Expect A Lot of Trouble

As a comment on a previous post puts it, referring to the possible resignation of Philip Hammond:

The Three Brexiteers will go first, by a combination of resignation on principle (Davis), resignation that's really sacking (Fox), and undisguised sacking (Johnson). They'll all be replaced with supporters of the May project of never quite leaving the EU. Hammond, a very long-standing and close ally of the Prime Minister's, is indispensable to that project.

I would of course agree with every word of that. But little bits of red meat to the dogs, such as classifying students as immigrants, do not help matters.

People expect a Blairite secession from the Labour Party. But it has yet to materialise, and they might be looking in the wrong place.

As another comment points out:

There are more Blairite Tory MPs than Blairite Labour ones. They're a smaller proportion of Tory than Labour MPs because there are more Tory MPs in total. But they are still the majority and they thought Theresa May was their candidate. They haven't got what they expected at all, whether it's workers on boards or it's this. Expect a lot of trouble for a PM with a wafer thin majority.

Until her elevation to the Premiership, no one had had the faintest idea that those were Theresa May's views. She was assumed to be really very right-wing indeed.

But that assumption was based on her hardline approach at the Home Office. That was itself a continuation of the New Labour programme that had in turn continued that of the Major Government, and especially of Michael Howard, long before any talk of Islamist terrorism.

Opposed all along the way, of course, by Jeremy Corbyn, by Diane Abbott and by Shami Chakrabarti.

Having borrowed numerous of Corbyn's domestic policies, May will need Labour votes in order to carry them, against the opposition of much of her own party.

But it will be worth watching to see whether any Labour MP continues to oppose workers' representatives on boards, restrictions on pay differences within companies, a crackdown on tax avoidance, a ban on tax-avoiding companies from public contracts, a huge programme of infrastructure spending in general and of housebuilding in particular, a cap on energy prices, a ban on foreign takeovers, or an inquiry into Orgreave.

The Work Capability Assessment that May has abandoned was introduced by Yvette Cooper, who was no defender of civil liberties when she was Shadow Home Secretary, and who, despite being a trained economist, was no opponent of the sacked George Osborne's austerity programme.

Think on.