It looks increasingly like her tactic with Brexit is to try and deliver a boring banal version of leaving. A compromise seems to be developing which consists of making the UK formally no longer a member whilst obeying most of the rules and delaying as many decisions as possible for a lot further down the line.
I think May sees this as a massive personal win. If the morning after Brexit there are no motorway lorry parks at the borders, no sudden exoduses of enormous numbers of businesses and we have some kind of frictionless trade deal with the EU then she is going to claim that she personally steered us through immensely choppy waters under enormous pressure.
In those circumstances we must expect her to be presented to us with the maximum possible spin as the one leader the country has got who could have taken the country out of the EU without ordinary people noticing much fuss and chaos. Given that the majority of the country just wants the whole issue of Brexit to be over and done with without any great harm, anything short of disaster could look enough like a win for her to romp home in an immediate post Brexit election.
That is why she has started electioneering already. “Austerity is over”. “It was tough but we grown ups saw you through it whilst others wavered” “This is a tough Prime Minister who can hold her nerve whilst others try and stab her in the back”. Those are the kind of arguments that are going to be increasingly heard in the next few months.
There are two main problems for her. The first is that she has to get a majority in Parliament before she can sign up to the small deeds compromise deal she now thinks is very possible. That can’t be done by relying on the far right enthusiasts for getting fully out of the EU at all costs. It can only be done with the support of Liberal Democrat MPs and quite a number of Labour MPs. I believe she is calculating that she can frighten enough of the far right with fears of a Corbyn government and frighten enough of the soft left with fears of a crash out hard Brexit to enable her to win that vote. There is every prospect that she is right.
The second problem is more insurmountable. She has to sell to the British public an image of herself as a centre ground politician that can fix the fundamental problems people have experienced as a result of bad policies her own party has introduced.
For example, austerity politics is being presented as an unavoidable act of God that fell from the sky and which a responsible government had no choice other than to implement. The big problem with that argument is that there were some very clear choices about who got austerity and who got profligacy. More than a trillion of profligacy went on rescuing investment bankers. They have a lot of power but not a lot of votes. Top income earners and those who depend on corporate dividends got profligacy. They also have power but not many votes. Teachers got austerity. Nurses got austerity. Local government got austerity. Zero hours contract workers got austerity. The next election will turn on how many people believe in their bones that the hardship of austerity was a necessary evil and how many have spotted the difference between generosity for the well off and austerity for the less affluent.
Then there is the problem of the young. It now requires 18 times the average income to buy an average house in my part of the world. That is fairly typical. When my generation became part of the “home owning democracy” it required 3 times your income. Home ownership has become out of reach for all but a tiny minority of young people unless they have considerable family financial support. So is access to university education. Many young people are commuting into work on out of date crowded commuter trains working exceptionally long hours with little protection of their rights at work whilst watching a lot of the older generation retire early on very nice pensions. Few of those young people are going to turn out and vote Conservative simply because Theresa May is finally allowing councils to start building a few houses. It took 40 years of determined Conservative opposition to destroy the legacy of social housing that was created by both Labour and Conservative administrations across the 60 years from the end of the First World War. It was the Conservatives who have created a complete mess out of the public transport system and put young graduates at the mercy of privately owned debt that goes up by 6% a year. If those young people stay at home and moan on twitter and Facebook then Theresa May will get away with it and win the next election. If they have been mobilised to vote in larger numbers than ever before then she will lose.
Then there is the problem of the regions. For decades UK policy has been focused on building up the City of London and neglecting the regions. The anger that created in places like Stoke, Sunderland and the Black Country was expressed very clearly in the determination of a lot of people to vote Brexit to send the government a message that they had had enough. Much will depend in future elections on what those disenchanted people do next.
There will be a big effort from the far right to persuade them that the dream of a wonderful Brexit has been destroyed by too many compromises and too much weakness in government. There is genuine frustration that the easy wins that were promised didn’t materialise and the far right might succeed in building on that. It is also possible that the frustration might be directed at Leave politicians who made false promises that they could deliver a quick fix via Brexit and then left the former industrial towns more neglected than ever.
What those towns and cities need is a powerful set of investments in future orientated businesses and that means heavy financial incentives to locate in the regions. Those regions need transformatory policies on housing and schools that attract young and successful people to want to work and live in those regions. Instead housing is being dumped on the green belt whilst inner city homes rot and inner city schools decline further. May is not going to find it easy to persuade voters in badly negelected regions that the Conservative Party is going to deliver seriously helpful change when that party was responsible for a great deal of the neglect. Particularly as her industrial strategy is such a complete rag bag of incoherent policies and blind hopes that fracking will rescue the country.
When it comes to the more successful and affluent regions of the country there are strong majorities of people there who vote to Remain. Will those people be grateful to her for delivering a not too bad Brexit? Or will they be cross with her party for putting their futures at risk and leaving the UK as a powerless rule taker instead of a powerful rule maker? May could lose the election in the affluent south east as remain voters vote against her in droves.
Finally, there is the issue of the environment. Will May be able to “greenwash” her government? We are going to be told at the next election that it was the Conservatives that banned plastic bags, and are committed to stopping subsidies for big landowners in order to pay for environmentally sensitive farming. We won’t be told that waste recycling has been utterly starved of money and there is so little recycling that our landfill sites are full and we are incinerating plastics. We won’t be told about record levels of air pollution due to inadequately enforced regulations on traffic emissions. We won’t be told about the harsh realities of fracking or the way it has been forced on communities that don’t want it.
On almost any issue you care to name the gap between the rhetoric of a responsible but caring Conservative government and the reality of their failure to deliver is stark. I therefore think anyone who doesn’t want years of Conservative government has to focus not on the arcane details of the future Brexit negotiations. Every threat of chaos immediately after the end of March could play into May’s hands if that chaos doesn’t materialise. It is a lot harder for her to explain the huge gap between what she is offering and the reality of her past actions and that is the best focus of attack.
We were promised that if we voted for May at the last election she would deliver strong and stable government. What we have had is weak, divided government wobbling from crisis to crisis whilst obsessing over a Brexit crisis that it created in the first place. That utter failure to deliver should be her undoing.