As of very early Friday morning, it looks as though the election in the UK has produced a hung parliament, with the Conservative Party of prime minister Theresa May failing to win a majority. Whether this outcome will prevent the Tories from forming a government depends very much on whether Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn can find enough coalition partners to form a simple majority himself.
Any election in a country of 65 million is extremely complex, and Labour’s good showing had several major ingredients. For one thing, the Conservative policy of offloading the cost of university education onto middle class families produced a substantial backlash in college towns. In general, youthful voters rebelled against austerity and the paring back of services, and such voters came out in strength.
The collapse of the far right, nationalist currents in British politics, which was supposed to benefit Conservatives, turns out to have been a mixed picture, with many ex-nationalists voting Labour or Liberal Democrats (LibDems).
But you have to wonder about a Trump factor.
Theresa May was famously buddy-buddy with Trump, who is deeply unpopular in the UK. When the American president attacked (under false pretenses) the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, May took a long time to reply, and then tepidly.
May’s past may have caught up to her. She had been Home secretary in recent years, before becoming prime minister. Jeremy Corbyn accused her of cutting 20,000 police jobs, which would have been nice to have back given the ISIL attacks in Manchester and London.
This meme was genius on Corbyn’s part, since it slammed austerity and so appealed to younger voters, at the same time that it took away from the Tories any presumption that they were better on security issues.
It should be remembered that Trump gave the nod to French Neofascist Marine Le Pen in that country’s recent presidential election. She lost by a wide margin.
At the very least, the British public in swinging to the Left, repudiated Trump and Trumpism in a European context.
Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.
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1 Comment
It may come as a surprise to Juan Cole and some Znet readers that the US is not the centre (or even center) of the universe.
What is happening is that there is a rejection of the extreme (neoliberal) centre. It STARTED in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn’s rise to the leadership of the Labour party. It continued when Britons ignored the extreme centrist Barak Obama’s call not to leave the EU. Then even extremer centrist Hillary Clinton defrauded Bernie Sander’s out of an easy presidential win against Donald Trump; with the anything-but-centre (particularly her) mood of the people prevailing, she justly lost.
To interpret Macron’s French victory as a shift to the Left, is to misunderstand pretty much everything. As commentators in the know (such as Diana Jonstone) have correctly observed, Macron is well to the right of Le Pen, whose manifesto was almost identical to the undeniably leftist Mélenchon. Macron was an unfortunate victory for the extreme centre, not a fortunate victory for the Left.
Jeremy Corbyn’s success has everything to do with his being everything that Ed Milliband (UK’s previous Labour leader) wasn’t: a genuine leftist who totally eschews neoliberalism.
This all STARTED with Jeremy Corbyn. Trump is merely an embarrassment to the US citizenry; for the rest of the world he is giving us a break from the smooth-talking liars who have for seventy years hogged the political limelight and hijacked the global agenda.