Britain is facing weak minority rule

The Prime Minister was seeking a mandate on Brexit. She was denied.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The great gamble of Theresa May is reduced to ashes. The election she called to win a landslide has brought her to the brink of political defeat and personal demise. She survives by a thread, her authority ruined, with Britain facing the prospect of a minority, weak and unstable government.

Britain is now a deeply divided entity. It is convulsed at the precise moment it faces epic challenges over Brexit, Islamist terrorism and economic tribulation. This election delivers a difficult hung parliament when May was hoping for a big majority and strong government.

IN DEPTH: UK election 2017 full coverage

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This vote was about May — the entire focus of the Tory effort — and she failed. Rarely has any campaign mattered so much and the public, when it saw the real May, denied the mandate she craved. May will never recover and her weakness has empowered the most radical and populist Labour Party in memory.

The Conservative Party is reeling and in shock. It will sink into ­almost certain turmoil. Senior Tories predicted as the count continued that May had a 50-50 chance of surviving as leader for any extended period. Her backers say she has a duty to stay and stabilise her broken party — for the time being.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a marginalised protest politician for many decades, has staged one of the great disruptions and populist revolts in British history. Corbyn ran on the most left-wing agenda since World War II, and his success will shatter the Labour moderates who have detested him and shift the national political debate decisively to the left. In the end much of the public didn’t buy the Tory scare — that Corbyn was soft on terrorism, an agent of chaos, economically inept and weak on national security.

The result is a minority conservative government supported by the Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. May visited the Queen to advise on the new minority government.

While Corbyn has called on May to resign, he fell short of being able to form his own minority government. Corbyn is a winner by transforming the dismal expectations about himself through his benign uncle election persona.

This stunning election result is driven by a force similar to the Trumpian revolution that carried America last year. It reveals, again, the power of polarisation and populism. Corbyn went to the left, just as Donald Trump went to the right, both outside the orthodox norms and both exploiting the stagnant wages and living standards of many millions. While Trump and Corbyn are personality opposites, they mobilised disenchantment with the system and establishment figures such as Hillary Clinton and May, neither of whom had emotional rapport with much of their publics.

May called a campaign on Brexit but Corbyn made the campaign about austerity, pledging to govern for the many, not the few. The message is manifest: the public is sick of austerity and harsh budget measures.

This sentiment reached its zenith with the hostility towards May’s manifesto that had elderly people having to pay for their home care via the proceeds of their estate, branded the “dementia tax”.

This result compounds the Brexit challenge. It will weaken Britain and strengthen the EU in the negotiations, a dangerous shift in the power equation. It will embolden those politicians inside and outside the Tory party who want a soft Brexit. May’s pledge for a tough Brexit is undermined because this result sees the revolt of the “remainers” who lost last year’s referendum despite polling 48 per cent and have now struck back. May asked for a mandate on Brexit and she was denied. There is no mandate.

This election is riddled with paradox, irony and cruelty. May has lost her majority and authority but Corbyn has not won the election. The people have denied May the mandate she sought but refused to put Corbyn into Downing Street. May has seen her 17-seat majority disappear in an election she never needed to call.

Having moved to the left to appeal to the disadvantaged, May has been outfoxed by Corbyn, who embraced ultra-left populism and saw the Labour vote increase from 30 per cent to 40 per cent since the 2015 poll. Corbyn backs renationalisation, higher corporate taxes, higher taxes on the top 5 per cent of income earners, elimination of university tuition fees and a stack of new spending on the key social services, the National Health System and education.

If there is one message for Australian politics it is that Bill Shorten’s parallel populist strategy is affirmed. Corbyn also showed the age divide is now as vital as the class divide. Young voters champ­ioned Corbyn and Labour rewarded them in its policies. Early in the count Corbyn declared that “we have already changed the face of British politics”.

Having failed to vote in the Brexit referendum, where they backed the “remain” cause, this time young people turned out and delivered. In a repeat of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon from the US campaign, Corbyn won the youth vote with idealism, authenticity and historical amnesia.

May increased the Tory vote from 37 per cent to 43 per cent compared with the 2015 poll but this was part of a bigger trend — the return of two-party politics dominated by Tory and Labour — that hurt her. The collapse of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party vote did not fold neatly into the Conservative vote as its strategists assumed. More than a third went to Labour. In the end Labour was able to hold its seats in the north and midlands, thwarting May’s campaign to raid the white working-class vote.

