Theresa May must call a General Election- but not for the reasons you might think.
Do away with the fallacy of an “unelected Prime Minister”- Theresa May lacks the mandate for “Brexit meaning Brexit”.
Theresa May will become the second woman Prime Minister — indeed the second woman Conservative Prime Minister — on the 13th July. She’ll be appointed without a leadership contest, with the backing of almost two-thirds of Conservative MPs after her opponent Andrea Leadsome dropped out.
But that’s not the reason why she should call a General Election. The idea of an “unelected Prime Minister” in a parliamentary democracy is a fallacy:
Not a single member of the executive (the cabinet- the government) is directly elected. The Prime Minister is never directly elected because we use a parliamentary system. The only people who voted for David Cameron were the the 35,201 people that did so in his Oxfordshire constituency (Witney). Similarly the only people that ever voted for Theresa May are the 35,453 that did so in her Maidenhead constituency. That’s because we elect our representatives to parliament.
The leader of the biggest party/ group of MPs then is invited to be appointed Prime Minister by the Queen. Only those in the Prime Minister’s own constituency actually vote for the Prime Minister themselves.
The main reason that Theresa May must call a General Election is because of her stance that the result in the EU Referendum resulted in a vote to leave, and her switch in support for leaving the European Union- the “Brexit means Brexit” policy she has adopted.
We elected a pro-remain House of Commons in the 2015 General Election. that means that the current House composition simply doesn’t have the mandate neither to vote for nor deliver Brexit. More importantly, the government May now leads no longer has a mandate to carry out its functions in the event that a mass transfer of powers would occur from the European Union to Westminster and HM’s Government.
Because of this, Theresa May must take to the country and seek a new mandate for a government that can fulfill Brexit. All political parties must publish manifestos of how they want to negotiate Britain leaving the EU, as well as the government they want to run over the two year process.
Some parties like the Liberal Democrats and Green Party may even decided to run on platforms opposing Brexit- something which, with a significant amount of votes in a General Election, would spark trouble should a government be returned with a slim, or no, majority- but that is beyond the point- all parties should seek what they want to see from the Brexit negotiations and go to the public with that to seek a mandate for their vision.
The resulting government should then spend two years negotiating Brexit- with Article 50 of the European Union treaties being triggered as soon as a negotiating team is set up.
Only after this new election will a government have a mandate for Brexit. Only after this new election will a Prime Minister, under the British constitution, be able to ask parliament for permission to trigger Article 50. And only after this new election will any government have a mandate to govern in ‘Brexit Britain’.
