British Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that she will be resigning June 7. About time.
She has been a disastrous failure, failing to produce the withdrawal from the European Union that British voters demanded in their June 2016 referendum. She has driven her Conservative Party, the second oldest political party in the world (by my reckoning and that of the British historian Robert Blake), down to single-digit support in public opinion polls.
May’s selection as prime minister was an example of a problem in many democratic systems, including ours — there is no entirely satisfactory way to select the party leader who, if the party wins, will become head of government or head of state. May was chosen after Prime Minister David Cameron, a strong opponent of Brexit, resigned after the referendum. Her Cabinet experience as a longtime Home Secretary and her reputation as a self-proclaimed “bloody difficult woman” helped her become one of two people nominated for party leader, and she was effectively chosen when the other, Andrea Leadsom, dropped out.
“Brexit means Brexit,” she declared early on. But not actually, it turned out. Why did she fail? Why did the European Union negotiators maneuver her into taking positions that were roundly repudiated by large majorities in three separate votes this year?
One reason is that she proved to be a “bloody difficult woman” not with the EU negotiators (the BBC recently ran a documentary showing one of them laughing about the concessions May made) but with her parliamentary colleagues, whom she excluded from decision-making and consultation. For a fuller description, see this Telegraph column by Asa Bennett.
Another reason is that her priorities were different from those of Brexit voters and Brexit supporters in Parliament. As economist Andrew Lillico explains, May’s goals were a Brexit agreement which allowed Britain to reduce immigration from the EU and to maintain the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland — one of the key achievements of the bipartisan, binational Irish peace process in the 1990s. She got those concessions from the EU. But she accepted an agreement that would require Britain to accept EU rules and laws until the EU agreed to let it go — the very opposite of Brexit.
Many Remainers who supported Brexit and have been scheming to stop it accuse the Leavers — the 17.4 million Britons who voted for Brexit — as motivated by bigotry against immigrants and foreigners. But if that were their true motivation, they should have been satisfied with May’s agreement. Their discontent with this deal indicates their true aim — that the United Kingdom should make its own laws and not have to accept ukases from arrogant bureaucrats in EU headquarters in Brussels.
The EU has considerable appeal for those in Western Europe who remember war and Nazi rule on the continent. It appeals to many in Eastern Europe who believe its requirements of due process and economic market rules will help them recover from decades of communist rule. But Britain does not fit into either category. It has its own system of common law, which imparts different habits and institutional behavior from the law that prevails in Continental Europe. It also has a freely elected Parliament which has met and governed every year since 1689.
Why did May act now, even though earlier this week she said she’d try to get a parliamentary majority for her plan a fourth time? One reason is the increasing number of Conservatives who have said they’d vote it down. Another is to get ahead of the announcement Sunday of the results of the European Parliament elections that were just held Thursday — elections in which polls suggested that Nigel Farage’s newly former (in January) Brexit Party would win a plurality and that the Conservative Party, formed when MPs led by the young Benjamin Disraeli refused to support repeal of the Corn Laws (i.e., free trade) in 1846, would get less than 10% of the votes.
I will refrain from speculating on who will be the next Conservative Party leader and prime minister, but I will record here my expectation that Britain will finally achieve Brexit on the currently required date, Oct. 31 (after May postponed it twice). That presumably will be a “hard Brexit,” with no agreement with the EU, but a reversion to WTO trade rules. Diehard Remainers have been predicting this will devastate Britain’s economy. But these doomsayers are the same people (as I noted in my weekly column) who said that a vote for Brexit would do so. In fact, Britain has had better economic growth than the continent, its stock market has been performing better, and the Bank of England says 80% of private businesses are ready for a hard Brexit.
The new prime minister’s obvious tactic will be to prepare for hard Brexit on WTO terms. May, with her peculiar priorities, never made those preparations; if she had, she might have secured an agreement from the EU that Parliament would accept. And instead of resigning, she might be preparing to celebrate a successful third anniversary as prime minister.