Tory fantasies that May would use this election to establish an authority that resembled that of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair were exposed as hopes wrongly vested in a limited politician who had never led an election campaign before.

Commentators and politicians could scarcely believe the rapidity with which May’s huge 20-point lead evaporated. However, when the public saw her wooden, stubborn, control-freak mindset the tide ran out. May was utterly unpersuasive. Having called the election supposedly on Brexit, she had virtually nothing of substance to say about Brexit during the entire campaign.

Having seen the campaign marked by brutal acts of Islamist terrorism, May was unable to project Tory national security credentials against Labour.

Muslim Mayor of London Sadiq Khan turned the issue against May, attacking her cutting force reductions as home secretary, saying she should resign and warning: “Yes, we do have a problem, we should never have cut police numbers.”

While May’s “enough is enough” rhetoric signalled a determination to put citizen protection before human rights laws, the campaign revealed the politics around Islamist terror have become more complex and can backfire on a government when such attacks are carried out by extremists who have been under surveillance.

The scale of the task is frightening. After the Manchester attack M15 confirmed that 23,000 people had been identified as extremists, such a number defying thorough scrutiny with available resources. In truth, this election result shows something Australians grasp readily — neither May nor Corbyn can command this divided polity. The upshot is that May will struggle to survive long-term while Corbyn — or what might be called Corbynism — has been given the kiss of life.

British Labour today is unrecognisable from the party of Blair and Gordon Brown.

It has abandoned the middle ground for old-fashioned leftist ideology, massive vote buying, flawed socialism, the lurch to international pacifism and playing to an enthusiast base. Labour now enjoys a huge 500,000 plus membership and when the parliamentary party declared no confidence in Corbyn it was the base that rallied and saved him.

Corbyn is the authentic accidental leader whose history as protest movement politician nicely fits into the tenor of our times. The irony of this election is that Corbyn’s success is a false trail for ­Labour.

The moderates who wanted to eliminate Corbyn post-election having been thwarted. The party will now embrace a delusional euphoria that it is close to office and that Corbynism is its future. In the end, this is the best hope for a dispirited Tory party.

This vote, in fact, captures a cruel phase of history for the Conservative party. Having won the 2015 election David Cameron lost the Brexit referendum and lost his prime ministership. He was succeeded by May who, infatuated by Labour weakness, called an unnecessary election hoping for a landslide, only to lose her majority position and probably doom her own prime ministership.

Consider the record: two PMs fatally wounded in two successive years when facing a weak Labour leader. It is a lethal reflection on the Tories. If the Tories decide the loss of another PM is intolerable May will be forced into major changes in her cabinet, the abandonment of her secretive style and excessive reliance on her personal staff.

The result is guaranteed to trigger turmoil within the Conservatives over beliefs and tactics. May had embarked on a recasting of the Tory party towards state intervention, equity and a more moral-based community economics. In every sense it was the antithesis of Thatcherism. The Tory manifesto boasted: “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets” and “we reject the cult of selfish individualism”.

But the campaign saw the Tory press escalate its criticism over May’s policies and tactics. She faces a trifecta of woes — insurgents within the party, scepticism within the public and hostility within the media. Yet there is no obvious successor.

Going to press last night the Conservatives had 318 seats, just short of the 326 seats required for a majority in the 650-strong House of Commons. Providing they can secure the backing of the Northern Ireland-based Democratic Unionist Party, likely to have around 10 seats, they will have an extremely narrow majority.

The message from the Unionists last night is that they will seek concessions — the main concession being a soft Brexit, the first sign of the huge ground May will be forced to make.

Labour had 262 seats compared with its starting position of 229 seats, with Corbyn hailed a hero for his “honest politics, straight talking” style. The Scottish National Party lost a swag of seats in Scotland, further testifying to the risks of incumbency these days.

The moral from this election is that voters will punish incumbents, meet any arrogance or complacency with a voting backlash and reward those leaders with the ability to empathise with the public’s tribulations.

This is British democracy in action. But it has delivered a hung parliament, weak government, a confused Brexit situation and, perhaps, the possibility of another election not too far down the track if the parliament cannot deliver.