These are serious times
Returning to the book-lined London room in which she launched her leadership campaign less than a year ago #MrsME told us all about leadership, an important consideration when this election ushers in "five years that will define the future of our country for generations to come". It wasn't just that speech, though some of it was very familiar. She is seeking the strongest mandate possible to start the Article 50 negotiations and that's still "the most critical issue in this campaign", though terrorists have raised additional questions.
The Brexit talks are "perhaps the most difficult set of international negotiations this country has ever known", and "everything we want as a country depends on getting these negotiations right". And future prosperity and the rest "depends on having the strongest possible hand". I'm forced to ask how any election result would affect the hand we have to play. And "if we fail, the consequences for Britain and for the economic security of ordinary working people will be dire. If we succeed, the opportunities ahead of us are great".
"The British people made their choice and it would be a scandal to do anything other than respect [my interpretation of] their decision. And it is right to respect the view of other European leaders also when they say we can’t be half-in, half-out of the European Union... So we will leave the European Union and take control of our money, take control of our borders and take control of our laws."
"Our money… so we no longer pay huge sums to the European Union every year but spend that money on our priorities here at home. Things like the new Shared Prosperity Fund we will put in place to reduce the inequalities that exist within, and between, the four nations of our United Kingdom." This fund, according to the manifesto "will use the structural fund money that comes back to the UK... to create a United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund... to reduce inequalities between communities across our four nations [and] will be cheap to administer, low in bureaucracy and targeted where it is needed most". Only good things.
"Our borders… so while we continue to attract the brightest and the best to work or study in this country, we can be confident that we have control over immigration and that our immigration system serves the national interest." Despite the opinion of every economist, including the Office for Budget Responsibility, that just aiming for an arbitrary number (tens of thousands anyone?) will reduce national income by more billions than might eventually "come back" for a shared fund.
"Our laws… so we bring the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to an end and return decision-making authority to this country, as [I have determined that] the public demanded we should."
Theresa May: "Our way of life and democratic process must go on"— Christopher Hope 📝 (@christopherhope) June 5, 2017
GE2017 pic.twitter.com/CfjIEo1GeU
Needless to say, all this achievement will be accompanied by a "new deep and special partnership with Europe – allowing us to trade and cooperate with our nearest neighbours – but we will also reach out beyond Europe to strike new trade deals for our goods and services with old allies and new friends around the world too" Starting with some of the many such deals we will drop out of at Brexit.
We know a little of what Jeremy Corbyn would do. He openly says he would throw all of our work away on day one by scrapping our White Paper... [Which white paper? The one supporting the Article 50 notification? The one on the Great Copy And Paste Bill? Neither was acclaimed as a particularly thorough document. And if those represent "all our work", what have hundreds of civil servants been doing for the last nine months?]
He says he wants tariff-free access to the EU, but cannot say if he wants to remain a member of the single market...[the Labour manifesto talks of "retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union" not membership, rather as David Davis uses the inelegant phrase "the exact same benefits"] ... and with it, remain subject to the rulings of the European Court [possibly, for the things Labour would want to share with the EU] and to European free movement rules [though Labour have repeatedly said "freedom of movement ends" at Brexit.
He cannot say if it means remaining a full member of the customs union [see above - perhaps the Labour approach would be to leave everything on the table and discover what has to be given up in negotiations, rather than throwing most of it away up front and then ttrying to negotiate as much as possible back] – which would deprive us of our ability to strike new trade agreements around the world [having lost membership of many trade and trade-easing agreements to begin with].
Having set up these questions, May accuses Labour of not answering them. But we do know something that Jeremy Corbyn says he would do on day one... He would throw away our negotiating position at a stroke by rejecting the very idea of walking away with no deal... Jeremy Corbyn seems to think that any deal... is better than no deal.
As we know, "no deal" can mean any of several different things. No deal on a future trade relationship would be expensive, involving tariffs and customs costs, but we could come back and try again. No deal on security cooperation would mean loss of access to shared databases and European arrest warrants, but again we could at least try again. But no deal on withdrawal itself would leave us unable to fly (until the absolutely necessary deal was done), with EU and UK expats in a legal limbo, with the status of the border across Ireland undefined, and a thousand other things.
Is pretending to offer that as a solution "leadership [or] abdication of leadership" #MrsME?
Labour and the Tories seem to be aiming at fairly similar Brexits from different directions and neither of them has dared to estimate the cost of the process, or even admit that there must be one.
Response to recent attacks
A familiar sounding gathering took place at the east London mosque, with representatives of Muslim, Jewish, Christian and civic bodies. The Anglican bishop of Stepney called on the public to reject “any tendency to scapegoat our Muslim neighbours” and the chair of the mosque described the attackers as “evil terrorists” who espoused a “twisted narrative and perversion of the religion of Islam”.But he went on to say that extremists had been turned away from the door, and that they “continue to harass out worshippers” and "their hatred of mainstream Muslims rivals that of the extreme right".
The chair of the Finsbury Park mosque, once known as a centre for extremism but now a "model of community relations", expressed concern at #MrsME's words on Sunday. “The measures she might take could affect the whole community, not just extremists,” he said, whereas “Muslims have to be part of the solution” and “the prime minister shouldn’t put all the blame on others when she’s been in the government for the past seven years. Does she expect us as Muslims to stop these things alone? It’s for all of us to do.”
