Humiliating Victory

The results of the British General Elections are out. These are being interpreted in the media as a disaster for the ruling Conservative party, and victory (of sorts) for the opposition Labour Party. Everyone is taking a great pleasure in the humiliation of Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative party and prime-minister, who ran (an ineffective) presidential style campaign.

As the exit polls predicted a hung parliament, pundits lined up to explain why this had happened: the Conservative party, which started the election campaign twenty points ahead of Labour, failed to win a clear victory, which its leader, Theresa May, wanted. Theresa May has now jumped into bed with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, a party, if truth be told, no one outside of Northern Ireland had heard of until now, with more eagerness and speed than my neighbour displays when getting up from the chair to collect her burger in the local McDonald. DUP is a party, it can be revealed, that wants to bring back death penalty, and wants all the rights and privileges of LGBT community removed; it is a party that is rabidly anti-abortion, and consists of senior members who insist that the world was created by God in seven days and climate change is a cruel hoax perpetrated by the devil-worshippers. In other words a party of crackpots.

The consensus seemed to be that the blame of this disaster for the Conservatives should be laid at the door of the Prime Minister, in particular the way in which she ran the campaign, focusing on the personal styles of the two leaders. You have got to say that the strategy, in principle, was sound. The reputation of the Labour leader, Jeremey Corbyn, for the best part of the two years, since he surprised everyone (and shocked himself) by becoming Labour’s leader, was lower than crocodile’s piss. Everyone, including many Labour MPs, feared that the Labour faced a wipe-out in the general election. In many newspapers Corbyn had become a figure of either ridicule or pity or both. By contrast the personal rating of Theresa May was 5-6 times that of Corbyn’s at the start of the campaign. It was also logical that, with the difficult Brexit negotiations looming, whoever is the prime-minister of the country, could have done with a solid mandate.

It is therefore remarkable that May managed to squander her near-unassailable lead in just seven weeks, and has ended up short of outright majority, albeit by a whisker.

The problem for the Tories was that Theresa May was simply not very good at projecting herself as the strong and stable leader she clearly believes she is. She seemed to lack the warmth and the necessary interpersonal and communication skills. Whenever the interviewer asked May a question she did not like, her eyes would narrow and the corners of her mouth would be set, as if what the interviewer had said deserved nothing other than a sound thrashing. In the few interviews and question-answer sessions which she did, May mostly came across as wooden and not spontaneous. Her answers to most of the questions were couched in generalities and did not really address the questions. For example, when Andrew Neil asked her in the BBC interview, to explain how her party was going to find the eight billion pounds the Conservatives promised for the NHS, May’s answer (delivered in a regal and majestic tone) was that the Tories had a long and proven record of managing the economy well and providing strong and stable leadership. Under these very favourable circumstances it was inevitable that the economy was going to prosper and everything was going to be hunky-dory. That is as maybe, the answer failed to provide any clue to the listener how the NHS was going to receive extra funding. May did this repeatedly: she was reluctant (or unable) to go into specifics. When pressed she would appear peeved and snap back that it was all spelled out in the spring budget of 2017, which, in case the interviewer had failed to register, was presented by the Conservative party (of which she was a strong and stable leader). It gave the impression that the woman was evasive at best and mendacious at worst. Grandpa Corbyn, in contrast, went round with his manifesto and a calculator, and strived to give account (to the last penny) of how the Labour was going to keep the tall promises they had given to everyone except the rich (who are obviously enemies of the proletariat and ought to disappear in the sugarcane fields, as they did in Cuba, ran by the Communist dictator Castro for decades, of whom grandpa is a long-standing admirer). Corbyn as well as his close colleague, Diane Abott, the shadow home secretary, stumbled more than once while answering questions related to financing the myriad manifesto promises of Labour (which anyone with two brain-cells could see they would not have been able to keep). The unconvincing performances made them, Abott in particular, objects of ridicule; however, since May’s performance was not great either, the Conservatives could not capitalise on the Labour weakness. During the only question-answer session May condescended to appear in, she made jokey, if slightly snide, references to Abott’s inability to count (three times, if I remember correctly, in case the audience had missed the joke the first two times), refusing at the same time to give any details of her plans. Poor Abott appeared to be severely arithmetically challenged. She withdrew (or was ordered to withdraw by the Labour party high-command) from front-line interviews after she struggled to answer questions, which, she, in her role as the shadow home secretary, ought to have anticipated. Apparently she has a long term medical condition. What could it be? Developmental Disorder is my guess—inability to calculate, and marshal such cognitive resources as she has to answering questions put by the interviewers. This ought to have been picked up in her childhood and she should have received appropriate help—another glaring failure of the NHS, if you ask me, no doubt the result of the underfunding of the NHS in the 1980s by the Tories.

