Well, I hope the French election on Sunday offers a faint glimmer of hope. Across the United Kingdom almost every constituency voted for lefties of various stripes - not just victorious Labour lefties, but also Scots nationalist lefties, Irish republican lefties, eco-lefties, Islamo-lefties and, of course, duplicitous pseudo-conservative lefties: you can get it in any colour as long as it's red. So, if you're one of those Britons concerned about, say, transformative mass migration or the right to freedom of speech, things are going to spend the next few years getting worse before there is any prospect of course correction.
This is squarely on the UK's hideous and repellent "Conservative and Unionist" party, which as a practical matter is neither. Effective politicians don't "move towards the centre"; they move the centre towards them, as Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan did. Instead, the Conservatives squandered fourteen years playing on the left's terms, and the result is a political culture that has never been less conservative, and a land where nothing works, from the creepily fetishised National Health Service to the wanker constabulary.
So Rishi Rich's party was pushed down to its worst ever result - worse than Balfour in 1906, if such comparisons are even relevant in a demographically transformed Britain. The casualties include so-called "big beasts" (who, as someone remarks in The Prisoner of Windsor, are nowhere near as big as they were) of all stripes: floppo GB News host Jacob Rees-Mogadon, Coronation sword-wielder Penny Mordaunt, and former prime minister Liz Truss. And yet, bad as it was, it was not as bad as it should have been. It was not a Kim Campbell extinction-level event. So a left-wing government will be opposed in Parliament by a mush-left faux-opposition that agrees with it on Net Zero, "online harms", the European Court of Human Rights, the Northern Ireland Protocol and the subversion of Brexit ...oh, and doubtless the necessity of the next lockdown.
This is not 1997, and Starmer is not Blair. Sir Keir has pulled off what the commentators are calling a "loveless landslide". He was the beneficiary, in England, of the implosion of the Conservative Party and, north of the border, of the implosion of the Scottish National Party - both entirely deserved. Yet Labour's share of the vote is five points lower than Jeremy Corbyn's supposedly humiliating defeat in 2017: in fact, it is the lowest share of the vote for any majority-winning party ever - just thirty-five per cent. Sir Keir has lost four sitting Labour MPs (and potential Cabinet ministers) to "pro-Gaza independents" - by name, Shockat Adam (in Leicester), Adnan Hussain (in Blackburn), Ayoub Khan (in Perry Barr) and Iqbal Hussain Mohamed (in Dewsbury). As I wrote two months ago:
Labour assumed the loyalty of its Muslim voters as it does the loyalty of its gay voters, but the former seem to grasp that they will soon be strong enough to do without the socialist infidels.
So we are seeing the emergence of an explicitly Islamic domestic politics with members elected on explicitly Islamic tickets. Four "pro-Gaza" MPs doesn't sound like a lot, but, for purposes of comparison, it's exactly the same number as Nigel Farage's Reform party managed to elect. I would account the rise of a separate Islamic political force that no longer needs to work within the established parties as the most significant development of last night - and not in a good way: this is Britain's future.
As for Reform, Nigel took the name and strategy from Preston Manning's breakaway party from the Canadian Tories three decades ago. On their first election campaign in 1993, Mr Manning's Reformers won 52 seats out of the 295 in the Ottawa House of Commons - and under exactly the same first-past-the-post system as at Westminster. By contrast, last night began with a BBC exit poll showing Farage winning thirteen seats and establishing Reform as the fourth largest party in the House. In the cold reality of dawn, that's shrunk to just four seats - compared to, say, seven for Sinn Féin, which has now replaced the Democratic Unionists as the biggest party in Northern Ireland. In North Antrim, Nigel endorsed the DUP's Ian Paisley Jr - but, in a seat his family has held for fifty-four years, Mr Paisley lost.
Where do we go from here? Nowhere good. Under a quintet of failed prime ministers, the Tories have brought a once great nation to near collapse and delivered the nation into the hands of "opponents" who will merely crank up the worsening of things to Ludicrous Speed. Mrs Thatcher's famous line was: First you win the argument; then you win the election. The "Conservative" party spent fourteen years not making any conservative arguments, and thus last night was entirely predictable.
So the principal fruit of a bollocksed Brexit is that Britain moves left as the Continent moves right. Heigh-ho: on to France and Sunday's second round. As I wrote on Monday:
The Fifth Republic's voting system was created to ensure the first round eliminated all but Tweedleleft and Tweedleright. Instead, the high turnout has resulted in a record number of soi-disant 'triangulaires' - constituencies in which a third-placed party (in this case Macron's) did well enough to qualify for the runoff. In 2017, there was just one 'triangulaire'; in 2022, there were eight; on Sunday there will be over three hundred. In the coming days, there will be a lot of horse-trading between the 'centre' and the 'left' to reduce the variables.
I'll say. Over two hundred of those third-place candidates have now withdrawn in a cynical alliance between Macronian technocrats and hardcore Commies to improve their chances of seeing off Marine Le Pen's "far right" Rassemblement National. We shall see how effective that proves in a little over forty-eight hours.
Yet, despite the differences between the UK and the Fifth Republic, the goal of the Permanent State remains the same: nothing will be permitted to change.
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