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The Observer view on a post-May Brexit: Labour must show it can offer an alternative


Decent, moderate and patriotic” was how Theresa May chose to describe her premiership in her valedictory speech on Friday morning. Heartless, hardline and nationalistic is a more apt way to characterise her record in office. She may be leaving Downing Street emphasising her fight against the “burning injustices” she claimed she would tackle when she entered it. But her three-year premiership has left Britain an undoubtedly crueller and harsher place to live, trapped in the most serious political crisis that has engulfed the country in decades.

May’s legacy: a more divided and
unequal country

May was dealt a bad hand as prime minister. She had to make sense of a referendum that produced a narrow majority on the vaguest possible question on Britain’s membership of the EU, a question so fuzzy it allowed the Leave campaign to promise a fantasy Brexit that bore no relation to reality. For that alone, David Cameron will likely go down in the history books as an even worse prime minister than his successor.

Related: Never again can Labour find itself on the wrong side of a historic choice

But May took that bad hand and seemingly did all she could to make it worse. From the start, there was one thing driving her approach to Brexit above all else. It was not the question of how to unite a divided country, of how to forge a compromise in the national interest, or how to level with the public that, while Brexit was possible, what the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson had promised them would be impossible to deliver. Rather, it was driven by her desire to do all she could to keep together a Tory party whose decades long splits over Europe were widening drastically.

And so she never bothered to find out what voters thought they were voting for when they marked their cross for Leave. Her hard red lines – an end to free movement of people, no customs union with the EU – were not drawn with voters in mind but for the benefit of the Tory Eurosceptics.

It was those red lines – together with the importance of avoiding a hard border in Ireland – that set the rigid parameters around the shape of the deal she could get with the EU. But instead of fronting up the inevitable trade-offs to her party and voters, she obscured them with bland slogans: “Brexit means Brexit”; “no deal is better than a bad deal”. She used her first conference speech not to try to heal divides but to launch an attack on “citizens of nowhere”. Far from challenging the deceit of the Leave campaign, she was its worthy heir.

Was it any surprise then that when she presented her deal to MPs and the country there was little support for it? Instead of striking the one compromise that could potentially have got it through after it was overwhelmingly rejected by parliament in January – to commit to a confirmatory referendum on her deal in exchange for MPs voting on it – she brought the same deal back another two times.

Her toxic legacy extends way beyond Brexit. Not only did she fail to address the “burning injustices” of modern Britain, she made them immeasurably worse. She could have sought to reverse Cameron’s austerity drive; instead, she ramped it up. Her government delivered expensive tax cuts that benefited the affluent, paid for by cuts to tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children. It is a devastating indictment of her premiership that in 21st-century Britain headteachers report children are turning up to school grey with hunger because their parents are struggling to put food on the table. Services for vulnerable children and older people have been cut back the most in the poorest areas, and life expectancy has started to decline.

She never bothered to find out what voters thought they were voting for when they marked their cross for Leave

In her resignation speech, she had the temerity to quote Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved the lives of hundreds of children by arranging their evacuation from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. If only she had taken a leaf out of his book. Instead, she has presided over a disgracefully inhumane system in which asylum seekers are forced to subsist on a pittance and unaccompanied child refugees are not even allowed to sponsor their parents to come to the UK. Her hostile environment policy – elements of which have now been deemed racist by the courts – has forced landlords, doctors and bank clerks to police their fellow citizens. People who have lived legally and paid taxes in the UK for decades have been denied life-saving NHS treatment and the right to rent a home, and even wrongly deported. Young people who have grown up in Britain are being charged thousands of pounds over a period of years in order to secure the permanent right to remain when they become adults that will keep them clear of the hostile environment.

Meanwhile, whole swathes of domestic policy – reform of elder care, tackling child obesity, building a green economy – have gone neglected as Brexit has absorbed every shred of political capital going.

The chance of a catastrophic, no-deal Brexit has increased

In normal times, the end of such an incompetent and malign administration might prompt a sigh of relief. But Britain is not in normal times. May’s successor will face an even sharper version of the same conundrum that has plagued her time in office. Parliament remains gridlocked. And the interests of the Conservative party and the nation are more divergent than ever.

What happens with Brexit will continue to be shaped by the dysfunctional internal politics of the Conservative party. The imminent Tory leadership contest looks likely to unleash an even more hardline prime minister on the country. They will be selected by just over 120,000 Conservative party members, who are far more Eurosceptic than the population at large. This is a profoundly undemocratic way to choose the country’s next prime minister. Leadership candidates are already tacking right, competing with each other in terms of how hardline they are on Brexit.

The interests of the Conservative party and the nation are more divergent than ever

This propels the country into an incredibly dangerous situation as the clock ticks down to 31 October. The frontrunner, Boris Johnson, has already said he will ensure Britain leaves with or without a deal at the end of October and that he wants to do the impossible of renegotiating the removal of the Irish backstop from the withdrawal agreement. Other leadership hopefuls may follow. In a few weeks’ time Britain may have a prime minister far more relaxed about us crashing out with no deal in October than Theresa May ever was.

And it will become increasingly difficult for parliament to prevent this from happening. If the Brexit party does as well as expected in the European elections, there may be more parliamentarians willing to countenance no deal to try to see off Farage. And experts believe MPs are running out of parliamentary devices that they can use to effectively block a no deal. So the chances of Britain catastrophically crashing out of the EU in a way that decimates jobs, increases regional inequalities, undermines the Good Friday agreement and breaks up the union have only increased with May’s resignation.

Labour’s position has never been more critical

The only conceivable way parliament could reassert itself would be if Jeremy Corbyn were to at last climb off the fence and exercise the leadership so desperately needed to find a way through the paralysis. Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has launched a justifiably excoriating attack on the party’s prevarication to date in today’s Observer. For too long, the Labour leadership has resisted swinging unambiguous support behind a confirmatory referendum, despite the wishes of many of its MPs and its members. Senior Labour MPs fear that tonight’s European election results will show just how wrong this strategy has been – not only in principle, but electorally.

Last week, the Conservative MP Dominic Grieve said he would do anything in his power to stop Britain leaving the EU without a deal. There will be other such rebels. In the coming weeks, the Labour leadership must work with them on a constructive strategy to prevent a hard Brexit. This must include a confirmatory referendum on the form of Brexit being proposed by the next prime minister, with remaining in the EU as an option.

The next five months look set to be the most torrid, yet pivotal, period in our history since the second world war. And as the Tory party engulfs itself in a self-indulgent leadership beauty parade, all remaining hope lies with Labour. Only Corbyn can conceivably deliver us from this unholy and destructive mess. But it’s far from clear yet whether he will choose to step up to do so.