Halfway through the campaign it became clear that May was struggling to project herself as the strong and stable leader, and—shock! Horror!—Grandpa, unbelievably, was coming across as more relaxed, confident, comfortable, and having some sense of humour. However, there was no observable change of course: he campaign continued to be all about herself, even though it was becoming clear that there was not much of it. The hasty retreats on some of manifesto promises did not help Brand Theresa as the stable and resolute leader.

It is also interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that the election, which was supposed to be all about Brexit, we didn’t really hear much about Brexit from either of the party leaders. May refused to say anything beyond her strong and stable mantra and repeating the meaningless slogan ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’. Corbyn focused more on issues such as giving money the country didn’t have to increase the wages of the nurses and abolishing tuition fees (even though evidence suggests that the number of university placements have increased in the last few years), nationalising industries, and pouring money into public services by taxing corporations and the rich. On the rare occasions when Grandpa could be bothered to talk about Brexit, his answers suggested that he had failed to grasp the enormity and complexity of Brexit (he confirmed that we would be out of the single market and free movement of people across the EU nations would end; but also blithely promised that under Labour there would be a tariff-free access to the EU markets, not bothering to give any idea—probably because he did not have any— as to how this was going to happen). This is a major worry. The leaders of Britain’s two major political parties seemed incapable of coming to grips with the complexities and scale of Brexit. In particular, neither seemed interested in answering how the likely economic impact of Brexit (about which the previous chancellor, George Osborne, whom May sacked unceremoniously within an hour of entering Downing Street last year, was repeatedly warning about) would be tackled. The lying Brexiter brigade during last year’s referendum had dismissed Osborne’s warning as Project Fear. Project Fear is about to become Project reality. Britain’s growth in the first quarter of 2017 was the slowest amongst the seven richest countries. Inflation is on the rise (at its three-year highest) and real-term wages of people are falling. During the election campaign Labour made much of the austerity programme of the Tories, and benefitted from the public’s anger about it. Guess what, austerity is not going to go away: the government revenues will fall in the coming years because of the slowing of the economic growth, and harder times are to follow. The UK’s decision to leave the EU was calamitous, and things are going to get much worse in the coming years, unless some common sense emerges in the Brexit negotiations. We cannot afford to go down the route of the kind of Brexit May wants to press ahead without inflicting serious damage on the economy. For that reason alone it is a good thing that May did not get the mandate she was demanding. One hopes that the Thatcherite MPs in the Conservative party will feel embolden by the result to steer the country away from the cliff-edge towards which May seemed determined to drag us.

The election results are without doubt personal humiliation, slap-in-the-face, whatever you want to say, for Theresa May. However, in the cold light of the day, despite May’s disastrous campaign, the Conservatives are still the preferred party of the British people. What has happened is that the British public has once again (almost for the third time in a row, if you discount Cameron’s slim majority in the 2015 election) has not given any one party a clear mandate. The position of the Tories is roughly the same as it was in 2015 and slightly better than it was in 2010. True, May has lost the majority that Cameron managed to get in 2015; but Cameron’s majority was wafer-thin—just 5 seats. The Tories have lost that majority, but not by a massive margin: they fell eight short of majority. May will probably go in the next few months. I can’t see her lasting given the regicidal tendencies of the Tories. They will do it with stealth, though. There won’t be any of the ungracious squabbling that we witnessed in the parliamentary Labour Party when the launched an ineffective coup against Corbyn who, they were convinced, was toxic.

