MAY CANNOT PROCEED WITH BLINKERS ON

Britain’s beleaguered prime minister must be looking enviously across the Channel at Emmanuel Macron sweeping France’s National Assembly election while she woos Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party and prepares for next week’s Brexit negotiations. Theresa May is determined to keep to the June 19 schedule for UK-European Union talks despite misgivings in Brussels and sniping by critics at home. But only the 10 DUP MPs can give her 318 Tory MPs the parliamentary strength to prove Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, wrong in predicting another election.

Insisting that it’s business as usual, Mrs May must have seen it as a direct challenge when the EU’s budget commissioner Guenther Oettinger responded to her weakened parliamentary position by saying it didn’t look as if negotiations could begin by the scheduled date. Arguing that in negotiations “a weaker partner weakens the whole thing”, Mr Oettinger told German radio that if both sides are strong, “you get results more quickly”. Warning that the EU would be “hard but fair” in its negotiations with Britain, he stressed that time was running out to reach an agreement which all 27 remaining European governments could approve within the prescribed two-year deadline.

Whatever the outcome, it was astute of Mr Oettinger to suggest that the British had not voted on the basis of Brexit, as some claim, but for “social justice and security”. That is something Mrs May seemingly refuses to recognise. Her jaunty public statements seem to imply that everything has turned out just as planned and that with the highest number of seats and share of the votes, she has won – not lost – her electoral gamble. Even her last pre-poll message to voters displayed no awareness of either the extent or the roots of British discontent. “If we get Brexit right, we can build a Britain that is more prosperous and more secure” she told voters, apparently quite oblivious of pressing domestic issues. She spoke of “a Britain in which prosperity and opportunity is shared by all” and “a Britain where it’s not where you come from or who your parents are that matter, but the talent you have and how hard you are prepared to work” as if both depended on Brexit. Although calling Britain “the greatest meritocracy in the world”, she revealed no awareness of how a feudal society had moved by way of the Industrial Revolution into the age of empire and transformed itself into the modern and model Welfare State that Clement Attlee ushered in after World War II.

There was none of that smug complacency in Labour’s rallying call, “For the Many, Not the Few.” The high turnout of almost 69 per cent – the highest since 1997 – may partly have been because the slogan resonated with voters, especially young men and women, who feel deprived. Many of those who braved the rains on election day to cast their vote have no personal experience of the Labour Party’s caring philosophy that owes much to the vision of Keir Hardie, one of the party’s founders 117 years ago. But they have suffered since Margaret Thatcher’s capitalist revolution became the driving creed of Tony Blair’s so-called New Labour. Free university education was stopped and subsidies for medical care, housing and social welfare drastically reduced.

The 43-page manifesto issued by Corbyn, who was dismissed as an old-fashioned international socialist, promised to restore many aspects of the dismantled Welfare State and nationalise former state undertakings like the railways, energy, buses and the Royal Mail. The delivery of letters is as erratic and uncertain in Britain as in Kolkata. The number of homeless people huddled in the doorways of British towns in the bitter winter cold was one indictment of Thatcher-Blair economics. Reckless privatisation produced chaos on the rails. When trains were cancelled half way through a journey, a wayside stationmaster explained that the Thatcher government had sold the trains and lines to one company and stations to another – whichever paid more – and they didn’t always coordinate activities. Instead of a caring society, Britain changed to a get-what-you-pay-for society. Corbyn also promised higher taxes for the rich as well as extra powers for the revenue authorities to chase individuals and companies who avoid tax. On immigration, too, Labour promised a more liberal and humane approach.

Obviously, this was not enough for Labour to win the polls. But it should be a source of hope and encouragement to democracies everywhere that the more than 12 million Britons who voted for the Labour Party led by a formerly despised and denigrated politician clearly yearn for the kinder gentler Britain of the pre-Thatcherite years. It also showed Mrs May, who lost the majority she inherited from David Cameron, isn’t trusted. Although she denied it, her manifesto did include some social welfare cuts. When Cameron was prime minister, she, like him, was in the Remain camp, but she quickly – and unapologetically – turned her coat when 52 per cent of the referendum favoured Brexit. She categorically denied any intention of calling a snap poll but did just that as soon as opinion polls gave her grounds for hoping she could improve her parliamentary majority.

The final touch was post-election. In a similar dilemma, Edward Heath lost no time in walking out of 10 Downing Street. In the best style of Indian politicians who never quit until death settles the issue, a snubbed and rejected Mrs May made it clear she has no intention of resigning. Since she commands the biggest number of seats in the House of Commons, Queen Elizabeth, the Head of State, had no option but to agree to her request to form another government. George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) she sacked, calls her “a dead woman walking.”

Mrs May has much on her plate. She must make a pact which is not anathema to liberal opinion in Britain with the rigid ultra-Protestant DUP. She must find a solution to the challenge of Northern Ireland’s land border with the Republic of Ireland so that EU migrants but not Irish travellers are kept out. She must find a way of staving off any revival of the demand for a referendum on Scottish independence. This is in addition to negotiating what is now called a “soft” exit from the EU instead of the “hard” exit that 52 per cent of Britain wanted according to the referendum on June 23, 2016 so that the penalties for leaving are balanced by the advantages of some agreements on migration, trade and investment. Once these are out of the way however, it would not be amiss for Mrs May to take note of the national mood as reflected in the election results, even as some of her colleagues are suspected of sharpening their knives to further their own career ambitions.

The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist

MAY’S jaunty public statements seem to imply that everything has turned out just as planned and that with the highest number of seats and share of the votes, she has won – not lost – her electoral gamble.