Britain’s Election Stakes Beyond Brexit, this vote will set the U.K.’s course for a generation.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/britains-election-stakes-11575841904?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Britons head to the polls Thursday for their most consequential general election since the 1970s. As with the 1979 vote that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, the outcome will shape Britain for a generation.
First and foremost, this is a Brexit election. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is campaigning to restore democratic legitimacy after Parliament has spent three years trying to thwart voters’ 2016 decision to leave the European Union. He is asking the electorate to give him a majority to pass his divorce deal, which despite its flaws remains the best chance to deliver Brexit and liberate Britain to enter a new era.
Opinion polls suggest voters are giving Mr. Johnson credit for his Brexit leadership. He has won the blessing of Nigel Farage, whose Brexit Party isn’t running against Tories in many seats in order to avoid splitting the Leave vote. Mr. Johnson’s opponents have helped him, too, as Remain politicians struggle to explain why voters should revise their 2016 verdict.
This means that, unlike his hapless predecessor Theresa May, Mr. Johnson is finally giving voters a real choice: a plan that delivers Brexit, or a crop of muddled centrists and wet former Tories who won’t.
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The stakes are even larger than Brexit because of the avowedly socialist platform of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Labour is proposing to increase spending on day-to-day operations by £80 billion a year, or 10%, in addition to a public-works blowout of £55 billion a year and uncountable billions more in entitlements after freezing increases in the retirement age built into current law. Spending as a share of the economy would hit levels not seen since the 1970s.
This would be financed by hidden taxes on the middle class. Labour claims a tax hike on the 3% of workers who earn more than £80,000 a year can fund its agenda. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies projects this adds up to less than 10% of the new revenue Labour would raise. The rest comes from tweaks to personal income-tax allowances that hit lower earners, and corporate rate hikes that would hit middle-class Britons whose pensions invest in stocks and workers whose wage growth would slow.
Mr. Corbyn also wants to nationalize utilities, railways and the postal system, offer free university education, increase property taxes and regulation, and build hundreds of thousands of new homes at government expense.
Mr. Corbyn hopes these handouts will cause voters to ignore everything else that should disqualify him as Prime Minister. That includes his hostility to Britain’s most important allies, especially NATO and the U.S.; his sympathy for terrorists like Hamas and despots like Vladimir Putin ; and the rise of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party on his watch.
Against this left-wing revanchism, the Tory manifesto is vastly superior. Mr. Johnson has ruled out increases to the value-added-tax, social-insurance tax and income tax, and is explicit in its support for what he calls a “dynamic market economy.” He would try to stimulate small-business investment by reforming onerous property taxes on business premises, and hints at a drive to cut regulation.
Yet Mr. Johnson’s reform ambitions are also disappointing, especially compared to the post-Brexit economic challenge. The Tories have ditched plans to reduce the corporate tax rate to 17% from 19%. Also gone is a pledge to cut income taxes on middle-class earners by shifting the brackets at which higher rates apply. Instead Mr. Johnson offers to exempt more income from national-insurance taxation.
The Tories also boast about their new spending on public services, especially for schools and the National Health Service. Mr. Johnson may feel this welfare-statism is necessary to win pro-Brexit constituencies outside of London that traditionally vote Labour. But the political price will be a diminished mandate for the reforms Britain will need to become a global mecca for investment and talent.
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The British stakes are also critical for America. Voters are deciding if they want Britain to remain an influential member of the club of Western democracies. Mr. Johnson represents a long British consensus that Britain and Europe benefit from a security alliance with America, and that Britain’s people have prospered with free-market policies and open trade.
A Corbyn victory would mean an economically weaker Britain less able to advance its interests in the world or deliver prosperity at home. It might also encourage other parties of the left—not least America’s Democrats—to lurch further toward socialism.
Opinion polls have Mr. Johnson leading as voters reward his Brexit gusto and punish Mr. Corbyn’s economics, but there is also a chance of another hung Parliament that would mean more political paralysis. The world will benefit if Britons seize this opportunity to end their country’s euroneurosis and reinvigorate a great and independent democracy.
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