Catching up on it all
No doubt, reams of commentary and analysis would be written about the just concluded UK General Election of 2017, but I will like to write a postscript to the event.
When Theresa May the incumbent Prime Minister suddenly called an election on the 18th of April 2017, the ruthless streak of the lady was to completely annihilate the opposition and put the Labour Party completely out of the reckoning.
The polls suggested the Tory Party would win a landslide and Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party would lead it to its worst electoral defeat in history. There were analysts who until the day before the election who completely underestimated Jeremy Corbyn and believed their prognostications to the point of annoyingly projecting it on any platform that would accommodate those views.
Giving Jeremy a closer look
Until the election was called, we were coasting to a somewhat ruinous separation from Europe called a Hard Brexit, Theresa May believed she had read the minds of us Britons and came to the conclusion that it was the freedom of movement that bothered us the most and so her headstrong Brexit strategy was gathering moss in that direction.
Invariably, we also had our doubts about what Jeremy Corbyn could achieve and probably would have voted for someone else until Theresa May’s arrogance, audacity and effrontery presented us with a stark choice of giving her free rein to take us over the cliff edge or we begin to subscribe to the reasonableness that became the hallmark and demeanour of Jeremy Corbyn.
The media bias against Jeremy Corbyn and his team was unrelenting and palpable as they brought up every ghost of the past to scare and terrify us into Theresa May’s ‘Strong and Stable’ corner.
Yet, the hashtag #EndMayInJune bore an amazing resonance as we began to look at Theresa May’s record as Home Secretary and then Prime Minister, we began to see leader that probably stood for nothing, all goals, aims, ambitions and promises given the oxygen of rhetoric, sloganeering, soundbite and endless repetition was just a lot of hot air and nothing else.
A broken record it was
We were not convinced that giving Theresa May a stronger hand in the #Brexit negotiations would give us the kind of Brexit that would be good for us. The referendum is a done deal, however, it is my view that if the politicians decided should ask us about whether we wanted to stay in Europe, it is right for them to return to us and review the manner of our leaving.
Basically, if we want to get off the EU bus, it is best the bus gets to a bus stop where we can safely alight rather than us jumping out of the window whilst the bus is in motion. There was a streak of British bloody-minded daring-do that was beginning to inform our manner of leaving the EU that was patently unacceptable.
Then again, even if Brexit was an important electoral issue, there were seriously pertinent local issues that were left by the wayside, those were the issues that Jeremy Corbyn brought to the fore as Theresa May sequestered herself away from needed scrutiny to challenge her record in government.
We had to stop this gamble
She was either clueless or given to sophistry that the gamble she took calling an election was beginning to write itself out as political folly. I had to vote and so I committed myself to a 500-kilometre roundtrip from Edinburgh to Manchester to vote on Thursday morning.
I believe, there were many like me who decided they had had enough of politicians in the mould of Donald Trump who took everything for granted and had no scruples gambling away our future on the whim of egotistical and reckless abandon for personal ends portrayed as a national interest.
Invariably, even after two terrorist attacks within weeks of each other and the local elections that appeared to buoy the Tory Party, the gamble did not pay off, and rather than increase her majority in the Parliament we are met today with a hung parliament with the Tories needing the support of the anachronistic, provincial and primordial Democratic Unionist Party of the Northern Ireland to form a minority government.
What a silly girl
One is left to almost blurt out, ‘Silly Girl’, but a lesson has been harshly taught and history is being penned with the enthusiastic aplomb of an epic-making thriller. Theresa May will go down in history as the incumbent leader who called an unnecessary election to bury the opposition into irrelevance giving her the freedom to traipse about like an empress, only to be reduced in clout, authority and effective mandate.
Unfortunately, the stiff-necked woman has learnt no lessons, the core of the team that heralded the shambles we are in have been retained to continue in shambolic plunder of our commonwealth. The Tory Party is, however, a restive hornet’s nest, it would sooner implode over something before the next scheduled election of 2022. I do not expect Theresa May to last this new Parliament as the leader of the Tory Party.
We, the people
What we have learnt is that people do feel strongly about the way we are governed, they are concerned about the NHS, social care and our communities, but would not be terrified into making choices like the ones that brought us Brexit again. We want a managed exit from the EU that involved consultation, consensus and agreement.
We are done with UKIP and its immigrant poison, the people persuaded of the UKIP agenda did not automatically file into the Tory column as Theresa May expected, they dispersed into columns that appealed to our greater sense of being as the Labour Party that was supposed to become history claimed more seats off other parties than they lost, a net gain of 21.
A strengthened opposition is what we need for the kind of Brexit Theresa May was cooking up for us and we have one led by Jeremy Corbyn who by terms is in the ascendancy. For that alone, I’m in clover.
God Save The Queen!
Related notes
Blog - The UK: One Vote! #GE2017
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