In this general election there was a clear choice between the Labour manifesto and the Tory manifesto. And the Labour was comprehensively defeated in the election. Hardly a ringing endorsement of Corbyn and his hard-left policies.

The clear verdict of the British public has not stopped Grandpa from strutting about as if he has conquered the world. Anyone watching the jubilation and celebration of the Labour leader would have believed that Labour had won the election with a thumping majority. Like a plumped up raisin Grandpa is exuding vanity and smugness in equal measures, and is asking Theresa May to resign (even though her party won loads more seats than his), which is a bit rich coming from him given his track record. This is no doubt because the Labour has done better than expected. Everybody thought Corbyn was useless and Labour was staring into abyss. That has not happened, although the results also do not establish beyond reasonable doubt that Corbyn and his second rate cronies like John McDonnell—who have zero experience of running anything except their own mouths—are not useless.

This is now the third general election the Labour have lost in a row. And comprehensively. In spite of the allegedly popular policies of Labour under Corbyn (a socialist utopia where everyone has rights and no one has responsibilities, except when you are a productive member of the society and earning money), Labour fell 64 seats short of majority and are comfortably behind the Tories at this stage, in terms of parliamentary strength.

The tetchy Shami Chakraborty, the shadow Attorney General of Grandpa, made the risible claim in the BBC question time that Grandpa had actually won (maybe she also has a chronic condition, which makes her stare at truth and ask, “Do I know you?”) and was thoroughly booed by the studio audience. It was amusing to see Alistair Campbell, the much reviled press secretary of the allegedly discredited Blair, coming to her rescue. How Chakraborty must have hated it.

There is now the inevitable optimistic nonsense spouted by the tiresome lefties, in the Guardian, of how this is going to be the beginning of sort of quiet revolution, and how, in the next general election, especially if it is held in the next few months, Grandpa will stomp to power. It was left to Chris Leslie, the former shadow chancellor, an arch Blairite and a trenchant critic of Corbyn, to point out (it had to be done) that, for all the euphoria of the Corbyn cheerleaders, it was the Tories who were going to form the next government.

So the big achievement of Corbyn is that he lost as heavily as Gordon Brown did in 2010; and Brown, remember, after that defeat, resigned. Labour are in such a sorry state and the expectations were so low at the start of the campaign that falling short of majority by 64 seats is being touted as a victory. Corbyn might have silenced his (I suspect still plentiful) critics in the parliamentary Labour party (for now), but Labour are still not anywhere within sniffing distance of forming a government on its own. Corbyn is now talking nonsense about bringing down the Queen’s speech and forming agovernment, apparently because he believes he has got the mandate to deal with the issues of poverty and inequality in Britain, and he is determined to endausterity. I can’t understand How Corbyn can claim that he has a mandate when his party was comprehensively defeated in the election. In the unlikely event of Corbyn forming a minority government (he and McDonnell have already declared that Labour would do no deals), he would face serious obstacles in pushing through his agenda (which would not be a bad thing, seeing as his policies will bankrupt the country), and, whatever might be the qualities of this aging crypto-Communist, they do not regrettably include being inclusive and tolerant of views that are different from his, which is just one of the many reasons why he is completely unsuitable to be the prime-minister.

I doubt very much that the general election marks of something new and exciting in the British politics, as the Corbynistas (a term coined by British newspapers to describe the noisy and often obnoxious supporters of Corbyn, such as the Trotskyist Momentum) seem to have deluded themselves into believing. Grandpa Corbyn is mediocre at best and is simply not a prime-ministerial material. He will not be prime-minister. Ever. The Blair era might have ended in the Labour in this election, and the grip of hard-left on Labour might have become stronger; however that may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Labour will not win another general election unless they reclaim the centre ground in the British politics.

British General Election 2017

The British general elections will be held in eight days, and we shall know who would be Britain’s next prime-minister.

