Election gamble blows up in the face of British PM Theresa May. Or how settling for an insecure coalition cabinet with a stronger opposition could become a blessing in disguise for the UK as a whole.

British Prime Minister Theresa May of the conservative Tory party had it all figured out: with the extremely tough Brexit negotiations with the European Union ahead and with the Labour party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, seemingly flat on its back, it seemed like an appropriate time to organize national elections in the United Kingdom.

According to her plan, these national elections would act like a two-edged sword.  When she would indeed have the sound victory based upon an absolutely majority that she anticipated, she would acquire a stronger mandate with respect to the EU negotiations and it would also rub her adversary Jeremy Corbyn deeper in the dirt of his own incompetence, she figured.

With the Tories as absolute majority leaders in parliament and Labour lying in tatters, she would be energized to take the tough stance against the EU that she deemed necessary to carry out the best possible results from these negotiations.

Things went... a little different:

The Tories won the elections by a small and non-decisive majority of  58 seats (319 seats against 261 for Labour, according to the latest polls) and they saw Labour gain a quite impressive 29 seats, in comparison with the last elections.

When one takes into consideration that Labour under the “clumsey leader” Corbyn seemed a lost cause  and that May seemed on her way to a landslide victory only a few weeks ago, it is clear that things went horribly wrong for Theresa May.

And the remarkable thing is that neither the Brexit nor the terrible terrorist attacks of the last few months in the United Kingdom seemed the direct smoking gun, with respect to this strongly disappointing election result.

The terrorist attacks – terribly brutal and vicious as they were – were of course condemned by all parties and it was not that the policy of either the Tories or Labour would have led to a different outcome. Besides that, all three attacks (i.e. the two in London and the one in Manchester) were executed by people living in the UK for a long time or even all their lives, so even the most restrictive policy regarding immigration would not have stopped these terrorist attacks at all.

To put it even stronger: the perpetrators were perhaps all part of the United Kingdom’s colonial heritage and not a consequence of the unhindered immigration of the recent years.

And the Brexit was not even the elephant in the room in the prelude to the elections. As Bernard Hammelburg, the savvy Dutch correspondent for Foreign Affairs of BNR Radio stated (if I recall him correctly): “the Brexit itself as an event hardly played a role in the British elections. The Brexit was a thing from the past, upon which all the important, gamechanging decisions were already taken. It was especially the unclear economic outlook and the feeling that not all would be hunky dory within the British empire after all, that drove the people – especially the youngsters – towards Corbyn’s Labour party”.

BNR Newsradio Foreign Affairs journalist Bernard Hammelburg
Picture copyright of: Ernst Labruyère
Click to enlarge

Whatever the reason was: fact is that the whole plan of Theresa May to improve her position via these elections blew up in her face.

Instead of having an absolute majority of at least 326 seats, she ended somewhere south of 320 seats. In order to find a workable majority directly after the elections, May called in the help of a Northern Irish splinter group: the Unionist Democratic Party. This party is far more populist and conservative than even the Tories would like to endorse. Nevertheless, calling in the help of this party seemed the only way in which she could continue her governmental plans at short notice.

This means that due to this UDP party participation her hands could be tied with respect to all kinds of political hot potatoes, like the Brexit (the difficult choice between a soft and hard Brexit), the open border with Ireland, immigration and the economic development in all the countries within the United Kingdom.

And on top of that she seems to have lost the confidence of many youngsters in the UK, in favour of Labour with its leader that initially “nobody wanted” and that really nobody among the powers-that-be took serious in the beginning.

Corbyn was considered a basket case, with a totally outdated political view that came straight from the Eighties of last century: a political Catweazle [Catweazle was the name of a fictious wizard from medieval times, who was transported to the 20th Century by a failed spell – EL]. 

But the tides have turned for both PM Theresa and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn...

So what can Theresa May do, now it is probably not possible to maintain her tough stance against the EU (i.e. “a Brexit on our terms or else... no deal!”), as she is now stuck somewhere between the desires of a now very powerful Northern Irish splinter group, a strongly divided Tory party and a Jeremy Corbyn with much more power than before and with the momentum going his way?

Perhaps the best solution would be to grind off the sharp edges of her current Brexit-related policy by diluting it here and there with a dash of mildness and a spoon of compromise and humility. She knows that she has to take three totally different opinions into account (Labour, Tories and UDP) in order to get anything through the parliament in the coming years. 

She can’t always trust the hardliners within her own party for automatically voting in her favour, so she must be able to find a broader compromise than she did before.

