UK election 2017: Theresa May dumbly gives Corbyn a chance

Britain’s hung parliament epitomises the polarised nation after an election they didn’t have to have.

Yikes! The worst election campaign in the worst strategic decision — to call an election years before schedule — has robbed British Prime Minister Theresa May of her parliamentary majority and shot Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing Labour leader in British history, to within an ace of becoming prime minister.

Surely May is finished now as a long-term leader and the forthcoming Brexit negotiations are thrown into chaos and uncertainty, as is the whole project of government in Britain.

IN DEPTH: UK election 2017 full coverage

BLOG: How the day unfolded

This election shows we are in a new situation in the history of Western politics. Voters are dangerously volatile. Nothing is stable. Nothing lasts.

Donald Trump showed you can win from the hard right in the US. Jeremy Corbyn shows you can just about win from the extreme left in modern Britain.

The centre is dead. It offers politicians no rewards. Fierce, often semi-irrational, hyper-partisanism is rewarded.

Corbyn and Trump offer in essence the same political lesson: pander to and agitate your base on culture and identity issues, go as hard as you like on those issues, the harder the better, but the other half of the new formula for success is that at the same time you must offer all the voters you can more government money. Your base will be all fired up over the identity issues and the great unwashed in the middle will have eyes only for the transfer payments.

Forget the big picture. Forget a sensible overall political narrative. Forget responsibility. Above all forget the most basic lesson of modern economics, indeed of eternal economics: you cannot indefinitely spend more than you earn. Voters in affluent Western nations have no taste for that message.

In a night of many small tragedies nothing better illustrates this than the fate of the former Liberal Democratic Party leader Nick Clegg. In 2010 he was the surprise star of the leaders’ debate. “I agree with Nick,” chirped Gordon Brown and David Cameron both.

His party won nearly a quarter of the votes and nearly 60 seats and formed a coalition government with the Conservatives. Clegg implemented many Lib Dem policies but did what voters always say they want — he put nation ahead of party and compromised, allowing most of the Conservative program through.

As a result his party was thrashed in 2015, with most of its seats going to Cameron’s Conservatives and giving them their unexpected outright majority. In this election Clegg suffered the final humiliation. He lost his own seat. Though it had voted two-to-one to remain in the EU, his Sheffield constituency threw him in the dustbin, even though the Lib Dems were the only big party running on a clear pro-EU platform.

Seven years ago Clegg was the superstar set to reshape British politics. But in modern politics votes from seven years ago are about as relevant as campaign slogans from the 18th century.

As well as a night of many small tragedies, this election was a night of countless huge ironies.

May called the election to get a mandate for Brexit. In her constipated, ill-tempered campaign she tried to talk almost exclusively of Brexit. But Labour was not running against her on Brexit. Brexit was decided already. Corbyn talked about the National Health Service, pension rates, tuition fees for university students, civil servants’ pay. On all these issues the Conservatives said very little, and what they did say involved some modest retrenchment of benefits, and some version of austerity and restraint.

The electorate gave one giant, unified, Jerry Maguire response: SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

The Brexit result, like the whole election, was the absolute reverse of what May wanted: nobody talked about it and yet its opponents can claim a hard Brexit — or, as supporters call it, a clean Brexit — has been rejected.

May’s position in the complex, historic Brexit negotiations, or the position of whoever leads a minority Conservative government, is infinitely weakened. Instead of the strong message of the Brexit referendum result and a government with a small but stable majority, the British government will now be constantly hanging by a thread. A bad-tempered Tory or two can cause an instant crisis for the government by threatening to cross the floor, and the minor party that will keep them in office, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, will be a demanding and difficult partner that favours a complicated, soft Brexit.

The statistical oddity of this election is dizzying. The Conservatives seem to have won 318 seats in a parliament of 650, leaving them seven short of a bare majority. Another irony: they were saved by winning 13 seats in Scotland, their best result since 1983. They also barely scraped across the line in three London constituencies whose neighbours all went Labour (London was a disaster for the Conservatives) apparently because of a sizeable Jewish vote in those electorates. British Jews used to vote Labour. Corbyn’s ugly roll of anti-Semite gargoyle friends seems to have affected only this small corner of Britain.

Northern Ireland was one of the tragedies too. All seven Catholic seats went to Sinn Fein, with its ghastly terrorist past. This election saw the historic eclipse if not the outright death of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the admirable champions of Catholic civil rights, the brave nationalist constitutional party that represen­ted Ulster’s Catholics for decades.

On the Protestant side, the more moderate Ulster Unionists, who once dominated Ulster politics, lost their last seats: all the Protestant seats are now held by the more hardline DUP.

This sad and troubling result, which does not bode well for sustaining peace in Northern Ireland, oddly helps the Conservatives. Sinn Fein MPs refuse to take up their seats in Westminster, because they do not recognise the legitimacy of Westminster’s authority in Ulster. So if you deduct their seven MPs that leaves 643 in the House of Commons, which means the tiniest majority is afforded by 322, a tantalising three MPs more than the Tories won.