Theresa May called the snap general election in April 2017, after insisting repeatedly for several months that she would not call a general election until 2020 because, it would, you see, not good for the country’s stability, until she had the epiphany—while on a walk in Snowdonia—that in fact a snap general election was exactly what the doctor advised to bolster country’s stability. It also happened to be the case that April 2017 was also the month in which May's Conservative Party was declared to be twenty-five points (or some such ridiculous margin) ahead of the main opposition Labour Party by the pollsters (the same pollsters who were predicting a ten point lead for the remain campaign over the leave campaign in the last year’s British referendum about Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU)).

When Auntie Theresa called the election, everyone was predicting a landslide victory for the Tories over the Labour; and with good reason. Labour, increasingly resembling a lame-duck party, with its hopeless (and hapless) leader Jeremy Corbyn, surrounded by left-wing zealots who have been plotting a left-wing revolution for the last three decades, cocooned in a world rarely penetrated by reality, had seemed incapable of providing effective opposition. In the two years since the its last general election defeat in 2015, Labour had not so much been a political party but a battle ground between the rival factions within the party. Corbyn spent so much time fighting against his own MPs, who (probably not without reason) formed the view that the chances Labour winning a general election under the leadership of Corbyn—who, until his surprise elevation to the leadership of the Labour party, had spent his entire political life on the back-benches, carping against Blair and Brown and Miliband, when he was not going on protest marches or embracing the leaders of Hamas and IRA—were less than Donald Trump sending a sensible (or even comprehensible) tweet, that he was unable to—incapable of, in the eyes of some—providing a semi-effective parliamentary opposition.

However, as they say, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

Grandpa Corbyn, the aging revolutionary, has proved to be a bit of a surprise. No doubt having been tutored (albeit inadvertently) by the hostile opposition within his own party in the two years leading to this election, as well as his inherently pachydermic skin, Corbyn, during the election campaign, has come across as relaxed and sure of himself in the face of hostile questions and interviews. Theresa May, by contrast, has shown herself to be thin-skinned, petulant, panicky, evasive, and—dare I say it?—unsure of herself. Not exactly the strong and stable leader she has been ordering the British public to believe she is.

I know crazier things have happened (look who is in the White House), but, as the election day looms, there is now a possibility that it might not after all be a smooth sailing for the Tories, and Auntie, much to her irritation, might not get the brutal majority, which she obviously thinks is her God-given right.

If May does not get the landslide win she thought was within her grasp just a couple of months back, she has only herself to blame.

Theresa May’s strategy seems to be as follows: repeat the same thing over and over again and hope that people would be bored into believing it: I am strong and stable leader; only the Conservatives will ensure a growing economy; only the strong and stable leader will negotiate robustly with the EU bureaucrats who are hell-bent on punishing Britain, yada, yada, yada (or yawn, yawn, yawn). May seems to think that she is immune to the requirement of providing any evidence to support her claims. To paraphrase Orwell, it is a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again (and it is not as if she has anything nice to say; it is just hate, hate, hate—be it Corbyn or immigrants; let’s get-together and have a good hate). It also seems to have escaped her mind that (as Aristotle pointed out millennia earlier) it is your actions and not your talk (even when delivered in a stern schoolmarmish style) that will tell people about your qualities and abilities. On the evidence so far, Auntie may talk the talk, but can she walk the walk?  If the completely un-costed Tory manifesto was shambles, May’s U-turn, within forty-eight hours of its publication, on one of the key-policies in the manifesto (when it dawned on her that it might alienate the geriatrics who would vote a donkey if it was a Tory candidate) and her attempts to convince that it was not a U-turn (she had, exactly what she was saying now, in her mind all along, even though she had neglected to mention it in the manifesto, and by the way, it was all Corbyn’s fault; darned nuisance the man was turning out to be, with his scare-mongering) were about as convincing as a Nazi concentration camp Commandant claiming in the Nuremberg trials that the gas chambers were for burning wood so that the inmates could stay in comfort in the winter months. Her fall-back position is: when you are running out of argument(s) (or, as has been so frequently witnessed in this election campaign, you have no argument) launch a nasty and personal attack on Corbyn. It is off-putting.

