Over the Christmas week, CapX is republishing its favourite pieces from the past year. This was first published on June 12.
Britain’s political commentariat didn’t see the Corbyn surge coming, didn’t understand how it could happen, didn’t believe it was real while it was happening, and insisted right up to the day of the election that even if Corbyn had lots of supporters, they wouldn’t turn out to vote for him.With the threat of a Corbyn government, the Tories must find a way to carry on for as long as possible, in the hope something turns up. If that means, for the next five years, running a minority government that does little more than pass a holding finance bill each year, with the rest of the Commons’ time spent debating drain repairs and motions congratulating the Queen of Bhutan on the birth of her latest child, that’ll be just fine.
To beat him, we will in due course need a different leader. Theresa May should not resign immediately. She became leader unopposed, and most of those folk now saying how terrible she was in the campaign were saying what a genius she was in the first week of it. She got 42.4 per cent of the vote – the same percentage as Thatcher in 1983. Her vote share barely changed in the polls during the campaign.
She failed to stop Corbyn’s vote from surging in a way we’ve never seen during an election campaign before, but it was not for lack of trying. The Conservatives went very negative trying to dissuade people from voting Labour. It just didn’t work.
We also need to better grasp the cosmetic impact for young people of policies such as those on EU citizens. In my experience, younger people could not understand any good reason for threatening to deport three million people and did not always have the historical perspective to be confident that wouldn’t really happen. They saw it as hateful and I suspect it was an important motivation to get out and vote.
Changing that now – by offering a political guarantee that whatever cut-off date is used for changing the rights of EU citizens, anyone here by June 23 2016 will be allowed to stay and work – could be a good start in trying to win them back.
Thus, we must not fight another general election until either the Labour Party has found a way to replace Corbyn (which I do not believe plausible) or we have a new leader and new programme that can attract voters under the age of 35 and beat him. Forget all your pet policy programmes for this Parliament. Brexit talks are about the only substantive thing we should do – because we now have no choice but to proceed – but we should not be optimistic that anyone (EU, US, Australia) will do a deal with us while a Corbyn government sits just around the corner. We cannot really make progress on Brexit until Corbyn is gone, but if we backtrack on Brexit that will make a Corbyn government even more likely. We need to tough it out and do what we can.
Clear the decks and strap in. It’s going to be a stomach-churning ride.
