Rivals trade blows on last day of campaign
Security dominates agenda
LONDON, June 7, (AP): Britain’s political leaders crisscrossed the country on the last day of the general election campaign Wednesday, with security dominating the agenda in the wake of the London Bridge attack.
The main contenders are battling over who will keep Britain safer from an ever-morphing terrorist threat.
Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to crack down on extremism if she wins Thursday’s vote — even if that means watering down human rights legislation.
Her main opponent, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, said the real danger comes from Conservative cuts to police budgets.
“We won’t defeat terrorists by ripping up our basic rights and our democracy,” Corbyn said.
May began the day with an early morning visit to Smithfield meat market in London, where she was heckled by some butchers shouting “vote Labour.”
She called the snap election in a bid to boost the Conservative majority in Parliament, which May says will strengthen Britain’s hand in divorce talks with the European Union.
“Get those negotiations wrong and the consequences will be dire,” she said.
Labour has had a better campaign than many expected, with opinion polls showing a narrowing of the gap between the party and the Conservatives. Corbyn, widely written off at the start of the campaign, has drawn thousands of people to upbeat rallies and energized young voters with his plans to boost public spending after years of Conservative austerity.
Corbyn planned to address six rallies in England, Scotland and Wales, ending in his north London constituency on Wednesday night.
He said Thursday’s vote offered a clear choice between “another five years of a Tory government, underfunding of services all across the UK ... or a Labour government that invests for all, all across Britain.”
Attacks in Manchester on May 22 and London on Saturday have put the threat from international terrorism at the center of the campaign.
Corbyn has criticized cuts to the police under the Conservatives, which saw the number of officers fall by almost 20,000 between 2010 and 2016.
The Tories, meanwhile, have increased their attacks on Corbyn’s security record. He opposed British military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, wants to scrap Britain’s nuclear arsenal and shared platforms with Irish republicans in the years when the IRA was setting off bombs in Britain.
Meanwhile, Scottish nationalists like to portray their nation as a progressive European outpost removed from right-wing politics, but Thursday’s general election could put that view to the test.
While the campaign battle elsewhere in Britain is largely between Conservative Theresa May’s rightwing hard Brexit stance and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leftist socialist agenda, things in Scotland look rather different.
Independence remains the defining issue — nearly three years after Scotland voted by 55 percent to remain a part of the United Kingdom.
The pro-independence Scottish National Party continues to dominate, despite being on the losing side in the 2014 referendum, and is pushing for a second independence vote, probably in spring 2019 — before Britain actually exits from the European Union.
In last June’s referendum on EU membership, Scottish voters by 62 percent chose to remain in the bloc. So SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has also proposed a “compromise” which would respect the results of both referendums and keep Scotland in the UK and in the EU.
This would grant Scotland a special status within the EU, enabling it to remain in the European single market even as the rest of Britain leaves.
“We know Theresa May doesn’t just want to take the UK out of the European Union, but she’s intent on pursuing an extreme Brexit that will take us out of the single market as well,” Sturgeon told AFP.
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The EU is steeling for a possible collapse of Brexit negotiations whoever wins Britain’s increasingly close general election this week, officials and analysts say.
While many in Brussels still bet on Prime Minister Theresa May’s return to power, despite a fading poll lead, the real focus is on British threats to walk out when the talks start.
European Union Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier says he is ready to begin immediately but has warned London of the risks of walking away without agreement on Britain’s departure.
“A big punch-up or blow-up is not unlikely” after Brexit negotiations formally start, an EU source told AFP on condition of anonymity. “A ‘no deal’ is possible — absolutely.” May and her Brexit minister David Davis have repeatedly warned that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, particularly when it comes to a 100-billion-euro exit bill that Brussels is demanding.
London is also still insisting on having talks on a future trade deal at the same time as negotiations on the actual divorce, something Brussels won’t allow.
The EU is eyeing June 19, 11 days after Thursday’s election, for the formal start of two years of tough talks, with informal contacts “soon” after the election result.
While Brussels is officially neutral about national elections, European sources say they want a “strong leader in London” who can negotiate backed by strong support from the British electorate.
While this might seem counterintuitive in an adversarial process, the idea is that if May, for example, increases her slim majority she would be less beholden to eurosceptics in her own party.
This, the reasoning goes, would make her able to make compromises on thorny issues such as the exit bill, and on safeguarding benefits and immigration rights of EU citizens living in Britain.
But the increasingly harsh tone on Brexit and the threats to walk away which have emerged during the election campaign have worried some in Brussels.
Frenchman Barnier insisted when EU states gave him his formal mandate on May 22 that quitting talks was “not my option, my option is to succeed.”
He strongly warned that if Britain does so he would “advise everyone to explain well what the consequences are”, not least for a future EU-British trade deal.