Parties spar in election that may settle Brexit — or not
LONDON — Finally, Britain’s political ice floes are moving. After three years of Brexit impasse, an election in six weeks may break the logjam. Or it may just rearrange the ice pack, keeping the United Kingdom trapped half in and half out of the European Union.
Official campaigning for the Dec. 12 poll hasn’t even started yet, but Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and opposition Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were already laying out their key arguments for a Brexitdominated election as they sparred Wednesday in the House of Commons.
Johnson claimed his leftwing rival would subject the country to endless “dither and delay” over its EU departure, while Corbyn accused Johnson of planning to slash employment rights and sell off chunks of Britain’s health service after Brexit.
The partisan peacocking came a day after the House of Commons approved an early election, 2½ years before Britain is next scheduled to go to the polls.
While Johnson’s Conservative Party has a wide lead in most opinion polls, analysts say the election is unpredictable because Brexit cuts across traditional party loyalties. For many voters, their identities as “leavers” or “remainers” are more important than party affiliation,
The Conservatives face a challenge for proBrexit voters from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which wants to leave the EU without any deal on future relations. The centrist Liberal Democrats, who want to cancel Brexit, are wooing proEU supporters from the Conservatives and Labor in Britain’s big cities and liberal university towns.
“The British electorate is more volatile than it has ever been,” said Anand Menon, director of the U.K. in a Changing Europe think tank. “Between 2010 and 2017, 49% of electors changed the party they voted for. So there is all of that uncertainly.”
All parties worry that that they could be hurt by voters’ Brexit fatigue. Britons are tired and grumpy as they face the third major electoral event in as many years, after the country’s 2016 EU membership referendum and a 2017 election called by Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May to try to boost the Conservatives’ majority and strengthen her hand in negotiations with the EU. Instead, the party ended up losing its majority in Parliament, and May failed to pass her plans for leaving the EU.