Table of Contents:
Victory for Boris Johnson’s All-New Tories: The Economist, Dec. 13, 2019
There Is No Way Back for the Pig-Headed, Pulverised Labour Party: Sherelle Jacobs, The Telegraph, Dec. 14, 2019
Boris Johnson Joins Trump in Redefining Conservatism: Stephen Fidler and Gerald F. Seib, WSJ, Dec. 13, 2019
Barbara Kay: A Victory Lap For Democracy After Jeremy Corbyn’s Humiliating Defeat: Barbara Kay, National Post, Dec. 13, 2019
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Victory for Boris Johnson’s All-New Tories
The Economist, Dec. 13, 2019
BRITAIN’S ELECTION on December 12th was the most unpredictable in years—yet in the end the result was crushingly one-sided. As we went to press the next morning, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was heading for a majority of well over 70, the largest Tory margin since the days of Margaret Thatcher. Labour, meanwhile, was expecting its worst result since the 1930s. Mr Johnson, who diced with the possibility of being one of Britain’s shortest-serving prime ministers, is now all-powerful.
The immediate consequence is that, for the first time since the referendum of 2016, it is clear that Britain will leave the European Union. By the end of January it will be out—though Brexit will still be far from “done”, as Mr Johnson promises. But the Tories’ triumph also shows something else: that a profound realignment in British politics has taken place. Mr Johnson’s victory saw the Conservatives taking territory that Labour had held for nearly a century. The party of the rich buried Labour under the votes of working-class northerners and Midlanders.
After a decade of governments struggling with weak or non-existent majorities, Britain now has a prime minister with immense personal authority and a free rein in Parliament. Like Thatcher and Tony Blair, who also enjoyed large majorities, Mr Johnson has the chance to set Britain on a new course—but only if his government can also grapple with some truly daunting tasks.
A cold coming they had of it
On a rainswept night the Conservatives marched into constituencies long seen as Labour strongholds (see Britain section). Blyth Valley, an ex-mining community in the north-east where Tories have for generations been the enemy, fell before midnight. Wrexham, Labour turf for more than 80 years, declared for the Conservatives at 2am. Great Grimsby, a struggling northern port held by Labour since the second world war, was taken soon after. By dawn it was clear that the “red wall” of Labour constituencies, which stretched unbroken from north Wales to Yorkshire, had been demolished.
Mr Johnson was lucky in his opponent. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, was shunned by voters, who doubted his promises on the economy, rejected his embrace of dictators and terrorists and were unconvinced by his claims to reject anti-Semitism.
But the result also vindicates Mr Johnson’s high-risk strategy of targeting working-class Brexit voters. Some of them switched to the Tories, others to the Brexit Party, but the effect was the same: to deprive Labour of its majority in dozens of seats.
Five years ago, under David Cameron, the Conservative Party was a broadly liberal outfit, preaching free markets as it embraced gay marriage and environmentalism. Mr Johnson has yanked it to the left on economics, promising public spending and state aid for struggling industries, and to the right on culture, calling for longer prison sentences and complaining that European migrants “treat the UK as though it’s basically part of their own country.” Some liberal Tories hate the Trumpification of their party (the Conservative vote went down in some wealthy southern seats). But the election showed that they were far outnumbered by blue-collar defections from Labour farther north. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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There Is No Way Back for the Pig-Headed, Pulverised Labour Party
Sherelle Jacobs
The Telegraph, Dec. 14, 2019
In the harsh light of this brilliant new dawn, the Labour Party has never looked more ugly. Jeremy Corbyn is writhing defiance made flesh. Despite leading his party into the worst defeat since 1935, he growled in his final speech that his manifesto policies had “huge popular support”. His frontbench henchmen are out in force on the BBC, whining nasally about the difficulties of “cutting through the noise of Brexit” and conspiracy theorising the power of “the Murdoch Press”. Meanwhile Momentum is squirming stupidly like a snake that has been drained of its venom. Its leader Laura Parker can only grudgingly hiss on the airwaves about the need “for a period of reflection.”
