Wednesday marks the official opening of Parliament in the United
Kingdom: an ancient ritual in which the monarch, decked out in full
royal regalia, including the Imperial State Crown, reads out a list of
legislation that the government hopes to get passed in the coming twelve
months. The ceremony dates back to 1832, but rarely have the
circumstances surrounding it been as tumultuous as they are this year.
In the past month, Britain has seen a general election in which the
Conservative government lost its majority; an enormous apartment-tower
fire that killed dozens of people; and three terrorist attacks—the
latest of which took place on Sunday night, when a forty-seven-year-old
far-right extremist, from South Wales, ran a van into a crowd of Muslims
leaving a mosque in Finsbury Park, North London.
The series of events has shaken a country that likes to see itself as a
safe and peaceful place, and it has also severely damaged the standing
of the Prime Minister, Theresa May, the sixty-year-old vicar’s daughter
who succeeded David Cameron, last summer, following the surprise victory
of the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum.
Practically nobody blames May for the terrorist attacks, of course. But
her decision to call an early election—which was intended to strengthen
her position as she negotiates Brexit with the European Union—backfired
horribly, with the Conservatives losing thirteen seats in the House of
Commons. To remain in power, May had to cobble together a government
with the support of the Democratic Unionists, an avowedly sectarian
party from Northern Ireland.
Even before this past week, members of her own party were openly
speculating about a possible leadership challenge in the fall. And in
recent days she has faced more severe criticism for her response to the
inferno at Grenfell Tower, a public-housing building in London’s North
Kensington neighborhood.
On Thursday, the day after the fire, May announced that she would set up
a public inquiry into its causes. But local residents complained that
the authorities were slow to provide shelter to the survivors of the
blaze. On her first visit to the scene, last week, May left without
speaking to any of the displaced residents or family members of the
victims, an inexplicable omission that was inadvertently exacerbated,
later in the week, when Queen Elizabeth and her grandson Prince William
stopped by a sports center that is being used as an unofficial
headquarters for efforts to help the affected. On Friday afternoon, when
May returned to meet with survivors and local leaders, a hostile crowd
shouted “coward” and “shame on you.”
Some of May’s allies defended her response to the fire, saying that she
had concentrated on getting the proper emergency resources in place. But
the media coverage of her was unsparing. On Friday night, a BBC
interviewer, Emily Maitlis,
accused May of failing to
react quickly enough and of misreading the public mood. In Saturday’s
edition of the Times of London, a Conservative-leaning newspaper, the
editorial cartoonist Peter Brookes
depicted May standing in a reception line to meet the Queen, who asks, “And what
do you do?” In the Daily Telegraph, the traditional house organ of
the Conservative Party, the columnist Simon Heffer
wrote,
“Her robotic and sequestered performance when visiting the disaster
scene showed that Mrs May is not that leader—an impression confirmed by
her subsequent TV interviews.” Polly Toynbee, a liberal columnist at the
Guardian, invoked George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina,
declaring,
“That tomb in the sky will forever be Theresa May’s monument.”
And yet, after all the opprobrium that was heaped on her last week,
May’s reaction to Sunday’s attack in Finsbury Park—in which an odd-job
man named Darren Osborne plowed a rented van into a crowd before
reportedly shouting, “I want to kill all Muslims”—was rapid and
forceful. Speaking outside 10 Downing Street on Monday morning, she
called the incident
“another terrorist attack on the streets of our capital city, the second
this month, and every bit as sickening as those which have come before.”
She went on, “It was an attack that once again targeted the ordinary and
the innocent going about their daily lives—this time British Muslims as
they left a mosque having broken their fast and prayed together at this
sacred time of year.”
This statement marked a big shift in tone from May, who previously had
said little about Islamophobia and attacks on Muslims in the United
Kingdom, despite warnings from the government's own antiterrorism
experts that violence inspired by anti-Muslim sentiment represented a
serious threat. Just a couple of weeks ago, following the attacks in
Manchester and on London Bridge, she promised to crack down “on the
ideology of Islamist extremism and all those who support it,” including
agitators affiliated with mosques. On Monday, she equated those earlier
attacks with Osborne’s. This latest incident, she said, “shares the same
fundamental goal” as all terrorism. “It seeks to drive us apart and to
break the precious bonds of solidarity and citizenship that we share in
this country,” she said. “We will not let this happen.”
On Monday afternoon, May attended an interfaith meeting at the Finsbury
Park Mosque, and the head of London’s police force announced that
security would be stepped up at Islamic places of worship around the city.
Even some of May’s harshest critics welcomed her words and actions. She
“managed to do the right thing with reasonable timing,” the Guardian said in an editorial, on Tuesday. “It will not be enough to redeem her
standing, but at least it suggests she has learned something from the
past few dreadful days.”
The Prime Minister is still facing enormous challenges on several
fronts. She and her Conservative colleagues have yet to explain why they
and their predecessors failed to heed warnings that thousands of
public-housing buildings similar to Grenfell Tower were potential death
traps. Following a 2009 fire at a high-rise in South London that killed
six people, a group of M.P.s repeatedly pointed out that many
residential buildings lacked sprinkler systems and contained flammable
external cladding that building codes in Germany and the United States
prohibited. “Can we really afford to wait for another tragedy to occur
before we amend this weakness?” the parliamentary group wrote to
ministers, in 2014.
The housing minister who failed to respond to this entreaty was Gavin
Barwell, a Conservative M.P. who lost his seat in the June 8th
election—and whom May then appointed as her chief of staff, four days
before Grenfell Tower went up in flames. With many people calling for
Barwell’s resignation, he now seems destined to be an important witness
at the forthcoming public inquiry. Critics have also seized on the fire
as a tragic coda to seven years of Conservative austerity policies, which
have severely reduced central-government funding to local authorities and
have emphasized cutting costs above all else. It has emerged that when
Grenfell Tower was renovated a couple of years ago, flame-resistant
external cladding could have been used at an extra cost of just five
thousand pounds. The company that did the renovation, and which had
submitted the lowest bid for the work, chose the cheaper, more
flammable, option. “If you cut local-authority expenditure, then the
price is paid somehow,” Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party,
noted in the fire’s aftermath.
On Tuesday, there was yet more disturbing news for May. Philip Hammond,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a speech about Brexit in which he
appeared to distance himself from the hard-line approach championed by
May and the Brexit minister, David Davis. “It must be done in a way that
works for Britain,” Hammond
said.
“In a way that prioritizes British jobs and underpins Britain’s
prosperity.”
Meanwhile, there were
reports that Labour and Scottish National M.P.s would try to bring down the
new government by proposing a series of amendments to the Queen’s
Speech, on which the House of Commons has to vote. If any of the
amendments passed, then, according to historical convention, May would
be forced to resign.
As long as the Democratic Unionists* support the government, this is unlikely
to happen. On Tuesday evening, there were also reports of a last-minute
breakdown in negotiations between the party and Downing
Street about an agreement in which the Northern Irish party, while
stopping short of joining a formal coalition, would agree to back the
Conservatives on key parliamentary votes. Despite this development,
however, it still seemed likely that the Democratic Unionists would vote
for the Queen's Speech, since bringing down May would probably usher
Corbyn into Downing Street—an outcome that the Unionists are implacably
opposed to. (The Labour leader has long had ties to the Irish Republican
movement, which is on the other side of the sectarian divide in Northern
Ireland.)
Whatever happens on Wednesday, the consensus in Britain is that May and
her minority government won’t last very long.
*An earlier version of this post misstated the political party working with the Conservative government.