehension. The number of possible outcomes has expanded it probably beyond the capacity of mere politicians to understand the process let alone control it. What I don’t see here is a leader of any party who would have the strength of will as well as the vision to see this through to a conclusion that will serve the national interests of all the countries involved.
My first reaction to what I have learned about this election since my arrival five days ago was that I had merely escaped one political mess for another. But a closer look reveals much difference and a singular similarity. The differences are that the drive to escape the EU is historic in its meaning. I am not saying that Brexit will, by itself, shatter European and Transatlantic solidarity in and of itself, but that it must be handled in ways that do not weaken that solidarity and in the long run maybe even strengthen it. The US political crisis is not so structural or strategic in nature. It is whether our institutions, primarily our courts and Congress, can stop a Presidency which may be in collusion with our most dangerous enemy, and whether a President who has set himself above the law and the Constitution can be stopped and constrained by those same institutions. But the similarity is that the intemperate actions of politicians out of their depth in such historic contexts, actions driven as far as I can tell by pure political self-aggrandizement, have put Brexit on a path which may in the end be severely deleterious to the solidarity and harmony needed to get through the momentous challenges that face Europe in the next few years. And in the US the politically self-aggrandizing acts of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and the tribal inclinations of their respective parties may lead American democracy in the same destructive ways to the worst-case conclusions with respect to a Western Alliance that is already in serious trouble. The politicians are messing us up.
The author is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh