TLDR News: What Did Theresa May Actually Do? - Brexit Explained

With May set to leave resign from her position today, we look back on what her government actually achieved. We discuss how she got the role, the progress she made on Brexit and what she actually did besides Brexit.

VICE News: The Brexit Mistakes That Led to Theresa May's Resignation

After almost three years of waiting for their country to leave the EU, British voters finally saw some action. Prime Minister Theresa May resigned as leader of the Conservative Party last week.

Her resignation has been inevitable since May failed to get Parliament to accept a deal and was forced to delay Brexit. Still, there’s no clear frontrunner to fill the power vacuum that will emerge as she steps down, and whoever takes over will inherit the problems that took May down.

One thing, however, is clear: In the next few months, her successor will clarify whether Theresa May single-handedly and spectacularly failed at her only job or whether delivering Brexit is a suicide mission for any politician.

More than a few conservative hardliners are banking on the first hypothesis — that May’s string of bad decisions were the problem. They’re pushing to see Boris Johnson, the figurehead of the 2016 leave campaign, take over and finish what he started.

Whoever ends up in the unenviable position will first have to handle the fallout from the European Parliament elections. Polls show the Conservative Party finishing in a humiliating fifth place. And with Nigel Farage and his newly-formed Brexit Party raging toward victory, the humiliations are likely to continue well after the results are in. 

The Atlantic: The Implosion of Jeremy Corbyn

According to polling by The Jewish Chronicle, 85 percent of British Jews now think that Corbyn is anti-Semitic. And that was before this week’s bombshell: documents obtained by The Sunday Times showing that Labour failed to investigate hundreds of anti-Semitism complaints, and let hundreds more slide. The documents show not only that Labour’s procedures for investigating anti-Semitic incidents were—despite public assurances to the contrary—dismally subpar, but also that members of Corbyn’s office directly intervened in more than one in 10 investigations, despite having claimed that they were impartial. [...]

A year earlier, in March 2018, the story broke that Corbyn had been a member of three secret Facebook groups in which virulent anti-Semitic memes were sometimes shared. Understandable, perhaps, in radical campaign circles. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, right? We’re protesting an occupation, not forming a government. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about deploring Israel Defense Forces violence in Gaza, but if Palestine is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Jews—just like if Israel is your cause, sometimes you’re going to meet people who really just hate Muslims. [...]

Until the general-election upset in June 2017, when Labour stunned pollsters by increasing its vote share, Corbyn seemed unlikely to stick around for long. But that victory—of sorts—trapped him. After the election, MPs who thought they could wait him out grew restless. Luciana Berger, a Jewish Labour MP, had been perennially targeted for abuse, both anti-Semitic and misogynistic, mainly from the far right. But when she started talking about anti-Semitism in Labour, when she expressed concern about Corbyn and the mural, something changed. Some of the abuse seemed to be coming from Labour supporters, even members. “One person told me: ‘Momentum will be watching you,’” she wrote.

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Spiegel: A Series of Miscalculations Has Brought Britain to the Brink

For some it's anger at a political class that has made so many promises and kept so few of them. For others, it's anger at the nationalist tempters gambling away the country's future in a quest to reclaim past glory. There is anger at a government that no longer has the power to solve critical social problems. Anger that it's not over yet. And yes, also, self-directed anger. [...]

For non-Brits, the Brexiteers' chauvinist rhetoric may be hard to understand, but it is part of a long tradition. The Brits only hesitantly joined a united Europe in 1973. At the time, the plan's opponents had similar arguments to today's Brexiteers. Labour Party lawmaker Peter Shore later explained: "What the advocates of membership are saying is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations almost as though we had suffered defeat in a war." [...]

The nostalgic nationalists told them so nonchalantly because none of them seriously expected that a majority of Brits would vote to leave the EU. It was easy to make these mistakes because their primary aim had been to exploit the referendum to win a fight within the Tory party. Ultimately, the people voted 52 to 48 percent in favor of Brexit. While the rest of the Europe unloaded its frustration with the status quo by swelling the ranks of right-wing populists, the Brits found their scapegoat in Brussels. [...]

May would later say that her stance represented what "British people want." But that wasn't true. The people were asked whether they wanted to leave the EU -- not how. Clearly, there wasn't just one way people wanted that to happen. And the more time that passed, the more it became clear that these many potential ways of exiting the EU were irreconcilable. [...]

