Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence is fracturing the political right

The Tory Blue-Kip strategy was 20 years in the making, but when Theresa May activated it in April 2017 by triggering the snap election, it backfired spectacularly and actually ended up costing the Tory party their parliamentary majority, and now, just a couple of years later the Tory party is teetering on the brink of electoral ruin thanks to multiple splits in the political right.

The Blue-Kip strategy

Before Theresa May called the 2017 General Election, the numbers seemed to make perfect sense for the Tories. If they could combine the Tory vote with the UKIP vote, Labour would be annihilated and the other opposition parties wouldn't stand a chance either.

After years of upping the far-right, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist rhetoric in order to appeal to the Ukip crowd, Theresa May and the Tories decided to put their plan into action, and to an extent it worked. The far-right ultranationalist boost increased the Tory vote by 2.2 million from 2015, but what they didn't count on at all was the Corbyn surge which added an astounding 3.6 million votes for Labour.

Not only did the Tories fail to achieve the 150-200 seat mega-majority they'd dreamed of, they actually lost their parliamentary majority and put themselves at the beck and call of the Northern Irish DUP sectarians.

Demographics

One of the most obvious consequences of this massive shift in British politics was that the Tories have rendered themselves utterly reliant upon the extremely fickle Blue-Kip demographic, because if the 2.2 million flowed out as quickly as they'd flowed in, the Tory party would obviously end up getting hammered at the next General Election.

So the Tories were forced to continue pandering to the Blue-Kip demographic with far-right politics, anti-immigrant posturing, rabble-rousing, and overt displays of ultranationalism, despite the fact that the less rabid type of Tory voter and the younger generations are absolutely repulsed by this stuff.

In a way Theresa May and the Tories did reasonably well to keep this almost impossible shambles rolling for as long as they did, alternating top spot in the polls with Labour for the next year and a half.

OK they've had the majority of the mainstream media firmly on their side, and "centrists" continued helping the Tories by refusing to critique the ruinous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and caused the Brexit vote in the first place (the Lib-Dems who colluded with austerity fanaticism for five years, and the Labour right-wingers who lost the 2015 General Election by pathetically imitating austerity instead of vehemently opposing it) but the demographic trapdoor they've painted themselves over was always going to give way at some point.

And now that the Tories have failed to deliver the far-right ultranationalist fantasy of Brexit they're clearly in very deep trouble.

Brexit

Delivering Brexit was always absolutely crucial for the Tories to retain the support of the fickle Blue-Kip demographic.

I guess May imagined it would be easy enough to do with a 150-200 seat mega-majority in parliament, but once that fantasy was destroyed by the Corbyn surge in 2017, delivering any kind of Brexit became impossible, hence the national humiliation of the UK government having to go to Brussels to beg the EU to give us more time to sort out the extraordinary constitutional deadlock that Theresa May has created for us.

She knows that her endlessly repeated threat of punishing the British people with a devastating "no deal" meltdown if she didn't get her own way would have utterly destroyed the myth of Tory economic competence and driven millions of people away from the Tories for ever, so she knew that she could never actually follow through on her threats, despite wasting literally £billions on "no deal" planning to make it look like she was serious.

And she also knows that she can't get her shitty almost universally unpopular deal through parliament without significant compromise, and that any compromise towards Customs Union membership, Single Market access, protected workers' rights and the like would sound the death knell for Toryism by driving the far-right Blue-Kip demographic away from the Tories for good.

So she can't deliver Brexit, she can't follow through on her threats, and she can't compromise.

After steering the nation into this absurd deadlock situation and then simply clinging to power instead of letting someone else have a go, it's extraordinary that the Tories have any political support left at all.

Brexit Party

Theresa May's failure to deliver Brexit has led to her worst nightmare, the resurrection of UKIP under a new shinier brand, and in a matter of weeks pretty much the entire Blue-Kip demographic has surged away from the Tory party to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage's new opaquely-funded Brexit Party.

The worst Tory local election results since 1995 (despite the Brexit Party not even standing candidates) have been followed up by extraordinary polls showing Labour establishing significant leads after huge numbers of people have abandoned the Tories to switch support to the Brexit Party.

