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Both Britain's major parties are changing rapidly. Where will this lead?
The nervous breakdown of British politics
By Anne Applebaum
The vulgarity is missing, as is the celebrity glitz. There aren’t any candidates ranting about sex tapes and adultery; there are no hacked emails. But even without the drama that only a U.S. election can provide, the crisis is similar: On both ends of the spectrum, the two major British political parties are suddenly suffering from the same kinds of identity crises as their distant American cousins — and with the same kinds of costs for British democracy.
For most of the past three decades, ever since Margaret Thatcher dragged it out of the shires and onto the international stage, the British Conservative Party has touted itself as the outward-looking, globally trading cheerleader for a country that “punched above its weight.” The party pushed privatization, lower taxes, lower spending, a smaller state. Some of that language is still there: In her speech at the party’s annual conference this week, Prime Minister Theresa May told her colleagues that “the Britain we build after Brexit is going to be a Global Britain.”
But almost in the next breath, she implied that her country would be severing its links with the European Union in a manner that may well result in the construction of new tariff walls and will certainly require prolonged trade negotiations. Later, she threw a few bones to xenophobes,hinting she would like to kick out the tens of thousands of foreign-born doctors who keep the vast British health service functioning and updating the old “rootless cosmopolitan” slur for a new audience: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” she declared, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”. . . .
Anyone uncomfortable with any part of this message — anyone who doesn’t like the encrypted xenophobia, anyone still attached to the Thatcherite ideals of the small state or worried about government borrowing, or indeed any member of the 48 percent who voted to keep Britain part of the European Union — is out of luck. Because the opposition Labour Party, transformed under Tony Blair into a centrist party that won three straight general elections, has now been captured by an extremist fringe that is so far outside the center its leaders no longer seem interested in parliamentary politics at all. Consumed by infighting, tarred by accusations of anti-Semitism, the party and its strangely detached leader, Jeremy Corbyn, are more interested in fighting Western democracy than authoritarianism, more interested in toeing extremist lines than winning elections. . . .
The nervous breakdown of British politics
By Anne Applebaum
The vulgarity is missing, as is the celebrity glitz. There aren’t any candidates ranting about sex tapes and adultery; there are no hacked emails. But even without the drama that only a U.S. election can provide, the crisis is similar: On both ends of the spectrum, the two major British political parties are suddenly suffering from the same kinds of identity crises as their distant American cousins — and with the same kinds of costs for British democracy.
For most of the past three decades, ever since Margaret Thatcher dragged it out of the shires and onto the international stage, the British Conservative Party has touted itself as the outward-looking, globally trading cheerleader for a country that “punched above its weight.” The party pushed privatization, lower taxes, lower spending, a smaller state. Some of that language is still there: In her speech at the party’s annual conference this week, Prime Minister Theresa May told her colleagues that “the Britain we build after Brexit is going to be a Global Britain.”
But almost in the next breath, she implied that her country would be severing its links with the European Union in a manner that may well result in the construction of new tariff walls and will certainly require prolonged trade negotiations. Later, she threw a few bones to xenophobes,hinting she would like to kick out the tens of thousands of foreign-born doctors who keep the vast British health service functioning and updating the old “rootless cosmopolitan” slur for a new audience: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world,” she declared, “you are a citizen of nowhere.”. . . .
Anyone uncomfortable with any part of this message — anyone who doesn’t like the encrypted xenophobia, anyone still attached to the Thatcherite ideals of the small state or worried about government borrowing, or indeed any member of the 48 percent who voted to keep Britain part of the European Union — is out of luck. Because the opposition Labour Party, transformed under Tony Blair into a centrist party that won three straight general elections, has now been captured by an extremist fringe that is so far outside the center its leaders no longer seem interested in parliamentary politics at all. Consumed by infighting, tarred by accusations of anti-Semitism, the party and its strangely detached leader, Jeremy Corbyn, are more interested in fighting Western democracy than authoritarianism, more interested in toeing extremist lines than winning elections. . . .
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