The list of Jeremy Corbyn’s problems is longer than the treaty of Versailles. To name a few: his image (incompetent fuddy-duddy with the charisma of dish-washer and personality of a lawn-mower); the outré statements he and his pal John McDonnell made over the years when they did not envisage being within the sniffing distance of the leadership of the Labour party coming to haunt them; and the non-entities that make up his shadow-cabinet (with the possible exception of John McDonnell, who is probably clinically insane) as no one in the parliamentary Labour party with a smidgen of common sense would want to associate themselves with these crazy people.

There, really, is no reason to believe that Theresa May would be a more capable leader than Corbyn. You don't become a strong and stable leader just because you shout till you are blue in the face that you are one. Theresa May's record, first as the home secretary in the Cameron government, and, for the last eleven months as the prime-minister, is unimpressive to say the least. She insists that she, and only she, is the person to lead the country through Brexit negotiations, and accuses Corbyn of not having a plan; yet she refuses to give any details of what plan she might have other than "trust me". She is once again promising to reduce the net migration to tens of thousands (urging the electorate to not trust Jeremy Corbyn, who, she warns, will open the floodgates). Without going into the advisability of this plan (George Osborne described it as economically illiterate) May has repeatedly and spectacularly failed to deliver on this promise. The net migration in the UK, throughout May's tenure as the home secretary (when she was in charge of migration) and now, as the prime-minister, was in hundreds of thousands. Why should people (in particular those for whom immigration is a concern) believe that she would be better than Corbyn, especially as, yet again, she does not come up with any plan as to how she proposes to reduce the net migration? Such flimsy details as she deigns to give are no different from what Corbyn is saying: the UK will leave the EU and free movement of people within Europe will end. There is disingenuousness in blaming the EU for the increased migration. In the last seven years, when May has been in power, the migration from the non-EU countries (on which the UK, presumably, has complete control, as it has nothing to do with the EU) has been consistently higher than the EU migration. So, on the issue of migration, which may well be uppermost in the minds of some sections of the British society, the only difference between May and Corbyn, insofar as I can see, is that May is blithely giving promises which she can't possibly keep, whereas Corbyn is more cautious and is refusing to give promises which he knows he won't be able to keep. That would make him, in the eyes of most sensible people, not less trustworthy, but more honest.

Let's think about the economy a bit. Corbyn has been Father Christmas in his manifesto, showering huge largesse on the public sector services (which have suffered terribly under the Tories). He is going to do this by borrowing more and taxing the rich. He is also going to increase the corporate taxes (he is priceless, Corbyn: a bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool, stamped-and-seeled-in-the-production-factory, head-in-the-clouds Socialist). If he is allowed to do this, May is inviting us to believe that Armageddon will arrive and swarm of locusts will attack the Royal family. All the businesses will leave the UK (even though even with the proposed hike in the corporation tax in the Labour manifesto, the UK would still have one of the lowest corporation tax regimes amongst the rich countries). Fair enough. What then are the economic plans of the Conservatives? Search me: their manifesto is completely uncosted. May was outraged when Andrew Neil, in his interview, had the temerity to ask her how she was going to finance the eight billion pounds she was promising to the NHS (which, incidentally, has been systematically decimated by the Tories). "Trust me. I am Theresa May. Isn't that enough?"

Ultimately, though, it comes to the public perception.Nasty as Theresa May maybe (The Economist described her, in fact, as Theresa Maybe—so much for strong and stable leadership), and, let it be said that she has run a thoroughly despicable campaign, which no one save Donald Trump would approve of, the British public may (reluctantly) choose Cruella de Vil to be in the Number Ten because it may (reluctantly) conclude that Comrade Corbyn and his merry bunch can’t be trusted to look after their washing let alone the country’s economy and the Brexit negotiations.

I predict a Tory victory. Let’s hope it is not a landslide.