The battle over Brexit has poisoned the United Kingdom. At some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be taught as a case study for political failure. Planning for a Brexit museum is likewise underway. Several activists have joined forces for the project, hoping to show how the United Kingdom took back its "sovereignty." Or not. Who knows, perhaps the museum will ultimately be home to a blue bus and a red bus.

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Financial Times: Sajid Javid: the man who would be prime minister

The FT's politics editor George Parker sketches a profile of Conservative politician Sajid Javid, who seemed set for the sack a year ago but is now thriving as home secretary and has become favourite to succeed Theresa May as UK prime minister.

The New Yorker: Theresa May’s Impossible Choice

As a result, it is hard to sense what May is thinking or to predict what she will do next. “No one knows where they are at any point in time when they are working for Theresa May,” one of her former staffers said. May rejects the inevitable comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, because Thatcher had an agenda that was overtly ideological. May, unlike Thatcher, would not enjoy being photographed driving a tank. Her definition of politics is “doing something, not being someone.” People say that she would have made a fine lawyer or judge. But she happens to be the leader of the United Kingdom—a divided nation of sixty-five million people, Europe’s second-largest economy, and America’s closest ally—as it chooses how it wants to proceed in the world. This summer, that choice, which is frankly overwhelming, came to rest with May. Britain waited and watched. May made her call, and then her government more or less exploded. And that was before Donald Trump showed up. [...]

Since the referendum, the central task in British politics has been to try to square two conflicting demands: to respect the democratic impulse of Brexit while limiting the economic consequences. It is a version of the challenge posed by populist anger everywhere. How far should governments go in tearing up systems that people say they dislike—the alienating structures of global capitalism and multilateral government—when the alternatives risk making populations poorer, and therefore presumably more furious than before? [...]

And that’s Brexit, in a way. “Every single element in this is connected,” the senior official told me. The mightiest riddles, such as the customs union, have dominated the political conversation, but the truth is that it’s nitty-gritty all the way down. During its forty-five years in the E.U., Britain has imported around nineteen thousand European laws and regulations. The fabric of the acquis, as the legal framework is known, is the fabric of political life. E.U. articles and directives govern everything from equal pay for men and women to the international trade of the hairy-vetch seed. Two days before I went to Dover, a fourteen-page update from the Brexit negotiations included progress on the status of staff employed on British military bases in Cyprus, the ownership of fissile nuclear materials, and the future administration of sales taxes. One of the reasons that people voted to leave the E.U. is its totalizing nature, and the sense that it had penetrated too far into British life. But the years of membership, the weaving of the acquis, have constructed a reality that is hard to change—and even harder to imagine a life outside.  [...]

One of the central difficulties of coming to an agreement is the different way that the two sides imagine politics. The Lisbon Treaty, which serves as the E.U.’s constitution, is two hundred and seventy-one pages long; the U.K. has no such thing. In Westminster, no situation is completely unfixable; the rules can be made to bend. For this reason, Brexiteers have always believed that Britain’s economic and military importance to the E.U. would prompt it—or, rather, its German car manufacturers, or its Dutch oil refiners—to offer the nation a singularly advantageous deal. (May often talks about a “bespoke” Brexit.) But, since the vote in 2016, the E.U. has maintained that Britain can choose only from a menu of trading relationships that already exist. “I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

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BBC4 Analysis: British Politics: A Russian View

Peter Pomerantsev asks why new techniques in political campaigning have succeeded and what the consequences are for society. He has a different view to most from his past career working inside the TV industry in Moscow.

The future arrived first in Russia. The defeat of communism gave rise to political technologists who flourished in the vacuum left by the Cold War, developing a supple approach to ideology that made them the new masters of politics. Something of this post-ideological spirit is visible in Britain. Centrism no longer seems viable. Globalisation is increasingly resented. Ours is an uncertain political landscape in which commentators and polls habitually fail to predict what is to come. There was a time when if you lived in a certain place, in a certain type of home, then you were likely to vote a certain way. But that is no longer the case. Instead, political strategists imagine you through your data. The campaigns that succeed are the ones that hook in as many groups as possible, using advances in political technology to send different messages to different groups.

Pomerantsev, one of the most compelling voices on modern Russia, is a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and is the author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia".

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The Guardian: Could Theresa May’s pact with the DUP lead to a united Ireland?