Labour seems to have already convinced itself that this rout is a blip; that its heartland has “lent its vote” to the Brexit cause temporarily, and will inevitably navigate back to the Left. The BBC, meanwhile, seems convinced that the witless masses have succumbed to American imported populism and the subliminal witchcraft of the phrase, “Let’s get Brexit done.” This is metrollectual nonsense. The working classes have deserted the Labour Party en masse because it does not – and crucially, cannot – speak for them.
To understand this important point, you have to go back to the beginning. When it formed in 1900, Labour was not a socialist uprising, but a practical trade union movement. It had no dogma, doctrines, or draconian teachings. It simply believed that workers should have a mechanism for negotiating a better deal from their employers. That is the working-class way – resourceful, aspirational, and unafraid of a barney with the establishment, if necessary.
Sadly, a strain of middle-class fanatical socialism that is alien to the British working class infiltrated Labour within a generation. Ever since, the Labour heartlands have chafed against the embrace of the Left’s scratchy – cardiganed altruism. They shivered at Blair’s norther utopias sparkling with out-of-town supercasinos, and more recently, bristled Momentum’s patronizing assertions that the working class are all austerity-ravaged food-banked dependents.
But it was Labour’s opposition to Brexit that finally lit the match, catastrophically exposing the extent of the party’s emotional alienation from those it claims to represent. Outraged that “their” people made a decision of such national import against their better advice during the referendum, Labour decided that the voters were wrong. They wilfully misrepresented Leavers craving to move forward as a sign of their backwardness. Which strikes at the heart of the Labour problem: such an unapologetically patrician movement simply cannot respond to this new era of populism. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Boris Johnson Joins Trump in Redefining Conservatism
Stephen Fidler and Gerald F. Seib
WSJ, Dec. 13, 2019
Boris Johnson’s big election victory this week drove another nail into the coffin of the brand of conservative politics Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher first rode to power four decades ago.
As Mr. Johnson’s decisive win in a hotly contested national election illustrated, the conservative movement in the West now has become markedly more populist and nationalist, and appeals to a distinctly more working-class constituency. Fiscal restraint, once a cardinal tenet of conservatism, matters less; rewriting the rules that have governed the global economy matters more.
For now, that approach is working similarly on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. Johnson prevailed by using a playbook similar to the one that delivered the White House to Mr. Trump three years ago. “Populism is the future,” says Steve Bannon, a political strategist who helped engineer Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory. “Economic nationalism is the future.”
The particular issue that drove Mr. Johnson and his Conservative Party to victory was a uniquely British one: The election turned, above all else, on Mr. Johnson’s promise to complete, once and for all, Britain’s exit from the European Union, which the nation’s voters had called for in a referendum some three years ago.
But the political dynamics behind the Brexit struggle were similar to those that have propelled Mr. Trump and other populist leaders in the West in recent years. Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Trump won by successfully appealing to blue-collar voters in postindustrial regions who had traditionally backed their political opponents to the left.
Mr. Trump stole away formerly Democratic voters in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; Mr. Johnson’s Conservative parliamentary slate “took dozens of seats that actually hadn’t voted conservative in decades, or had never voted conservative before,” says Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Both capitalized on blue-collar and middle-class resentments of the financial and political elites, who, in such voters’ views, were oblivious to the way global economic trends were cutting against workers in the heartland. Brexit was the symbol of those grievances in Britain; in the U.S., trade relations with China and Mexico were the symbols Mr. Trump used.
Both also capitalized over cultural anxieties. In Britain, the country voted by a 52% to 48% majority in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union, and did so for a mixture of motives. But one important motivating factor was the concern of many voters that, under EU rules, too many immigrants were coming from Europe and putting pressure on public services. Mr. Trump also used public unease over immigrants from Latin America to his advantage, often casting them as criminals and purveyors of drugs. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Barbara Kay: A Victory Lap For Democracy After Jeremy Corbyn’s Humiliating Defeat
Barbara Kay
National Post, Dec. 13, 2019
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives racked up a stunning victory in the U.K. elections, with numbers so decisive – 368 of 650 seats – we will hear no more rumblings about a “second referendum” on Brexit. You can love Boris or hate him, or struggle with mixed feelings (as I confess I do), but he now has a mandate to get Brexit done.
