British voters have just shocked Europe—and perhaps themselves—by repudiating their conservative prime minister Theresa May. May called a snap election because it seemed an easy way to bolster her slender parliamentary majority as she began negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union. That didn’t happen. According to early poll projections she might lose her majority altogether.
May’s rationale was this: Why not take advantage of the Labour party’s decision to place its fate in the hands of 68-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed 1970s-vintage Marxist whom the press and the public hated? Look at the guy! He made Bernie Sanders look mainstream by comparison. His platform called for investing half a trillion pounds in rebuilding Britain’s industrial infrastructure, building millions of homes, making universities free, and re-nationalizing the country’s railways, utilities and postal service. He proposed to pay for all that by hiking corporate tax rates from 17 to 26 percent and imposing punitive taxes on real estate and incomes over $100,000 a year.
You could tell May was in trouble when her supporters started to browbeat the public about the “Laffer curve”—the argument that raising tax rates can depress tax revenue. Yes, the media was foursquare against Corbyn, just as May’s advisers had optimistically assumed, and even a majority of his own party’s members of parliament opposed his leadership. But neither the press nor the politicians had a clue what the public thought. The public weren’t disliking Corbyn’s platform as much as they were supposed to.
Corbyn would have been a terrible candidate in a national election if this were 1974, when he entered politics, or 1983, when he first got elected to Parliament. He opposed the Falklands war and backed Fidel Castro, the IRA, and the PLO. But the Falklands War is over, Castro is dead, the IRA is disarmed, and the PLO has been superseded. And a good number of the voters who showed up for Corbyn were not born back in those days. Like Sanders, Corbyn has found a way to thrill university students and senior citizens, even while his appeal remains almost inaudible to those born between 1952 and 1992. Youth turnout on Thursday appears to have been high.
But with all their unleashing-entrepreneurship talk, it was May’s people, not Corbyn’s, who were dwelling in the past. The center-right Tories are indeed good at producing growth. So was the Labour party when the “moderates” Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ran it. But neither party has shown the slightest inclination to share the wealth. When the economy grows by 1 percent, the rich take 2 percent, it seems. When it grows by 2 percent, they take 3 percent. This is really all that matters. If the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing, Corbyn is a hedgehog. The big thing he knows is fighting inequality.
For British politics as it is in 2017, that has proved sufficient.