In other words, she has to take Labour’s desires also into account to a certain degree and stick out a hand towards the man that she probably dislikes more than anyone else: Jeremy Corbyn. Will she be able to do that? Who knows?!

I think the best she can do, is creating a compromise that nobody loves, but nobody hates either. A compromise that is in the best traditions of Dutch politics with its outrageous number of (small) parties and its long, long history of coalition cabinets, that were always a difficult marriage between sense and emotion.

And probably, when Theresa May grinds off the sharp edges of her Brexit policy, the EU is also willing to abandon their plans to punish the UK for trying to leave the EU.

The toughest nut to crack will be the immigration issue, as well as the free traffic of capital, citizens and goods and services. However, even in these formerly non-negotiable areas of EU policy there might be a small opening.

Immigration already has turned into the hottest potato within the EU itself and the member states are already discovering that unlimited free traffic of citizens (i.e labour) has a series of serious drawbacks that cannot simply be ignored by the powers that be.

Politicians start slowly to discover that the EU citizens become more and more fed up by the EU’s neoliberal policy of the last thirty years, because it largely ignored the sense of security and financial / economic stability that almost every citizen requires, in order to have a decent living and raise a family in relative prosperity. That could mean a chance for the UK in the coming negotiations.

However, the most important factor will be whether Theresa May is able to sing a different tune or not? Will she be able to show the EU negotiators a little more humility than before, when she made it seem that she held all the cards and the EU leadership had to sing to her tune in the Brexit negotiations.

Even though the UK is still very much a stronghold in the financial and commercial services industry and not all financial companies are automatically choosing to leave London after the Brexit, May must understand that the UK still needs the EU more than the EU needs the UK after the Brexit. It is simple as that.

The UK is in my opinion quite vulnerable in the areas of agriculture, manufacturing and heavy industry, as well as the exports of manufactured goods, as the island cannot and will not be self-supporting in the coming years.

In some industrial areas, like the steel industry, the country still suffers from obsolete and hopelessly inefficient plants, that are no match for the cunning and efficient German industries or the heavily subsidized Chinese industries with their dumping of steel and other semifinished products. And nobody can eat or drink financial services alone.

So finding a viable and feasible compromise in the prelude to the Brexit can be a lifesaver for the UK in the end. The decision to start the Brexit can probably not be withdrawn without a massive British loss of face, but the way that it happens is very much in the capable (?) hands of PM Theresa May.

And then, this outcome of the elections, even though it will be a tough lump to swallow, could be a blessing in disguise: both for Theresa May and for the United Kingdom as a whole. And they can be a good chance for the EU to show a more friendly and humane face as well. 

A British mandate that takes the interests of more people into account is probably a better mandate in the end.

Gibraltar and the domestic gains of old-fashioned, post-colonial sabre-rattling against a ‘vicious enemy’

I visited Gibraltar once in my life – in 1996 – during a fortnightly group roundtrip in a minivan in Spain. This roundtrip led us through the magnificent Spanish province of Andalucia and one day we visited indeed the most British part of Europe, located east of Dover.

I remember the beautiful view on the top of the mountain, the funny and energetic berber monkeys, the wonderful weather and the horrible British food – Shepherd’s Pie with overcooked carrots and greenpeas drowned in gravy –  which I suspect until this day gave our whole group a food poisoning that lasted for a minimum of two days for the lucky ones and among others much, much longer. But, to be frank, it could also be a fish dish in Spain itself, that caused our group’s discomfort.

And of course I remember how utterly British Gibraltar was, as a kind of open air museum crafted after the picture-perfect, proverbially British city that didn’t exist in reality. With red telephone booths, pubs, souvenir shops, restaurants featuring British ‘cuisine’ and other typically British paraphernalia for both tourists and anglophiles.

Now, twenty-odd years later, the same peninsula of Gibraltar is the subject of heavy, vocal sabre-rattling by both the Spaniards and the Britons.

Hardly the British government and diplomats delivered their Article 50-letter, effectuating the Brexit as a process, or the Spanish government smuggled a Gibraltar paragraph in the EU draft agreement that was the starting point for the orderly Brexit negotiations. The New York Times described the matter in the following snippets:

After it became clear Friday that the union’s remaining leaders might give Spain an effective veto over whether any deal applied to Gibraltar — a British territory long the subject of an acrimonious sovereignty dispute between London and Madrid — lawmakers in Britain and Gibraltar responded with defiance and concern.

Gibraltar’s chief minister, Fabian Picardo, made his anger clear on Friday, calling Spain’s tactic “disgraceful” and “predatory.” He said in a statement about the insertion of language on Gibraltar into the European Union’s draft guidelines for negotiating a British withdrawal: “This unnecessary, unjustified and unacceptable discriminatory proposed singling out of Gibraltar and its people was the predictable machination of Spain.”