But I have no mixed feelings about the Labour Party’s humiliating loss, at 191 seats their lowest ebb since pre-World War Two. If ever a party leader deserved a definitive smackdown, it was Jeremy Corbyn and a victory lap is in order for democracy doing what it does best.
On seeing the results, I said to myself, “Yay!” The second thing I said to myself was, “Who will be the first to pull a Jacques Parizeau and how long will it take?” As it turned out, not long at all, and it was former London mayor Ken Livingstone who reprised Parizeau’s infamous “money and the ethnic vote” blame-shift after the Yes side’s narrow loss in the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum.
As soon as it was clear the U.K. Conservatives had crossed the threshold majority number of 326 seats, Livingstone announced Labour’s defeat was at least partially down to “the Jewish vote.” In fact, a Jewish population of 260,000 could not by itself have greatly influenced the result, but it is a mark of the anti-Semitic mindset to constantly exaggerate Jewish power.
Livingstone, who has called allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party “lies and smears,” was himself suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 over an assertion that Hitler supported Zionism before he eventually quit the party in 2018. It was by no means his only egregiously insensitive remark. In April, he reportedly told the group Labour Against the Witchhunt that “It is not anti-Semitic to hate the Jews of Israel”.
In their own minds, Parizeau, Corbyn and Livingstone are just well-meaning politicians doing their best to serve the nation’s interests. They believe they have been martyred because of baseless hatred from people who are not even really Québécois or English. (I’m not being fair to Parizeau here. Livingstone has demonstrated that he hates Jews, while Parizeau was a mere xenophobe. There’s a huge difference. Parizeau didn’t hate Jews or immigrants or anglos in general. He principally saw them as a numerical federalist force standing in the way of the sovereigntist dream.)
Will Labour’s defeat and Corbyn’s likely exit from political life create the conditions for a moral cleansing of the party? Hopefully. Meanwhile, some of us find ourselves brooding over the rise of institutionalized anti-Semitism of an atypical, more virulent kind for the English, who tend generally toward a casual anti-Semitism that is offensive, but not menacing.
For example, in 1996, when Princess Diana chose Anthony Julius as her divorce lawyer, the Daily Telegraph commented, “(Julius) is a Jewish intellectual and Labour supporter, and less likely to feel constrained by the consideration of fair play. ‘I’d be very worried if I were the Royal family,’ says a Cambridge don who taught him. ‘He’ll get lots of money out of them.’”
Now, you would never see that kind of stuff in any North American newspaper, much less a respected mainstream one, but this is not hatred speaking. It’s “genteel” anti-Semitism. (The Telegraph did apologize in the face of indignant response, but it’s telling that the editor didn’t see a problem with it.)
Julius went on to write an exhaustively researched history of anti-Semitism in England, published in 2010. In Trials of the Diaspora, Julius writes that although English anti-Semitism was brutal in its medieval incarnation, in the last few hundred years, it has remained widespread but relatively benign: “(The) typical English anti-Semite does not see Jews in every hiding-place and under every disguise; he is not obsessive; he is not at risk of being driven mad by his consciousness of Jews. Anti-Semitism is rarely burdensome to him.” [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
The British Working-Class Saves Britain – and its Jews: Melanie Phillips, Melaniephillips.com, Dec. 13, 2019 — The relief was overwhelming. When the exit poll on Thursday evening correctly predicted a large majority for Boris Johnson’s Conservative party, British Jews allowed themselves to breathe again. Overcome by the sense of deliverance from a great evil, some wept.
Looking for Conservative Lessons in Britain, and Failing to Find Them: Colby Cosh, National Post, Dec. 13, 2019 – In the afternoon, Andrew Scheer went out, and in the evening, Boris Johnson got back in.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Crushing Defeat: Bagehot, The Economist, Dec. 13, 2019 – The Conservative party did everything it could to hand an election victory to Labour.
Boris Johnson’s Government Will Make It Illegal Engaging With Anti-Israel BDS Movement, Report: Hank Berrien, Daily Wire, Dec. 15, 2019 — On Sunday, the UK Special Envoy for post-Holocaust issues informed the International Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s conference in Jerusalem that the new Conservative British government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson would pass a law making it illegal for public bodies to engage with the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, as The Jerusalem Postreported.
