Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp: May claims the centre ground for xenophobes

The second goal of May’s speech was an attempt to take the central ground abandoned by Labour’s lurch to the left. Political strategists know that you win elections from the centre but that the centre is a movable target and that if Labour move left then the Tories simply need to reword a few Tony Blair speeches, sound like New Labour, add in a few attacks on foreigners and suddenly you have a political brand that can simultaneously appeal to the less left-leaning Labour and British Nationalist Ukip voters.

It’s all standard, caring, conservatism; boilerplate political rhetoric – tall on platitudes and, as time will show, short on any meaningful policies or, indeed, change. Blair moved New Labour to the right and governed from even further right. May will move to the centre and govern from even further right than Blair. The standard promises of a fairer deal for workers and promises of more prosperity sound good, but remember, this is a party that believes it only takes hard work to succeed. May is also the champion of a plethora of right-wing policies: grammar schools, vilifying foreigners, telling businesses to reveal how many foreign workers they employ – so roundly, and rightly, attacked in Holyrood. She also made numerous references to our strong armed forces linked to Philip Hammond’s plan to set up 150 new cadet units in state schools. Is the militarisation of children not a deeply worrying authoritarian doctrine? Don’t worry though, if your kids decide to join the army, May guarantees that they won’t have pesky “left-wing” human rights lawyers prosecuting our soldiers for actions on the battlefield, as our soldiers will now enjoy an exemption from human rights laws while troops are in conflict areas. Err, isn’t that where you need human rights laws the most?

Supporters of independence for Scotland will see the irony in May’s attack on nasty Scottish nationalists when in fact her opening speech was the most nationalistic by a UK leader since Churchill. Apparently, isolationist, anti-foreign, militaristic, rightwing, British sovereignty is good; but international, civic, environment, centralist Scottish sovereignty is bad. She said: “We are going to be a fully independent, sovereign country, a country that is no longer part of a political union with supra-national institutions that can override national parliaments and courts”. However, she thinks it’s best for Scotland to remain a dependent part of a political union it has little influence over, with Westminster, a supra-national institution, able to overrule our national parliament and take us out of the EU against our wishes. Let’s leave aside the fact that the EU is a trading and not a political union and the fact that being a member of the EU doesn’t mean Germany or France are not independent nations. May has effectively copied Farage’s Brexit night speech and declared UK independence.

Helpfully, she set out some priorities for this new-found sovereignty when she said “we are going, once more, to have the freedom to make our own decisions on a whole host of different matters, from how we label our food to the way in which we choose to control immigration”. Yup, that’s right, the best reason for Brexit is that we can leave out a load of important information on food labels and keep out all those troublesome Polish workers that save our building sector from skills shortages or those Estonian nurses who looked after my dad in his last few months of life. It is true, however, that after Brexit food labelling in the UK won’t be dictated by the EU, but if anyone wants to export to the EU they will have to label their products in a way that meets its regulations. Will companies have different labels for exported goods or just keep them the same? At P&G we created pan-European packaging and labelling to save money (even for non EU members) and at Northern Foods I once had to scrap tens of thousands of mince pie boxes as the photographer thought they needed more mince and topped up the content, making the product image misleading. My point is, I know a fair bit about FMCG and food-labelling regulations and, trust me, it isn’t worth half a million people across the UK losing their jobs just so you can say we have gained the right not to have food labelling that makes exporting easier.

The immigration controls May promises will, as widely reported, mean an end to full, free access to the single market, but that doesn’t mean there will be tariffs. Neither the UK nor the EU can afford tariffs at this point but the EU must somehow punish the UK for leaving – it can’t offer the benefits of membership to a non member or the EU will swiftly cease to exist. So, with some element of border control or curbs on immigration it’s now almost a racing certainty that the UK will lose financial passporting rights and that means maybe as many as 50,000 finance jobs will be lost in the city of London. As I have said before, an independent Scotland still within the EU would be an attractive location for the majority of those jobs.

Article 50 negotiations will indicate the kind of trade deal that will be done, post Brexit, and once people see the economy failing and Brexit negotiations going very badly wrong, those who reluctantly voted No in 2014 will have to ask themselves if they want to stay part of a failing, negative, isolationist, backward-looking UK or vote for an outward-looking, progressive and ambitious, renewed, and more prosperous Scotland.