The UK Election: Pros and Cons
Prior to the election, I’d exchanged many emails with my friend Gaby Charing, who lives in London, and who has been despairing of the outcome, whatever it might be. She had been a committed Labour member—a lifelong social democrat and anti-communist—until the Corbynites seized her party . When Momentum took over her local branch (a meeting on Gaza was their first priority), she resigned. She’s not a perfectly typical British voter, demographically. She’s gay, Jewish, highly-educated, urban, and she’s just had her 90th treatment of Cetuximab (a targeted cancer drug that’s done a bang-up job of keeping her alive). So she's probably more vividly aware of issues that affect the NHS than the typical voter. But she’s typical insofar as she’s in despond over Britain’s political condition and feels neither party, and certainly not their leaders, are fit to hold office.
I’d asked her many times how she thought the electorate would break; she said she didn’t know, but was sure that in retrospect the outcome would seem foreordained. This one was unusually hard to predict, because voters were, like her, torn in so many directions.
The election was understood to be a referendum on Brexit. The British are—like Gaby—historically moderate in their instincts, but they had no moderate options. Leave, particularly as Boris has conceived of it, is the extremist position. The sane strategy for Labour would thus have been to adopt the moderate position: They should have run on a Remain platform and presented themselves as a big-tent party: slightly-left-of-Blair, anti-austerity, but growth-and-market friendly. Their public face should have been sensible, reassuring, and familiar.
Instead, they ran as Jew-hating Bolsheviks who sincerely believed the wrong side won in the Cold War. Corbyn didn’t really want to talk about Brexit; everyone suspected this was because deep down he favored it, this on the grounds that EU membership would be obstacle to nationalizing Britain’s industries and collectivizing its farms.
The Liberal Democrats tried to capitalize upon this—they styled themselves as liberal, internationalist, centrists, Remainers—but the First-Past-the-Post electoral system makes it hard for a third party to break through under the best of circumstances, and they ran such a lousy campaign that even their party leader lost her seat.
Now we know that Boris Johnson has secured a crushing victory, and Gaby was right: immediately, it seems it was always inevitable. How could I have worried a sensible, practical people like the British would hand the keys to Number 10 to Jeremy Corbyn? I suppose the only reason it seemed within the realm of possibility was Brexit; an electorate that would vote for Brexit might vote for anything.
As the results came in last night, Gaby sent me her first thoughts, at two a.m:
The Jewish community are entitled to be very relieved, but should not be celebrating the victory of a party that played the race card in the election campaign.
The rejection of Corbyn is not primarily about the Jews or antisemitism. I doubt if we even figured in most voters’ minds. And it isn’t about the rejection of racism. But it is the rejection of hard left politics. His attitude to the IRA was probably the biggest single factor.
Remain would have lost a second referendum.
Parliament is widely seen as having obstructed implementation of the 2016 referendum result. With hindsight, this damage to the standing of Parliament is the most serious consequence of Cameron’s decision to call a referendum.
Although Johnson is not Trump, this is a frightening moment for parliamentary democracy.
Oliver Kamm (whom you should be following if you aren’t already) was and is right about Labour. I’m glad I haven’t got voting Labour on my conscience.
I very much doubt if Corbyn will resign in the morning. It will make little difference if he does or doesn’t.I am very upset indeed at the prospect of a Johnson government with a large majority. He’s unfit to be PM.
We’ll break all our promises to EU citizens. Those who’ve got settled status may see it revoked.
British citizens living in EU countries will face justified retaliation.
Johnson will have to decide whether to exempt the NHS from immigration rules that will only allow in high earners.
If the NHS deteriorates really badly, it’s unlikely anyone who hasn’t already done so will be able to afford to take refuge in the private sector. This is potentially dangerous for Johnson.
Who will gain financially and economically from Brexit? Unless there’s a group with political clout who do, whom does he turn to for political support when things get bad?
How do decent, liberal-minded people and politicians re-engage with the working class who’ve understandably abandoned Labour over Corbyn, but also Brexit?
Here’s Oliver Kamm: Voting Labour is not just a mistake, it’s morally unconscionable:
It’s not hyperbole but the literal truth that senior lieutenants in his circle believe that the wrong side won the Cold War. The party’s equivocations over Brexit make a mockery of its claim to advance collective goals such as workers’ rights and environmental protection. Corbyn’s own rhetoric on issues of immigration (he’s condemned the “wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry”) and free speech (he addressed a rally in 2006 protesting against publication of the famed Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed) is deeply illiberal. It’s weird that a man like this should be counted a progressive politician …
One reason above all, however, makes a Labour vote impossible for me. Perhaps I can give a little personal background. I was once on a panel with Corbyn many years ago when the moderator cited some ferociously anti-Semitic invective by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran and an overt Holocaust denier. Corbyn was directly in my line of sight and he showed not a flicker of emotion. In responding, he made no mention of these inflammatory remarks but simply carried on with his castigation of the supposed imperialist designs of the United States and its allies on the region. I realised at that moment that Corbyn lacked the visceral revulsion for anti-Semitism that he ought to possess. I attributed it to an incomprehensible lack of imagination.
That, I now believe, was an unduly charitable interpretation of his strangely bloodless response.
I agree on all these points.
My own first thoughts:
It is very well that Corbyn and his clique have been crushed. Anything short of this would have made it even more difficult to expunge his squalid, corrosive, anti-Western and anti-Semitic strain of thought from the Labour Party.
It’s too late for this election, but Britain will be better off with two functional political parties. This was a necessary (if not sufficient) first step toward reclaiming one of them, at least, from the authoritarian temptation. So for those who believe Labour has and may yet again play a wholesome role in British politics, this is was salutary setback. From this perspective, the results are the best outcome one might have hoped.
It’s much less happy to contemplate what we’re apt to see with Boris unfettered. Britain will be convulsed and distracted for years with the economic and political fallout of Brexit. The United Kingdom is apt to break up.
In the larger context, Peter Zeihan may be right about the writing on the wall: Brexit offers Americans the biggest opportunity to lock Britain into strategic enslavement since Lend-Lease. “Strategically and economically, the British are now weak and vulnerable, and their eventual post-EU membership trading partner will be able to pick them clean.”
The US has the only market that’s big enough, advanced enough, and institutionally sophisticated enough to replace the EU as a trade partner. The Royal Navy no longer rules the waves. The only way it can function now is in partnership with the United States.
In our new, remorseless, America-First incarnation, we’ll strike a victor’s bargain with Britain. The terms of the trade deal will not be be advantageous to them. We’ll swamp the UK market with cheap food, destroying British agriculture—they’ll just have to acquire a taste for chlorinated chicken. British finance will move to New York.
This might actually be for the best for Britain, if the US is really checking out of Europe long-term. Our withdrawal will leave the Continent a shambles at best and at worst under Russia’s thumb. Hewing close to the US would be safer than staying in a Europe that’s no longer under the US security umbrella.
But “taking back control” will not happen. Washington’s faceless bureaucrats will just replace the ones in Brussels.
So, yes, good news and bad news, but since we can choose where we dwell, how fine it is that Corbyn and his miserable Stalinist cadre had their asses handed to them.
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