May’s landslide victory in ‘doubt’ after attack

‘Retreating from globalisation’

LONDON, May 28, (Agencies): British Prime Minister lead over the opposition Labour Party has narrowed sharply, according to opinion polls published since the Manchester attack, suggesting she might not win the landslide predicted just a month ago.

Four polls published on Saturday showed that May’s lead had contracted by a range of 2 to 6 percentage points, indicating the June 8 election could be much tighter than initially thought when she called the snap vote.

“Theresa May is certainly the overwhelming favourite to win but crucially we are in the territory now where how well she is going to win is uncertain,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told Reuters.

“She is no longer guaranteed to get the landslide majority that she was originally setting out to get,” said Curtice, a leading psephologist who is president of the British Polling Council.

May called the snap election in a bid to strengthen her hand in negotiations on Britain’s exit from the European Union, to win more time to deal with the impact of the divorce and to strengthen her grip on the Conservative Party.

But if she does not handsomely beat the 12-seat majority her predecessor David Cameron won in 2015, her electoral gamble will have failed and her authority could be undermined just as she enters formal Brexit negotiations.

Sterling on Friday suffered its steepest fall since January after a YouGov opinion poll showed the lead of May’s Conservatives over Labour was down to 5 percentage points.

May

Lead

An ICM poll for the Sun on Sunday showed May had maintained a 14-point lead, the only poll since the Manchester attack that has shown her lead unchanged.

When May stunned politicians and financial markets on April 18 with her call for a snap election, opinion polls suggested she could emulate Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 majority of 144 seats or even threaten Tony Blair’s 1997 Labour majority of 179 seats.

May is offering voters a retreat from globalisation in one of the most significant developments in recent British political history, former finance minister George Osborne said on Saturday.

Osborne, who was sacked by May as finance minister after the June 23 Brexit vote, criticised May’s plan to cut annual net migration to the tens of thousands and said her pre-election social care proposals were clearly badly thought through.

May rejected “untrammeled free markets” and promised to rein in corporate excesses in preelection pledges earlier this month. The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has pledged to nationalise water, mail and rail companies.

“Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are offering, in very different ways, a retreat from international liberalism and globalisation,” Osborne, who now edits the Evening Standard newspaper, told the BBC.

British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon on Sunday denied media reports of divisions in Prime Minister Theresa May’s team ahead of a June 8 election.

The Sunday Times reported that May’s team was riven by divisions with her joint chiefs of staff, Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, at loggerheads over an unpopular social care pledge which May was forced to back track on after her poll lead shrank.

When asked about reports of splits, Fallon told ITV: “You know this is Westminster tittle-tattle.”

Also:

Having voted for Labour, the Conservatives and then the eurosceptic UK Independence Party, voters in a faded seaside town are running out of places to turn in

upcoming general election. Since its golden age in the 1960s,

in the southeastern English county of has struggled to reinvent itself, a decline witnessed by 77-year-old

“There use to be lots of hotels in Clacton, but they are all bedsits now,” he told AFP on the terrace of a fast-food restaurant. The pier is “dead” in winter, he said, but “in the summer, you’ll find lots of eastern Europeans working there,” added the former delivery driver, who moved from 10 years ago.

Despite supporting Labour for most of his life, John went against party policy in the 2016 referendum, voting to leave the European Union, believing Britain “can do better on our own”.

The pensioner is typical of many of the town’s residents, according to head of communications for the wider district of Tendring.

Brawn explained that town has welcomed hundreds of pensioners who could no longer cope with the cost of living in the capital, an hour-and-a-half away by train.

“They bring with them the immigration issue; they felt it was a huge issue in London and they’ve still got that mentality.

“But it’s not such an issue here,” he added, pointing out that only four percent of the town’s population are immigrants.

He believes the perspective of immigration is why the town voted 69 percent in favour of Brexit, compared with 52 percent nationally. In 2014 the Clacton constituency elected

UKIP’s sole MP, who has since resigned from the party and will not stand in the June 8 vote.

“To be frank with you, minorities mostly won’t find a job here,” said Sri Lankan-born who opened his own grocery store after being unemployed for several months.

“They don’t want to waste their time in the place, that’s why you don’t find many minorities here.”

He said UKIP’s success in the area was down to the figure of Carswell, who defected to UKIP from the Conservatives, more than to anti-immigrant feeling.

“He is popular here, wherever he goes, it’s that simple,” Ramasamy told AFP.