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May has only a wafer-thin Parliamentary majority. This allows the remnants of John Major's 'b4st4rds', (Career-long brexitters, Cash, Redwood, IDS possibly others who are even less memorable), plus recent opportunists, (Gove), to wield disproportionate negative power in the forlorn Brexit debate. (Witness Gove et al walking out of the Parliamentary committee on Brexit that dared to suggest that there could be negative outcomes from leaving the EU).
None of these wreckers, (that I recognise), have ever been employed in the productive part of the economy and have no concept of the benefits of the Customs Union or pan-EU harmonisation of standards. They fail to understand what will happen to the UK economy if in March 2019 we 'just walk away' with WTO as a fallback position.
I have no idea what Tory Central Office have been doing to vet their parliamentary candidates, but May must be hoping to return to Westminster with a majority to vote through some strategic compromises despite the 'referendum b4st4rds'.
Of course the simplest route would have been for John Major, [after his hissy fit resignation as Leader of the Conservative Party, dubiously remaining as PM, and defeating the ludicrous Redwood], to have expelled the b4st4rds to make them stand as explicit early ukippers, where they could have dissipated their time in the poltical wastelands of lost deposits. Neil Kinnock had the strength to expel Militant.
The Tory party sees no problem with its spectrum of support including British Nationalists and overt racists. -
long-term
No longer matters in politics
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@Oliver Schick
I think this election is a big political mistake by May, to add to her having got just about everything important wrong so far. If she wins, she will most likely cause the Conservative Party long-term damage. It's not good for a party to be too dominant.
It's difficult to speculate about the causes without the inside knowledge she undoubtedly has. It does seem as if her hand was forced by the legal difficulties relating to Conservative election spending in 2015, but it's impossible to say. Her stated reasons for calling the election are certainly utter nonsense.
Obviously, pace everybody, the timing is bad for Labour. I can imagine they knew this was coming, as their policy activity recently has been more than you'd expect during local elections, leading even to positive comment in the Nuadriag:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/15/corbyn-had-good-week-are-people-ready-to-listen-to-ideas
Still, I doubt they're really ready (they would have been a lot more ready without last summer's distractions) and I think the chances of a creditable result for them are slim. They can only hope that the claim, which I've seen several times recently in different media, that their policies are popular with a majority of the electorate, is actually true and will have a sufficient impact.
If May really has some idea that a dominant election result will help her in European elections, she must be completely unaware of how she and the UK are seen in Europe. I doubt that's her real reason, and Labour would do well not to make this election about 'Brexit'. (I doubt they would, anyway.) It's not about that at all, and her suggestion that it is is nothing short of bizarre.