2 Britain’s choice Our guide to the 2017 election JUNE 2017 BRITAIN’S CHOICE ON JUNE 8th Britain will hold a general election. Since the last time the country went to the polls, in 2015, it has changed dramatically. The vote for Brexit last year has set it on a new, uncertain course; all its main political parties have changed their leaders, who offer contrasting visions of the country’s future—and a decisive break with its past. Voters must now decide which they prefer. During the campaign we have published numerous articles on the election and the issues surrounding it. To help interested readers, we have assembled a selection of them below, starting with our leader explaining how we would cast our own vote. Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief CONTENTS 3 Our endorsement 12 Nationalising industries 18 Theresa May The leaders of both main parties have A high short-term price and higher long- The two Theresas: one thoroughly turned away from a decades-old vision of term cost competent, the other less so an open, liberal country 13 Social care 19 The elderly vote 4 The background A magnificent U-turn raises questions Why the elderly are keener than ever on British politics is being reshaped by the about Tory competence the Conservatives collapse of the neoliberal consensus 13 Welfare 20 Online campaigning 8 Election manifestos Britain’s poor face more painful benefit Digital democracy is changing the way The three main parties are proposing cuts whoever wins on June 8th elections are fought, for better and very different policies. Yet they have a worse common thread: a more intrusive role 14 Low pay for government A plan to give Britain one of the world’s 20 Turnout highest minimum wages Election fatigue and a big gap in the 10 Immigration polls may persuade voters to stay The Tories’ plan to cut immigration by 15 The economy at home two-thirds would be highly damaging With a slowdown looming, the Tories have picked a good time for a vote 20 Ground troops 11 Education and mobility As party leaders fight for the airwaves, Ditching tuition fees and opening 16 Scotland their activists pound the ground grammar schools could help rich children Referendums on independence and at the expense of poor ones Brexit have caused a realignment that benefits the Conservatives 11 Tax Whoever wins the next election, taxes 17 Northern Ireland are likely to go up Yet another election will not help efforts to patch things up Published since September in 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." Editorial office: 25 St James’s Street London SW1 1HG Tel: +44 (0) 20 7830 7000 2 The Economist May 2017 BRITAIN’S CHOICE would each in their own way step back from the ideas that have made Britain prosper—its free markets, open borders and internationalism. They would junk a po- litical settlement that has lasted for nearly 40 years and influenced a generation of Western governments. Whether left or right prevails, the loser will be liberalism. Labour, the conservative party Mr Corbyn poses as a radical but is the most conservative—and the most danger- ous—candidate of the lot. He wants to take the railways, water and postal service back into public ownership. He would resur- rect collective pay-bargaining and raise the minimum wage to the point where 60% of young workers’ salaries are set by the state. His tax plan takes aim at high earners and firms, who would behave in ways his costings ignore. University would be free, as it was until the 1990s—a vast subsidy for the middle class and a blow to the poor, more of whom have enrolled since tuition fees helped create more places. On Brexit, Labour sounds softer than the Tories but its policy comes to much the same. It would end free movement of people, precluding membership of the single market. Mr Corbyn is more relaxed than Mrs May about migration, which might open the door to a slightly better deal on trade. But his lifelong opposition to globalisation hardly makes him the man to negotiate one. No economic liberal, Mr Corbyn does not much value personal freedom either. An avowed human-rights campaigner, he has embraced left-wing tyrants such Our endorsement as Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro (a “cham- pion of social justice”), who locked up op- Britain’s missing middle ponents and muzzled the press. Mr Corbyn has spent a career claiming to stand for the oppressed while backing oppressors. Candidate of nowhere June 1st 2017 The Tories would be much better than The leaders of both main parties have turned away from a decades-old vision of Labour. But they, too, would raise the an open, liberal country drawbridge. Mrs May plans to leave the RITAIN last voted in a general election stagnated. Public services are stretched. EU’s single market, once cherished by To- Bjust two years ago. Back then, the coun- Political parties have responded in radi- ries as one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest try was a bridge between the European cally different ways. All have replaced their achievements. Worse, she insists on cut- Union and Barack Obama’s America. Its leaders. Jeremy Corbyn has taken Labour ting net migration by nearly two-thirds. economy was on the mend after years of to the loony left, proposing the heaviest Brexit will make this grimly easier, since squeezed living standards. Scottish inde- tax burden since the second world war. Britain will offer fewer and worse jobs. pendence had just been ruled out. Labour’s The Conservative prime minister, Theresa Even then, she will not meet the target most controversial policy was a plan to cap May, promises a hard exit from the EU. The without starving the economy of the skills energy prices, denounced as “Marxist” by Liberal Democrats would go for a soft ver- it needs to prosper—something she ought the Tories, who went on to win. sion, or even reverse it. to know, having missed it for six years as Today Britain finds itself in a different The party leaders could hardly differ home secretary. era. The vote for Brexit has committed it more in their style and beliefs. And yet Her illiberal instincts go beyond her to leaving its biggest trading partner and a thread links the two possible winners suspicion of globally footloose “citizens of snuggling closer to others, including a of this election. Though they sit on differ- nowhere”. Like Mr Corbyn she proposes less-welcoming America. The economy ent points of the left-right spectrum, the new rights for workers, without considering has held up better than many feared but Tory and Labour leaders are united in their that it would make firms less likely to hire growth is slowing; investors are jittery. The desire to pull up Britain’s drawbridge to them in the first place. She wants to make union is fraying again. Real wages have the world. Both Mrs May and Mr Corbyn it harder for foreign companies to buy Brit- 1 3 The Economist May 2017 BRITAIN’S CHOICE 2 ish ones. Her woolly “industrial strategy” But against a backward-looking Labour took over. If Mrs May polls badly or messes seems to involve picking favoured industries Party and an inward-looking Tory party up Brexit, the Tories may split, too. Many and firms, as when unspecified “support about to compound its historic mistake moderate Conservative and Labour MPs and assurances” were given to Nissan after over Brexit, they get our vote. could join a new liberal centre party—just the carmaker threatened to leave Britain Backing the open, free-market centre is as parts of the left and right have recently after Brexit. She has even adopted Labour’s not just directed towards this election. We in France. So consider a vote for the Lib “Marxist” policy of energy-price caps. know that this year the Lib Dems are going Dems as a down-payment for the future. And though she is in a different class nowhere. But the whirlwind unleashed by Our hope is that they become one element from Mr Corbyn, there are also doubts Brexit is unpredictable. Labour has been on of a party of the radical centre, essential about her leadership. She wanted the elec- the brink of breaking up since Mr Corbyn for a thriving, prosperous Britain. n tion campaign to establish her as a “strong and stable” prime minister. It has done the opposite. In January we called her “The- resa Maybe” for her indecisiveness. Now the centrepiece of her manifesto, a plan to make the elderly pay more for social care, was reversed after just four days. Much else is vague: she leaves the door open to tax increases, without setting out a policy. She relies on a closed circle of advisers with an insular outlook and little sense of how the economy works. It does not bode well for the Brexit talks. A campaign meant to cement her authority feels like one in which she has been found out. It is a dismal choice for this newspaper, which sees little evidence of our classical, free-market liberal values in either of the main parties. We believe that, as it leaves the EU, Britain should remain open: to busi- ness, investment and people. Brexit will do least damage if seen as an embrace of the wider world, not simply a rejection of Europe. We want a government that maintains the closest ties with the EU while honouring the referendum, and that uses Brexit to reassert the freedom of Britain’s The background markets and society—the better to keep dy- namic firms and talented people around.