The warning signs that the Tories had no idea what they were doing were there from the outset: in a stunning display of both arrogance and stupidity, they announced they had reached a deal with the DUP before negotiations had begun, assuming a party with 10 MPs would acquiesce rather than face the embarrassment of correcting them. But the embarrassment was all Theresa May’s, as well the DUP knew, as they forced the Conservatives to step back up to the lectern and admit their error. The next error was assuming that if the Tories flew over for the weekend, the DUP would meet them on a Sunday. If Tory special advisers failed to pick up the most basic knowledge about the working habits of Free Presbyterians on the Sabbath, it’s little surprise they took so long to broker a deal. Unbelievably, the Conservatives hopped on a flight to Belfast assuming it would be a breeze to broker a deal with a party that sat through all of the negotiations leading to the Good Friday agreement and still opposed it. [...]

Keeping gay marriage and abortion illegal has long been made possible by a combination of the Republic opposing both, Sinn Féin maintaining some social conservatism and the rest of the UK largely ignoring the north. Now all of those supports have evaporated: Sinn Féin campaigned to repeal the eighth amendment, and is pushing the British government to legislate on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Both access to abortion and LGBT marriage rights will be enshrined in law in the Republic, and the DUP is scrutinised now more than it has been since the heyday of Ian Paisley. [...]

This hypocrisy runs through the ongoing Brexit negotiations too. New research published by academics at Queen’s University Belfast on the attitudes of people in Northern Ireland show that the majority of people back same-sex marriage rights: 62% of people overall, with 75% of Catholics and 50.5% of Protestants backing mooted legislation.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Corbyn Generation

Today, those frustrated hopes and freezing afternoons appear in a different light — as the first signs of the generational divide that has come to define the country. After Labour’s humiliating defeat in the 2015 election, many of those involved in the student protests went on to support Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the party. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, three-quarters of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voted Remain, while two-thirds of over-sixty-fives favored Brexit. Then, when a snap election was called in June 2017, Corbyn made abolishing tuition fees a flagship policy of the party’s manifesto, and Labour defied expectations to bring about a hung Parliament. Youth turnout climbed to a twenty-five-year-high; the generation gap was the widest since polling records began.

Myers chronicles the trajectory of this privatization push, which began with Tony Blair’s New Labour government — a period in which fees rose to £3,000 and private-sector activity in higher education grew from 32 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2007 (the EU average is 20 percent). The tripling of fees in 2010,” Myers writes, “did not emerge from nowhere.” Now, UK students are saddled with more debt on average — £50,800 — than in any other country in the world, partly thanks to extortionate interest rates that can be raised retrospectively at will. As one of the government’s own advisers on student finance remarked, if a company possessed similar terms they might attract sanctions, perhaps even prosecution. (In the United States, although the cost of tuition varies far more, the average debt burden on students is much lower at $36,000, or £27,900.) [...]

Most significantly, however, the demographic of these protests was different. Like the French student protests in 2005, the 2010 movement brought together a cross-section of poorer city youth — ethnically diverse and more disillusioned — with wealthier, middle-class students. These disparate groups had distinct motivations, but they had a shared feeling of being held in contempt.[...]

Again, this new alliance would endure after the collapse of the 2010 protests, helping fuel Corbyn’s ascendance to the top of the Labour Party. Support for Labour among black and minority voters rose by six points in the 2017 election, while turnout increased to a high of 64 percent. These communities have been disproportionately punished by austerity. Like students, they were asked to bear the burden of an economic crisis not of their making. As early as 2010 the Institute for Public Policy Research found that “mixed ethnic groups had seen the biggest increases in youth unemployment since the recession began, rising from 21 percent to 35 percent in the period.”  

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Independent: Michael Gove is waving the white flag over Brexit – but it’s not for the reason you would think

For many consumers of social media, the big election issues were not Brexit, or Theresa May’s mechanical personality, or her dementia tax, or Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to abolish tuition fees. They were worked up about May’s support for fox hunting and her failure to mention a ban on ivory sales in her manifesto.

Now Gove as Environment Secretary is on the side of the animals. He is banning bee-harming pesticides, insisting on CCTV in slaughterhouses, and supports a ban on trading ivory. He even says all the right things about climate change. The Green Party has praised him. He must have his sights on No 10.  [...]

It was not May’s agreement with the EU27 that was a surrender; it was Gove’s Telegraph article. He has sued for peace with an eye to his own ambitions, and on behalf of his former friend, the Foreign Secretary, who has been noticeably more reluctant to heap praise on the Prime Minister.  [...]

