MAY-DAY, MAY-DAY!
The Labour party made significant gains on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives Thursday during the British election. The Conservatives were poised to lose their majority, bringing political upheaval to the country on the verge of Brexit.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s gamble in calling an early election has backfired spectacularly with her Conservative Party losing its majority in parliament.
The result could lead to a period of political uncertainty and throw Britain’s negotiations to leave the European Union into disarray.
With 640 of 650 seats counted, the Conservatives have won 312 seats in Parliament, down from 330, while the Labour Party has taken 259, up from 229.
As the results piled up, some form of minority or coalition government appeared increasingly likely.
“The prime minister called this election because she wanted a mandate,” said the opposition Labour Party’s left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn after winning reelection. “The mandate she’s got is lost votes, lost Conservatives seats, lost confidence.”
Corbyn then said May should resign.
When May called the election it was supposed to be a defining moment, uniting a confident nation behind their leader before she negotiates a deal to leave the European Union.
Instead, the campaign exposed a very different Britain.
The disunited kingdom on display is divided among English and Scottish nationalists, young and old, migrants and natives, London and the rest, and is deeply unsure of its political and economic future. It’s also enduring a terrorist campaign of a frequency and scale not seen for decades, with two attacks in London, a deadlier one in Manchester and five foiled plots in less than three months.
The country agrees on little while facing an unprecedented array of hard choices. From trade, tax and debt to immigration and security policy, they come with the U.K. adrift between an estranged EU and unpredictable U.S.
“The country is facing an existential challenge of the kind it faced in 1940,” when confidence collapsed in the government to lead the nation in World War II and Winston Churchill took over, said Hugh Pemberton, a historian of contemporary Britain at Bristol University. “And yet it is busy pretending that challenge does not exist.”
May, 60, declared the core issue of the election to be picking a team and vision to negotiate Brexit, a process due to begin this month. Yet neither her Conservatives nor the Labour Party have said anything of substance about it.
Not only have the ranks of both parties been divided over Europe since before Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, said Pemberton, but “it’s in neither of their interests to reveal that they fundamentally don’t know what to do.”
One of the top issues has been how to fund the staterun National Health Service. That institution, once referred to by a Conservative grandee as the closest thing the English have to a religion, faces an estimated 30 billionpound ($52 billion) deficit.
Terrorism and the cost of living have also risen to the top of the agenda. In a vast manifesto, Corbyn pledged re-distributive economic policies that hark back to the 1970s, taxing the better off to spend liberally on students and others who lost out from the years of austerity measures that followed the financial crisis. Pensioners, who tend to vote — and vote Tory — were protected.
May’s big misstep of the campaign came when she tried to address the growing wealth divide between the generations.
She threatened her most loyal supporters, the elderly, with losing their homes to pay for long-term care rather than burden younger tax payers. Branded the “dementia tax” by opponents, Corbyn responded by saying that May’s “only offer to pensioners is insecurity and cuts.”
After leading the G7 economies in growth last year, the U.K. was at the bottom of the pile in the first quarter of 2017.
“The outlook for the U.K. economy is dire, and the election is unlikely to change that meaningfully,” begins a June 1 research note from Fathom in London. “Brexit in our view will just weigh further on the economy,” said Joanna Davies, a senior economist at the consultancy firm.
Of course, economists and historians have in the past proved poor soothsayers. The U.K. economy survived the decision to leave the EU better than most expected, including the Bank of England.