New UK Prime Minister will script new future
Almost three weeks after the much talked about Brexit vote, the fight over the ‘leadership issue' in the British Conservative Party has come to an end on Wednesday. The decision to finally nominate Theresa May as the next Prime Minister of Britain is historically significant as she will have to shoulder the responsibility of overseeing the most complicated transition of the country from the European Union in the days to come.
Besides being the second women Prime Minister of Britain, after Margaret Thatcher, now she will have a tough time to negotiate with the restive EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and the “most indispensable European leader”, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel is known, who is calling the shots on crucial matters affecting the EU, these days. The new Prime Minister is promising to “forge a bold, new positive role” for the nation on the way to leave more than forty years of bonhomie with the EU which has been turbulent so far. She has vowed to fight “burning injustice” prevailing in the British society and create a union between all the citizens by trying to highlight the one nation brand of conservatism.
While taking over, she has shown a radical shift of direction at the heart of the government formation by sacking George Osborne as the Chancellor, replacing one of David Cameron's key lieutenants with former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. She made a direct pitch for the political centre ground by stating to speak for the millions of ordinary working class families across the country. Though notably the tone and tenor of her language was Centrist and conciliatory, but while making the first set of Cabinet appointments she has indicated a shift to the Right, with Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary and veteran Right-wing politicians like David Davis and liam Fox surprisingly back to the new Government as secretary for handling Brexit and international trade respectively. However, she has amply demonstrated an attempt to reunite the Conservative Party badly fractured by the Brexit vote.
However, most of the economists were of the view that Britain's membership of the EU has translated into more trade than would otherwise have been the case. In the last 40 years, the UK economy outperformed other EU members like Germany and France. In fact, the economic performance of Britain had saw two remarkable trends: First, in the 1970s when the country just joined the EU and after the Union opened its single market in goods in 1992.
On the backdrop of such glaring instances of the upward movement of the British economy, and a vast majority of Britons decrying the bureaucratic machinations of the Brussels for just dictating and determining the fate of the country resulting into the historic Brexit vote on June 23, May will have to tread carefully while scripting the course of action for staying relevant in the continent. She is struggling to put the common British citizens at the centre of her governance, but she cannot afford to out rightly ignore the elite of the country while wading through the troubled waters in the post-Brexit period. As she has repeatedly spoke that “Brexit means Brexit” since she has stood for her party as the Prime Minister, now it will be worth watching how she shapes the ties between the EU and Britain.