It’s getting harder to imagine that the U. is run by the party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservatives took Britain into the precursor of the European Union in 1973 and spent much of the last three decades squabbling over whether to get out. As negotiations stall again before what the U. says is a crucial summit in Brussels this week, the biggest battle remains in London between the party’s Brexit backers and doubters.
There’s a growing feeling of political limbo for Prime Minister Theresa May, undermined both at home and in Europe while the economy deteriorates. Six months into the most challenging government operation since World War II, the dominant electoral machine of modern British history is riven by internecine warfare.
May is unable to get her cabinet to agree on a negotiating stance as the clock ticks down to Brexit day in March 2019. Businesses are delaying investment and considering moving operations because ministers are unable to tell them what Britain’s trading and legal status will look like.
“The Conservatives are trapped between a rock and a hard place,” said Anand Menon, professor of European Politics at King’s College London. “Either disappointing a part of the party that has proved only too willing to rebel, or implementing a policy that risks real damage to their reputation for economic competence.”
May, 61, is surrounded by people who don’t support her but don’t want her to quit. With Brexit, she’s implementing a policy she opposed but will be her legacy. And if her position seems both unsustainable and inescapable, it’s the same for the party she took over after last year’s in-or-out EU referendum cost her predecessor his job.
The Conservatives, or Tories, are openly discussing throwing May overboard. Yet their problems run deeper than one person.
The party is split not just on the answer to the Brexit question, but on what the question actually is. On one side there are those like Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, for whom Brexit is a trade-off between separation from the EU and economic damage.
Then there are those such as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who argue that the economic advantages are greater the further and faster Britain is removed from the bloc. He sees no problem with reverting to World Trade Organization tariffs for goods and said the EU could "go whistle" for a financial settlement to the divorce.
Bernard Jenkin, a member of parliament who spent his political career trying to get out of what he views as a "superstate" that crimps British sovereignty, is among the Tories urging May to walk out of talks.
“If this prime minister comes back this week refusing to make further concessions and preferring that we leave on WTO terms, and paying no exit bill, she would be cheered to the echo,” Jenkin said. He was relaxed about the economic warnings. “Most of business would welcome an early prospect of the end of uncertainty,” he said.
The confusion in London hasn`t gone unnoticed in the rest of Europe. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar was among those warning on Tuesday that the divisions made for “quite a difficult negotiation.”
Labour Threat
The Conservatives consider themselves the party of government in Britain, safely managing the finances and advocating the free market rather than getting caught up in too much political ideology. There have been 14 Tory prime ministers since the beginning of the 20th century, more than twice the number of premiers the opposition Labour Party has managed. The current battles threaten that.
“The danger for the Conservative Party is that while it settles its individual battles in public, people start questioning if they’re fit for power,” said Craig Oliver, a former director of communications for May’s predecessor, David Cameron.
If the civil war wasn`t bad enough, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, 68, has turned into a party sniffing at power again as his opponents wrestle with their existential crisis.
In April, he was trailing in the polls so badly that May called a snap election to take advantage of his weakness. Instead, she exposed her own, and when the vote came in June, Labour beat every expectation to win seats. Now the greatest fear for the Tories is that another election could put Corbyn, a socialist who says he wants to remake Britain’s economic model, in office.
May is kept in place by a combination of factors: The lack of a replacement who is acceptable both to the pro-EU and anti-EU factions of her party; the fear that her fall would precipitate another election; and the hope that before she’s thrown overboard, May can absorb some of the political damage likely to come when Britain leaves the EU.
So for now, she must plot a seemingly impossible Brexit course. Even should she find a position her cabinet could agree on, she then has to get the 27 remaining members of the EU to agree to it. If they don’t, she has to sell whatever they do agree to her party, and deal with the wrath of voters if the result is economic damage.
It’s little wonder that May struggled to answer when she was asked last week if she would vote to leave should another EU referendum be held now.
“This is the sharpest version of a 200-year-old division in the Conservative Party, between nationalism and economic liberalism,” said Stewart Wood, a Labour member of the House of Lords, and former advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “Any time May puts any flesh on the bones of a strategy, she loses support from one side or the other. There’s no solution.”
Membership of the European Economic Community, the EU’s precursor, originally fitted in with the Tory belief in open access to trade, especially as Britain was struggling economically. It was Labour that was initially torn over joining what many, including Corbyn, viewed as a capitalist club.
After Thatcher
But by 1990, when it brought down Thatcher, Europe was a Conservative fault line. In the years after the Maastricht Treaty, which led to tighter integration among members, Tory rebels came close to bringing down John Major’s government. The public impression of a prime minister unable to control a divided party helped to push Major from office.
For the next decade it seemed as though euro-skepticism was a fringe pursuit in British politics. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was a passionate pro-European, who argued it was Britain’s “destiny” to play a leading role in the EU.
But within the Tory party, the movement was growing. In the party’s 2001 leadership election, Iain Duncan Smith, a Maastricht rebel who had never held any ministerial post, beat former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke, a pro-European stalwart.
That shift was masked by the 2005 election of Cameron as leader. Just 39 years old, he saw himself as a complete break from the past. He told his party exactly why he believed they had lost three elections: “While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life, we were banging on about Europe.”
But if Cameron didn’t want to talk about Europe, his party enjoyed nothing more. Once he took office in 2010, his lawmakers rebelled against him on European issues repeatedly, until he finally gave in. 23, 2013, just as parents up and down the country were worrying about getting their kids to school, he announced Britain would have a referendum on its membership of the EU should the Conservatives win the election two years later.
He was going to “settle this European question in British politics” and, though he didn’t say it, in Tory politics. It didn’t work out that way.
More than a year after the Brexit referendum, the electorate remains as divided as ever. Polling company YouGov Plc has been asking monthly whether leaving was the right or wrong decision. The numbers hover around 45 percent for each side, with the lead switching back and forth.
Some Conservatives feel the situation could be a watershed for their party.
“Even if you put Brexit on one side, there’s a series of huge problems facing the country,” said Tory lawmaker Robert Halfon. “We don`t yet have a powerful narrative for dealing with them. The party machine is creaking: Labour can send hundreds of activists around the country. We can’t get close to that. If we don’t do something seriously radical and counter intuitive we’re in serious trouble.
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