Another expected response was from Sadiq Khan: "The act of these three men on Saturday night was cowardly, was evil. And I’m angry and furious that these three men are seeking to justify their action by using the faith that I belong to in order to justify their actions. The ideology they follow is perverse, it is poisonous, and it has no place in Islam."
Then government minister Sajid Javid told the Times: "Speaking as a Muslim myself, we need to ask ourselves searching questions… There’s no avoiding the fact that these people think they are Muslims... And they carry out their attacks – ignorantly, offensively – in the name of Islam. That’s why, although we all share the responsibility for tackling terrorism, there’s a special, unique burden on the Muslim community…We need to offer not just a counternarrative, which rebuts the extremists, but a positive and self-confident narrative that promotes pluralistic, British values – and their compatibility with an Islamic life. And that message can best come from within the Muslim community."
The Muslim Council of Britain agreed with #MrsME that "enough is enough". “We are ready to have those difficult conversations," said Harun Khan, the secretary-general, "as equal citizens with an equal stake in this fight". It's in everyone’s interest to stop the perpetrators of such attacks. "We know that many of these people have previously led a life of delinquency [and] the path towards extremism is outside of the mosque and at the margins of society... This is an ideology that makes killing and hating cool, and uses the words of Islam as a cloak to justify it."
British Muslims must play their part in turning “people’s minds away from this death cult”, Khan continued, and the MCB would escalate its campaign for a “grassroots response to the terrorist challenge”, with mosques would be encouraged to report suspicious activity [and] work together keep our country safe.”
Mak Chishty, the highest-ranking Muslim officer (a commander) in the Metropolitan police told us "It is the Islamic duty of every Muslim to be loyal to the country in which they live" and more than 130 imams and religious leaders from diverse backgrounds have refused to perform the funeral prayer for the London attackers.
It's to be hoped that this concentration of responses is down to the number of attacks and not just because the latest was in London, but it looks like the kind of "joint concern", official and community-based, we need. It's to be hoped also that such combined energy stays visible and overtakes the implication of #MrsME's Sunday morning speech, that her "uncomfortable conversations" would be "done to" Britain's Muslims.
Bubbling under the surface
The unfortunate Karen Bradley, never the current government's greatest communicator toured the studios to field questions on #MrsME's approach. One of the Sunday speech's topics - technology companies and "online hiding places" - falls in her brief, but most of the questions concerned police numbers. She repeatedly refused to acknowledge that the number of police, and especially firearms officers, has fallen since 2010, though she eventually blurted out on Today that there have been reductions in police numbers "across the board".If only someone had given Karen Bradley this chart, she could have answered the question on whether the number of armed police has been cut pic.twitter.com/qP6Sy4aUbs— Matt Chorley (@MattChorley) June 5, 2017
#MrsME herself claimed that Met commissioner Cressida Dick says she has all the resources she needs. Then Ms Dick herself told a variety of outlets "we need investment in community policing". On Daily Politics, attack dog Dominic Raab "explained" that the police have what they need, that new firearms officers undergo more rigorous training than they used to ("SAS on the streets" was the description elsewhere, which is "reassuring") and Labour's emphasis on community policing was a distraction.
It would be ridiculous to expect community officers to tackle such an attack, Raab told us. Unfortunately one of Cressida Dick's interviews looked at "the resource that the police have, both the counter [terrorism] police, but also our neighbourhood officers. The majority who responded on Saturday night aren’t counter-terrorist police.”
All the Tory criticism of Labour includes the claim that "in 2015" Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench (of which, of course, he was not a member at the time) "called for" a further 10% cut in the police budget, implying that it was a policy at that election. The 2015 Labour manifesto said "We will protect neighbourhood policing... different choices – to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, end the subsidy of firearms licenses, mandate police forces to work closer together... safeguard over 10,000 police officers".
This attack in fact rests on what Andy Burnham, then shadow home secretary, said in a speech 30 September 2015, shortly after Corbyn became Labour leader: “Of course, savings can be found. The police say 5% to 10% over the parliament is just about do-able.” So he was reacting to further proposals by the Tories, who were by then in government.
Other emergency services pitched in, various interviews with NHS staff stressing yet again how busy they were (and one describing the racial abuse suffered by a Muslim nurse on her way home from a long shift in a London A&E ward looking after stabbing victims). And the fire service too:
A friend of a friend is a firefighter. Please read & share what he has to say about cuts to the emergency services. pic.twitter.com/I7PlbORmvm— Nathaniel Tapley (@Natt) June 5, 2017
Another standard Tory attack line is that Corbyn is "against shoot to kill", backed by a clip from an interview with Laura Kuenssberg. That interview was labelled misleading by the BBC Trust (though BBC News rejected the judgement), but Labour have only themselves to blame for this subject running on so long.
In Corbyn's formative political years "shoot to kill" was the label for a policy - much suspected but always denied - of shooting mostly IRA suspects without even attempting to arrest them. I've long suspected that the label is still there in many minds, but Emily Thornberry on Rado 4's Monday World Tonight is the first I've heard to actually discuss it.
The official police policy is "shoot to stop", which does usually means to kill, but there has to be a perceived fatal threat to the public or to officers themselves for a firearm to be used at all, and every discharge is investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Labour's public pronouncements seem to back this position in general. I wish they had addressed this definitional problem earlier.
