There is a cautionary tale unfolding for governments which call themselves Conservative. Maxime Bernier is staging a frontal assault on the Conservative Party of Canada. And in Britain, Theresa May's government is unravelling over Brexit. May was a Remainer. Yet she has been tasked with negotiating Britain's divorce from the E.U. The deal she reached with Brussels has split her party. Andrew Hammond writes:
The cabinet resignations reflect, in large part, the continuing U.K.-wide divisions over Brexit which leaves Ms. May’s tenure in Downing Street precarious. These problems were meant to have been put to bed by publication of the government’s Brexit White Paper in July.
Yet, if anything, Ms. May is even more politically isolated following the subsequent departure from her cabinet of leading Brexiteers Boris Johnson and David Davis. The former senior ministers have previously stood to be Conservative Party leader, and may do so again in the future, and are both lobbying hard against what has become known as Ms. May’s Chequers version of Brexit.
Her vision in the Chequers document came under intense criticism from the British political right and left, not to mention outside players such as U.S. President Donald Trump. Indeed, such was the opposition of elements of even her own Conservative Party, which lobbied to “chuck Chequers,” that the Prime Minister had to effectively rebrand it.
Now a draft U.K.-EU Brexit deal has been agreed to, the parliamentary arithmetic is such that Ms. May could need to rely on the votes of opposition Labour Party MPs to get the agreement through the House of Commons. Here it is highly unclear how many such Labour parliamentarians would support Ms. May, despite the potential pressure to do so for those politicians representing constituencies that voted in 2016 to leave the EU.
During the 1980's conservatism rejected its Burkean roots and adopted Ayn Rand as its philosophical godmother and Milton Friedman as its accountant. Rand and Friedman trumpeted the beauty of the Individual Unbound. The result was that conservatives became so enamoured of individualism they could agree on virtually nothing -- except what they were against. And what they were against, most of all, was government.
The end result has been that, when conservatives achieve power -- in Britain and the United States -- they can't govern because they can't craft policy. Their differences doom their dreams.
That's a lesson Ontario's Conservatives, under Doug Ford, are now learning.
Image: Politico Europe
