The Upcoming British Election, June 8: Whither the Right?

We just returned from 3½ weeks in England and Wales.  In a somewhat amusing turn of events, after spending almost all 2016 watching the Chicago Cubs instead of the presidential campaign, we wound up in Great Britain during their 2017 Parliamentary campaign.  We even watched a debate among the leaders of the less important parties (the Tory and Labour leaders didn’t show up).  The day after the debate we were talking to a couple form Derbyshire, and they said that while they watched our Presidential debates last fall, they didn’t watch their own debates the previous night.  For us it was the opposite.  I guess it’s easier to watch somebody else’s mess than your own.

The British Prime Minister, Conservative Theresa May, called the election early in an attempt to get an increased majority in the House of Commons.  By getting a bigger majority, she hoped to not as constrained in the Brexit negotiations by the more extreme members of her party.  (Paul Ryan could probably sympathize.)  And while she started the campaign with a huge lead, it has steadily dropped as the campaign has progressed.

What is interesting about the British campaign, especially when compared with our campaign last fall, is how far the Conservatives have moved from where they were in the 1980s, philosophically.  If you think Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan (President Trump says he is, but then President Trump says a lot of things), Theresa May is even farther from Margaret Thatcher. 

While Prime Minister May has promised “strong and stable” government, her campaign has had more U-turns than I did driving around the English and Welsh countryside.  Not for Mrs. May was Lady Thatcher’s defiant promise: “The lady's not for turning.”¹  According to Martin Wolf, Economics columnist for The Financial Times:

“Mrs May has returned to the interventionism [i.e., government intervention in the economy] of Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963.  When the classical liberal Friedrich von Hayek (one of Lady Thatcher’s intellectual heroes) dedicated The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, to ‘socialists of all parties’, he had such people in mind.”

Mrs. May’s Conservative election manifesto proclaims: “We must reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right and instead embrace the mainstream view that recognises the good that government can do.”  No Margaret Thatcher in that statement.

It almost makes one wonder if this is part of the problem for the Tories.  Are they really all that different from Labour, whose manifesto is titled “For the many, not the few” (other than, perhaps, in competence, which the Conservatives are not showing this time around)?

In any case, the result next Thursday will be interesting, not unlike ours last November 8, as a statement of where, philosophically, the main party of the right is tending and how successful they may be in going there.
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¹ See also here.