British have chosen a spectacular mess
The British election last Thursday has created another great political schemozzle in a relatively new century already rather crowded with them. For those amazed and troubled by the United Kingdom’s paroxysms over Brexit, the situation today and going forward will be even more topsy-turvy.
Like U.S. voters, the British have chosen a spectacular mess. They have elected a Conservative minority government that, in order to stay in power, will be entirely dependent on the whims of a largely Presbyterian political party from Northern Ireland. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is overly fond of Orange Order parades and has a narrow, socially conservative, reactionary world view on such issues as creationism, abortion and homosexuality. In the not-too-distant past it sometimes supported right-wing extremism.
More than anything, the DUP is full of ideas that the now much more outwardlooking, liberally minded British Conservative Party has spent the past 20 years trying to get away from.
The primary focus of Prime Minister Theresa May’s new government will not be on negotiating Brexit or the defence of homeland, let alone Europe, at a time of great global uncertainty. Having fantastically misfired by calling an election she did not win, May — like U.S. President Donald Trump — will be focused on her own political survival. To stay in power she will almost certainly have to indulge that old European curse of more social spending, which will put additional pressure on an already stretched treasury.
Just as the U.S. is fading fast internationally because of its navel-gazing, the United Kingdom will be so caught up in its own affairs that it will have little influence over anything else. Or, to paraphrase with a negative twist former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd’s famous line: Britain will no longer punch above its weight in Europe or anywhere else.
The only clear winners from the American and British elections are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. The Russian and Chinese dictators will have trouble containing their mirth or checking their ambition as the West keeps scoring what in soccer are called “own goals.”
May’s dilemma was brought into sharp focus this past weekend. Unable to conceal his delight, fellow Conservative and bitter rival, George Osborne — who is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) — sniped that May is “a dead woman walking” with the only question being “how long she remains on death row.”
With even greater uncertainty about Britain’s path out of the European Union and the consequences of that ill-considered move, and with the socialist hordes, personified by the highly unpredictable Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, baying at the gates, there is likely to be capital flight from Britain and more shocks for the beleaguered pound.
As in the United States, British politics is more polarized than ever with radically opposing views about the country’s future. Corbyn may be the media darling of the moment for keeping his powder dry while May selfdestructed on the campaign trail. But until very recently he was regarded as a crackpot and unelectable, even by many in his own party.
Corbyn is far more loudly anti-NATO than Trump ever has been and may be more smitten with Putin than the American president, too. Informing everything now is the fact that there is every chance that the maverick, Corbyn, could be Britain’s next prime minister in fresh elections that, depending upon how already fractious talks between May and the DUP turn out, could come as soon as this fall.
Corbyn the Destroyer would, if elected, kill the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet and its nuclear strike capability and likely throw the U.S. air force’s 48th Fighter Wing out of Britain after what has been a 75-year run for the Americans over there. Moreover, Corbyn is also stridently pro-Palestinian. That is something that sets him far apart from every other leading British and European politician going back decades.
Britain’s hung parliament will open up more fascinating opportunities for the rekindled German/French friendship that is being fashioned by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron.
Merkel’s strengths as a no-nonsense, no-drama, chancellor are well known. So is the titanic strength of the German economy when compared with every other EU country.
Macron is smart and cunning but an outsider patching together a new party that will face constant verbal attacks from France’s old parties and the elites and bloody terrorist attacks by homegrown Islamic extremists. He may soon fizzle for these reasons and because he inherits a moribund economy that is immensely hard to change because his compatriots are wedded to unsustainable state entitlements and caught up in racial and cultural frictions.
Still, France, like Germany, has already sensed Britain’s vulnerability over taxes, social spending and political instability. With Brexit negotiations that are either going to get dirty or be easy because Britain has such a weak hand it will be a pushover, France and Germany will now try even harder to get global financial corporations to quit London for Paris or Frankfurt. Such efforts can only create tensions and bad blood on both sides of the English Channel. Britain and the U.S. being transfixed and paralyzed by their bizarre political dramas can only abet Chinese and especially Russian efforts to divide and conquer.
By the time Britain has a sensible government again, it could be too late to repair the damage at home, in Europe and in the world that it wrought last week.