The generous interpretation of the Prime Minister’s handling of the cabinet Brexiters is that her careful management has kept them on board. In fact, Gove has been kept on board by a combination of his ambition and being forced to accept the realities of leaving the EU.

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openDemocracy: Brexit, Ireland, and the revenge of history

The reality is that Theresa May now has two choices. She can either risk the collapse of her own government. Or she can pave the way for a ‘hard Brexit’ – that’s Britain crashing out of the EU in April 2019 without a trade deal, and all the disastrous consequences that follow. [...]

Earlier this year, openDemocracy revealed that the DUP received £435,000 from a mystery donor to campaign for Brexit. The secret donation – three times as much as the DUP has ever spent on an electoral campaign in its history – attracted particular controversy because almost none of the cash was spent in Northern Ireland. Yet a little-known law which applies to Northern Ireland, and not the rest of the UK, allowed the donors(s) to remain anonymous. Clearly, this was a flagrant abuse of the outdated ‘security’ reasons for donor secrecy in Northern Ireland. The upshot? Theresa May’s government is being propped up, as it negotiates Brexit, by a party funded by secret Brexit donors. [...]

It is not only May’s government that comes out of this looking weak and, frankly, stupid. Throughout the EU referendum campaign, the question of what would happen to Ireland’s enormous, open border was barely addressed. It was clear that leading Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, now the UK’s gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary, had given it not a moment’s thought. But neither, it seemed, had the Remain camp. As part of ex-PM David Cameron’s ill-fated ‘Project Fear’, British voters were served a daily diet of warnings about economic armageddon and little else. The British press, for the most part, did little to probe the question of Ireland further either – perhaps most unforgivable of all, given the supposed role of the fourth estate.

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RSA: Who's Destroying The American Dream

This event was recorded live at The RSA on Tuesday 31st October 2017

It’s now conventional wisdom to focus on the excesses of the ultra-rich top 1% who are hoarding income and wealth while incomes for the rest are stagnant. But the more important, and widening, gap in American society, argues Richard Reeves, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society. Income isn’t the only way to measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access to money generally determines who gets the best quality education, housing and health care.

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighbourhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is a fracturing of American society along class lines, not just an economic divide.

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Social Europe: Examining ‘The Corbyn Effect’

The next six weeks saw an extraordinary turnaround. Labour’s vote soared to 40%, some 10% higher than its 2015 performance, and the biggest rise in any party’s share of the vote since 1945. The Tory government, anticipating a post-Brexit landslide, lost its majority, sending it into a chronic tailspin. [...]

For Goodfellow and others, Labour’s rise vindicates Corbyn’s strategy of building support through a radical programme capable of appealing to those who usually don’t vote rather than triangulation to appeal to those who do. The party’s challenge is to consolidate and extend the support it won in 2017, a coalition encompassing not just the infamous ‘metropolitan elite’ but also low paid public sector and precarious workers, students, and the poorer working class in former industrial areas, amongst whom Labour retains significant support (though it has indeed fallen back among the older working class). [...]

There are interesting thoughts here about the substance of Labour’s agenda. There is praise for the bold social democratic intent of the 2017 manifesto, with its commitment to the principles of universalism and a strong state. But there is also an appeal for a social democracy that goes beyond statist managerialism. Hilary Wainwright draws a contrast between a paternalist ‘power-as-domination’ according to which the state seeks to do things for people and ‘power-as-transformative capacity’ exercised by people themselves once given greater opportunity to access and shape political and economic systems. [...]

Jo Littler locates the emotional appeal of Corbyn’s message in his insistence, against neoliberal orthodoxy, that individual freedom can only be realised through collective agency. With his gentle demeanour and heartfelt language Corbyn seeks to reclaim the language of aspiration from the right, and presents an ideal of collective provision that evades conservative stereotypes of statist authoritarianism.

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The New York Review of Books: Brexit: ‘Take Back Control’?

But right after announcing these two departures, and in the very same speech, May turned on a dime. She told the assembled EU ambassadors that, following Brexit, she wanted to propel strategic sectors of the UK economy right back into the single market and the customs union, but with one big difference she called her “bespoke” deal. While Britain would still enjoy most of the benefits of membership—“frictionless trade,” in her words—the UK would be largely free of its obligations. So, no free movement of labor between the UK and the EU, no British jurisdiction for the Europe Court of Justice, and no multibillion-pound annual payments by the UK into the EU budget.  [...]

