May bemoans ‘coarsening’ of debate in parting shot
Prime Minister takes aim at Johnson and Trump as Chancellor goes to war with Brexiteer Rees-mogg
THERESA MAY yesterday fired a parting shot at politicians who make promises they “cannot keep” and tell people what they want to hear.
In her final lengthy speech as Prime Minister, she also warned against the spread of “absolutism” and populism in British and global politics. She said there had been a “coarsening” of debate that could take the UK to a “much darker place” and breed a political culture based on “winners and losers”.
While Mrs May insisted her comments were a “general observation”, they will be seen as criticism aimed at Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
She told an event at the Chatham House think tank in London: “An inability to combine principles with pragmatism and make a compromise when required seems to have driven our whole political discourse down the wrong path. It has led to what is, in effect, a form of absolutism, one which believes that if you simply assert your view loud enough and long enough, you will get your way in the end, or that mobilising your own faction is more important than bringing others with you. This is coarsening our public debate.”
Mrs May said: “This absolutism is not confined to British politics. It festers in politics all across the world. We see it in the increasingly adversarial nature of international relations, which some view as a zero-sum game where one country can only gain if others lose.”
She said the only way to resolve the “Brexit impasse” was to deliver on the referendum result, insisting there was “no greater regret for me than that I could not do so” and advised her successor to try to secure a Brexit deal and find a way to leave the European Union that was “in the national interest”.
She said: “I think we had a good deal, but Parliament wasn’t willing to come behind that with a majority.” Mrs May also defended the Irish backstop, the most divisive part of her Brexit deal.
It came as Philip Hammond engaged in open warfare with Brexiteers in his party as he said it was “terrifying” that Jacob Rees-mogg could be close to government under Mr Johnson.
The Chancellor criticised a column by Mr Rees-mogg in The Daily Telegraph, in which the Brexiteer described Mr Hammond’s warnings
‘It has led to an absolutism which believes that if you assert your view loud enough, you’ll get your way’
that no-deal could cost £90billion as “negative” and “silly”.
Mr Hammond said: “Happy to debate scale of negative impact of nodeal on the economy, but terrifying that someone this close to a potential future government can think we’d be better off by adding barriers to access to our largest market.”
Stephen Barclay, the Brexit Secretary, said that Mr Hammond had been quoting “selectively” from Treasury figures to bolster his arguments.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “The Chancellor has, on a number of occasions, pointed to some research from last year which was modelling Chequers-type agreements against a no-deal scenario.
“They were published by the Government, but they are a specific comparison between the Chequers-type model of a future partnership, not a comment on no-deal in general.”