But no one can really govern with a majority of one. There is a much stronger tradition of MPs’ independence, crossing the floor and doing their own thing, in Westminster than there is in Canberra. So the DUP’s 10 MPs are critical. But the DUP is to the right of the Tories on issues of identity and constitutional unionism and general residual bigotry.

Like most regional and populist parties, it is actually to the left on economic issues and welfare. It wants higher pension rates. It wants a “frictionless” border with the Republic of Ireland, which sets a severe limit on any prime minister’s negotiating position in Brus­sels. Because Ulster is so integ­rated with the broader economy on the island of Ireland, the DUP wants a “softer” Brexit. And it always wants more government spending.

The DUP is a close right-wing cousin, in fact, of the left-wing Scottish National Party. The push for a second independence referendum in Scotland has had a big setback because of the SNP losing 21 seats.

But it’s easy to overstate the SNP’s loss. Last time it won 56 of 59 seats in Scotland. This time it won 35 out of 59, which would be considered a fantastic victory in any more normal context. Labour, having been almost extinct in Scotland, also won half a dozen new seats there.

The fact the Tories won so many more votes than Labour nationally conceals how evenly divided and polarised the British electorate is. The Conservatives won about 43 per cent of the vote nationally. They increased their national vote share by 6 per cent and lost more than a dozen seats.

Here is another minor tragedy of the election. The British electoral system contains a small but significant gerrymander. Scotland gets more seats than it deserves, the large variation in population numbers in seats across Britain hurts the Tories. May had legislation before the House of Commons that would have cut the number of seats to 600 and removed the gerrymander.

She didn’t bother pursuing that to finality partly because some of her own people didn’t like it, but mainly because she began the campaign with a 20-point lead and thought she would win a smashing victory on the old boundaries. As with every one of her tactical calculations, we can say in retrospect, though in truth nobody much said it at the time: Dumb Dumb Dumb.

Corbyn increased Labour’s vote share by a staggering 10 per cent. As Fraser Nelson of The Spectator points out, Corbyn did more to lift Labour’s vote than any Labour leader since the sainted Clement Attlee in 1945. This has many consequences. One of the most important is that Corbyn stays as leader and the hard left has captured the British Labour Party. Corbyn and his sandal-wearing storm troopers will poleaxe and purge the remaining Blairites in the Labour Party.

If you add to Labour’s vote the 3 per cent the Scottish Nationalists got and the nearly 2 per cent for the Greens, plus more than 1 per cent for the Welsh nationalists, Plaid Cymru, and the Sinn Fein vote, you get a hard left vote of nearly 50 per cent, for all these minor parties are to the left of the Labour Party, and under Corbyn the Labour Party has itself never been more Left.

The Conservatives have kept the centre-right vote more consolidated, though the collapse of the UK Independence Party vote was a big part of this election. It seems that a third or so of the UKIP vote did not come to the Tories but went back to Labour.

If you add UKIP’s remaining vote of 2 per cent, plus the Democratic Unionists, to the Tories’, you get a centre-right vote also not very far short of 50 per cent.

Even though this election saw a return to the two main parties — the first time for decades that both parties have got such high primary votes — the parliament is hung partly because the nation is so evenly divided.

May showed herself to be a dreadful campaigner. Her robotic repetition of the slogan “strong and stable leadership” did not cut through as a message but rather became irritating and ridiculous. Her social care policy was the election’s turning point: telling people their family home would have to be sold on their death to fund their social care in their frail old age frightened huge numbers of middle class voters without any notable pay-off with working-class voters.

May based her whole campaign on trying to steal working-class voters from Labour without understanding the most basic fact about them, that they yearn to become middle-class.

Margaret Thatcher seduced the working class by offering them the chance to buy the council houses they had always rented. Wage slaves could become property owners. May threatened what little property they had. Once again: Dumb Dumb Dumb.

She mistakenly thought she could get the working class on Brexit.

The performance of the opinion polls wasn’t so bad this time because they predicted every conceivable result. But those two other allegedly more reliable guides — the betting markets and the financial markets — got it dead wrong, showing themselves to be nothing more than exaggerated versions of conventional wisdom.

May is surely shot as any kind of long-term leader. If she goes soon she will be the second shortest serving prime minister in British history, exceeding only the justly forgotten Andrew Bonar Law, who was prime minister for five minutes in the early 1920s.

Where do the Conservatives look for their next leader? The once attractive Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, survives by a thread in her own electorate and was heavily identified with the campaign from hell.

David Davis, the Brexiteer who is heading the Brexit negotiations, looks competent and plausible. Boris Johnson remains the last of the Big Cats and he’s popular. But he had a king of political core meltdown right after winning the Brexit vote, when he looked like he didn’t know what he wanted from Brexit because he secretly never thought the referendum would pass.

Corbyn did so well because he didn’t lose his temper, he spoke in normal English, he radiated that most loathsome modern quality “authenticity” (a quality he shares with Trump), he pandered to every inner-city identity ideological excess, he promised everyone money and he didn’t apologise for his past but never really looked defensive about it.

What the Corbyn ascendancy ultimately means for Western politics generally is deeply unclear. May looked like a dissembling amateur when she reversed her social care policy and claimed there had been no change.

Dumb Dumb Dumb.