With North Korea and the US dragging the world towards nuclear cataclysm, it seemed no other story could emerge to top the goings-on on the Korean Peninsula. Then British Prime Minister Theresa May called an early snap election, saying she wants to “strengthen her hand” on Brexit by removing opposition in the UK parliament.
On paper, there is hardly an issue here. Polls have consistently shown that May’s Conservatives would win such an election comfortably. The opposition Labour Party has made little impact since Jeremy Corbyn survived a leadership challenge, and the only other UK-wide parties, who could theoretically gain enough seats to take power, are the Liberal Democrats (who presently have a mere nine seats out of 650), the Greens (one) and UKIP (none at all, their only elected MP having defected back to the Conservatives).
The one dark spot the Conservatives saw was that May is a poor speaker and campaigner, and has refused to take part in any television debates, not feeling she has any need to convince anyone of what she happens to think. However, the scheduled local elections earlier this month, which came after the general election had been announced, produced big Conservative gains. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats lost ground, while UKIP almost disappeared, its vote flowing to the Conservatives now that it has won the argument over Brexit, as it sees it.
Furthermore, it was speculated that the real reason May called the snap election, after frequently insisting she would not, was because up to 30 of her MPs were beg investigated for possible breaches of electoral law. Had the Crown Prosecution Service pursued charges against these individuals May’s majority would be gone and she would be tainted by the scandal. But if the election really was called for that purpose, it worked. No charges are being brought on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence that the MPs concerned knew they were filing their campaign expenses falsely, despite the fact that ignorance of the law is no defence in England.
So it appears that everything is falling into the lap of Theresa May and the newspaper owners who have been promoting Brexit, and the racial hatred and exploitation which fuelled the success of he referendum, as if their lives depend on it. This is what opinion polls are saying too. But as Trump proved, polls can be wrong—at least sometimes. If you ask people how they intend to vote in an election, you get one answer. If you ask them what they care about most, you often get another: and when polling day comes round, this gut instinct is what determines where the votes go. And then when you ask them who they really voted for many will never admit who they actually voted for.
Not in our name
The story of this campaign so far is not what lengths the overwhelmingly Conservative-supporting press are going to, “no-hold-barred”, in getting their party elected – that is the norm, and old news to most voters – but how far the “man in the street” is refusing to listen to everything the newspapers are telling him. For example, the seemingly near-dead Liberal Democrats gained 2,000 new members within three hours of the election being announced. Party leader Tim Farron met Theresa May’s challenge head on by stating that the election was indeed about Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats are the only party insisting that the UK must remain in the single market and guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK – issues people weren’t specifically asked to vote on in the June 2016 Brexit referendum.
A number of new opinion polls were produced after the shock election announcement. According to one in the Daily Star, a deliberately downmarket tabloid which is not known for having liberal attitudes, at least 40% of that paper’s readers were intending to vote Liberal Democrat. There is no way of knowing whether the respondents to this poll really were regular Daily Star readers, but even if the poll had been hijacked by LibDem voters that should not have made a lot of difference, as their support in other polls has been running at around 10%.
Furthermore, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is now polling higher than it did during the previous election, when several polls suggested right up until polling day that it could form the next government. Corbyn is routinely derided in the Conservative press as loony left, unelectable, out of touch and many other things never said about his predecessor, media darling Ed Miliband who is part of the trendy “Primrose Hill Set”. Despite this, he is drawing large crowds to his rallies, apparently because he remains a curiosity, someone who political logic says shouldn’t even be in the Labour Party any more but has been overwhelmingly elected twice by its members, despite press-inspired attempts to rescind the membership of anyone who might vote for him.
All this is consistent with what has happened since Brexit. Corbyn has never liked the EU, and has insisted Brexit will still happen if he becomes Prime Minister. Farron is not actually demanding that Brexit be halted either, merely saying that a second referendum must be held on the terms of Brexit, which will presumably not go ahead if the public reject those terms. Therefore the newspaper barons who have been demanding Brexit since before UKIP was invented, for reasons Rupert Murdoch famously revealed a few years ago, have no serious opposition and should have nothing to fear from any election result.
Instead the Brexiteers have taken the defensive position. This should be the time when they are setting out visions of a new future and the public which voted leave are eagerly accepting them. The Conservative newspapers insist this is happening. However the Brexiteers themselves have grown ever more defensive. They are talking about “still” supporting it, and how many people “have not changed their minds” since the referendum. Is that in question? Apparently Brexit supporters themselves believe so.
Undoubtedly the motivations of Leavers are still strong. But they seem to have not understood the old English saying – “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. You can only tell UK voters so much before they feel they are being told what to do, and then do the opposite on principle.
When Tony Blair won his landslide in 1997 one seat was not contested because one of the candidates had died. That election was held soon afterwards and Blair himself, fresh from his triumph but against all precedent, turned up to speak in support of his candidate. This should have helped, but in fact turned voters in exactly the opposite direction, and Labour lost the seat. The people may have voted for him, but that didn’t mean he could tell them who to vote for.
