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Home / World

Mike Hosking: It's May all the way, despite headlines

NZ Herald
7 Jun, 2017 05:00 PM4 mins to read

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British Prime Minister Theresa May has run a poor campaign but the Labour Party has failed to capitalise on it. Photo / AP
British Prime Minister Theresa May has run a poor campaign but the Labour Party has failed to capitalise on it. Photo / AP

British Prime Minister Theresa May has run a poor campaign but the Labour Party has failed to capitalise on it. Photo / AP

Opinion

Thursday June 8, 2017: Election day in Britain.

Who would've imagined the campaign would have unfolded the way it did.

Theresa May looked very Thatcher-like when she threw caution to the wind and called the vote no one saw coming.

It made sense, it would assert her authority, it would give her and her government a mandate on Brexit, and quite possibly fulfil the dream of all Tories to crush the Labour party in a way not seen in generations.

The polls early on showed this was more than possible; a 22 point lead is a rare thing indeed and Jeremy Corbyn and his Mad Hatter ideas seemed to add fuel to the fire of his destruction.

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But then, as is so often the case in campaigns, things happened that no one saw coming.

The Prime Minister has run a poor campaign, and policy has backfired, not least of which the changes to care for the elderly, which have enraged their core supporters.

She failed to show for debates, and has battled the whole way with the complacency factor: Brits are sick of voting.

They've had an election, they've voted on Scotland, they've voted on Brexit. To get them excited for a fourth go in a short period of time was always going to be tricky.

What very few seem to get as they trumpet the headlines over the ever closing gap in the polls, is that the numbers represent a national view, and even then, early this week we had three polls out in one day.

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The one that got the headlines was the one that had the gap down to a single point. But the other two polls had gaps to the Tories of 6 per cent and 12 per cent.

So is it 1 or 6 or 12 per cent ... or somewhere in between? The difference between them is the difference between a close run thing or a landslide.

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More importantly Britain is a first past the post country, so a national poll is virtually irrelevant.

At no point in this race when the actual seats have been broken down, have the Tories been in actual danger of losing.

The worst case scenario is they don't have a working majority, which won't happen, but even if it did, let us not forget that prior to the last election the country was run, and reasonably successfully, by the country's first coalition.

The saving grace for May of course is the Labour party.

Corbyn is one of the most remarkably unelectable people ever to present himself to the electorate.

Disliked by most of his own MPs, loathed by the public, and only saved by the unionists who have flooded the party membership to get him the leadership.

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His policies are from another age, and so extreme that when push comes to shove, when people actually have to decide who runs their country, short of the small collective of Marxists who have never quite joined the real world, Brits know full well there is only one choice.

The economic backdrop to this race must not be forgotten either. Britain is actually doing quite well.

The doom merchants and their forecast of catastrophe post-Brexit have been shown to be wrong.

The jobless rate is actually better than ours, overall the country is operating in solid economic times and history shows that when the majority of punters are happy, they go with the status quo.

So despite the fact the headline writers have done their best to make this thing sound gripping, no one votes for economic chaos, so the conservatives will win, and I wouldn't even rule out a big win despite the polls.

May gets her mandate on Brexit, May actually gets elected as PM, having of course merely been appointed post-David Cameron.

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And May gets to deliver a Britain free of Europe, which history will show is one of the best decisions they ever made.

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