The Daily Star
Monday, December 16, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Last time I visited The Daily Star’s comment pages, I predicted that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party would win the U.K. general election comfortably. Well, to be fair, Johnson had been ahead in the polls so it wasn’t a hard call. However, the huge parliamentary majority he achieved Thursday was not anticipated.
Johnson’s populist electioneering - U.S. President Donald Trump dubbed him “Britain’s Trump” - has handed the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987 and the days of Margaret Thatcher. It is also the biggest majority for any prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001.
For all that though, it’s clear the U.K. remains divided, both between the nations that comprise it - the election saw a sharp rise in the number of separatist Scottish nationalist parliamentarians - and, despite Johnson’s overwhelming victory, between Brexiteers and those who wish to remain in the EU.
However, this election has now ended the Brexit argument. There will not be a second referendum on European Union membership, something promised by the opposition Labour Party. Meanwhile, the one party that promised to scrap Brexit, the minority Liberal Democrats, barely won enough seats to make up a football team.
Johnson’s huge parliamentary majority will ensure Brexit will now formally take place at the end of January, ending three years of deadlock. A 12-month-long transition period will then follow in which the U.K. and EU will attempt to hammer out a trade deal.
Much has been made of Johnson’s ability to appeal to working class (blue collar) voters, millions of whom abandoned their traditional party, Labour, for the Conservatives, traditionally seen as the party of the bosses.
Labour won its fewest seats since 1935 as its traditional supporters, those in the so-called Labour left-behind heartlands in the north of England, deserted it for Johnson’s populism.
But this was an election of populists. Johnson has promised to spend billions of pounds of largely borrowed money in Labour’s heartlands on infrastructure and across the country on the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service. Not to be outdone, the Labour Party committed itself to even bigger public spending programs, again based on borrowing, and promised to nationalise key industries, including energy, the train network, and even broadband services.
However, what Labour forgot, was that this election was about identity, first and foremost. Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the Labour Party, was seen by many of its traditional working class voters, as anti-British and what most people perceive to be British values.
Corbyn was better known in the U.K. for his long-standing links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and his support for nasty dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela. He is largely anti-Israel and anti-American, and even blamed NATO for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. He has also been accused of presiding over a culture of antisemitism within his party since he became leader.
At the same time as Johnson promised to sharply increase government spending and deliver the people’s 2016 vote on Brexit, he also promised to tighten immigration controls - the most significant factor in the Brexit vote - and be tougher on fundamentalist Islamist terrorism in the U.K.
Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Rutherford College, Kent University, succinctly summed up why Johnson’s populism beat Corbyn’s: “It is easier for the right to move left on the economy than it is for the left to move right on identity.”
So, what will this new populist Johnson government stand for in international affairs?
Well, Brexit has so diminished the U.K.’s standing internationally, no one seems to care all that much what the new government’s foreign policy priorities will be. This is perhaps just as well because Johnson doesn’t seem to have any beyond “getting Brexit done” and securing an increasingly unlikely, and certainly unfavourable, free trade deal with Donald Trump’s America.
And herein lies the rub. Whatever reputation the U.K. enjoyed, to borrow a phrase from Bismarck, as an “honest broker” in the middle east - straddling the largely pro-Israeli America and the largely pro-Palestinian European Union - has been in tatters since the Brexit vote. Post-Brexit, Johnson, like his predecessor Theresa May, is desperate to court the White House to secure that illusive free trade deal that will compensate for exiting the world’s largest trading bloc.
To that end, the Conservative Party manifesto for this election maintained its support for a “two-state solution” in the Middle East, and that was pretty much it. There was no mention of its policies toward Syria, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Nor did it put forward a view on the merits or otherwise of the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement the White House despises.
Interestingly, Corbyn had pledged to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in protest at the kingdom’s war in Yemen. Labour also planned stop exporting arms “used in violation of the human rights of Palestinian civilians” to Israel. It was also committed to “immediately” recognize a Palestinian state.
More importantly, Johnson’s foreign policy looks set to be tailored to suit the U.K.’s trading needs, first and foremost. He has already announced plans to merge the U.K.’s Department for International Trade with the government’s business department to better facilitate potential trade deals with the U.S., Japan, and Australia. He also intends to merge the hitherto all-powerful Foreign Office with the Department for International Development to help” co-ordinate” the U.K.’s aid budget with the government’s foreign policy goals.
At any rate, the most immediate foreign policy problem facing Johnson will be the continuing trade negotiations with the EU that will begin once Brexit happens in January. If Johnson fails to broker a trade deal between the U.K. and the EU during the 12-month transition period, the U.K. could end up trading with the EU on World Trade Organization terms.
Moreover, regardless of the terms of the U.K.’s exit from the trading bloc, against the backdrop of a slowing global economy, Johnson will find it hard to deliver on all the public spending promises he made on the hustings. The U.K. economy isn’t pulling up any trees. GDP growth is expected to hit an 11-year low of 1 percent next year.
Small wonder then that immediately after his victory Johnson thanked those who, in his words, “lent us your vote.”
What this election has proved beyond doubt is that you can sell anything, regardless of whether you can deliver it. This has led to a worrying shift in our politics, to entrenched polar extremes. It remains to be seen whether Johnson is truly capable of reversing that shift and deliver more than just Brexit. Heraclitus famously said: “character is destiny.” The popularity contest is over. It is now time for him to govern.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on Monday, December 16, 2019, on page 4.
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