How May Could Have Won
Matters could have been quite different. The most recent past tends to colour the appreciation of what went before, and so we forget she was once a formidable opponent who could have locked Labour out of power for a decade or more. And were it not for strategic blunders that opened the door for Corbynism, it would have come to pass. Some locate her errors in the wooden 2017 General Election campaign, widely derided on the right as well as by our own people. Labour supporters will remember it fondly for decades to come - the public meetings without the public, the press conferences without the press, and the party promos without the party, the idiot mantra of strong and stable, the hubris of the dementia tax - oh what a time it was. What a tasty feast of schadenfreude it was. And this undoubtedly did for her. The May we came to know is a product of Corbynism, a failing and flailing Prime Minister brought low by the sweat of our brow, but May was our enabler: the long June lasting from 2017 to the present persisted because she unwittingly opened the door to her demise.
When your opponent is at the height of their powers, put despair away for hubris is the moment the seeds of destruction are cast. May's was much earlier than her fabled walking holiday with dear old Philip: it was not long after she took office. It was a pretty black moment for centre left politics, let alone the Corbyn project. In the aftermath of the greatest domestic political disaster since the Suez Crisis, Labour was courting extinction while the Tories quickly pulled themselves together, and wrapped the leadership contest up in quick time with May's coronation. Brownie points for a show of seriousness. The second sinking moment was her address to the nation from the Downing Street lectern. She channelled the spirit of Milibandism as she promised to wage struggle against injustice and address poverty. Coming after Dave's showy but callous government, from the side eye by which most people view politics she sounded different, serious, a conviction politician. This was one nation Toryism rebooted, audaciously premised on half-inching the ground Labour stood on but was too busy squabbling to prevent the land grab.
It went down a storm. Those who found Dave congenial had their consciences assuaged about supporting the Tories because May wanted to help the poor. There was no red meat for established Tories, but they knew her record from the Home Office well enough to start dreaming of Thatcher 2.0. Remember the embarrassment of Tory backbenchers affectionately referring to May as "mummy"? And a little bit of soft labourism married to authoritarianism and social conservatism, isn't that the heady brew working class voters "in the north" (of course) were supposed to be champing for? Almost immediately the Tories rallied in the polls and for the next nine months or so posted huge leads. In normal times this was the stuff from which hegemony was made, a project in formation for managing the class relationships criss-crossing and underpinning the British state with the advantage tipped permanently toward capital. This situation, which for a moment looked inevitable and viable, didn't work out precisely because we don't live in normal times. Or, rather, because of the particular way May and her, um, "celebrated" advisors Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, decided to approach Brexit.
With Labour indisposed in the summer of 2016, and buoyed by the polling and the fawning press, she made her crucial mistake: after leading the Westminster pack on she announced her interpretation of Brexit was pretty hard. This meant disengaging from EU institutions, an end of free movement for EU citizens, and a renegotiated trading relationship. The upside was a nebulous freedom for the UK to negotiate its own trade deals. In other words, as deals went, this was the most economically disruptive and potentially ruinous basis for an agreement out of the range of possible options. She had made a critical strategic error: by crassly putting the interests of keeping the Tory party together, May believed her coalition would hold. Which turned out to be the case: going hard on Brexit drove UKIP to the abyss, and served as the glue keeping them together (and getting the highest number of Tory votes since 1992), but the cardinal rule of hegemony building was forgotten nor understood. Organising yourselves goes hand-in-hand with disorganising your opponents.
Looking at the disarray Labour was in and then, by early 2017, its persistent lag in the polls you could almost forgive May for thinking a general election would be a good idea. Indeed, no one at the time was warning against one and I can remember sending several "we're fucked" texts as she was making her announcement. But she had set up the conditions for an insurgency. By then, the "burning injustices" speech was obviously just window dressing and whole swathes of Britain were effectively locked out of the awards our supposedly booming economy was generating. It was quite clear May wasn't about to address the problems of housing, of crap wages, of zero prospects, nor the suffering Dave and Osborne took delight in inflicting. What I missed, what we all missed, was a polarisation taking place beneath the surface. Effectively, May had coagulated a coalition of the haves - retirees above all - but by making Brexit its central organising principle it gave the have-nots something to define themselves against. Brexit is an empty signifier that organises not just its supporters, but its opposition. May's hard Brexit annoyed those who were for remain, and also those wanting a sensible, softer Brexit than the one she offered. May allowed it to become a rallying point, a moment of discontent in a complex of discontent the Labour Party was able to organise behind it. It was the catalyst for the real class polarisation to come out into the open and manifest itself in the electoral politics of the land.
You could argue May didn't have any choice but to incorporate Brexit as a wedge issue, but on the contrary she did have a choice. Dave called the referendum to neutralise the threat from UKIP, and May moved to accommodate them to secure the Tory right flank. But with a bit more imagination May could have capitalised on the good will, her (initial) novelty as a (presenting) conviction politician, and the latent desire to overcome the divisions set in train by the referendum by deepening her one nation pitch. She might have, for instance, in the spirit of magnanimity have announced a consensus-building approach to Brexit through a series of public consultations. She might have appealed to disgruntled Labour right wingers by trying to get them on board, while working to marginalise Corbyn even further. This would not have avoided trouble with her backbenchers but they'd have found it harder to behave as they have done thanks to her moral authority as a great unifier. In short, this could have allowed her to redefine a new common ground in politics that excluded the left as well as the fanatics in her own party, and one her party would have benefited from for years to come. A good job for the left that she was not so imaginative, and the Conservative Party interest was interpreted so narrowly.
The price of this failure is visible in the wreckage that daily fills our screens. The party May leaves is broken and disintegrating, and compounding the disaster it appears nearly all of her would-be successors none appreciate the merde it's stuck in and want to repeat her fatal error. Nevertheless, the Tories cannot be trusted to destroy themselves, by themselves. They need a good shove, and another, and another. That's where we come in, and why we must attend to the urgency of repairing our own coalition of support after the EU elections to be ready for whatever happens next.
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