Election was a bid for bigger majority
THIS has been an unusual election campaign of dubious necessity, disrupted by two terrorist attacks that demonstrated once again that having good political intentions is not enough in this dangerous world.
People in Wales have now been to the polls five times in two years. Some would see this as a commendable testament to democracy in action, while others might see it as over-kill.
“Strong” and “stable” are not adjectives that spring immediately to mind when contemplating the future.
The campaign we have just lived through was based on a false premiss: that the Prime Minister needed a new mandate in order to conduct Brexit negotiations.
That wasn’t the case at all. Mrs May had a majority, and she had secured the vote to trigger Article 50 without any difficulty.
Everyone knows that the General Election was no more than an opportunistic exercise on her part designed to secure a bigger majority in advance of what are inevitably going to be tough negotiations with the EU get under way.
Despite a lot of empty rhetoric, we know no more about the Conservatives’ Brexit strategy than before the election was called. While the provision of strong leadership was the central theme of the Tory campaign, there has been a failure to set out in coherent terms what our negotiators are hoping to achieve, and how they hope to achieve it.
Given that coming out of the EU is the most important decision taken by the UK in a generation or more, it would have been good to hear more details.
While it was quickly described as “the Brexit election”, there has been a distinct reluctance to have a proper debate about what that means.
“Brexit means Brexit” is a fatuous slogan that means nothing. It fails completely to address the economic consequences of leaving the EU and the Single Market.
Apart from the Liberal Democrats – who have opportunistically tried to lure diehard Remain voters with the promise of a second referendum they know they will never be in a position to deliver – all the parties have to a large extent shied away from confronting this massive issue.
The fact is that last year’s Referendum campaign was the most highly charged political event most of our politicians have ever been involved with – and they have been spooked by it.
The old days of polite disagreement between people of differing views were consigned to history as the atmosphere became increasingly nasty.
Loyalties were stretched, with many voters who in the past had backed Labour switching to Ukip because they had been persuaded that migrants from other EU countries, or indeed from anywhere, were the root cause of their grievances.
When the mood has been so febrile, it’s understandable, if disappointing, that politicians of the left were reluctant to be as strong in their warnings about a hard Brexit as they might have been.