If the Tories get a landslide, parliament will rubber-stamp whatever Theresa May wants on Brexit. She’ll be able to force us to leave the EU even if the people change their minds, as a YouGov poll for the Times suggests may already be starting to happen. The prime minister will even be able to crash out without a deal. Instead of checks and balances, she’d get a blank cheque.
May currently appears to want to reach an agreement with the EU. She understands that crashing out without a deal would be damaging. It would, in fact, be bonkers.
However, the prime minister doesn’t seem to realise how much she’ll need to compromise to get a deal. When the talks reach a crunch point in roughly 18 months time, there is therefore still a big risk that they will break down.
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This is the point when a massive Tory majority would be most worrying. There would then be precious little to stop May leaving the EU – even if more and more voters realise it is a bad idea when they start seeing what Brexit means. The YouGov poll found that 45% of voters agreed that, with hindsight, Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU, while 43% said it was right and 12% did not know.
Enough loyal Conservative MPs would likely just say “yes” however bad a deal May produced. And if she didn’t get a deal at all, they would rush like lemmings over the cliff.
The prime minister may indeed not want this. But she also knows that, by calling an election now, she won’t have to face the voters again until 2022. She probably calculates that by then the economy will have recovered from the chaos – and even if it hasn’t she’ll be able to rely on the Brexit press to drum up the Dunkirk spirit, pinning the blame on beastly Europeans and saboteurs at home.
All the more reason to strain every sinew to stop May getting a landslide on June 8.
Edited by Luke Lythgoe
I totally agree with all of this. It is madness and the people who will really be hurt will be the poorest and most vulnerable as always. Another major fear must be that once the Tories have taken us out, they will erode the protections that we currently enjoy in working rights, human rights, healthcare and welfare. They have already shown their colours by savagely limiting disabled benefits and funding for our councils, hospitals and much else. They can say what they like in their propaganda messages but they must not be allowed to get away with this.