Kicking off our series, The Year Nothing Changed, James Kirkup looks at how Theresa May could have responded to voter concerns over the past year.
Political analysis should make more use of the counterfactual. Asking “What If” isn’t just about intellectual entertainment, it allows the useful re-examination of political decisions and the consequences. The Government of Theresa May is ripe for that examination, as ministers are lost and local elections loom, because things really didn’t have to be this way.
The Prime Minister is doing her best to play a very bad hand of cards, but this is a hand she dealt herself. Perhaps if she’d done things differently over the past year, that hand would contain rather more aces today.
1. Brexit for all
The first lesson Mrs May should have drawn from the 2017 election is that there was no absolute electoral endorsement for the sort of Brexit she had proposed before the poll. Having called the election to request a mandate for a Brexit that takes Britain out of the single market and customs union, she should have accepted that her failure to win a majority – and the relative success of a Labour Party whose Brexit stance was deliberately ambiguous – meant that the “will of the people” was unclear and possibly contradictory.
National leadership, therefore, lay in uniting moderate Remainers and moderate Leavers around a Brexit that did end our EU membership but retained membership of the Single Market. To do that, she could have made a “big, open offer” to Labour centrists: accept that Brexit must indeed happen, and in exchange you can take seats on Cabinet committees overseeing Brexit strategy, with the aim of an EFTA-style deal.
That would have meant clashes with some Tory Leavers, but the row would have been less violent than you might think; although people now choose to forget it, many of those Leavers did once support EFTA or something similar.
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