So the people Theresa May has spent her entire time as PM pandering to have disappeared even more quickly than they flocked into the Tory ranks in the first place!

CUK and the Lib-Dems

The Brexit Party is clearly Theresa May's biggest problem, but then she also has another major headache too because there are two so-called "centrist" parties jostling to hoover up the Tory vote at the other edge by imitating their pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, orthodox neoliberal policies under the Remain banner.

At the 2016 EU referendum 57% of Tories voted for Brexit, but 43% voted Remain, which is hardly an insignificant proportion.

If these people start to believe that they can have the exact same "impoverish the poor to further enrich the wealthy" neoliberal policies elsewhere, without the inconvenience of being ideologically tied to this Tory Brexit shambles, significant numbers of them are going to buy into yellow or grey versions of orthodox neoliberalism, and the more effort Theresa May puts into preventing the Blue-Kip exodus, the more she's going to drive people out at the other end of the party.

The egotistical CUK squatters have made an absolute mess of almost everything they've touched in their first three months, but picking an ex-Tory leader who positions them to the right of the Tory party on economic policy, appointing the austerity fanatic Chris Leslie as their economics lead man, and the pro-privatisation Angela Smith as their business, environment, and transport bod are clearly moves designed to bring orthodox neoliberals into the CUK fold, and to attract the big money donors who are getting close to losing their patience with bankrolling the decaying Tories and their interminable Brexit farce.

Division of the right

Even those of us who were only children, or not even born in the mid-80s know all about the SDP and how divisions on the political left ended up handing Margaret Thatcher a majority so large that it wasn't finally eroded until 1997, but now, as a result of Theresa May's extraordinary incompetence, the political right is fracturing into various factions.

The far-right ultranationalists are deserting the Tory party in droves to back the Brexit Party Faragists and the remnants of UKIP, while the orthodox neoliberal right-wingers are ever more tempted by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, pro-EU posturing of the CUK squatters and the Lib-Dems.

It's looking increasingly likely that all that will be left of the Tory party will be the rump of political tribalists who treat political parties with the same undying loyalty as football fans treat their teams (no matter how shit they are they'll never abandon them to support another team, the worst they'll ever do is stop turning out to support them).

Labour

The division of the political right and the vast Labour membership surge since Jeremy Corbyn binned orthodox neoliberalism and returned Labour to their democratic socialist roots mean that the party will probably never have a better shot at regaining the government than the next General Election, and finally reversing the neoliberal economic fanaticism that has done so much damage to the UK since Thatcher infected the Westminster political establishment class with this toxic hard-right militancy in 1979.

Of course the CUK squatters and Lib-Dems will try to erode the Labour vote too, by appealing to the orthodox neoliberals in the Labour ranks, but grotesque living standard-eroding stuff like austerity dogma, privatisation mania, brutal social security cuts, and deliberate infrastructure under-investment have far more appeal to right-wing Labour MPs than they do to ordinary Labour Party members and voters.

Labour will continue to be attacked from both sides for their policy of trying to de-escalate Brexit, rather than whipping it up even more for their own political purposes with cries of "betrayal" and "treason" from the Brextremists, and the desperate pining for a final 'do or die' 'now or never' clash of civilisations 'another roll of the dice' referendum from the Remain Ultras.

This is unfortunate, but the Tories created this massive social division, and political opportunists from both sides are fully intent on whipping up the hate, and actually widening the divide for their own selfish political purposes, rather than seeking some kind of compromise that neither side will particularly like, but most ordinary people can live with.

This isn't to say Labour shouldn't back another referendum (they've voted in favour of one twice already), it's just that they should make sure they offer a more moderate Brexit (Customs Union, Single Market, protected workers' rights, co-operation on science, security & environment) and do everything in their power to make sure ruinous undefined options like "no deal" are kept off the ballot (surely the #1 lesson from the 2016 referendum is that undefined options in national referendums are a dreadful idea?).

The worst mistake Labour could make is to follow Theresa May's lead and pick one side of this hyper-partisan Brexit division, because you only have to look at the chaos she's created through this wilful partisanship, and the ongoing breakup of the Tory vote to understand the risks.

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