Money means numbers
We now know that not only was the Leave Campaign in the referendum more motivated and better organised, it used better methods. It was one of the clients of a company called Cambridge Analytica, which collects information from Facebook and other sources to target swing voters. This is funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who has a long history of donating to parties of the right.
In previous articles I have suggested that there is an organised campaign of commenting positively or negatively on the stories the money men are most interested in. If anyone is behind such a campaign, it is Mercer. Time and again the UK’s Press Council has received complaints about the Conservative newspapers’ inaccurate portrayals of immigrants, incitements to racial hatred and similar issues which played a factor in Brexit. But nothing has prevented the endless repetition of inaccurate and inflammatory tales, designed to create a particular climate of opinion which Mercer’s clickbaiters then insist exists, and is eventually believed to exist simply because people hear about it all the time.
All the major UK parties are either supporting or allowing Brexit because they are afraid of what they are told is public opinion. But what is that opinion actually based on? If it is merely exposure, and assumptions people make about why they keep seeing the same views, that is not public opinion. It is a propaganda campaign which uses sophisticated methods to succeed, which could readily be countered by a similar campaign, similarly funded, which was prepared to use the same methods.
All it would need is someone to fund it. This means the non-Conservative parties have to find a similar donor. There have been a few over the years, such as Labour-supporting bestselling author Ken Follett, but none consistent enough to take this machine on. The only question is how far the public can be pushed before they know they are being pushed, and inevitably push back in greater numbers.
Pyrrhic defeat
The Brexit “cause” has never had a real existence. It is just an amalgam of things people don’t like which can be blamed on the EU. However the anti-Brexit case is now based, rightly or wrongly, on a situation which already exists – the practical problems the UK is now facing as a result of deciding to leave. With Brexit itself being old news, this could prove potent.
Brexit has thus handed any opposition party a great weapon in this election. None of them are using it, because they are too scared. But if the Liberal Democrats, of all people, are gaining ground as a result of Brexit this fear may evaporate by polling day, as overturning something imposed on you from without is as motivating to people lectured by the newspapers as it was to people who voted Leave last year.
There have been shock results in UK elections before, most notably in 1970 and 1992, when the one thing no poll predicted was a Conservative majority and that is what resulted. We also need to take into account that one reason for those results, and that of 2015, is that the Conservative vote is traditionally under-reported by polling companies due to sampling errors. If the polls say they are 10 points ahead … that means at least a 12 point lead on the ground, so any Conservative lead is much more difficult to overcome in actual ballot boxes.
So if May fails to win this election would break all precedent. However, as YouGov pollster Peter Kellner once wrote when he was a committed Labour-supporting journalist, if everything followed previous precedent nothing would ever happen. There was no precedent for the enormous swings to the SNP in Scotland in 2015, or for UKIP’s equally large vote gains at parliamentary rather than local government level. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are starting from stronger positions than the SNP and UKIP were then, in a system which traditionally squeezes third parties out of contention.
If people care about precedents, they can also be cited in favour of such a shock occurring. The Liberal Democrats and the old Liberals have produced them before in individual seats, and can believe in them. As a traditional party of government Labour has a duty to believe in them, and that belief can easily percolate to the voters.
Win-win in lose-lose
There are signs that Theresa herself wants out. She says she needs this election to strengthen her negotiating position with the EU. She is also saying that the country is uniting behind Brexit, but if she actually believes this there is no need to strengthen her negotiating position, as she can simply continue dismissing the objectors to Brexit as not representative of the majority.
If May loses her majority, having called for a mandate to pursue Brexit, she can say that “the will of the people” was for a Conservative-led government which doesn’t go through with Brexit. If she is forced into opposition, it is someone else’s problem, and she can recast her party as the liberal, tolerant force she believes it should be, provided she can only use the words without having to behave that way herself, the signature of her political career.
If British voters begin to think that the Prime Minister herself, who says she will implement a hard Brexit despite having supported Remain, is only going along with this because she was talked into it they will come to the same conclusion. There is precedent for this too: in both 1987 and 1992 the non-Conservative parties were flooded with calls from people apologising for voting Conservative the day after they had done it. Eventually these forces came together to cause the crushing Conservative defeat of 1997, the people feeling their previous votes were the result of a con job, and wanting a way to cleanse themselves from their own gullibility.
This election is indeed about Brexit. But on a deeper level, it is about how far the British public wish to be manipulated by a small number of wealthy individuals. If they feel that is happening, and that Brexit is part of that manipulation, all those who are seen as having “collaborated” with this action will pay a heavy price.
Print media sales are falling in the UK as if the rest of Europe. If people stop believing that what they are told is public opinion, they will show that in the ballot boxes on June 9th, however the votes are actually sliced.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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