In Gibraltar, which has a clear frontier with Spain, the fear is different. It is that once Britain is outside the European Union, which guarantees free movement of people, Spain could demand concessions or make the border with Gibraltar harder to cross, effectively isolating the territory.

Although the mounting emotions about Gibraltar are perhaps understandable with both the Spain and British views and background in mind, the Spanish action – to make the negotiations with the UK an effective hostage of the future British plans for Gibraltar – was not so sensible from a political point of view. Especially as Spain itself has two exclaves – Ceuta and Melilla – on Moroccon soil; two exclaves which Spain is not likely to abandon soon.

On top of that, the situation around Gibraltar never stopped both the Spaniards and Britons from actively working together for 40 years within the European Union and its predecessors. And it also never stopped the British elderly from spending their finest years in Spanish holiday resorts and second houses, at the same time that their youngsters spent their holiday money in Spanish discotheques and pubs, while drinking (much too much) Spanish beer, wine and cocktails.

So the question is valid “what the fuzz is all about”?!

And while the Spanish action was already quite erratic to these eyes, the British reaction – especially represented by former minister and current Tory official Lord Michael Howard, as well as a few warmongering British newspapers – was straightforwardly bananas, as the following snippets from the Guardian show:

Theresa May would be prepared to go to war to protect Gibraltar as Margaret Thatcher once did for the Falklands, former Conservative leader Michael Howard has suggested, in comments that were immediately criticised as inflammatory.

Lord Howard’s suggestion that the prime minister would be ready to follow in the footsteps of her predecessor 35 years ago came alongside a government pledge to protect the sovereignty of Britain’s overseas territory.

Downing Street said May had called Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar, on Sunday morning to say the UK remained “steadfastly committed to our support for Gibraltar, its people and its economy”.

Sir Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, also used robust language. “We’re going to look after Gibraltar. Gibraltar is going to be protected all the way because the sovereignty cannot be changed without the agreement of the people of Gibraltar ,” he said.

The highly provocative picture of a British aircraft 
carrier at full steam in the British Telegraph newspaper
Picture courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk
Click to enlarge

And the Telegraph put things in overdrive, with a picture of a British war vessel and the following bragging lines about the British military strenght in a possible war with Spain:

Britain's Royal Navy is substantially weaker than it was during the Falklands War but could still "cripple" Spain, military experts have said.

Rear-Adml Chris Parry, a former director of operational capability at the Ministry of Defence,  has called on the Government to "appropriately" invest in Britain's military capacity if it wants to "talk big" over Gibraltar.

It came as a former Tory leader suggested that Theresa May would go to war with Spain to defend the sovereignty of the peninsular just as Margaret Thatcher did with the Falklands.

Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom quickly downplayed the situation in the media, reputedly by “laughing off the Spain war talk”, but the tone was definitely set.

As this incident shows, a toxic combination of aggrieved pride and an inferiority complex, as well as unhealthy nationalism and an uncertain future under influence of arguably the biggest and most uncertain, economic step in recent British history, could quickly lead to mounting anger and dangerous envy among the British population. And this by itself could lead to irreversible steps on the path towards war: hence the Falklands war, with its massive bloodshed and skyrocketing emotions about a few dry and almost deserted islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.

By focusing on a mutual enemy – Spain in this case – the British officials can distract the attention from the mounting political and economic uncertainty and the quite unfavourable outlook, emerging from the inconsiderate, to these eyes even reckless Brexit that the United Kingdom entered into.

The promise of a war against a ‘vicious enemy’, who threatens a country’s social, economic and political interests, is a catalyst for exploding nationalism and national pride. It will probably lead to a population that stands behind the government as one man, more than willing to chew through a dozen economic, sour apples on behalf of the greater good and the national interests being at stake. That is the reason that I am not absolutely sure that the situation between the United Kingdom and Spain will not escalate further, before coming to a timely end (or not).

Is the current British escalation strategy a dangerous strategy? It is very dangerous!

Is it effective? Oh yes, it is very effective for domestic purposes, as it overcomes political differences within the population and leads to ‘one people united against the enemy’!

And might the British government – perhaps with Lord Howard as a straw man – have deliberately (ab)used this Gibraltar crisis as a powerful weapon of government mass deception and nationalist demagoguery?! 

Well, to answer that question I gladly turn to what Sir Francis Urquhart, the main political vilain from the (far superior) British ‘House of Cards’, would have stated in this situation: “You might very well think that! I could not possibly comment!”