HER political career has been defined by caution. So it is cruel for Theresa May, and delicious for her enemies, that it may have been ended by one big, disastrous gamble. Eight weeks ago she called a snap election, risking her government for the chance to bank a bigger majority against an apparently shambolic Labour opposition. With the Conservatives 20 points ahead in the opinion polls, it looked like a one-way bet to a landslide and a renewed five-year term for her party. But there followed one of the most dramatic collapses in British political history. As we went to press in the early hours of June 9th, the Tories were on course to lose seats, and perhaps their majority.
The balance of forces in Parliament means that any number of outcomes is possible (see Britain section). But none of them will be the “strong and stable” government that Mrs May said the country needed when she called the vote. The talk back then was of a Conservative majority of over 100 MPs. The best case for the Tories today is a wafer-thin majority under a prime minister whose authority may never recover. Labour’s only hope of forming a government would be through a gravity-defying deal with other parties. Another election—Britain’s fourth national poll in little more than two years—may be on the way.
Whoever becomes prime minister will very soon have to grapple with three crises. First is the chronic instability that has taken hold of Britain’s politics, and which will be hard to suppress. This week’s poll reveals a divided country—between outward- and inward-looking voters, young and old, the cosmopolitan cities and the rest, nationalists and unionists.
The parties are in flux. Mrs May has led the Tories in a more statist, illiberal direction, with heavier regulations on firms and strict limits on immigration. Thatcherites, who stifled their criticism out of a sense of duty or ambition, will be sharpening their knives. Labour, which under Tony Blair found an accommodation with the market, has morphed back into a hard-left socialist party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn—who, in contrast to Mrs May, is now unassailable. South of the Scottish border, two-party politics is back, after the collapse of the UK Independence Party and a disappointing campaign by the Liberal Democrats. North of the border, the Scottish Nationalists, while still in charge, lost enough seats to cast doubt over a second independence referendum.
Second, the economy is heading for the rocks in a way that few have yet registered. Whereas in 2016 the economy defied the Brexit referendum to grow at the fastest pace in the G7, in the first quarter of this year it was the slowest. Unemployment is at its lowest in decades, but with inflation at a three-year high and rising, real wages are falling. Tax revenues and growth will suffer as inward investment falls and net migration of skilled Europeans tails off. Voters are blissfully unaware of the coming crunch. Just when they have signalled at the ballot box that they have had enough of austerity, they are about to face even harder times.
And third is the beginning, in just 11 days, of the most important negotiation Britain has attempted in peacetime. Brexit involves dismantling an economic and political arrangement that has been put together over half a century, linking Britain to the bloc to which it sends half its goods exports, from which come half its migrants, and which has helped to keep the peace in Europe and beyond.
Brexit’s complexity is on a scale that Britain’s political class has wilfully ignored. Quite apart from failing to spell out how to negotiate history’s trickiest-ever divorce, no politician has seriously answered the question of how the economic pain of Brexit will be shared. Less trade, lower growth and fewer migrants will mean higher taxes and lower public spending. Voters seem resigned to the fact that they were duped by promises of a Brexit dividend of more cash for the National Health Service. No one has prepared them for the scale of the hardship they will endure in its name.
Mrs May said that her reason for calling the election was to get a mandate to negotiate Brexit along the lines she set out in January: to leave the single market and to press ahead with cuts to immigration that no one considers feasible. During the campaign, she added nothing to her thin Brexit strategy beyond resurrecting the fatuous slogan that “no deal is better than a bad deal”.
Let us be clear: after this vote there is no mandate for such an approach. Only an enemy of the people would now try to ignore the election and press ahead regardless with the masochistic version of Brexit that Mrs May put to voters. There are not grounds to reverse the referendum result—though Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, warns that a new referendum may be coming. But the hard Brexit that Mrs May put at the centre of her campaign has been rejected. It must be rethought.
The centre can hold
What can come of this chaos? Britain is not the only country reeling from electoral shock. But whereas others were campaigned for by new leaders—Donald Trump in America, Emmanuel Macron in France—Britain’s rumbling revolt has left no one in charge. Mr Corbyn’s grip on Labour has been strengthened, but the party is far from winning a majority. The Tories remain the biggest party, but their leader is a busted flush and has no obvious successor. The Lib Dems remain tiny.
And yet it is just possible that something better may rise from the ashes. Last week we lent our backing to the Lib Dems in this election, not because we thought they would win, but because we identified a new gap in the radical centre of British politics that was being neglected. The election result suggests that voters, too, are not much convinced by the inward-looking bent of either Mrs May’s Conservatives or the hard-left factionalism of Mr Corbyn’s Labour. Our backing of the Lib Dems was a “down-payment” for the future. As the Tories ponder a new leader to replace the tragic Mrs May, that liberal future is once more in play.This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "A gamble gone wrong"
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