by Perry Anglin
Britain got its second female prime minister today amid political turmoil driven by the inequality of wealth that is fuelling furious dissent in the United States and other western democracies.
Canadian politics will not be immune.
The new British PM, Theresa May, has been a highly competent senior minister in the UK’s ruling Conservative party.
She was called “a bloody difficult woman” last week by an MP who was actually supporting her. He had served in the cabinet of another such woman, Margaret Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady.
Mrs. May, steely and straight-talking, is a clergyman’s daughter and Oxford graduate. She beat out the runner-up for the Tory leadership, Andrea Leadsom, whose looks, accent and financial success were the epitome of upper class entitlement at the expense of the blue collar class that is increasingly not working.
With speculation that Mrs. May will call a snap election, she promises to serve workers in her bid to evince Tory affinity with both high and low income voters in a Conservative formula established in the nineteenth century by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Mrs. May would almost certainly beat a bitterly divided Labour party in disarray under its embattled leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few hours after it was clear that Mrs. May would automatically succeed David Cameron in Number 10 Downing Street, Mr. Corbyn called for just such a snap election.
Mr. Corbyn has every reason to want a quick election. He faces a contest to remove him from his leadership, following rebellion by three-quarters of his caucus in Parliament.
Most of his MPs are convinced that Mr. Corbyn, of weedy beard and far left dogma, can’t win an election to form a Labour government.
The leading Labour rebel, Angela Eagle, has working class roots, an Oxford eduction, and experience in an industry association. She aspires to be the first female Labour leader. If she won a general election she would be the third female prime minister, and the first lesbian one.
Mr. Corbyn’ s leadership was defied on the basis that he campaigned so feebly to remain in the EU that half the supporters of his Labour party didn’t even know that the party was in favour of the EU. Many of them voted to leave.
The underlying force in the turmoil is anger that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—to a degree unknown since the nineteenth century.
The disparity may be a natural consequence of unfettered capitalism as identified two years ago in a stunning study by French economist Thomas Piketty. His reams of statistics showed that middle class prosperity in the West, peaking about 1970, was an historical aberration.
Only government intervention can curb the excesses of capitalism. Mr. Piketty’s proposed cure—a huge tax on wealth—is politically impractical and perfectly unrealistic, because wealth can be moved across borders to avoid tax.
The democratic cure for inequality of wealth is election of governments that will do something about it. That is what is proposed by the Democratic Party in the US (and opposed by self serving Republicans).
The other cure is revolution. Whatever that signifies, Bernie Sanders, the runner-up for the Democratic nomination, means it when he says he wants one.
Jeremy Corbyn has much same outlook. Commentary in this week’s Economist suggests that Mr. Corbyn’s efforts to win public favour are feeble because he doesn’t care about winning elections. He may really prefer a South American-style revolution such as the one he admired as a young man visiting Chile.
So what is going to happen in Britain?
I was studying in London and Oxford when Britain was a new member of the European Common Market, and was impressed with the quality of the televised debates leading into a national referendum that voted to stick with Europe.
The recent debate on the matter was appalling.
Serious warnings about the disadvantages of leaving were dismissed and smeared as fear tactics.
Many of the leading exhortations to leave were mendacious, reprehensibly irresponsible and tinged with racism about dark-skinned immigrants. Even the racism was phony: the bulk of European immigration to the UK has come overwhelmingly from Poland and, to a lesser degree, from other fair-faced parts of Europe.
It is my guess that despite her current stance, Mrs. May will steer Britain to an associate status with the EU rather like Norway’s. That means making payments to the EU budget and probably getting back EU subsidies for farmers and small businesses. Norway has also had to accept free immigration from the EU. Mrs. May says she won’t. A standoff. But public hostility to immigration may fade if it turns out that few people want to come to a staggering British economy convoluted by the recent vote to leave the EU.
How will Canada respond to income inequality?
Although the US has the worst income inequality among developed countries, Canada is among the next worst, following only Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan.
The Trudeau government has promised to help aboriginals and has notably helped all poor families with massive spending on a child benefit.
The NDP is sympathetic to low income earners. Calls by its idealistic left wing are akin to the Sanders and Corbyn cries for some kind of revolution. Will the NDP left wing gather force?
It is too soon to tell how—or whether—the Conservatives will respond.
Political battles, here and abroad, are joined on the issue of free trade pacts. Passions are inflamed by resentment of inequality far beyond whatever difference is actually made by free trade agreements.
The real question of our time is whether the world can reverse the concentration of wealth in the vaults of the very few.
It will matter.
Mr. Anglin has followed politics in Canada, Britain and the United States for the last 50 years. As a civil servant he met frequently over the years with British officials. He and wife visit the UK most years and have close social ties there. Mr. and Mrs. Anglin live on Belle Baie Lane on Lake Manitou near Mindemoya.
