UK General Election

UK General Election

Having made readers of this blog suffer my ramblings on politics and Brexit I feel I should give an immediate (but only initial) reaction to the news that Theresa May has called a general election. The following are my initial thoughts, having had little time to think things through. They may sound a bit Machiavellian.

I think Theresa May is boxing very cleverly and worry that the opposition is not up to it. I don't believe the claimed reason for the general election is the real one. Theresa May has so far made no clear attempt to unify the country but she does care about parliamentary power, as do most politicians (other than Corbyn), and has worked out that she has a better chance of securing power now than she woud have in 2020 (when most of the downside of Brexit and none of any advantages, if any, would be visible). Corbyn is pro-Brexit. He thinks he'll get the support of the grunt Labour supporters that way and has said he wants a Brexit pro-jobs, workers' rights and public services. Nobody seems to have explained to him that there isn't such a thing. It's just more Alice In Wonderland. The government has now cleverly said that Parliament will have the final say on the eventual Brexit terms but the eventual Brexit terms are so far away (10 years?) as to be irrelevant. Although the Tories have a slim majority in Parliament now the polls show the Tories with a massive majority of support and Corbyn has effectively resigned from doing anything about that. One thing the election does is to allow the real issues to be aired but, since nobody knows for sure what will be negotiated, nobody can say what the outcome of these issues will be. The government can, and almost certainly will, promise everything, say that of course they will negotiate with the best interests of the British people at heart and afterwards simply say, «Sorry, we couldn't get the terms we wanted but we tried». Who can disprove that now?

I'm far from sure that the electorate is up to what it will take to break Brexit, or even ensure it is a soft one, which would be for every Remainer, and I mean every Remainer, to disbelieve whatever the government says and vote tactically to unseat theTory candidate in their constituency. The best feasible result in that case would be a hung Parliament and even then Corbyn could torpedo that if the Labour party doesn't manage to get rid of him beforehand.

My best guess now, and it is only a guess, is that Labour will lose a shed-load of seats, the Lib-Dems will make some gains but not enough to offset the Labour losses, and UKIP may gain a seat or two. The only really persuasive Remain argument for the electorate will be if it can definitely be shown that Brexit must be negative economically, an argument that can easily dismissed as scare stories as it was at the time of the referendum. The negative economic data is already evident but since the result of Brexit negotiations are unknown, who now can prove that those are not scare stories (even though evidence is mounting daily)? And nationalistic cries to «taking control» and «getting our country back» could well trump (Trump) them. Sad, but that is how I see it at the moment. Given the increased majority that the government wants and will probably get, it will proceed to a hard Brexit and the UK can say goodbye to public services, including the NHS. The opposition should then be a lot stronger but it will be too late. Thank you very much, Jeremy Corbyn.