May put together her approach with only a couple of advisers in Downing Street, and without significant consultation with either her cabinet or British business leaders. But May’s fall has blown open the politics of Brexit within her cabinet. In her year of power, the contradictions of her Brexit diplomacy could be taken as evidence that she needed to make a choice between them, a choice that was hers to make. The weakness of her position now means that these contradictions have been exposed and are harnessed to rival cabinet factions fighting for supremacy, with May caught in the crossfire and powerless to control them. The most significant development in this opening-up of the politics of Brexit has been the emergence of a cabinet faction led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond. [...]

But May did not fire Johnson because he has maneuvered himself into becoming the champion of the nationalist insurgency in the Conservative Party and of those voters who see Brexit as a moment of liberation. Johnson enjoys support not only among grassroots party members but also in May’s cabinet, from ministers like Davis, Fox, and the Environment Secretary Michael Gove, along with the militant core of Conservative members of parliament for whom Brexit has been a lifelong cause. Their cause is also cheered by the pro-Brexit national press led by The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. With a gravely weakened prime minister caught between these warring cabinet factions, it is hard to see how their conflicts will be resolved.

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Politico: Jeremy Corbyn betting on Brexit fatigue

Britain’s opposition leader, who exceeded expectations in Theresa May’s snap election in June with a campaign focused on public spending rather than Europe, shows no sign of changing tack despite pressure from his own MPs to row back on his support for leaving the single market. [...]

If Brexit was on his mind, he showed very little sign of it as he addressed 1,000 enthusiastic supporters in the remote village of Pool, with a lengthy stump speech focused on the National Health Service. [...]

But with the party gearing up for its annual September conference and Brexit negotiations heating up, many Labour MPs believe internal disputes over membership of the single market and whether or not to promise a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal will reach boiling point. [...]

“Many of those voters, particularly the young voters, who helped us deprive the Tories of a majority in June don’t want Brexit and they certainly don’t want Labour to support a hard Brexit,” said Ben Bradshaw, Labour MP for nearby Exeter. “They are looking for us to show leadership on this and will be hoping that Jeremy and his frontbench colleagues provide it.”

Many in his party are unsure Corbyn will be able to sustain the adoration from huge crowds, like those seen at the summer music festival Glastonbury, if he is seen to be too close to the Conservatives on Brexit, and if the British economy suffers from leaving the single market.

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openDemocracy: An epochal election: welcome to the era of platform politics

We can quibble about the numbers. It is technically true, that because the Tories also gained votes, this election result did not (as was widely misreported) see the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. For that to happen, the Conservatives would have had to lose votes to Labour. Instead what happened is that Labour won votes from UKIP (far more than anyone expected), the SNP and Greens, while the Tories gained far fewer than expected from UKIP and rather more anyone foresaw from the SNP. But the overall result saw the biggest direct increase in Labour’s General Election Vote Share since 1945. In 1945, there had not been an election for 10 years, because of the war. In 2017, the last election had been just 2 years earlier. So this was, by any reasonable standard, a historic result. What it actually meant, and what produced it, is, of course, a matter for debate. At least two popular explanations have been widely circulated. [...]

There is a slightly different explanation on offer, which is far more credible, although it also can be accused of seeking to downplay the significance of what looks like a historic result. From this perspective we are, more than ever, in an era of extreme voter volatility, with non-voters mobilisable, and swing voters swinging, in greater numbers than ever before. Perhaps a better way to describe this situation would be to say that it is one of greatly increased reversibility. Political outcomes and events which looked like they could not be altered any time soon can now, it turns out, quickly be turned around. The return of the Tories in Scotland surely stands as some evidence for this idea – nobody saw it coming, and nobody really thought that it was even physically possible. But this leaves open the question of why this peculiar form of reversibility has emerged, and should draw our attention to the fact that ‘voter volatility’ is not a new political phenomenon. Commentators have been commenting on it since the early 70s. [...]

