Today Britain finds itself in a different era. The vote for Brexit has committed it to leaving its biggest trading partner and snuggling closer to others, including a less-welcoming America. The economy has held up better than many feared, but growth is slowing and investors are jittery. The union is fraying again. Real wages have stagnated. Public services are stretched.
Its political parties have responded in radically different ways. All have replaced their leaders. Jeremy Corbyn has taken Labour to the loony left, proposing the heaviest tax burden since World War II. The Conservative leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, promises a hard exit from the EU. The Liberal Democrats would go for a soft version, or even reverse the plan.
The party leaders could hardly differ more in their style and beliefs, but yet a thread links the two possible winners of this election. Though they sit on different points of the left-right spectrum, the Tory and Labour leaders are united in their desire to pull up Britain’s drawbridge to the world.
Both May and Corbyn would, each in his or her own way, step back from the ideas that have made Britain prosper—free markets, open borders and internationalism. They would junk a political settlement that has lasted for nearly 40 years and influenced a generation of Western governments. Whether left or right prevails, in other words, the loser will be liberalism.
Corbyn poses as a radical, but is the most conservative—and the most dangerous—candidate of the lot. He wants to take the railways, water companies and postal service back into public ownership. He would resurrect collective pay-bargaining and raise the minimum wage to the point at which 60% of young workers’ salaries would be set by the state. His tax plan takes aim at high earners and companies, who would behave in ways his costings ignore. College would be free, as it was until the 1990s—a vast subsidy for the middle class and a blow to the poor, more of whom have enrolled since tuition fees helped create more places.
On Brexit, Labour sounds softer than the Tories but its policy comes to much the same. It would end free movement of people, precluding membership in the single market. Corbyn is more relaxed than May about migration, which might open the door to a slightly better deal on trade. However, his lifelong opposition to globalization hardly makes him the man to negotiate one.
No economic liberal, Corbyn does not much value personal freedom either. An avowed human-rights campaigner, he has embraced past left-wing tyrants such as President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Fidel Castro of Cuba, a “champion of social justice” who locked up opponents and muzzled the press. Corbyn has spent a career claiming to stand for the oppressed while backing oppressors.
The Tories would be much better than Labour, but they too would raise the drawbridge. May plans to leave the EU’s single market, once cherished by Tories as one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievements. Worse, she insists on cutting net migration by nearly two-thirds. Brexit will make this grimly easier, since Britain will offer fewer and worse jobs. Even then, though, she will not be able to meet the target without starving the economy of the skills it needs to prosper—something she ought to know, having missed it for six years as home secretary.
Her illiberal instincts go beyond her suspicion of globally footloose “citizens of nowhere.” Like Corbyn she proposes new rights for workers, without considering that it would make companies less likely to hire them in the first place. She wants to make it harder for foreign companies to buy British ones. Her fuzzy “industrial strategy” seems to involve picking favored industries and companies, as when unspecified “support and assurances” were given to Nissan after the carmaker threatened to leave Britain after Brexit. She has even adopted Labour’s “Marxist” policy of energy-price caps.
Though she is in a different class from Corbyn, there are also doubts about her leadership. She wanted the election campaign to establish her as a “strong and stable” prime minister. It has done the opposite. The Economist dubbed her “Theresa Maybe” for her indecisiveness. Now the centerpiece of her program, a plan to make the elderly pay more for social care, has been reversed after only four days. Much else is vague. She leaves the door open to tax increases, without setting out a policy. She relies on a closed circle of advisers with an insular outlook and little sense of how the economy works.
It does not bode well for the Brexit talks. A campaign meant to cement her authority feels like one in which she has been found out.
It is a dismal choice for voters, who see little evidence of Britain’s classical, free-market liberal values in either of the main parties.
As it leaves the EU, Britain should remain open—to business, to investment and to people. Brexit will do least damage if seen as an embrace of the wider world, not simply as a rejection of Europe. The country needs a government that will maintain the closest-possible ties with the EU while honoring the referendum, one that will use Brexit to reassert the freedom of Britain’s markets and society, the better to keep dynamic companies and talented people around. In their different ways, both Labour and the Tories fail this test.
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (June 3). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.