Righting the Ship

The recent general election in India carried echoes of the 2017 British election. Prime Minister Theresa May had called that election, three years ahead of schedule, after opinion polls indicated an imminent landslide for her Conservative Party. This was similar to polling, earlier this year, soon after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s consecration of the unfinished Ram temple at Ayodhya, which projected that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party would win a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha. With both major parties accepting the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the most important issue facing the British electorate in 2017 was the gutting of the welfare state in the name of austerity—not unlike India, where widespread unemployment and inflation made welfare policies a focal point of the campaign. Unable to address the public anger caused by austerity, May was humbled in the election, failing to win a majority in the House of Commons and being forced to rely on the outside support of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Much like her, Modi, far from winning a supermajority that would allow him to unilaterally amend the Constitution, is now beholden to the Janata Dal (United) and the Telugu Desam Party.

Nevertheless, May was able to cling on to power for another two years, before Boris Johnson, who had spearheaded the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum, executed an intraparty coup and replaced her. Over the next few months, Johnson violated several constitutional norms to paper over the contradictions in his Brexit policy, and his government announced an end to austerity in its autumn budget. Meanwhile, the opposition Labour Party was undergoing a leadership crisis. The British media, which had carried out a vilification campaign against Jeremy Corbyn ever since he became leader of the opposition, in 2015, doubled down after the 2017 election. The verdict had created rifts within the Labour Party itself, leading many to publicly oppose Corbyn’s leadership and his stance against a second referendum. This gave the Conservatives a chance to cast Labour as metropolitan elites who did not respect the public mandate, a potent line of attack in the towns of northern England that had traditionally voted Labour but supported leaving the European Union. A large section of Leave voters, after all, had been taken in by Johnson’s false promise of using Britain’s contributions to the EU coffers in order to fund the floundering National Health Service.

As a result, the election Johnson called in November 2019 had the opposite dynamic as 2017. For the large section of the electorate that did not follow the minutiae of parliamentary politics, it appeared that both major parties agreed on ending austerity but disagreed on Brexit. Johnson, a popular politician still enjoying a honeymoon period as prime minister as well as the full backing of his party, won the election in a landslide. Labour, which lost ground among both Remain supporters angry at Corbyn’s refusal to support a second referendum as well as Leavers angry at the party considering another referendum in the first place, won its fewest seats since 1935, forcing Corbyn’s resignation as party leader.