I think it can. In recent years, post-Fordism has itself been increasingly displaced by a new form of capitalism relying on a new generation of technological innovations. The corporations which define our age – Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, YouTube – do so not through their specialised fragmentation in pursuit of niche markets, but through the constitution of massive monopolistic platforms which enable them to profit directly from the creative activity and labour of their users. Andrew Goffey and I actually interviewed the great British economist, Robin Murray – the person responsible for Marxism Today adopting the term ‘post-Fordism’ – in 2015 , and he explained in that interview that post-Fordism was now being displaced by this new form of capitalism: what Nick Srnicek calls in his recent book ‘Platform Capitalism’ (see also Alex Williams in ‘Control Societies and Platform Logic’). [...]

One thing that is now evident from the election result is that May’s strategy of appealing to socially conservative, pro-leave Labour voters proved catastrophically unsuccessful, even in Birmingham (a traditional redoubt of working class conservatism, since the days of Joseph Chamberlain). Labour achieved its result by inspiring a new social coalition which included working class voters from all but the most traditionally conservative of the Labour heartlands, young voters of almost all class backgrounds, across every region , and many affluent voters in the South, frightened for their children’s future at a time when even the offspring of the professional classes have seen their historic privileges eroded out of existence by neoliberalism and austerity.

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Politico: UK’s empty Brexit threats

In the heady days of a comfortable (if not generous) House of Commons Tory majority and an opposition in disarray, Hammond said that if the EU gave the U.K. a bad Brexit deal, “we could be forced to change our economic model and we will have to change our model to regain competitiveness.” It evoked images of a Singapore-style low regulation, low-tax economy on Europe’s doorstep. [...]

The tough talking has been replaced with a far more emollient tone. “I often hear it said that the U.K. is considering participating in unfair competition in regulation and tax,” he told Le Monde, innocently. “That is neither our plan nor our vision for the future.” [...]

And the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which more than 80 people died in a social housing tower block fire (the final death toll may not be known for months), has changed the political mood further. Any appetite for the tearing up of red tape dissipated in the wake of the disaster, which appears to have been caused by a catastrophic regulatory failure.

The opposition has also landed some punches on Hammond’s Singapore vision. Labour’s position on the EU single market and customs union may be even more confused than that of the government, but Corbyn’s oft repeated claim that the Tory Brexit deal threatens to create a “bargain basement economy” gained traction in the election campaign and spooked his opponents.

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MapPorn: Results of UK General Elections 2015 and 2017 by Region.

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Al Jazeera: Will the Scottish National Party lose to Corbynism?

At the UK's snap general election on June 8, the SNP shed 21 of its 56 Westminster seats and saw its share of the vote slump by 13 points. Angus Robertson, the party's chief strategist, and Alex Salmond, its former leader, both lost their once rock-solid constituencies in the rural north-east. Towering nationalist majorities across Glasgow and the central belt crumbled. Even the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a modest Caledonian revival, adding three new Scottish MPs, in Edinburgh, Dunbartonshire, and Caithness, to their previous, solitary total of one. [...]

Remarkably, given the scale of its losses, the SNP hasn't collapsed into acrimony, nor is Sturgeon's leadership in any serious trouble. However, a debate is starting to brew within nationalist circles about the exact nature and purpose of SNP strategy - a strategy that is clearly no longer working.

The most urgent criticisms are coming from the left. Some senior nationalists, such as Tommy Sheppard, the MP for Edinburgh East, want the party to embrace a more radical social democratic identity. They are worried that the appeal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn runs much deeper in Scotland than anyone had initially anticipated and that, in the event of another election, the SNP could haemorrhage seats in its urban and working-class heartlands.  [...]

Davidson's unexpected success capped the resurgence of a party that had been relegated to the fringes of Scottish political life in the late 1990s, but has now navigated its way back into the mainstream on a wave of unionist frustration. For the first time since Holyrood was created 18 years ago, the Scottish right is brimming with confidence. Davidson has cast Sturgeon's referendum U-turn as a personal victory, and is pressing the SNP for additional concessions, notably, that any talk of independence is suspended until at least the next Scottish election in 2021, and that the nationalists get back to their "day job" of running Scotland within the constraints of the current devolutionary settlement. [...]

The numbers are stark. At the 2014 independence referendum, 1.6 million Scots voted "Yes" on a record-breaking turnout of 84 percent. The following year, at the 2015 UK election, the SNP soaked up most of that base, winning 1.4 million votes. At the 2016 Scottish devolved election, the SNP vote dipped to just over one million. In June, it dipped again, to 980,000, on a massively reduced turnout of 66 percent.

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Financial Times: Why Theresa May is here to stay