Commons nod for snap elections
• UK premier May’s overwhelming win paves the way for intense seven-week campaign to negotiate the kind of Brexit she wants
UK Prime Minister Theresa May won by a landslide the approval she wanted for a June 8 snap election as she seeks to strengthen her mandate ahead of Brexit negotiations.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May won by a landslide the approval she wanted for a June 8 snap election as she seeks to strengthen her mandate ahead of Brexit negotiations.
Legislators in the House of Commons voted 522 to 13 on Wednesday in favour of the prime minister’s plan to hold an election three years earlier than has been scheduled.
The result of the poll paves the way for an intense sevenweek campaign in which the UK’s fraught relationship with the EU will undergo scrutiny less than a year after the country voted in a referendum to leave the continental bloc.
May is seeking to make strong gains against the opposition before gruelling Brexit negotiations begin.
With polls showing May’s Conservatives with a commanding lead over her main rival, the prime minister is calculating she can increase her slim majority of just 17 MPs and negotiate the kind of Brexit she wants without being swayed by hardliners in her party.
“Every vote for the Conservatives will make it harder for those who want to stop me from getting the job done,” the premier told the lower house.
Until Tuesday, May had repeatedly ruled out holding an early election, saying there would be no national vote until 2020. She changed her mind last week — on a walking holiday with her husband — after “reluctantly” coming to the conclusion that “game-playing” over Brexit among UK politicians would make negotiating with EU leaders much harder.
May timed the election to capitalise on a surge in her popularity, with polls showing voters like how she has handled Brexit so far and with the economy holding up.
Opinion polls show that her Conservatives are as many as 21 points ahead of the main opposition party, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.
SILENCE CRITICS
If she can extend her parliamentary majority, May will be able to silence critics who have opposed her own policies, not just on Brexit but also tax and education. Moreover, it means she is no longer prime minister by default after replacing David Cameron last July.
Rather than Corbyn, the biggest challenge is likely to come from the Liberal Democrats, the pro-EU party that was almost wiped out at the most recent election, in 2015, after serving for five years in a coalition government led by May’s predecessor.
Its leader, Tim Farron, will run against what the party believes is May’s vision of “the hardest form of Brexit”.
Britain would get a “much worse deal” if May won, “particularly if she wins big”, Farron told Bloomberg Television.
May has ruled out televised debates, taking her pitch directly to millions of Britons.
Without wanting to give out more details about what kind of Brexit strategy she will pursue, May is asking voters to trust her to deliver.
“Let us lay out our plans for Brexit, let us put forth our plans for the future of this great country, let us put our fate in the hands of the people and then let the people decide,” she told the Commons. “Every vote for the Conservatives will make me stronger when I negotiate for Britain with the European Union,” she said.
European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said on Wednesday the “real political” negotiations on Britain’s exit from the EU would start after the snap election.
Schinas said the negotiations had been due to begin in June even before his boss Jean-Claude Juncker had spoken to May in the wake of her shock election call.
Meanwhile, former finance minister George Osborne, a key opponent of Brexit, said on Wednesday he was quitting parliament, but would “go on fighting” for Britain as editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, Britain’s fourth-largest newspaper by circulation.
“I am stepping down from the House of Commons — for now,” Osborne wrote in a letter to his constituents, leaving the door open for a potential comeback. “I will go on fighting for that Britain I love from the editor’s chair of a great newspaper,” he said.
The 45-year-old was appointed as editor in March.
A week earlier, he had drawn criticism for disclosing he would earn £650,000 a year working as an adviser to US asset management fund BlackRock for four days a month.
Osborne, who has been representing Tatton in northwest England since 2001, served as chancellor of the exchequer under Cameron from 2010 to 2016, dealing with the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
He left the government in July following the Brexit vote in a referendum in which he had campaigned hard for Britain to stay in the EU.
His resignation came as parliament prepared to vote on the snap election.